seemed warm beacons beckoning him in from the cold. Tonight they looked like a multifaceted cluster of eyes, watching him.
Because if one room was bugged, why not more? Why not all the rooms?
He pushed through the entrance to the south wing and turned toward the stairs to the second floor, heading for Women's Country. He had to tell Quinn. She had to know.
Then he stopped, unsure. Was that fair? Between classes, labs, and tests, plus her research job, she had enough on her mind. This would make her as crazy as it was making him. And maybe all for nothing. He could be wrong. Why dump any of this on her until he was sure?
But how could he be sure, unless...?
If Quinn's room was bugged, there was a good chance his was too. Tim could think of only one way to find out: tear it apart.
He headed for his room.
*
'I really appreciate this, Kevin.'
It had taken a fair bit of doing, but Tim had convinced his roommate to bunk in with Scotty Moore for the night. Moore's roomie, Bill Black, had gone home for a long weekend due to a death in the family. Kevin, a good guy but a congenital straight-shooter, wasn't crazy about the idea. He was afraid it was against the rules, but he hadn't been able to find a rule against it. So he'd agreed, reluctantly.
'Yeah, well, it's okay this time, but don't make a habit of it.'
'This is the only time I'll ask this of you, Kev,' Tim said. 'I swear.'
He'd told Kevin that he and Quinn needed 'some time alone together' and that the inhabitants of Women's Country were too damn nosy to allow them any 'real privacy.' Pretty thin, but it was the best Tim could come up with on short notice. He didn't feel he could wait until Kevin went home for a weekend; he wanted to search the room now. It worked, mainly because everyone knew that Quinn and Tim had a thing going on. Kevin read between the lines what Tim had written there for him, and finally agreed.
'And you'll stick to
'
Kevin's dark features darkened further. 'I mean, you'll just use your own bed, right? You won't...do anything in mine?'
Tim held up three fingers. 'Scout's honor.'
'All right. But I've got to get back in here first thing in the morning.'
'Have no fear, buddy. Everything will be exactly as you left it.'
As soon as Kevin was gone, Tim ducked out and ran down to the parking lot. He took the tool kit from his car trunk and lugged it up to the dorm. Back in the room, he locked the door and stood there, looking around.
Where to begin?
He decided to try the bedroom first. After all, wasn't it in Quinn's bedroom that he'd stepped on the bug he mistook for a stick pin?
He started with the furniture. Flashlight in hand, Tim crawled around the room, peering into every nook, cranny, corner, and crevice. He crawled under his bed and Kevin's, and when he found nothing on the underside of the frame, he pulled off the mattress and box spring and inspected the frame from above. He couldn't move the bed around because it was bolted to the headboard unit which was fixed to the wall, so he unbolted the bed frame from the headboard and gave it a thorough going over. He emptied the closets, pulled out the nightstand drawers, cleaned out the bookshelves built into the headboard unit, took down the curtains and dismantled the curtain rods.
Nothing.
Then he remembered what he'd seen in the movie. He attacked the telephone, dismantling both the base and the handset. Then he removed the wall plates from all the electrical sockets and light switches. He dissected the desk lamp and the gooseneck tensor lamp atop the headboard unit.
Nothing.
Hours after starting, Tim stopped and surveyed the carnage around him. It looked like Nirvana had shot a video here. He'd torn the place apart. All for what? He was tired—probably the one of the last people awake in the dorm—and he was angry. There was something here. There had to be. Too many coincidences lately to be ignored. And he wasn't crazy.
He flopped back onto the mattress and box spring where they lay on the floor. He put his hands behind the back of his head and lay there staring at the ceiling, thinking: Where is the best spot to place a microphone if you want to pick up every sound in the room? Someplace centrally located with no possibility of being covered and muffled...
Tim's gaze drifted past the light fixture in the ceiling, then darted back to it.
Of course!
He jumped to his feet and stood on his mattress, but it was too much of a stretch to reach the fixture. He pulled a desk chair over, and he was there. As he loosened the central screw on the frosted glass diffuser he wondered if it was just coincidence that the glass on these fixtures hung an inch below the ceiling. A sensitive bug positioned up here would pick up every word said in the room.
When the glass came free, Tim set it on the bed, then squinted at the two sixty-watt standard bulbs. He couldn't see much in the glare, plus they'd been on for hours and were hot. He craned his neck, this way and that, trying to check it from all sides, but saw nothing.
Damn, he thought. Not only was it the perfect place, but it was the last place. He gave up and was fitting the diffuser back on its spindle when he spotted something in the tangle of wires behind the bulbs. A tiny thing—black like the one he'd found in Quinn's room, only this one's face was more beveled—with its pin inserted into the insulated coat of a wire above the bulb sockets. Completely unnoticeable, even to someone changing a bulb.
'Jesus.'
Tim could barely hear his own voice.
An uneasy chill rippled through his gut as he stared at the bug. He realized then that deep within he hadn't expected to find anything. He'd been suspicious, there were unanswered questions, but this whole exercise had been something of a game. His hunt was not supposed to yield a real bug. Nestled in the unspoken rules had been the assumption that he would do a thorough search and find nothing, and then the game would end, leaving him frustrated at having no hard evidence to back up his suspicions.
But the game was no longer a game. Hard evidence was half a dozen inches from his nose. He stared at it a moment longer, then stepped down to the floor and sat on the corner of the bed.
Report it? To whom? Certainly not Louis Verran. And what did one bug prove? No, the best way was to spread the word, have everybody check out their ceiling fixtures, and then present all the bugs en masse to the administration, even though they were probably involved as well. But even if they weren't, what could they do? What could they say? He could imagine what they'd say:
Yes, you have indeed found electronic eavesdropping devices in the rooms, but that doesn't prove anyone is actually listening. It's got to be some sort of elaborate practical joke. Because in the final analysis, why on earth would anyone want to listen to the incidental conversations of a group of medical students?
Neither could Tim.
But that opened the door to another question: If the administration had nothing to do with the bugging and didn't care what was being said in the dorms, why did they insist that all Ingraham students live here for their entire four years as medical students?
It didn't make sense.
Unless there was something else going on.
He'd been puzzled by the seemingly alien thoughts taking hold in his mind. What if they'd been planted there?
Tim shook his head. This was getting wilder and wilder. The bug was one thing, but...
...but what if the people behind the bugging were interested in hearing what was coming out of the students as a way of monitoring what they were putting in?
