Great. In trying to solve this case, I’d made myself the prime suspect. Detective DeRusso didn’t believe for a second that I’d just happened to drop by. If Kevin and I couldn’t figure out how Josh died, I might be in trouble with both the witch and the human police.
Since I didn’t have anything else to say to Detective DeRusso, I put on a serene smile. “Have a good afternoon.”
Once I pulled away from the curb, I asked my GPS to take me to the local train station. Although I’d rather find Josh’s brother and question him, I didn’t want to know how DeRusso would react if they showed up to break the news to the next of kin and found me there. I’d give Brian a chance to grieve and instead see if there were any clues in Josh’s office.
Even on the weekend, trains went into the city pretty regularly. Faculty offices at a major university might be open. Or might use a keypad system, just waiting to be exploited by a bright student with a useful psychic ability.
If nothing else, seeing where Josh worked might give me a vision. Or I might find someone who knew him to ask some questions about his enemies. It was worth a shot, considering we had few leads and not a lot of time to follow them.
Luckily, there was a train heading into town in about twenty minutes. But first, I had a magical call to make. After pulling into a space, I pulled out the dime and summoned Lilia.
She appeared instantly in the passenger seat. “Hello, Sodium. That was fast.”
“Aly,” I corrected her.
Ignoring me, she said, “Did you solve it already?”
“I just came from Josh’s house here, in this world. He’s dead.”
“Yes. He is dead. Good job.” She rolled her eyes. “To think Mary said you were the smart one. I pity the rest of your family.”
“But we didn’t do a spell in this world. I wasn’t even here! Our magic couldn’t be the reason he’s dead.”
“You’re not a witch, so I get how you could think that. I told you earlier that magic comes at a price, right? Taking something in exchange for giving you Katrina back only creates balance if it happens in both worlds,” she said. Darn it, I’d wondered about that but hoped to be wrong. “I’m telling you, unless you can find some other explanation, Mary’s going down for this.”
I sighed. “Then I guess I’m headed to New York City.”
“Wonderful. I’d love to come with you, maybe catch a show. Unfortunately, I have things to do. Call me when you’ve got something concrete. Ta-ta for now, Barium.”
She vanished before I could respond. I smacked my steering wheel in frustration. The horn honked, and a woman on the sidewalk turned to glare at me.
Ugh.
After my train arrived at Penn Station, I caught a subway to the university where Josh had taught. It wasn’t far from where Sam was getting his master’s degree, so this leg of the trip was very familiar to me. I wondered what Sam was doing right now. In the old world, he’d probably have been spending the weekend up in Shady Grove with me, shopping or hanging out with his moms or even teaching me to ski. We’d talked about that once, and now it would never happen.
I shook the thoughts away. I needed to focus on figuring out who killed Josh and saving Mary. Getting distracted by the chaos of my love life wasn’t going to help.
Forty minutes after boarding the subway, I arrived at the University of New York’s Greenwich Village campus. There weren’t a lot of people around, but plenty of signs pointed me at the science faculty building.
No directory, but every office had a name on the door. Josh’s office was at the end of the first floor, near the stairwell. I reached for the knob, then stopped dead.
Under Josh Montenegro’s name was a piece of paper that said “Carey Redding, Anthropology.” They couldn’t have reassigned his space already, right? It never occurred to me that professors at an established university would have to share an office, so who was this other person and why had they taped their name to the door? Making their territory? That was gross. He’d just died.
The door stood ajar. The room appeared to be empty. But unless a member of the cleaning staff or a police officer left it open, Professor Redding might be back any second. I needed to be extremely careful that she didn’t catch me.
A glance up and down the hallway revealed that no one was around. Since I might not have much time, I seized my moment and swept through the doorway.
There were two desks tucked into the small space, one huge and one that looked like an afterthought. The larger desk against the left wall was meticulous. Not a stray paper anywhere. Everything was exactly in place, even down to the two pens arranged in the holder. It looked more like an ad for Staples than a working office. In contrast, papers covered every square inch of the space of the smaller desk. It sat squished up against the far wall, almost as if it was trying to escape.
Where to start?
Since Josh’s house had been pretty clean, I went to the bigger desk first. Bingo! The nameplate told me I’d chosen correctly. That made sense, since the sign outside made it seem like the second professor had only recently made a home here.
There was no time to waste. I needed to know who might have a motive to kill Josh, and there was nothing on the surface of his desk. I swept into his chair and turned to face the keyboard. Okay, come on. Motive for murder, motive for murder. Where might you be? I called an image of Josh into my mind and held it there firmly while trying to look like a college professor.
Pulling a fancy fountain pen out of the holder, I pretended to write a note on a piece of paper. The room tilted.
A man sat in the chair on the other side of the desk, about my size but more muscular. He wore an expensive suit and tie that looked like silk. With his brown hair and eyes, he resembled Josh but I was pretty sure this wasn’t him.
“I don’t know what else to try,” I said to the man. “The formula doesn’t work. Our test subjects gained weight. Some of them—”
“There has to be something else,” he insisted. “This could be a billion dollar idea. We just need to get the ball rolling.”
I raised my hands in a shrug. “I’m sorry, we need to scrap the whole thing. The FDA won’t let us sell this as a diet aid, even if we wanted to.”
“What do you mean, even if we wanted to?” He rose to his feet, balling his hands into fists. “Why wouldn’t we want to after all this? We’ve put all of our money into this. And years! Years of effort.”
“Because it killed the lab rats, Brian! People who take a little gain wait. People who take a lot get sick. And the formula is toxic in large doses.”
Those words would have given me pause, but the man behind the desk—Brian, apparently—didn’t seem to care. “Don’t be ridiculous. Lab rats aren’t people. It’s still fixable. We just need to change the dosage. Tweak the amounts. You’ve got this!”
“I don’t. No one is going to buy a weight loss supplement that makes them gain weight. Or worse, vomit until they die of dehydration. This was a great idea, but we’re not there yet. Our investors are already pulling out.” Despair filled me at the notion of yet another failed business attempt. We were never going to get ahead at this rate. My head dropped into my hands. “I’m so sorry.”
“And like I said, we’re moving forward before the last few schmucks catch on,” Brian said. “Repackage it. Make it so we’re not selling it as food. People do that all the time, right? We don’t need the FDA. We just slap some warnings on the label. I’ve got too much wrapped up in this, Josh. We need to move forward, and we need to do it now.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do that. If you want to move ahead, you’ll have to do it without me.”
“You’re the scientist!”
“Then I guess it’s over.”
“If we quit now, we’ll lose everything.” He clenched his jaw and looked away, face growing red. After a moment, he continued, “You told me this formula would work. I took money from my clients to fund the research. If people find out what happened, I could go to jail. We could both go to jail.”
A wave of fear went through me, but I stood my ground. My baby brother might be mad, but he would never hurt me. “I didn’t tell you to steal from your clients, Brian. That’s on you.”
“Don’t you want to show Mindy what she could have had?”
“Not when it means risking innocent lives.”
He shook his head and took a menacing step toward me. “I’m very sorry you feel that way. Because I’m putting this on the market, with or without you.”
“Over my dead body.”
Footsteps in the hallway brought me out of the vision. It was a little disorienting, but I rose to my feet as quickly as I could, moving so anyone who entered wouldn’t be able to tell where I’d been sitting. Hopefully.
There was so much to unpack in that vision, I hated not to be able to see the end of it, but there was no time.
I’d barely finished positioning myself to look like I’d just walked in when a voice made me jump. “Can I help you?”
My heart pounded.
Spinning around, I found a woman probably in her late forties, dressed much more casually than I would expect from a professor. Then again, it was the weekend, and she taught anthropology. Looking at bones was a dirty business. I’d rather do it in yoga pants and a faded sweatshirt, too. In that moment, I was just glad to see it wasn’t Josh’s brother, having killed his brother, returning to the office to finish off the psychic who knew about it.
Mentally, I shook myself. One argument didn’t mean murder. I couldn’t jump to conclusions. I didn’t even know when that conversation happened. It could have been years ago. But the woman in front of me might have some answers.
When I didn’t reply to her question, she cleared her throat. “I said, can I help you?”
“I’m sorry,” I stammered out the first thing I could think of, which hopefully sounded plausible. “Is this Professor Montenegro’s office?”
“It’s our office,” she said. “For now, anyway. A pipe burst in mine. Hopefully, the repairs will be done by the time the new semester starts. Are you one of his students?”
“Not yet. I’m thinking about transferring from Maloney College next fall,” I said. “I work for Professor Tabitha Zimm as a research assistant, and she recommended I speak to Professor Montenegro about the campus while I was in town visiting family. I know it’s the holiday break, but it’s early enough that I thought maybe I’d find him.”
The woman exhaled softly. “I’m so sorry, dear. Why don’t you have a seat?”
She moved into the room and settled behind the smaller, messy desk against the wall, gesturing toward the student chair on the other side.
“Thanks,” I said.
“I know my side looks like a disaster, but I assure you, I know where everything is.” She gestured for me to take a seat across from her. When she spoke again, her voice was kind. “I’m so sorry to tell you this, dear, but Professor Montenegro passed away this morning. Campus police just left.”
That was a relief, actually. I’d figured I wouldn’t run into Detective DeRusso out here, but it hadn’t occurred to me to worry about university cops.
“Oh my goodness!” I tried to inject surprise into my voice. This wasn’t the time to let her know that I’d found the body. If I was going to keep investigating murders, I really should take an acting class or two with my roommate. She’d be thrilled. “What happened?”
“No one knows. A neighbor found him in his home this morning. The officer I talked to made it seem like it wasn’t an accident, but they wouldn’t tell me more.” She leaned forward and lowered her voice. “You ask me, any foul play must have something to do with that girlfriend of his. She was always up to no good.”
The way this woman spoke about a girlfriend made me wonder if she’d killed Josh herself. She came across as jealous rather than someone with actual knowledge about the case. On the other hand, she seemed truly broken up by his death.
“What do you mean?” I also leaned forward to show my eagerness to hear this information. “Do you know her?”
Carey shook her head. “No one knows Mindy. She’s a textbook golddigger. She rarely comes to faculty events. Instead, she’s out all dolled up for auditions or schmoozing with industry folk while I’m left listening to Josh cry into his shrimp cocktail about how she ignores him. Poor guy.”
Definitely jealousy. “Auditions? Is she an actress?”
“She claims to be, but really, she just doesn’t want to work. Expected poor Josh to pay for everything while she went to an audition a month.” Carey snorted. “As if a professor around here makes enough to support anyone else. He didn’t even have tenure.”
I seized the opening. “Professor Zimm told me Professor Montenegro was starting a new business. She didn’t know the details, but it seemed very exciting, poised to take off any minute. Would that give him money to support his girlfriend?”
Carey glanced toward Josh’s desk as if he might pop out to chastise her for running her mouth. “He was so secretive about the new business, sometimes I wondered if he was opening an assassin service. But either way, I don’t think it was going well. He was always pacing around the office on his phone, speaking quickly, trying to convince people to invest. Always whispering or telling people he’d call them back in a few minutes. Lots of frustration. More than once, he’d get off a call and storm out of the building. It didn’t sound like the venture was going anywhere.”
It would be highly suspicious for me to know the business was on the verge of collapse, so I decided to fish for more information. “That’s odd. Professor Zimm told me they already applied for FDA approval. What are they making?”
“If you knew they were seeking FDA approval, you know more than me,” she said. “Josh never talked about his research, claimed it wasn’t time yet. I always thought it had something to do with those protein shakes he was drinking. Josh was a total health nut. Loved his shakes, insisted he just needed to find one perfect secret ingredient. I tried one once, ages ago. Let me tell you something: if he didn’t want the shakes to taste like dirt, the secret ingredient should be sugar.”
That made me laugh.
“Do you know how I could reach the brother? I’d like to pay my condolences, and I’m sure Professor Zimm will want to send flowers.”
“Oh, sure. His brother was a finance guy. Josh was so proud, his baby brother doing so well. He kept a stack of business cards in the top drawer of his desk. Handed them out all the time. Go ahead and take one. I won’t tell.”
Trying not to show my excitement, I opened the top drawer of Josh’s desk. The inside was meticulous. A sea of compartments, each with one thing centered inside. “Wow. That’s some organizer.”
She rolled her eyes. “He designed it himself. Josh was the neatest person I’ve ever met. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’d had ‘A place for everything and everything in its place’ tattooed on his bum. That should have been his business.”
I glanced at the card before putting it into my pocket. Brian worked for a huge bank in the city as an investment advisor. His office wasn’t far from here, or at least, it was on my way back to Star’s Ridge. Unfortunately, I doubted he would be there on a Saturday, hours after his brother died.
“I take it you and Josh weren’t friends?”
“Colleagues, I would say. We got along well enough. Even went out once. Got lunch at this cafe nearby. He had to cut his food into perfectly perpendicular squares before he would eat a bite. We never would have worked out.” She gestured vaguely at the chaos on her desk. “That’s one thing that surprised me when he started dating Mindy. She seemed like such a mess. Hair everywhere, constantly spilling, stains on half her clothes. She went into her purse to find her phone once and I swear ten receipts fell out. Maybe his cleaning system finally made her crack.”
“Cleaning system?”
“Yeah. Another product he invented. Seemed really excited, but it never went anywhere. Lots of his products never went anywhere. Josh was always big on ideas, less so on execution.”
“Like the serious girlfriend he never wanted to marry,” I mused, as if to myself. “Do you really think she killed him?”
“Well, obviously I can’t say,” she said. “But she seemed to think Josh was going to support her in the style she wanted to become accustomed to. Always talking about fancy cars, asking to borrow his credit card to buy clothes. She was in here a couple of weeks ago, asking about a Tiffany engagement ring. Tiffany! When Josh told her that wasn’t in the cards, she got so mad. She screamed at him, right here in front of me! It was during my office hours so I didn’t feel like I could leave, but it was awful. She could see me sitting here, trying to pretend I couldn’t hear her. What a nightmare. Then she stormed down the hall. That was the last time I saw her. I assumed they broke up.”
Huh. If Josh’s girlfriend was mad that he didn’t want to marry her after expecting him to fund her acting career, that gave her a motive. Alternatively, if she found out he was lying about how well the business was doing, she could have killed him in a fit of rage.
But did she have magic? Lilia was so sure Josh had been killed by magic. Carey seemed nice, but if I asked her if she knew any magical people, she’d kick me out of her office faster than I could say “charlatan.”
“Do you know if she and Josh lived together?”
“I don’t think so.” She shook her head. “Mindy always struck me as the sort of person who wanted to keep her options open. Like she would ditch him in a heartbeat if she met someone with more money. Living together would make that more difficult.”
“But you said Josh didn’t have a lot of money.”
“He didn’t. But to hear him talk, he was very close to a tremendous breakthrough in his research. Once that product got approval, it was going to sell like hotcakes. He was one hundred percent sure he was about to become a millionaire overnight. It sounded like she believed in him.”
So Mindy kept biding her time, waiting for that fortune to come in. Then the FDA approval got denied, and the business was on the verge of collapse.
Based on my vision, Brian looked like a likely suspect. He had motive and opportunity, as the victim’s brother. But I couldn’t discount Mindy yet. If she’d been waiting for Josh to get a big payoff, she might have been pretty ticked off to find out it was never coming.