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“SO DOES SHE KNOW?” I asked.
“Yeah. After all these years, we’re getting married. Finally.”
“Wow, there’s a plot twist. Congratulations.”
“Her new boyfriend turned out to be a total washout.”
“Well, it sounds like it was a rebound relationship. I understand those don’t usually work out.”
“Molly, I know this sounds kinda weak, but I’d still like to be friends.”
“Of course. If your girlfriend—fiancée—doesn’t mind. Are you going to invite me to your wedding?”
“Sure,” he grinned.
“I’m picturing some indie band from Portland, playing a folk-inflected version of Mendelssohn's Wedding March on genuine 19th century string instruments.”
He laughed. “It sounds kinda cool, actually. I like it.”
“Are you moving back to the mainland?”
“Yeah. There’s not much here for either of us, career-wise.”
My phone hummed in my bag.
“Go ahead and get your call,” he said.
“I’ll just check and make sure it isn’t my lawyer—oh no, it is my lawyer. I’m so sorry. What awkward timing.”
“No, it’s okay.”
“I got Melanie’s phone records,” Honey said. “Are you on campus?”
“I’m at the pizza place. Chang’s Pizza Pagoda Express.”
“I’ll be there in five.”
Atticus was at the soda machine getting a refill when Honey showed up with an armload of printouts. She dropped two thick stacks of paper on the table in front of me.
“Here’s her phone records, Professor. And here’s printouts of the websites she was visiting frequently. The phone records show texts between Melanie and Leilani Zelenko, your real estate agent. So there’s more evidence for what we were thinking about Melanie wanting the Brewster House.”
“Okay, we’ve confirmed Melanie was after the Brewster House. Anything else?”
Honey pulled up a chair and sat down next to me.
“There’s some phone calls to and from the university, but the university has a central switchboard so it’s impossible to tell who those were to.”
“I wonder if any of these calls were to Scott Nixon. Threatening to expose his plagiarism.”
“Maybe,” Honey said. “But even if we could show she called Scott Nixon, it wouldn’t be unusual. He was her new department chair. Anyway. How long will it take you to look through all of these?”
“All of them?” I asked.
“Yes. You’re the only one who can tell me if they mean anything.”
“I don’t know. This is a lot of paper—”
“How about this weekend?”
“This weekend? It’s already Tuesday.”
“It’s Wednesday.”
“See, it’s already Wednesday. I always lose track of the days in the summer. I don’t have my class schedule to keep me oriented.”
“We can’t waste any more time,” Honey said. “If you find something worth following up on, I’ll have to get our investigator on it.”
“We have an investigator?”
“Haven’t had to use her yet. I was thinking of having her look for Scott Nixon, but I thought I’d wait for the police to do their job.”
“Any progress there?”
“Nah. Nothing on Scott, or the student he supposedly ran off with. I bug Medeiros about it at least once a day. He’s starting to duck around corners when he sees me.”
“Thanks.” The Medeiros-pestering was certainly going on her billable hours. I tried not to think about what my legal expenses were going to look like.
“Oh, Atticus, this is Honey Akiona, my capable lawyer and one of our outstanding alums. Honey, this is Atticus Marx, from our IT department.”
“Nice to meet you.” Atticus put down his soda and offered his hand. Honey clasped his hand tightly and stared at him.
“It’s a privilege to meet you,” she whispered.
The hard-to-impress Honey Akiona wore an expression I had never expected to see on her: Starstruck.
Atticus smiled amiably. “I better get back to work, Molly. Hug?”
I stood up and he gave me a big hug, leaving a smear of pizza grease on my sleeve.
“Nice to meet you, Honey. Bye, Molly.”
Honey, starry-eyed, watched him amble out.
“Do you know him?” I asked. “Honey?”
“Oh. Do you remember when you wrote me the recommendation letter? For the conference fellowship?”
“I do remember. That’s why I was surprised to find out you’d gone to law school. I always thought you were going to end up doing something with computers.”
“He was one of the featured speakers.”
“Atticus Marx was a speaker at your hacker conference?”
“It was a security conference. We don’t call ourselves hackers. Professor, his work is amazing. He was the one who found the security breach that...ah, you don’t wanna know the details. It’s technical.”
“Atticus Marx? The guy who just—the man I was just having pizza with?”
“No one knows his real name.” Honey was still staring at the glass door, the jaunty lettering spelling out Chang’s Pizza Pagoda Express in mirror image. “Everyone just calls him Mad Dog.”