“That could have been anyone,” I moaned. “All faculty members and grad students have a key to the main door, and people come in and out at all hours of the day and night to check on their experiments.”
“So technically anyone on staff could have let themselves in without being noticed?”
I nodded, but I realized it was worse than that. “The building is open from nine to five and there is no security guard at the main door.” I couldn’t help wondering how Jim had found out so quickly. Could he have done this? Was he that set on eliminating me as the competition, or had he coincidentally been in the hallway and smelled the insecticide? Odd, though, since his lab was one floor below mine.
“So, anyone could have come in, waited until after hours, killed your bugs, stolen your disks, and then left at night. No note. No one’s claimed responsibility, no fingerprints. Is there any reason to suspect an animal rights group?”
“With insects?” I asked incredulously. “Do you realize how much most people detest insects? You have to be cuddly, furry, soft, and photogenic before the animal rights activists get hot under the collar. If this is linked to them I’ll eat candied ants for breakfast.”
Finally the police left and I reluctantly turned the lab over to Martha to clean out and get the cages ready for new material. What new material? I thought. All my research from the last month was gone because I had failed to print a paper backup for a month, and much of my raw data was lost going back years. I’d need months just to sort through my paper records and design more experiments to replace the lost data for the Animal Behaviour paper if I couldn’t find the disks. It would be at least a year, if I was lucky, before I could publish again. And I knew what that would do to my chances at tenure. I shuddered at the thought. I had no choice. I had to find the disks or go down trying. I started ruminating on all the things that could go wrong and then realized that I had to do something to keep my dark thoughts at bay or I wouldn’t get anywhere at all. But it wasn’t easy — it never is.
I’d started sorting out what experiments I might be able to salvage from the paper records in my office when Martha poked her head in.
“I was cleaning out the cages after you left and found something really strange.”
My ears buzzed at the sound of her words. Martha and strange were anathema. I didn’t think the word was even in her vocabulary. God, what else could happen to me today? Let me count the ways, I thought.
“I took all the dead insects and put them in separate jars according to their cage numbers, just as you’d asked me to do, but when I came to do the two mesh cages of larvae there weren’t any.”
“No cages?”
“No. No larvae in the cages. They were completely empty. Not a single larva, none at all.”
“You mean all the cages with larvae? The ones I brought back from the canoe trip?” Something twigged in my mind.
“That’s right. The ones from you know what,” she said with one of her meaningful looks, “as well as all the larvae from your succession experiments. Only the larvae were touched, and whoever it was was very, very careful. They didn’t miss a single larva. My guess is they dumped the contents of each cage into a bag and then swilled out the cages.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Maybe they figured you wouldn’t try to catalogue all those dead insects, that you’d just count your losses, pitch them all, and start again, that you’d never notice the larvae were missing.”
I thought for a moment. “But why would they want me to think that?”
I just might have done that too, but I needed those samples for the lab work because of the lost collection on the river. But why would they be interested in the larvae at all? Who could possibly get anything from destroying those larvae? What was so important about the larvae that they had been stolen, and why had the rest of my insects been fumigated?
“Maybe someone’s found a cure for cancer in blowfly larvae.” Martha caught my venomous glance. “Just kidding.”
“What about my pickled larvae, in the jars near the door?”
“They’re all there except for the two I labelled ‘Dumoine.’ They’ve vanished.”
“Only the stuff from the canoe trip. What about the live larvae in the other room?”
“They’re still there. It was the first thing I checked.”
“Put new labels on them will you, Martha? I don’t want them to go missing. They might hold the answer to this whole mess.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“I’m not sure, but whoever did this was interested in the insects I brought back from Dumoine, and some of those came from Diamond’s body. Maybe there’s a link: dead body, a ransacked lab, stolen insects and disks. No bookie would bet on odds that this is all coincidence. There’s got to be a link among the insects, the body, and my stolen disks.” Not to mention a probable attempt on my life, I thought morosely. Martha opened her mouth.
“Don’t say it again, Martha. I don’t want to hear it. Whoever it was could have dumped formaldehyde on top of my disks just as they did with the laptop. They didn’t. They stole them instead, so there’s a chance they’re still around.” I was angry and a little bit scared, if I had the guts to admit it, which I knew I didn’t. At least not to Martha, anyway. I couldn’t bear the thought of what it would do to Martha’s face to know I was scared.
“But, Cordi, the cops have nothing to go on. They’re not optimistic they can find out who did it. No one saw or heard anything.”
I heard myself in her words. She was usually the optimist, me the pessimist, but I couldn’t afford to give credence to my pessimistic thoughts. Hearing them coming at me from Martha almost dissolved my resolve, but then I thought about what would happen to me if I didn’t fight and I rallied my wits.
“I don’t care what the cops say. I’m damned if I’m going to let someone screw my career without going down fighting. I’ve worked too bloody hard to see it slipping through my fingers.”
Martha cleared her throat and looked at me.
“Now what?” I asked, feeling like my balloon had just been pricked and I was mentally hunting around for the ragged bits of wet rubber to try and put it back together again.
“I know it’s a bad time, but the editor of Animal Behaviour emailed asking about your revisions.”
“Oh, Jeeesus, Martha. Stall him. Tell him I’m working on some last-minute stuff. Don’t let on that I’ve got no data! I need more time.” I pulled my hair. “I can’t lose this. It’s too important a publication, and if I don’t publish, the team in Calgary will surely beat me to it, not to mention kissing my job goodbye. He says they’ve already approached him but I’m first as long as I can deliver. Damn it to bloody hell. Why is it always me?”
After Martha left I tried to compose a letter to the funding people explaining why my quarterly report would be late, asking for more time. But I couldn’t concentrate. My mind kept wandering back to my ransacked lab. What was so important about the larvae and my disks? To put me off the scent? What scent? I sat, stocking feet propped on my desk, thinking about it, and then took the rest of the day off, I was so discouraged by it all. I needed to talk to Ryan. Even that was discouraging. I had to make do with my brother, ever since Luke had left. Not that I didn’t appreciate bouncing ideas off Ryan, but he had his own family and I was aware that they came first. I wanted another Luke, or did I just need another Luke to lean on? Depressing thought, because Luke had actually been a bit of a jerk and a lot of a prima donna. Surely next time I could want a companion that I didn’t need? Had that ever happened? Stop thinking!
I grabbed a cold juice from among all the frozen specimens in the little fridge in my office. I needed activity to keep my thoughts at bay