'I usually don't lock up like this,' she said. 'That man made me feel as if I were back in Hungary.'
Sliding open a left-hand file drawer, she looked down into it.
Frowned. Stuck her arm in, moved it around, pulled it out empty.
'Gone,' she said, looking up. 'How interesting.'
The two of us went up to the department office and Janos asked Merilee to get Dawn Herbert's student file. Five-by-eight index card.
'This is all of it?' she said, frowning.
'We recycle all the old paper now, Dr. )anos, remember?'
Ah, yes. How politically correct... ' Janos and I read the card: DE-ENROLLED stamped at the top in red. Four typed lines under that: BarDel: DX. ffog: ~.D BioS!.
D.O~.: 12/13/63
FOB: Po~eepaie, N.Y.
AB Matn, Po~eepsie Coin.
'Not much,' I said.
Janos gave a cold smile and handed the card back to Merilee.
'I've got a seminar, Dr. Delaware, if you'll please excuse me.'
She left the office.
Merilee stood there holding the card, looking as if she'd been an unwilling witness to a marital spat.
'Have a nice day,' she said, then turned her back on me.
I sat in the car and tried to untangle the knots the Jones family had tied in my head.
Grandpa Chuck, doing something to the hospital.
Chip and for Cindy doing something to their kids.
Ashmore andlor Herbert learning about some or all of it. Ashmore's data confiscated by Huenengarth. Herbert's data stolen by Huenengarth.
Herbert probably murdered by a man who looked like Huenengarth.
The blackmail scenario obvious even to a casual observer like Janos.
But if Ashmore and Herbert had both been up to something, why had she been the first to die?
And why had Huenengarth waited so long after her death to search for her disks, when he'd moved in on Ashmore's computers the day after the toxicologist's murder?
Unless he'd only learned about Herbert's data after reading Ashmore's files.
I stayed with that for a while and came up with a possible chronology: Herbert the first to suspect a tie-in between Chad Jones's death and
Cassie's illnesses-student leading the teacher, because the teacher couldn't care less about patients.
She pulled Chad's chart, confirmed her suspicions, recorded her findings-encoded as random numbers-on the university computer, printed out a floppy disk, stashed it in her graduate locker, and put the squeeze on the Jones family.
But not before making a duplicate record and filing it in one of Ashmore's computers, without Ashmore's knowledge.
