Poison Most Vial Page 6

  “How much you pay for this shack?” Rex continued, same tone, a little quieter.

  “Rex, third period—c’mon, third period,” Ruby said. “Let’s get back. She’s done bothering us.”

  And she was. Lydia, pointing at Ruby, in retreat now, her face colored with—what? Fear. Not just of Rex’s anger, either. Lydia had to be involved somehow. If not, why would she care so much about their snooping?

  Ruby had no chance to talk it over with Rex. The two had to hustle back to class to beat the bell between periods.

  “Now, now, no running in the hallways, please,” came a voice from behind. “Oh, it’s Miss Rose. And her friend.”

  Ruby turned to see Dean Touhy. The dean; he’d been there that night, too. Another suspect. He looked terrible, Ruby thought, haggard and even heavier than usual. The entire forensics department had been shut down by the murder investigation, and no one knew when it was coming back.

  “Ruby,” Dean Touhy said, “I do hope you are holding up, and I am sorry for everything.”

  “It’s OK,” said Ruby. “We’re just trying to get back to class.”

  “Please tell your father that when all this is settled and he is cleared—and I fully expect that to happen—he is welcome back here in his old position,” the man said. “He must be in a state. Please pass on my best to him, would you?”

  “He’ll be cleared?” Ruby asked. The dean, now walking them toward class, nodded distractedly and said, “I have reason to believe so, and soon.”

  Ruby’s head swirled. “What? Why? Then who did it?”

  But that was all she got. Dean Touhy, arriving at the door of the Regular class, signaled to Mrs. Patterson—and with a wink to Ruby, he was gone, down the hall.

  Cleared? She peeked at Rex, who shook his head in confusion. How could she possibly tell her dad that without knowing more?

  “All right, Theodore, please continue reading where we left off,” Mrs. Patterson said.

  Relief. Rex was a smooth reader, and the story was getting kind of interesting. It was about a man living in a nice house with a pool who needed money so badly that he sneaked into the house next door—his friend’s house—and took money from his neighbor’s wallet.

  Rex was reading: “In the dimness I could see the bed and a pair of pants and a jacket hung over the back of a chair. Moving swiftly I stepped into the room and took a big billfold from the inside of the coat and started back to the hall.”

  Half listening, Ruby slipped from under her arm the last thing she’d grabbed from the cubicles, the lining of a garbage can under Lydia’s desk. She almost laughed out loud when she saw what it contained. Victor’s tea bags. Pages with Grace’s doodles. Gum wrappers, two empty energy-drink cans, tissues (disgusting). Garbage. She thought of passing it all to Rex with a meaningful look on her face, just to see him claw through it.

  She found a Post-it note stuck in the folds of the plastic bag. Come see me about this exam at your earliest convenience. Bring your ID. Rama’s writing, his signature in green pen.

  Bring your ID. Ruby had a feeling about what that meant. Her dad had told her that Rama’s students did not last long if they couldn’t master the material. The scores of Lydia’s two tests were 62/100 and 49/100. Not so good, those. Now he was asking for her ID?

  Rex stopped reading. “Now, why do you want to be taking cash money from your friends?” he said. “For real, now. Creeping around in their house, while they’re in there sleeping? The man lives next door. You can’t ask for a loan? I’m sorry, that’s just desperate.”

  Desperate. Lydia Tretiak seemed to be failing out. She was broke, Ruby’s dad said. All those late nights, working on the weekends—only to be failing. Was that really enough to make you want to kill someone? Lydia was crazy, in her way (they all were, Ruby thought). But was she really so desperate?

  Ruby had no way to know. The other grad students had motives, too. Victor clearly saw himself as capable of running the lab, and Rama never really let him. Grace was so anxious, maybe there was a drug problem. And Wade—he despised Rama’s rules, his coldness, the way he demanded that the students come in even on weekends.

  Too many possibilities. She let it go. The ID numbers she’d copied down—hmm, nothing much there.

  Now she sensed something else, not related to the evidence.

  What? A chill.

  She was being watched.

  Ruby looked around.

  Sharon. Sharon Hughes, the laces artist. The girl was watching her intently. Openly.

  Uh-oh. What’s her problem?

  The note must have been there for a little while. On the edge of Ruby’s desk, a piece of torn paper folded in half, lost amid the scraps she’d taken from the library.

  She glanced up at Mrs. Patterson, who was listing vocabulary words on the whiteboard. All clear there.

  Ruby opened the note, written in Sharon’s purple pen: I want to help. She looked at the other side; that was it.

  Ruby glanced back at its author again, who nodded almost imperceptibly.

  “What the . . . ?” The rumor was that Sharon landed in Regular after she’d hacked into the school’s computers and . . . what? Ruby didn’t know the full story.

  The girl wanted to help how, exactly?

  Mrs. Patterson’s lesson ended, finally. The class broke, with an audible collective sigh, for a half hour of free time. Ruby, Rex, and Sharon gathered at a table by the window by themselves.

  “What do you mean, you want to help?” Ruby whispered.

  Sharon swept a strand of hair from her face (Everything she does is like some shampoo model, Ruby thought). “I mean,” Sharon said, “I know what you’re doing. I think. I’ve seen you in the library.”

  “But what do you care?” Rex said. “Don’t you tell me you been spying on us.”

  “I care because—well, you know. Because the school accused me of stuff, too, stuff I didn’t do, I’d never do. They accused me of hacking into the mainframe, of changing my grades.” (So that was it! Ruby thought.) “They said it, and now everyone believes it, and nothing I can do. Kinda like what’s happening with your dad, Ruby.”

  Ruby winced. She hoped that maybe not everyone believed that her dad was guilty.

  “But, like, how are you going to help?” Ruby said. Those worked-up laces and that prima-donna way of swinging her hair. “We don’t—we really don’t have anything for you to do. Rex?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Something, maybe.”

  Oh no: He wants her in? Does Rex like Sharon?

  “Nothing?” said Sharon. “You got absolutely nothing I can check out or work with? No school documents, no numbers?”

  “Just this,” Ruby said.

  Ruby wrote down in her notebook an equation that she saw all over the grad students’ notebooks: Ln(2)/T-1/2. She had no idea what it meant. Good luck with that, Ruby thought, not sure whether she wanted the girl to succeed or fail.

  Sharon’s face went slack at the sight of the equation, and she turned the page around. “No idea on this thing.” She looked up at the two of them. “But I can bring in someone who might know. Is that all?”

  “Nope,” said Ruby, and she felt of twinge of something—jealousy, maybe—that Princess Sharon was casually asking for items that Ruby had taken big risks to get. “Uh, let’s see. I wrote down the ID numbers from a couple security badges. But I’m not even sure whose they are.”

  Ruby thought she saw a flare pass through Sharon’s eyes. “Security badge numbers, did you say? Uh, yeah, I’m familiar with those. Let me show you what we can do with ’em. Meet in the library after school?”

  Ruby stalled for a half second, stole a glance at Rex. He was smiling, of course. “All right.”

  Ruby arrived first and checked the forensics cluster. Empty, and thank goodness; no need for another run-in with Lydia, not now.

  She staked out a table near the computers and flattened her lab diagram on the table just as Sharon and Rex were arriving.

&n
bsp; “Hey,” Sharon said, putting her backpack on the table.

  Ruby nodded, glancing at Rex.

  “Go ahead, Ruby, you tell it,” he said.

  She recited most of what they knew. The timing of the murder. The poisons used. The red vials. The grad students, with quick descriptions. And the layout of the lab. She did not mention Mrs. Whitmore.

  Sharon was nodding impatiently by the end. “So, OK, OK,” she said, tipping forward in her chair. “Now, let’s see those security card numbers again.”

  “Oh, right.” Ruby copied them on a piece of paper and handed it to Sharon.

  “Perfecto,” she said. “Now watch this.”

  She led them to one of the library computers and went to work, with Ruby peering over one shoulder and Rex over the other. She pulled up the DeWitt campus security page from the school’s website.

  “You’re not gonna get us in trouble, are you?” Rex said.

  “No, no,” Sharon replied. “Should be fine, no problem. I’m just going to see what happens when I put these badge numbers into the site.”

  “How you know how to get in that site, anyway?” Rex said.

  Sharon gave a half smile. “Login and password, all it ever takes. Now let’s just see what this tells us about where those ID cards were used.”

  Ruby thought of something. “Just a second. Are we—can you get into the lab’s files now?”

  “Probably. At least the general files, not personal ones. Why?”

  “Search for the Toxin Archive,” Ruby said. “Just try it; there may be a file there somewhere that tells us how much poison was in those vials.”

  Two clicks and there was the lab’s internal homepage, with Toxin Archive right there in the left margin. Sharon clicked on it—ACCESS DENIED flashed on the screen. “Oh, I hate that,” she said. “I always take it personally.”

  “Police probably blocked it,” Rex said. “Anyone else gonna have that file, Ruby?”

  “Wade,” she said, slapping her head. Better than that, she thought: Wade ran those sensitive detection machines, and he kept better records than Grace, who was in charge of the archive cabinet. “Wade Charles. Let’s go get his personal web page.”

  “Hello, Mr. Wade,” said Sharon, who now had the page on her screen. “Now, what are we looking for?”

  Ruby smiled to herself. “Try cocktail lounge. That’s what Wade calls the cabinet.”

  “How’s this?” Sharon said, pushing back from the screen, which had filled with a long list. There were deadly nightshade, monkshood, chokecherry—all of them. The archive.

  “Amazing,” Ruby said. She printed out the list and stashed it in her backpack.

  “OK,” Sharon said. “You ready to see who was there?”

  “You mean in the lab?” Ruby said, moving closer. “Of course. How?”

  “You watch.”

  Sharon opened a page called Badge Tracking. In a badge number search space, she typed the first number: 011-9865.

  She hit the Enter button. The screen filled with a list of numbers and dates. Sharon scrolled down to September 20, the day of the murder. She pushed back from the screen, so they could see.

  D12 1650

  D7 1651

  D5 1653

  D17 1752

  D5 1753

  D8 1853

  D17 1855

  D5 1956

  “Uh, OK,” said Ruby, feeling a stirring in her stomach.

  “What do the Ds mean?” Rex said.

  “They’re doors,” Sharon said. “Places where you have to use your security card to buzz yourself through.”

  “And the numbers?”

  “Times. Military times, counting up from noon. So, noon is 1200, one o’clock is 1300, two is 1400, and so on. See that?”

  Ruby felt her temples warming. This was more information than she ever imagined having for that evening.

  “It looks like you buzz through these doors just one way, from the outside,” Sharon said.

  “Yeah, that’s right, most are like that,” Ruby said. “Except the main front door of the building. You have to use your card to get out, too. Same goes for a few other rooms.”

  Rex said, “D12 must be the main building door, then.”

  Ruby pulled out her sketchbook and flipped to the diagram of the lab. “Exactly, here’s what we have.”

  Ruby pulled a chair closer to the computer and began numbering doors to her diagram as Sharon read them off. “Remember, this is one person’s badge we’re following,” Sharon said.

  “Right, OK, here they are coming in, through D12,” Ruby said, staring at her diagram. “Then they would have to swipe their card to get the elevator down to the forensics department—that must be D7. And that makes D5, the next door, the one into the lab itself.”

  “Whoever it is,” Rex said, “they’re going out and coming back in D5, with D17 in between there—and once, D8.”

  Ruby put her head back and imagined the hallway outside the lab. Only two ways to go: through the door on the left to the kitchen area with the microwave, candy machine, sink, and coffeemaker. Or through the door on the right to the bathrooms.

  “Victor,” Ruby said.

  The others gave her a blank look.

  “One of the grad students. He’s always going to that candy machine to get licorice to have with his tea. Like, it’s a ritual thing, every hour.” Ruby wasn’t aware that she picked up this pattern while sitting there doing her homework in the evenings. But now she was sure of it.

  So door D17 must be the door to the kitchen area. That meant that door D8 must be the one you had to go through to the bathroom. Ruby filled in her diagram.

  Sharon wrote down Victor? next to that badge number and plugged in the second number that Ruby had given her. “OK,” she said. “This person came into the forensics building at 5:13 P.M. and entered the lab a minute later . . . then, it looks like, they went out to the snack room. Right after they got there.”

  “Lydia,” Ruby said. “Like, 5:13, that’s late for a Friday. Everyone else is in there by five o’clock, latest. She always got there late—dropped her stuff and went right out to get a snack. Those nasty jalapeño pretzels.”

  “Right, well, that’s not all she did,” Sharon said.

  After arriving that night, Lydia came back through D17 and D5 a couple of more times. Runs for diet soda, Ruby told them. The badge also passed through the opposite door in the hallway, D8, three times—for the bathroom.

  “Nothing strange there, that looks normal,” Sharon said.

  “Wait,” said Rex. “Go back to that part, around 7:12 or so. The bathroom door one.”

  “Yep,” Sharon said, scrolling back. “There,” she said, pointing.

  D16 1901

  D8 1912

  D5 1912

  “D16?” Rex said. “Where’s that door?”

  Ruby made a guess. “On the other side of the bathroom there’s a tech room off the hallway. I was in there once; there’s a back door that leads to some stairs that go—I don’t know where. But I’ve never seen anyone else from the lab go in there.”

  “You have now,” Rex said. “That’s more than ten minutes before she comes back through the hallway door. What’s she doing in that little tech room that long? I go in the bathroom fifteen seconds at home there’s someone at the door.”

  “That’s because you got twenty people in that place,” said Ruby.

  “Nine. And you be quiet. Least we don’t hang boxer shorts out the window to dry, like your dad do.”

  “Yeah, well, if you guys didn’t tie up the dryers for five hours every day—”

  “Wait,” said Sharon. “Think. Keep your heads in the problem. What is Lydia doing over there for so long? Could be no big deal. But it’s a great question.”

  Ruby checked the library clock and saw that they hadn’t been at the computer for much more than ten minutes. Eleven minutes was a long absence at that lab. She was surprised that her father hadn’t mentioned it.

  “H
uh,” Ruby said. “Is there any way to check if someone else was in there? I mean, it seems weird that Lydia’s just there by herself. Doing what?”

  “Let me try something,” Sharon said. She clicked on the D16 door symbol, waited a moment, and sat up with smile.

  “Excellent. Click on the door and it gives you the badges that went through, with the times. And the answer is yes—there was someone else in there with her.”

  “Another badge?”

  “Yup,” Sharon said. “Look for yourself—number 015-4007, whoever that is.”

  Ruby shook her head. “No idea.”

  “Hmm,” said Sharon, dropping her head in thought. She clicked and scrolled some more. “OK, check this out. This person who met with Lydia—if it is Lydia—whoever it was, they didn’t go back to the main lab or leave through the building’s main door. This record goes all the way to midnight.”

  “Will you look at that? Somebody’s up to something,” Rex said. “Ruby, you got no ideas?”

  “I—I don’t know,” she said. All signs had been pointing to Lydia, and now—well, what? Could that be Wade in there? Or Grace? Hard to imagine. Nothing made sense.

  “The mystery person,” Rex said. “Double-O Seven.”

  Sharon said. “Hmm. What do you notice about that mystery number? I mean, compared to the others.”

  Rex saw it first. “Well, those two grad student numbers start with 011, and this one starts with 015.”

  “Exactly right,” said Sharon.

  “But so—so what?” Ruby said.

  “So, uh, you know,” Sharon said. “These school security badges have different categories, usually in the first few digits. So if 011 is a graduate student, then 015 may be some other type of person—an employee, say.”

  Ruby held her breath. “You mean . . . ”

  Sharon did not answer. She and Rex continued to study the computer screen as if searching for a hidden code.

  “You mean, like a janitor.”

  Ruby dropped her backpack near the door, headed into the kitchen, and fixed a bowl of cereal. Make that two bowls, she thought, for stability.

  “Dad?”

  “Ru, is that you?” Her father was in the bedroom, sprawled on a chair, listening to baseball on the radio. “I didn’t hear you come in.”