LITMIR.BIZ

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head to one side. God, he was a nice-looking man. I mentally kicked my thoughts to scatter them out of my mind. They were too damn distracting. The effect this perfect stranger was having on me was unnerving.

      “What kind of question’s that?” He shuffled some papers uneasily and cleared his throat. “Not easy, but I suppose it could happen. It’s a gun really, and the ammo is a dart that shoots out. The impact of the dart in the animal’s hide releases the tranquilizer. Still, you’d have to be pretty dumb or fantastically careless or accident-prone to do that unintentionally.”

       chapter eleven

      I found Leslie in among a whole truckload of boxes in Diamond’s old office. His name was still on the door, and the snarling face of a Canada lynx growled out at me. I knocked, and a moment later Leslie appeared at the door eating an apple. Her black closely cropped hair made her face look quite masculine, but the rest of her was definitely a woman.

      “Well, so we meet again.”

      “Looks like you got promoted?”

      “Yeah. Soon to be full professor from associate. But what a way to do it, eh? Over Diamond’s dead body. Nothing like taking over the responsibilities of a dead man.” I was startled by the bitterness in her voice, but then she smiled and I thought maybe I had been mistaken.

      “We never properly introduced ourselves back up there in the woods. Leslie Mitchell.” She hastily switched the apple to her left hand, wiped her right hand on her pants, and held it out to me.

      “Cordi O’Callaghan,” I said as I gripped her hand in mine. I winced at the strength of it. This was getting to be ridiculous. Had everyone learned that a limp grip labelled you a wimp? The harder you squeeze the more important you are?

      “Come on in,” she said and led me into the chaos of her office. There were boxes everywhere, all in various stages of being unpacked.

      She knelt down in front of a box and started rifling through its contents.

      “You’re an entomologist aren’t you?” she asked.

      “A zoologist, really, but I often work with insects.”

      “And you’ve lost all your specimens, as well as your disks.” She looked up at me, and seeing my surprised look she laughed. “This is a small university. Nothing is private here, and we stick by each other. Don just phoned to warn me you were coming around.”

      She sat back on her heels, a file folder in each hand.

      “Being a zoologist I know what it’s like to lose data or have an experiment go wrong and the hopes of tenure with it. I gather you were hoping to recover the disks. What makes you think they’d still be around?”

      “Hope. Desperation. I don’t know. They weren’t trashed at my office. They were physically removed, so I have some hope they’re still around, that whoever took them realizes what they mean and won’t destroy them. There’s nothing on them that would be the least bit useful to anyone but me.”

      The words hung in the air. The silence lengthened. She dropped the folders back into the box.

      “Not even to another zoologist or entomologist?”

      I paused, startled by her question. I hadn’t really given that possibility much thought. What if someone had wanted my data to beat me to publication and the stolen disks had nothing to do with Diamond? Ridiculous. My work just wasn’t important enough, even if there was another team working on it. If I had some new breakthrough, then it would be different, but …

      “Not interesting enough,” I said, and felt a pang of anger that my work really wasn’t something someone would want to steal.

      “That doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting to someone else,” she said. “What were you working on, besides the larvae?”

      “Basic taxonomy. Nothing earth-shattering. Some succession work and some stuff with praying mantids. I can’t see that anyone would be interested, except me.”

      “You’re probably right.”

      I tried not to look hurt at this cryptic dismissal of my work.

      “It was only a suggestion, but maybe you should be looking somewhere else besides here. Why do you think Diamond’s death is related to the theft of your disks anyway?”

      “Don seems to have told you everything.”

      Leslie rocked on her heels.

      “Yeah, well, he said you had some crazy idea that the larvae you found on Diamond’s body indicated that he had been moved a long way from where he died. Even if your accidental attempt at forensic entomology can tell you that, what the hell does it mean? It makes no sense. I mean, why would anyone want to move his body somewhere else? It’s ludicrous.”

      She yanked another box over to her side and rummaged inside.

      “Because his death might not be what it seems.”

      Leslie slowly turned to look at me, her face blank and unreadable. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

      When I didn’t answer she waved her hand impatiently.

      “You can’t get more straightforward than being killed by a bear. You really are desperate, aren’t you? Sounds as though you’re grasping at straws. Can’t say I blame you, though,” she added.

      I watched as she emptied out the box and started sorting out the papers that had been in it. Finally, as I had hoped, she broke the silence.

      “Did you ever actually meet Diamond?”

      “No. I knew of his work, of course, but I never met him.”

      “Yeah, well, he was well-liked by most people. He’ll be sorely missed. If you’re suggesting his death was anything but a horrible accident …”

      “I’m not suggesting that, but was there anything Diamond was doing that could have made people angry enough or frightened enough to explain why his body was moved?”

      “You mean like a sick prank or something? If you look hard enough everyone has enemies. But Diamond just got really careless. His campsite was a literal siren call of food. The cops said he even left a Mars bar in his tent, for God’s sake.”

      She shrugged, and I waited, hoping for more.

      “What do you want me to say? He got careless. I’ve been there, know what it’s like. But this time I got the consolation prize. I got his job. Lousy way to get it, and people calling me callous behind my back. What do they expect me to do? Say no to a promotion I’ve sought all my life? Sure, we were rivals — no secret there. I wanted his job. God knows I deserved it. But I didn’t want it this way. I’ve just learned the hard way to take what I can get in a deck stacked in favour of men. You got tenure?”

      “No.”

      “See? And you’re not likely to even have a chance at getting it without your disks, right?”

      The look on my face must have said it all.

      “What research are you working on?” I asked, wanting to get the spotlight off me. I hated it when my questions came back at me.

      “Oh, I’m quite eclectic. Move around and fill in the gaps left by my colleagues. Some taxonomy. I’ve worked with parasites and planaria, and done some studies with mice. I’ve spent the last few years working on moose and their predators, and a new project that I hope will prove very interesting.”

      “What’s that?”

      “Don’t have enough data to go public yet or know for sure if the hypothesis will stand, so I’d rather not say just yet.” She smiled. She was actually quite pretty when her face lit up like that.

      “It’s a new angle, may not pan out … but I have to wait and organize the data before I make it public. You know how it

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