“So that didn’t bother you?”
“That’s the fun part, Katherine.” Monica’s smile was incandescent. “In love. In life. In friendship. The change is the exciting part.”
* * *
Change is the exciting part.
Katherine tried to keep Monica’s advice in mind when she returned to the university on Friday morning. She had hours at the Fred lab, and she was supposed to have a meeting with Ansel Shaver.
It would be her first meeting with Ansel since she’d become convinced his research study in biometrics—which she wasn’t supposed to know anything about—was connected to the unexplained violence of three students at the college.
“Morning, Professor B!” Kaylee was sitting at the front desk. She looked like she was grading papers. Ansel’s other grad student, Greg—the one she’d run into at the student center—was sitting next to her. He appeared to be inputting some kind of data into the computer.
“Good morning, Kaylee. Greg.” Katherine nodded to both of them. “What are you two up to this morning?”
“Ugh. Essays for Intro to Critical Thinking,” Kaylee grumbled. “Someone kill me now.”
“Want to trade?” Greg scowled. “I have about three hundred more entries in this spreadsheet if you’d rather do this.”
Kaylee glanced at Katherine before she asked, “Is that the biometrics study?”
“You mean the sea of numbers I’m swimming in? I don’t know why he wanted me over here for entry,” Greg said. “Something about looking for patterns, but who has to do all the grunt work? I’m supposed to be meeting with Alice Kraft, but instead I’m doing all this bullshit.”
Katherine was surprised Greg was complaining in front of one of Ansel’s colleagues. It was unusual for a grad student, but then again, Katherine wasn’t a gossip, and Greg would never be defending a thesis to her. He was probably far more politic with those in his department.
“Kaylee, is Professor Shaver in his office?”
“Yep.” She flipped over another blue book. “He was in there arguing with someone on the phone, but he’s been quiet for a while, so he’s probably done.”
“Mehdi,” Greg muttered. “I think she’s the reason he wants to reorganize everything too.”
“Anita Mehdi?”
“Yeah.” Greg didn’t look up, and his brow remained furrowed.
What a sulky little boy.
That one would never last long with her. Odd. He’d been pleasant the other day.
Anita Mehdi had been the professor that Baxter was going to feel out about the study. And now Ansel was arguing with her?
Hmmm.
Kaylee caught her eye and gave Greg a massive eye roll. The corner of Katherine’s mouth turned up.
“Do you want me to call him?” Kaylee asked.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll just pop in. He knows we’re supposed to have a meeting this morning.” She headed toward her office but stopped when Kaylee called her.
“Professor B!”
She turned. “Yes?”
“I heard about that girl in the mathematics department. She was one of Professor Pang’s grad students, right?”
Greg looked up, suddenly interested in the gossip.
“She was,” Katherine said to Kaylee. “She’s a really wonderful girl. I hope they can figure out what happened.”
Greg said, “I heard the police were going to charge her with attempted murder. That it was some kind of domestic situation.”
Katherine turned to him. “Do you know Abby?”
He opened his mouth. Closed it.
Katherine knew he couldn’t admit knowing Abby if she was part of the study.
“I… can’t say,” Greg said. “I might have met her. It’s not a big campus.”
Katherine nodded, never breaking away from his eyes. “To those of us who know Abby, we understand how out of character this is. She is a very special, joyful person.” Katherine couldn’t say what instinct told her to keep eye contact with Greg, but she was following Monica’s directions.
Trust your instincts.
Her instincts told her Greg knew something. He might just be a grad student, but grad students saw the nuts and bolts of how university research happened. Katherine would bet her new psychic powers that Greg knew more than a little about Ansel Shaver’s study, and he also knew something wasn’t right.
He looked away first, back to the computer where he was entering data. “Huh. Well, I guess the police will investigate it, right? None of my business.”
Kaylee had watched the interchange with wide eyes. “I really hope Abby and her boyfriend get better soon, Professor B.”
“Thank you, Kaylee. I’ll pass that along when I see Professor Pang.”
Katherine turned and continued down the hall. She walked into her office, shut the door, and stored her briefcase in her file drawer. Then she opened her laptop and took a deep breath.
She’d be meeting with Ansel Shaver in just a little while.
So what are you going to do?
Chapter 18
She scrolled through the data printouts Ansel had sent to her, drinking coffee in his office and trying not to shout, “What did you do to Abby?” at him.
Katherine had a feeling that approach wouldn’t produce anything useful.
“So these are… exactly what we were expecting.” She glanced up. “That’s good news. Were there any anomalies you wanted to mention?”
“Tank One managed to get his electrode off in the third set—”
“That’s the one Maria calls Primo, right?”
Ansel looked up from his tablet. “What?”
He wasn’t a handsome man, but he was striking. Ansel Shaver was tall with greying blond hair and striking green eyes. His hawkish nose was prominent, and the wrinkle patterns on his face indicated a man who didn’t smile often but enjoyed being outdoors.
“Maria gave all the test octopi names. Tank one is Primo, tank two is Segundo, three is Tertius, four is—”
“Quatro, or something equally ridiculous?” His face held a slight sneer.
Ansel had always rubbed her slightly the wrong way, but she could never put her finger on why. Now she knew: he had no sense of fun. No imagination.
“No,” Katherine said. “That one she just calls Bob. She said she couldn’t figure out a good ‘four’ name.”
His expression didn’t change. “As I was saying, Tank One managed to get his sensor off in the third round of recordings. You can see that on
