18

I got lost twice on the way back to my hotel. Partly because of my usual bad sense of direction and partly because my mind was focused on Singer’s nondisclosure agreement. It was after eleven when I made it back to my room and looked at a text from Martin.

Trust you made it back okay. Hope you found what you needed.

I didn’t want to tell him what I’d found. No sense involving him any more than necessary. So I just sent a quick reply. Yes, back in hotel now. Interesting venture, thanks! Owe you dinner next time you’re in Boston.

He must have been waiting to hear from me. His response was immediate. And as usual, centered on food. You’re welcome. Any decent restaurants there?

I laughed out loud in a release of the evening’s tension. Mixed in with relief that Martin wasn’t going to press me for more information. Take you to the original Regina’s pizza in the North End. Put it up against your Pepe’s for the world’s best any day! Wanna bet the amount you bribed the security guard?

I could almost hear the snort of derision in his response. Hah! You’re on. See you soon.

I needed to get some sleep before the drive back to Boston tomorrow. But I couldn’t do it yet. I was too blown away by the discovery that Singer’s departure from Yale was veiled in secrecy. With Sally Lipton somehow involved.

There could, of course, be several reasons for a nondisclosure agreement. Singer was a highflier, and Yale might have bent over backward to keep him from leaving. If so, they may very well have made him an offer that was so rich they wouldn’t want other faculty members to know about it. That would explain an agreement between Singer and the Yale administrators who had signed on. But why Sally Lipton?

Alternatively, Singer had left Yale under a cloud. Perhaps involving the same kind of financial shenanigans that he might be implicated in at BTI. If so, Lipton’s signature implied that she was involved. Both then and now.

In addition to Singer and Sally Lipton, the agreement was signed by the dean of Yale’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences and the president of Yale University. As well as by someone named Martha Daniels, who didn’t have an official title.

I knew the former dean, Kenneth Emerson. He was now president of my own university, having moved to the top position at BTI a year or so after Singer joined us. In fact, if I remembered correctly, Singer had been a member of the search committee that had selected Emerson for the top job, suggesting that whatever had happened to Singer at Yale hadn’t bothered Emerson. Interesting, but it wasn’t going to help me find out anything more. Emerson would hardly break a nondisclosure agreement to talk to me about it. Nor would the Yale president.

Seeing Sally Lipton’s name on the agreement told me a lot. It meant there was a tie between her and Singer going way back and including some involvement in—or at least knowledge of—the details of his departure from Yale. But based on my interaction with her this afternoon, it wasn’t something she was going to talk to me about.

So that left one other possibility to look into. The other unidentified signatory, Martha Daniels. I revved up my laptop and searched for her in PubMed. I came up with two published papers from ten years ago, about the time Singer left Yale. The footnotes indicated that Martha Daniels had been a graduate student in chemistry. Neither Singer nor Sally Lipton was a coauthor on either of the papers, so neither appeared to have been directly involved with her work.

The most recent of the two papers said that the research had been part of Martha’s PhD thesis, implying that she’d graduated from Yale with a PhD in chemistry and two publications in first-rate journals to her name. Those were strong credentials, and I would have expected her to go on to a position at a leading research university. But there was nothing more recent from her in the published literature, meaning that she hadn’t pursued an active research career.

I switched to Google. It took some digging, but I managed to find her listed as a junior faculty member at Farmington Community College the year after she presumably graduated. I had to google Farmington to identify it as a small community college in the Lakes Region of New Hampshire. Not the kind of prestigious place I’d have expected a PhD from Yale to wind up at. But maybe Martha had been more interested in teaching than in research. And who knows, maybe she had family in New Hampshire.

The current Farmington website didn’t show her listed as faculty, so I did more searching until I found a Farmington archive. She’d been a faculty member at Farmington for only two years, eight and nine years ago. And then she just wasn’t there anymore. No indication of a forwarding address at another college or university.

Farmington was in Holderness, so I tried googling “Martha Daniels Holderness New Hampshire.” That brought up an old article from the Holderness Gazette, reporting that Martha Daniels had committed suicide by hanging herself.

I felt a shiver go down my spine as I stared at the newspaper article. What had driven a young woman like this to take her own life? Was she depressed by a career situation so different from what she’d apparently been pursuing at Yale? And was that somehow tied to her involvement with Mike Singer in whatever the nondisclosure agreement was about?

I needed to find out more about Martha. Maybe talk to someone who knew her and could shed some light on whatever had happened. The obvious starting point was the cops who had investigated her death, but I didn’t think they’d talk to me. But I knew someone they would open up to.

I texted Karen, being purposefully vague.

I’ve been looking into an irregularity involving Mike Singer’s grants and need your help in sorting things out. It has nothing to do with Upton or Emily, so no conflict. Can we meet for coffee or lunch?

It was too late for her to answer, but she’d get it in the morning and hopefully be intrigued enough to meet. In the meantime, I was too charged with adrenaline to sleep, so I checked out of the hotel and headed back to Boston. At least the traffic would be light at two in the morning.