Better Off Dead (31 page)

"Is that Bobby's favorite shotgun?" I asked.
It was a double-barrel .12 gauge that could cut a man in two from
close range. Bobby had been insane to lend it to Hugo.

Hugo didn't think so. He held the shotgun
across his lap as he rocked, making him look like some old-timey
mountain man waiting for a dagnabbit varmint to wander across his
property so he could blow it to smithereens.

"Mr. Dodd trusts me with it," Hugo said.
Great. Someone who actually gave Bobby D. some respect. More of
that and Bobby’s ego would swell to the size of his gut.

"We have everything under control." This was
from Bullet Head.

I took the hint. I stood up, giving Bullet
Head a taste of my pink fur. Right in the kisser. A small piece of
fluff clung to his lips as I moved on. That's what he got for
licking them when I was around. "Think I'll check on Burly," I
announced.

"He was up all night," Hugo told me. "He is
hot on the trail. He is a good man. Mr. Nash is a genius."

Burly merited last-name status, too? It
looked like everyone's star was hanging high in Hugo's heaven at
the moment. Except mine, probably.

I was right. "How is that boy who got shot
doing?" Hugo asked, his mouth grim.

"He's not awake yet," I explained as I
hesitated at the front door. The men shook their heads sadly. "His
madre," one of them muttered. The others nodded sadly.

His madre indeed.

I spent a couple of hours going through the
files I had stolen from Brookhouse's office. There was a lot of
correspondence between Brookhouse and the drug company funding the
study, including a flurry of kiss-ass letters from the department
assuring the company that all was well, no corners were being cut.
Others announced that Brookhouse was taking over the study for
Carroll due to changing schedules, etc. Damage control. Keep that
funding in-house.

I was astonished to see that there was no
mention of Brookhouse's rape trial in the file. Was it possible no
one in the drug company had caught on to it? Or cared? I knew that
particular firm was ultimately owned by a German conglomerate.
Maybe the news had never made its way over the Atlantic. Or, more
likely, the negotiations that had gone on over the trial, and
Brookhouse's character, had been conducted unofficially—to avoid
legal problems—and Brookhouse had separated that paperwork from the
drug study data.

There was no list of volunteer names to
guide me. What I had thought was a directory of the volunteers was
actually a list of names in code. The participants of the study
remained a mystery—except for their phone numbers on the list the
department receptionist used when she called and informed the
volunteers of the new Thursday night interview requirement. The
names of the subjects had been blacked out with a Magic Marker.
Only their phone numbers were left visible, along with whether they
were male or female, their ages and an identifying number. Another
row, I knew, indicated what sort of treatment each person had been
receiving: the actual drug, a placebo and, it seemed, some sort of
third comparison option. It was also in code and I could not
decipher it.

Nothing else in the file was of much use.
Weekly reports had been supplied to the drug company. They all
sounded pretty much the same: no major changes in mental ability,
the moods of the volunteers were holding steady, the drug did not
appear to cause any discernible side effects, things were looking
good, oh, happy day, start spending those big profits now.

That was pushing it, I knew. There were
times when I had interviewed the drug study volunteers and more
than one of them had reported headaches, feelings of hopelessness
and a decreased ability to deal with frustration. It had not
happened often, but it had happened.

None of this had made its way into the
reports to the drug company as far as I could tell. Which meant
Brookhouse had fudged the data, or at least reported a far rosier
picture of results than the strict truth merited. On the other
hand, I had no idea what was statistically significant in such
cases. Perhaps that sort of data was put on hold, accumulated with
other weekly data, and examined in more thorough quarterly reports?
I looked through the file carefully and found other reports. None
spoke of potential complications.

What did it mean? Maybe Burly would
know.

I knocked on the bedroom office door. "It's
me," I said.

"Come on in." He sounded distracted. I knew
the tone well. He was in the middle of tracing back elusive bits of
data, jumping from Web site to Web site, cross-correlating,
backtracking screens, opening new sites, and trying to keep all the
connections straight. He didn't need any interruptions.

"Keep going," I said. "I have a list of
phone numbers. Can you get the names for me?"

"Sure. Put it on the table." He didn't even
look up.

I put the list down and left. After all, a
genius was at work.

In the early afternoon, Fanny called from
the hospital to say that the police had located Luke's parents. As
soon as they got close enough to shore to be picked up by
helicopter, they were on their way to Duke. Fanny would keep vigil
in the meantime. I promised to stop by that evening with food and
moral support. "Bobby, too," I added, seeing his look.

"Why do you keep staring at me that way?" I
asked Bobby after I hung up.

"I'm not. It's your conscience," he said
with maddening certainty. He and Helen were playing rummy in a
halfhearted way. Helen kept glancing out the window. Maybe she was
afraid of Bullet Head. I know I was.

“Time to talk," Burly announced from the
doorway. God, but he kept his wheels well-greased. I never, but
never, heard him coming. He wheeled into the living room with a
stack of printouts on his lap. "I think we've got them."

"Them?" I asked, exchanging a glance with
Helen.

"Them," Burly said. "Everybody gather
round."

"We're going to make this a group activity?"
I asked.

"Damn right we are," Bobby said. "When my
partner starts lying to me, I start paying closer attention."

I ignored that little comment. I had to.

"We need Helen to stay," Burly explained. "I
have some questions for her."

"Okay, fine." I could deal with it. "What's
going on?"

"You remember that junior college where
Brookhouse worked for a couple of years in the early nineties?"

I nodded. "You were having trouble hacking
into their system."

"I got in. Brookhouse was there all right.
In fact, he got fired."

"Oh, yeah?" This was interesting. Duke would
never willingly hire anyone who was fired elsewhere for cause, I
was sure.

Burly nodded. "But I don't think it's on the
official records, because when I track down his resume after that,
it says he left to pursue research opportunities elsewhere."

"He got fired for falsifying study results?"
I guessed.

Burly shrugged. "That I couldn't tell. Not
all the records from that time period are computerized. I was able
to pull up a couple of letters exchanged between some provosts
discussing what they called 'the situation,' but no more than that.
All I know is that it was sensitive and they were afraid of a
lawsuit. So when they fired him, they agreed to keep it quiet."

A lovely and quite common habit of modern
employers. Fire some deadbeat and do all you can to make him
someone else's problem. I knew this because many companies paid me
to find out the real dirt on prospective high-level hires.

"So he could have been let go for boffing
coeds," I said. "That's sensitive."

"Yes," Burly agreed. "But that's not the
most interesting part of what I found out. As I was checking the
class schedules to see what he had taught there, I noticed another
name. That other professor who came to see Helen the other
night."

"Lyman Carroll?" Helen asked.

Burly nodded. "His name was listed as a
short-term lecturer in the psychology department. He taught for
eight weeks while someone else was on medical leave."

"So what?" I said. "They've been hating each
other for longer than we thought. Big deal."

"It's a big deal if they hid the fact that
they knew each other," Burly explained.

"They did hide it," Helen interrupted. "They
definitely hid it. I was there when they supposedly met for the
first time at a faculty tea. It was right after Brookhouse was
hired. They hated each other on sight. Everyone talked about it.
They shook hands, glared at each other and stalked off. I even
remember talking to Lyman about it. I asked if he knew Brookhouse
and what was the story? He told me that he didn't know him, that he
just hated his type. He called him something like a pencil-dicked,
academic leech with an ego as big as the campus."

"Not bad," I said in admiration. "That's
probably pretty accurate. Though I didn't realize that leeches had
dicks. But is it really significant?" I wasn't following Burly's
point.

"Yes, it is," Burly said. "I traced Lyman's
background. He and Brookhouse grew up together in a little town
just over the Virginia border near South Hills. Brookhouse went
away to a private high school, so the overlap doesn't show on their
official records. But I know that town. There's no way they could
both grow up there and not know each other. In other words, they've
known each other a long time and they've gone out of their way to
hide it."

"No one at Duke knows that, I promise you."
Helen looked at me. "Don't you see? They've been pretending to hate
each other, to be rivals."

I got it. "That way they could cover for
each other and no one would suspect it. Why would anyone lie to
help someone they supposedly hated?"

"I told you that guy was a prick," Bobby D.
added. "Man brings flowers and thinks a woman can't see through it.
I knew he was a phony son-of-a-bitch."

"But it's still not proof they've done
anything wrong," I explained. "Except maybe been sloppy with their
credentials and the drug study." I told them about the weekly
reports and how they seemed to be leaving out negative
information.

"Those kinds of problems should be reported
as they occur," Helen said. "In fact, that's why the study was
yanked from Lyman and given to Brookhouse in the first place. The
whole point of having Duke test the drug instead of an in-house
study, is to create objectivity."

"So Brookhouse looked like a hero instead of
another lying scum bag when he took over the study," Bobby said. "I
bet they're working together and siphoning off the grant money
somehow. It's always the money."

"But that doesn't tie them into the campus
attacks." I was disappointed. I wanted to nail Brookhouse for
Helen's rape, one way or the other.

"It might tie them into it," Burly said. "It
sounds crazy, but take a look at these." He started distributing
printouts. Mine showed a list of professional publications, the
kind academics live and die by. Long names. Technical terms.
Obscure publications. My eyes crossed within seconds. But Helen was
poring over her copy avidly.

"I need your eyes," Burly explained to us.
"I went to all the colleges where either Carroll or Brookhouse have
worked over the past twenty years, at least the ones I could get
into. Plus I searched the Net for their names together and
separately. A lot of academic and medical publications are now
online and have uploaded their archives to make it easier for
people to use their material when doing research or writing term
papers. Then, I downloaded a list of the official publications both
men claimed to have authored by the time they got to Duke. These
guys are obsessive about listing their work."

"They have to be," Helen said. "It's
supposed to be evidence they do original work. It's the only reason
why they were hired at Duke in the first place. Both of them moved
around a lot, but they've really pioneered some new theories and
Duke was getting a little worried about their reputation in that
regard." Whenever Helen spoke about academic matters, she had a
confidence lacking in all other areas of her life. It was her world
and she was good at it. I hoped she would get back to it one
day.

"Okay," I said. "I'm with you on their
publications. But so what?"

"The lists don't match," Burly explained.
"They change over time. Both men started dropping off titles, I
think. But there are too many papers listed for me to keep them
straight. I need your help comparing them."

Mine was not to reason why. Mine was but to
do or die. I humored Burly and dutifully checked my lists against
the titles he called out, marking down the names of any that were
missing.

By the time we were done, I understood where
he was going. Brookhouse had several papers missing in his recent
credits, including one dropped from his curriculum vitae in the
early nineties that was called "Sexual Predators: A Study in
Diversity." Not exactly the kind of diversity America needed. But
earlier descriptions of the paper positioned it as a major
breakthrough study. Why drop it from his professional credentials
before he came to Duke?

Carroll's omissions were equally telling:
"Trauma and Memory Loss: A Protective Mechanism?" plus one obscure
short paper penned early in his career that was goofily entitled:
"Social Habits of the Anti-Social: A Biker Gang in America." It
took me three seconds to make the connection. Judging from the
publication date, the men who had attacked us had been zooming
around on their choppers for close to twenty years. No wonder their
reflexes were rusty.

Both men had also dropped off a few arcane
publications, but they did not seem connected to the case.

"That's it," Burly said. "I knew there was a
reason the lists didn't match."