when I had committed to going ona trip into the past with him. I picked my glasses up off the desk and put them back on as the printer started spewing out copies with a repetitive
whoosh-whoosh
.
Chief Kirkland took the chair across from me. He leaned forward and directed an intense stare at me. “I wanted to get something into the open.”
I pushed the cookie jar—oatmeal chocolate chip this time—toward him, but he only shook his head. “No thanks, I’m not one much for junk food.”
I took a cookie for myself and asked, “What is it that you wanted to get out into the open, Chief Kirkland?”
“The word.”
“Which?”
“Murder.”
The word had been said before, but hearing him say it made it seem more official somehow. There was no going back.
“The
who, how
, and
why
are the three questions that need answering,” he added.
I almost jotted those three words down.
He went on, “The
how
we’ll put aside for the moment. The
who
possibilities include everyone with a TTE building pass and the code to the lab—really, just the lab code. Someone could have hidden in one of the bathrooms or classrooms as the building emptied for the day. As to the
why
—I need you to think, Ms. Olsen. Who had a reason to kill Dr. Mooney?”
“No one.”
“Nonsense.” He ticked off potential answers on his long fingers. “One, a student unhappy with a grade. Two, an envious or slighted colleague. Three, a jilted lover. Four, the inheritors of his estate. Five—”
I briefly closed my eyes, tired from double-checking budgetary forms, and stopped him. “Let me answer those in order.One—students. We get a disgruntled student or two every semester, that’s true, mostly undergrads. Occasionally one of them threatens St. Sunniva with a lawsuit or parents withholding donations if we don’t pass the student in all of the semester’s classes. But I can’t imagine that would lead to… Well, we don’t take too much notice of them, to be honest. Besides,” I added, “the door code to the TTE lab is changed monthly and never given to undergrad students, only to those grad students whose research requires it.
“Two—Xavier’s colleagues. He got along reasonably well with all of them.”
“You mean that they all worked well as a team, he and Dr. Rojas, Dr. Baumgartner, and Dr. Little?”
I paused to eat a second cookie. “Academia is not like that. Think of it as…” At a momentary loss about how to describe the peculiarities of the academic world, I caught sight of the walleye pin that Quinn had once given me, now sitting in a little box of office odds and ends. It was from the fishing club that both he and the chief had belonged to. (I was pretty sure that Quinn, who was not particularly outdoorsy, had joined the Walleyes to have something to do on the weekends that wouldn’t interest me. Spending hours in waders in a fishing boat—or bundled in a parka in a fishing shack above a hole drilled in the ice—was just not my thing.) I’d used the pin to puncture holes in the wedding photo that used to sit on my desk. I had kept it because it was handy for opening envelopes.
“Think of academia as a fleet of fishing boats bobbing on Sunniva Lake, each boat captained by a professor, manned by graduate students, and producing a steady catch of scientific finds and journal papers. Most of the catch is little fish but the fishermen bump into each other’s boats as they compete for the big fish—funds, grants, lab space, publicity, Nobel Prizes. It’s arare person who can keep a level head and not get pulled into the fray. Xavier Mooney was that rare person. Not because of any conscious decision on his part—on the contrary, in fact. He was always so brimming with ideas that he was simply oblivious to the politics of it all.” I shrugged. “He didn’t notice that sometimes others would get heavily invested in a single idea, or were desperate for funding, or were holding on for dear life until
whoosh-whoosh
.
Chief Kirkland took the chair across from me. He leaned forward and directed an intense stare at me. “I wanted to get something into the open.”
I pushed the cookie jar—oatmeal chocolate chip this time—toward him, but he only shook his head. “No thanks, I’m not one much for junk food.”
I took a cookie for myself and asked, “What is it that you wanted to get out into the open, Chief Kirkland?”
“The word.”
“Which?”
“Murder.”
The word had been said before, but hearing him say it made it seem more official somehow. There was no going back.
“The
who, how
, and
why
are the three questions that need answering,” he added.
I almost jotted those three words down.
He went on, “The
how
we’ll put aside for the moment. The
who
possibilities include everyone with a TTE building pass and the code to the lab—really, just the lab code. Someone could have hidden in one of the bathrooms or classrooms as the building emptied for the day. As to the
why
—I need you to think, Ms. Olsen. Who had a reason to kill Dr. Mooney?”
“No one.”
“Nonsense.” He ticked off potential answers on his long fingers. “One, a student unhappy with a grade. Two, an envious or slighted colleague. Three, a jilted lover. Four, the inheritors of his estate. Five—”
I briefly closed my eyes, tired from double-checking budgetary forms, and stopped him. “Let me answer those in order.One—students. We get a disgruntled student or two every semester, that’s true, mostly undergrads. Occasionally one of them threatens St. Sunniva with a lawsuit or parents withholding donations if we don’t pass the student in all of the semester’s classes. But I can’t imagine that would lead to… Well, we don’t take too much notice of them, to be honest. Besides,” I added, “the door code to the TTE lab is changed monthly and never given to undergrad students, only to those grad students whose research requires it.
“Two—Xavier’s colleagues. He got along reasonably well with all of them.”
“You mean that they all worked well as a team, he and Dr. Rojas, Dr. Baumgartner, and Dr. Little?”
I paused to eat a second cookie. “Academia is not like that. Think of it as…” At a momentary loss about how to describe the peculiarities of the academic world, I caught sight of the walleye pin that Quinn had once given me, now sitting in a little box of office odds and ends. It was from the fishing club that both he and the chief had belonged to. (I was pretty sure that Quinn, who was not particularly outdoorsy, had joined the Walleyes to have something to do on the weekends that wouldn’t interest me. Spending hours in waders in a fishing boat—or bundled in a parka in a fishing shack above a hole drilled in the ice—was just not my thing.) I’d used the pin to puncture holes in the wedding photo that used to sit on my desk. I had kept it because it was handy for opening envelopes.
“Think of academia as a fleet of fishing boats bobbing on Sunniva Lake, each boat captained by a professor, manned by graduate students, and producing a steady catch of scientific finds and journal papers. Most of the catch is little fish but the fishermen bump into each other’s boats as they compete for the big fish—funds, grants, lab space, publicity, Nobel Prizes. It’s arare person who can keep a level head and not get pulled into the fray. Xavier Mooney was that rare person. Not because of any conscious decision on his part—on the contrary, in fact. He was always so brimming with ideas that he was simply oblivious to the politics of it all.” I shrugged. “He didn’t notice that sometimes others would get heavily invested in a single idea, or were desperate for funding, or were holding on for dear life until
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