He grinned at me, pulled on his nose with his thumb and forefinger, and rose from his chair.
“Now, about my butterfly …”
chapter ten
“So what did the coroner say?”
I looked up from my desk to see Martha poking her head in the door from the outer office.
“How the hell did you know that I talked to the coroner?”
Martha smiled. “Nothing gets past me. Actually you doodled on that pad by your phone. ‘See Coroner re: Diamond’s death.’”
I quickly looked at the pad and thought I’d have to be more careful about what I doodled.
“After all, what with your larvae disappearing and what you told me about your discovery that the body was moved, in combo with that memo, I put two and two together. Let’s have all the gory details.”
I rolled my eyes at the ceiling. Nothing for it but to tell Martha all about my meeting.
“So now what?” she asked when I was done.
“So now, I’m going to go talk to all his colleagues, for starters, and see what happens, see if any of them can lead me to my disks.” I dreaded having to talk to all these people, in case I found myself stuck in that godawful darkness of one of my mood swings on the morning I had arranged to meet one of them. Depression has a habit of incapacitating its victim. I was thankful it was summer: more than likely I’d be okay. It was usually the winter months that haunted me, made worse by the fact that I seemed powerless to head it off. Maybe I needed to see a professional, but the thought made me feel ill and I hurriedly relegated it to the back of my mind with a lot of other baggage.
It was four long days before I could get away from the university and drive out to Dumoine. On the morning of that day I woke up relieved to find that I was in a good mood — no fear, no dread, no despair, just normal anxiety about whether I would ever find my disks or not.
No saving angel had delivered them to me with a note of apology for having taken them. The cops had no new leads and more or less said, “We’ll call you,” which of course meant my case had now been placed in the unimportant file, probably had never been in any other file.
I left the farm as the sun was spreading over the Eardley Escarpment, rimming it with soft golden tones and the first pale hint of the leaves changing. The cows were mooing, their udders full to bursting, calling Mac to come and give them relief as I drove out the farm gates and turned northwest on Highway 148. I stopped in Shawville for gas and a bottle of water. Not much had changed in the years since I’d come here as a girl and shown my calf at the Shawville Fair. Pretty heady times for a 4-H kid way smaller than the calf, who basically walked me around the arena while I made a show of trying to be in charge. It didn’t help that Ryan and his friends were hooting and hollering like banshees. I’d showed them all, though, when I won first prize. And I’d gone back, year after year, because it was a fantastic agricultural fair to compete at. And because I liked the petting zoo.
Two hours later I pulled into the grounds of Pontiac University in front of the zoology building in Dumoine. For a small campus in the country it was remarkably stark, as if the developer had chosen to ignore aesthetics. The results showed, raw and ugly. There were few trees and no effort had been made to have the buildings fit into their surroundings. They looked like a bunch of pill boxes in need of medication themselves.
I pulled open the heavy glass doors of the two-storey zoology building, which shared its space with psychology and human resources. The familiar sweet, musty smell of formaldehyde, dirty cages, and disinfectant swept over me. Zoology buildings the world over smelled like this, I thought: urine and feces, scent glands, and formaldehyde — a veritable cocktail of smells. In the foyer, hanging from the ceiling, was a huge metal spider’s web with the resident spider, ass to ceiling, hunkered down looking as though it was waiting for some poor unsuspecting undergrad to commit to biology. A young man pushing a tray filled with glass flasks and Petri dishes walked briskly through the foyer.
“Where can I find the zoology office?” I called after him.
“Follow the typing,” he said and then he was gone, the rattle of the Petri dishes slowly being replaced by the distinctive soft tapping of a computer. I followed the sound down to a door splattered with a thousand notices for seminars and meetings, most of which seemed to have already happened.
There was no sign of anyone in the main office, but the tap tap was coming from behind a portable wall.
“Anyone home?”
The tapping stopped abruptly, and seconds later a blue-eyed, red-haired, diminutive woman in a tight black skirt and pink spandex shirt flounced around the corner. I wondered how she had ever got the skirt on. It looked like paint. I felt my own worn pants, comfortable, practical, and wondered how this woman could stand high heels and tight skirts. It was certainly a rarity in any zoology building I had ever been in. If she was here for a degree, maybe it was a bachelors and not in zoology. I reeled back at my own chauvinism.
“What can I do for you?” she asked in a high-pitched, squeaky kind of voice that made me want to oil it.
Before I could answer she said, “I’m just filling in for one of the secs — she’s sick, my master’s research is stymied, and I need the cash so I offered, but there’s hardly time to eat. You should see the letters these guys want done. Been six days now and I’m getting good at it.”
“Can you tell me where I can find Don Allenby or Leslie Mitchell?” I asked.
She shot me a suspicious look, and the smile on her face grew brittle.
“If you’re the press or the police we —”
“No, actually I’m not. I’m just visiting. I’m a zoolo-gist from Sussex University.”
“Oh, well, in that case no probs. Don Allenby’s my supervisor. He’s in room 202. Mitchell moved into 105 although how she can stand to do that so soon after …” she hesitated, blushed.
“After what?”
“Well, you know. Surely you’ve heard about it in the papers. Made Dumoine quite famous.”
“You mean Jake Diamond?”
“Oh, gruesome story there, isn’t it? I mean …” she glanced hurriedly at me. “I mean, they say he died fast, like, I think, at least they say …”
“What a way to go.”
“Yeah, but sort of like him, you know? Ever the macho man. Oh, such a great guy though. I had him for the course on animal form and function. Funny man and sexy as hell.”
“Did you know him well?”
“Ha. Would have loved that. Nah. He was just a prof. I got to know him a bit because I’m a grad student of his colleague, Don Allenby. They worked together on a bunch of papers, you know.”
“You mean they collaborated?”
“Yeah, I guess. Diamond was a cat man and Don is small mammals. They teamed up sometimes on those predator-prey jobs — you know, linking the number of predators to the number of prey and that sort of stuff. Diamond’s name always came first. I always wondered about that. Guess Diamond felt he had to be first author. Had an ego the size of an elephant. Lots of profs around like to take all the credit, you know, but at least he did a lot of the work. Some profs do zip all. Their graduate students do it all and then the profs take all the praise. Oops, sorry.”
“Sounds like he could have had a bunch of enemies.”
She looked up suddenly, surprised.
“Nah. Not Diamond. Everyone liked him. I’m pretty sure. Except Davies, of course, but Davies doesn’t much like anyone at all.”