The Far Time Incident (11 page)

“The final grades for fall semester freshman Human Biology,” I said, keeping my tone firm but polite, “are already in the system, but I can’t disclose your son’s grade to you and your husband… Why not? Well, your son is eighteen, is he not?”

“Nineteen,” came the high-pitched answer through the phone.

“And therefore an adult. Legally, we cannot release students’ grades to anyone without their permission…no, not for any of your son’s classes… I’m sure he did well in the class and will go on to be a fine doctor…it’s school policy, sir—” A gruff voice had replaced the shrill one on the line. “Yes, I understand that you’re paying for his education…you could ask your son directly…well, I’m sorry you feel that way—”

The father hung up the phone after a few choice words. I shrugged off the conversation (calls like this were becoming more frequent as stronger-than-ever parent-child bonds were stretched to the limit when the newly minted adults arrived to face freshmen issues; a term had even been coined for the overprotective behavior—“helicopter parenting”) and rang Oscar’s post in the TTE building. He answered at once. I got straight to the point. “Oscar, I want to go over what happened the Monday night we lost Dr. Mooney.”

“Like I told Chief Kirkland, it was a quiet evening,” Oscar began, his raspy voice crackling down the line. “Not too much student partying going on, what with the kids studying for the week’s exams. The campus was deserted except for the occasional kid out for a late-night snack or biking back from a study group—you could tell which it was by whether they were balancing a pizza box or textbooks on their handlebars. Just before eleven, I saw Dr. Mooney nearing the building, his headlamp visible from afar. The snow had just begun to fall. Chief Kirkland asked me if Dr. Mooney seemed upset or distracted and if that was why he forgot to lock up his bike. I told him that the professor seemed like his usual self. He dropped off an unwrapped gyroscope for Toys for Tots, but didn’t linger to tell me about his latest time travel trips, like he sometimes did. But that wasn’t unusual. He
was a busy man. He seemed like he was in a hurry to get out of the snow and into the lab, that was all. Kamal Ahmad came out not long after the professor went in, maybe fifteen minutes later, carrying a stack of textbooks. He saw that it was snowing, said he wished he’d brought a knapsack for the books, waved good night, and left, stuffing the textbooks inside his jacket.”

I knew Oscar hadn’t fallen asleep at his post, but everyone had bodily needs. I took a moment to compose the question delicately. “Did you, uh—did you have to leave your post at any time during the night, Oscar?” Had someone stood in the shadows as the snow fell, hidden, waiting?

“Once, briefly,” he admitted.

So someone could have sneaked in, I thought, though that late in the day the building would have been locked and an electronic pass would have been needed to get in, not to mention the door code to the lab. I wondered if Oscar, after the bathroom break, had noticed a trail of fresh footprints in the snow leading to the front door of the building, perhaps from one of the neighboring ones or from the direction of the visitor parking lot.

He hadn’t.

“Ms. Olsen, do you have a minute?”

I almost dropped the stack of paper I had been about to feed into the printer. The incident with Dr. Mooney had made me jumpy and I’d had to resist the urge to lock my office door. During winter break, the campus was quiet and the hallways emptier than usual. It was slightly spooky. I beckoned in Chief Kirkland and slid the pastel-green paper (for flyers about the upcoming science guest speaker series) into the printer tray. I hadn’t seen the chief since early afternoon, when I had committed to going on
a 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 a
rare 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 tenure.”

“Any recent or unusual conflicts that you know of?”

I shook my head. “Xavier Mooney was an experimentalist and Gabriel Rojas is a theoreticist. On occasion they liked to engage in a friendly bet about whether a detail in history would turn out to be true, with Dr. Rojas trying to reason it out and Dr. Mooney insisting that History’s particulars were rarely predictable, even if you knew their outcome. Then one of them—usually Dr. Mooney—would go back and obtain photographic or video evidence. The results were about fifty-fifty either way.” I paused. “Xavier Mooney would have had a part in deciding whether the department should offer tenure to our two junior professors, Dr. Baumgartner and Dr. Little.”

“Was he going to come down on their side?”

“Too early to say. Junior professors are initially appointed to two-year contracts and an evaluation is done every two years until the tenure review in the eighth year. Dr. Little has been here just over nine months. Dr. Baumgartner’s first evaluation is coming up in the spring.” To obtain tenure, a young professor had to have it all—an excellent research and publication track, positive teaching and peer evaluations, successful supervision of grad students, and a glowing recommendation from Dean Sunder. Chancellor Evans had the final say. I added, “I suppose we could check Dr. Mooney’s notebooks and computer for any notes he may have jotted down on the matter. The movers have
packed up his office, so we’ll have to pull his things out of storage. Or you could talk to Dr. Rojas about it.”

“Speaking of Gabriel Rojas, can he be trusted? I have to take what he’s saying about STEWie’s software being tampered with at face value.”

“I can’t think of a reason why he would have felt the need to get rid of Dr. Mooney—and then tell us about it.”

“I can’t either. But that means nothing.”

“I suppose not.”

“At this stage everyone who had the door code is a suspect.”

“Including me?”

“Do you have the code to the TTE lab?”

“Copies of all the security codes are made available to the dean’s office in case of emergencies.”

“Would you have had the time-engineering knowledge to reprogram STEWie and make it seem like the focuser had malfunctioned?”

“Would I have—no.”

“Then you’re not a suspect.”

I almost asked him if that meant he could call me Julia now that I had been cleared of any involvement in Dr. Mooney’s death, but, brow furrowed darkly, he steered the conversation back to his original question. “What about jilted lovers or inheritors of his estate?”

“Xavier did go through a rather acrimonious divorce with one of our linguistics professors, Dr. Helen Presnik. But that was years ago, before my time here in the dean’s office. And,” I finished, “Xavier left all his worldly goods to the school. What’s number five?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“Earlier you were about to tell me about murder motive number five—”

“Ah, yes. The incidental murder. The professor may have gotten in someone’s way at the TTE lab, someone who was bent on going on an unauthorized run. Speaking of which, Ms. Olsen—” He cleared his throat and looked straight at me. “Remember what we now know—in one of the science departments, probably the Time Travel Engineering lab itself, there is a person who presents a danger to others.”

Was that a not-so-subtle warning for me to stay out of his investigation? It was all very well for him to say so, but he didn’t have researchers deluging him with messages asking—demanding—that STEWie be brought back online as soon as possible. Not to mention the fact that the dean had asked me to accompany the chief throughout his investigation.

“You say Dr. Mooney was married to a professor?” the chief added. “Is she still here at St. Sunniva?”

“Yes, Dr. Presnik works in the English Department.”

“I’ll speak to her first thing tomorrow morning.”

Chief Kirkland didn’t get the chance to speak with Helen Presnik first thing the following morning because we were both summoned to Dr. Rojas’s office. The professor had talked Erika Baumgartner into letting us squeeze in a run before hers. It wasn’t much of a concession on her part—a short near-time run for Chief Kirkland’s benefit wouldn’t delay her own run to eighteenth-century France by much. She was planning on being there just about a full day, which was fifty minutes in the lab; we only needed an hour or so, which would pass in a jiffy in the lab—133 seconds. (No one quite knew why precisely 133 seconds passed in the present for each hour you spent in the past. Dr. Rojas had spent the last five years trying to figure it out.)

“There are three more rules you should know.” Dr. Rojas was giving the security chief and yours truly a crash course on time travel basics from in front of the old-fashioned chalky blackboard that took up one corner of his office. (It might have been the last one left on campus. Whiteboards, with their colored markers, had proliferated on campus like mosquitoes on Sunniva Lake in the summer, in offices, labs, cafeterias, meeting rooms, hallways. Someone had argued that we needed them in all the bathrooms as well, for impromptu discussions and exchanges of ideas, but that had been ruled out as being too exclusionary of one gender or the other.)