The lunch bell rang just as Greg reached the science department. Within seconds, the corridor was filled with students heading anywhere but here, dragging along with them the slightly pungent aroma of freshly scrubbed laboratory. They slid by him on either side, almost but not quite touching. One or two smiled at him in passing; a few more stared openly at his eye patch; the vast majority ignored him.
‘You got a minute?’ he asked, sticking his head around the door of Demetrius Freedman’s classroom.
‘Sure, my brother,’ Demetrius said, smiling broadly. ‘I was hoping to catch up with you, anyway. Steelers this Sunday. My house. I’m having a bunch of people around. I’d love for you to come meet some folks.’
‘Then I’d love to be there.’
‘Great! I’ll email you the address.’ Desk behind him, Demetrius leaned backwards against it, bracing himself with long arms. ‘So, what brings you down here? More activated carbon?’
Greg chuckled before assuming a more serious demeanor.
‘I’m worried about Andrea Velasquez,’ he said. ‘I think she’s being fitted up.’
‘Fitted up?’ Demetrius looked puzzled.
‘Framed,’ Greg translated. ‘Because she’s Hispanic.’
Demetrius nodded slowly.
‘Always possible with Pittsburgh’s finest. Though word is they have a ton of evidence against her.’
‘I know, but I got a really bad vibe off that chunky thug of a police lieutenant, if you know what I mean. I’m not sure he isn’t above making the evidence fit the crime, and I just thought I’d check in with you, because you understand what goes on here so much better than I do. What I’m getting at is: did you sense any … animus when they interviewed you? After all, you were the last person out of the building Monday night. I thought maybe they gave you a hard time about it.’
Demetrius threw him a sharp glance.
‘Who told you that?’
‘Word gets around. But I was thinking they might have tried pinning it on you before they settled on Andrea. If they did, then I was thinking we might try and get a civil rights lawyer involved.’
Demetrius looked both surprised and impressed.
‘And here was me thinking you don’t listen to a word I say. Those crackers got it in for anybody that don’t look like them. And the closer we get to real power in this country, the angrier they gonna get.’
Greg nodded in what he hoped was solemn agreement.
‘Dealing with the police up close and personal was a real eye opener, Demetrius. That lieutenant fellow was harsh. Unnecessarily so. I can’t help thinking the whole experience would have been a lot different if my last name had been Cholmondley-Smythe instead of Abimbola.’
‘I hear ya, man.’ Demetrius stared down at the floor, as if collecting his thoughts. ‘I had the woman, so it may have gone a little different for me. She seemed alright: very respectful, very polite. But you still gots to watch every goddamned fucking word. Police is still police. Can’t trust ’em further than you can throw one of their frigging cruisers.’
‘So what did she ask you?’
‘She mostly wanted to know where I’d been all Monday night. So I told her. Here until just before nine and then home. Then she asked me if I’d seen or heard anything unusual and I said I hadn’t.’ He shuddered involuntarily. ‘Jee-sus fucking Christ! That woman might have been murdered while I was right here in this lab, and I had no goddamned idea! Life is just … strange, man. Fucking strange.’
‘If anyone’s strange,’ Greg said, laughing, ‘it’s you. What were you doing here till nine at night? You must have been freezing. Couldn’t it have waited till Tuesday? Or better yet, been done in the warmth of your own home?’
‘Hah! Spoken like a true student of the arts. Science, my man, requires actual work. I was in here freezing my ass off prepping an experiment. Quite literally something you should never do at home.’
‘You prep experiments?’ Greg was genuinely surprised.
‘Of course I prep experiments.’ Demetrius threw him a good-natured glance. ‘Think of it like … like a dress rehearsal for a play. Or maybe you’ve got people coming around, and you’re cooking something you’ve never cooked before. So you test it out on the kids a week ahead of time, just to make sure everything goes right.’
‘And that’s what you were doing Monday night?’
‘I surely was. I was working through the steps for a class experiment using sulfur hexafluoride.’
‘What the hell is that when it’s at home?’
‘Sulfur hexafluoride, Arts-man, is an odorless and colorless gas. All you need to know about it is that it’s invisible and incredibly dense, way denser than air. So … if you pour sulfur hexafluoride into a container, you can float things on it – light things, for sure – but get it right and they’ll float just like a boat on the ocean, except this is an ocean of gas and completely invisible. Total showstopper.’
‘I’ll bet!’
‘But you’ve got to get everything just right, otherwise you’re looking at complete – and I mean utterly humiliating – catastrophe. So I was here running the damn thing again and again until I was certain I could pull it off. Finished around eight twenty, tidied up and left. Never left the department the entire evening. Cause, unlike you, I have a real job.’
‘More fool you, then.’
Greg took his leave, still smiling at the exchange. He made his way back down the corridor toward the lobby. With a sudden jab of memory, he recalled that he had yet again left his keycard upstairs. He didn’t need it, of course. The security doors – doors that on Monday had been shut tight against the freezing cold – were latched tamely against the walls.
Greg stared at them thoughtfully. He wandered across the lobby and loitered by the front desk.
‘Stacey?’
‘Yes, Mr Abimbola?’
‘Our keycards: does the system log them in and out?’
‘Oh yes. Every time you use it, there’s a record.’
‘And where would that record be kept?’
Stacey grinned at him.
‘You get one guess.’
‘Ms Pasquarelli?’ Greg grinned back.
‘Yay! Give the man a prize!’
‘Thanks, Stacey.’
Greg headed up the stairs to the second floor, turned left instead of right and found himself in the admin suite.
Emily’s cubicle was empty. She couldn’t be far, though. Her coat and scarf were hung neatly on the coat rack. She was probably in the cafeteria or attending some lunchtime meeting – often the only time you could get a bunch of faculty to sit around the same table.
Greg sat down at her desk. The seat was far too low for him and smelt vaguely of Emily’s perfume. His head swam a little at the scent. He tapped her keyboard. The screen came up, demanding her now-compromised password. Greg entered it.
This way he didn’t have to come up with some cock-a-mamie reason for wanting something as esoteric as keycard logs.
The keycard security software required a different password – in theory. Greg knew, however, that there was a better than even chance that Emily used the same password for everything. He pecked it out again: Ba$ra01, and he was in. Ignoring a complicated looking budget spreadsheet, he found the icon he was looking for with a quick sweep of the mouse. The contents made for absorbing reading.
So absorbing, he didn’t hear Emily Pasquarelli re-enter the admin suite.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Her face was a mask of suspicion.
‘Waiting for you, actually,’ Greg drawled, even though his heart was hammering. ‘I just wanted to see what it felt like to sit in the seat of power.’ He made to get up, casually dislodging a ruler and two neatly aligned pens onto the floor.
‘Let me get that.’
‘Don’t bother.’ Emily, still irritated, bent down to pick them up. Greg took the opportunity to shut down her computer – and to keep her distracted.
‘Faculty meeting?’
‘What?’
‘I was wondering if you’d been at a faculty meeting.’
‘Oh. Yes. Art department. They’re spending way too much on materials.’ A quick sigh. ‘Science is next. We need to talk to them about their lab costs. They seem to have increased without rhyme or reason.’ She moved past him, sat down at her desk and primly placed the pens and ruler in their customary position. ‘You said you wanted something?’
‘I did. But I also really didn’t mean to annoy you. I’m sorry about sitting at your desk. I’ll swing by another time.’
‘No, no. It’s just me being silly.’ Now it was Emily’s turn to look apologetic. ‘It’s just that I handle all the school’s finances, so pretty much everything on my computer is super confidential. I get really paranoid about it. Sorry. You want something, I’m here to help. What can I do for you?’
Which turned out to be the most difficult question Greg Abimbola had faced in some time. He’d been so busy covering up his tracks he hadn’t had time to come up with a plausible reason for being there. His mouth came to the rescue before his brain had a chance to intervene.
‘I was wondering,’ he said, not quite believing his ears, ‘if you might be interested in going out to dinner?’