Not because she wasn't bright. She was extremely sharp, mathematically. It's why I accepted her in the first place, even though I had reservations about her motivation. I'm always looking for women who aren't intimidated by numbers and she had a true gift for math. But we never... jelled.'
'What was the matter with her motivation?'
'She didn't have any. I always got the feeling she'd drifted into grad school because it was the path of least resistance. She'd applied to medical school and gotten rejected. Kept applying even after she enrolled here-a lost cause, really, because her non-math grades weren't very good and her M-CAT scores were significantly below average. Her math scores were so high I decided to accept her, though. I went so
far as to get her funding a Graduate Advanced Placement fellowship.
This past fall, I had to cut that off. That's when she found the job at your hospital.'
'Poor performance?'
'Poor progress on her dissertation. She finished her course work with adequate grades, submitted a research proposal that looked promising, dropped it, submitted another, dropped that, et cetera Finally she came up with one that she seemed to like. Then she just froze. Went absolutely nowhere with it. You know how it isstudents either zip through or languish for years. I've been able to help plenty of the languishers and I tried to help Dawn. But she rejected counseling.
Didn't show up for appointments, made excuses, kept saying she could handle it, just needed more TIME I never felt I was getting through to her. I was at the point of considering dropping her from the program. Then she was..
She rubbed a fingertip over one blood-colored nail. 'I suppose none of that seems very important now. Would you like a chocolate?'
'No, thanks.'
She looked down at the truffles. Closed the box.
'Consider that little speech,' she said, 'as an elongated answer to your question about her disks. But yes, I did boot them up, and there was nothing meaningful on them. She'd accomplished nothing on the dissertation. As a matter of fact, I hadn't even bothered to look at them when your Mr. Huenengarth showed up-had put them away and forgotten about them, I was so upset by her death. Going through that locker felt ghoulish enough. But he made such a point of trying to get them that I booted them up the moment he was gone. It was worse than I'd imagined. All she'd produced, after all my encouragement, were statements and restatements of her hypotheses and a random numbers table.'
A random numbers table?'
'For random sampling. You know how it's done, I'm sure.
I nodded. 'Generate a collection of random numbers with a computer or some other technique, then use it to select subjects from a general pool. If the table says five, twenty-three, seven, choose the fifth, twenty-third, and seventh people on the list.'
'Exactly. Dawn's table was huge-othousands of numbers. Pages and pages generated on the department's mainframe. What a foolish waste of computer TIME She was nowhere near ready to select her sample.
Hadn't even gotten her basic methodology straight.'
'What was her research topic?'
'Predicting cancer incidence by geographical location. That's as specific as she'd gotten. It was really pathetic, reading those disks.
Even the little bit she had written was totally unacceptable.
Disorganized, out of sequence. I had to wonder if indeed she had been using drugs.'
'Did she show any other signs of that?'
'I suppose the unreliability could be considered a symptom.
And sometimes she did seem agitated-almost manic. Trying to convince me or herself that she was making progress. But I know she wasn't taking amphetamines. She gained lots of weight over the last four years-at least forty pounds. She was actually quite pretty when she enrolled.'
'Could be cocaine,' I said.
