Poison Most Vial (11 page)

“What now?” Ruby said.

“My instinct,” said Mrs. Whitmore, who noticed she was twirling a pen in her fingers like she did back when she was working a hunch in her lab days, “tells me that whoever was involved with Roman would have met him that Friday, the day of, to make sure the crime was in motion.”

Ruby smiled. “The badges again.”

Rex said, “My guess is Paris.”

“Yeah?” said Ruby, arranging her drawings, copies of the toxin levels, and other notes on the large table in the science library that had become their base of operations.

“Probably making a pipe bomb right now to help us out. Or Bruce, to do the reading for us—you think?”

“I sure do. What are you talking about?”

“The person she said she was bringing to help. Sharon. Remember?”

“Oh yeah, right. The someone. Watch it be Simon.”

“Long as he hasn't handcuffed himself to another piece of luggage for national securit—Uh-oh.”

Ruby turned to look. Sharon was approaching their table
with . . .
Simon Buscombe
. Rex leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. Ruby blinked in disbelief.

“Hey, remember I said I had someone?” Sharon said.

All elbows and dirty blond hair, Simon slid into a chair across from Rex without a word. He adjusted his headband, carefully pulled a plastic wrapper off of a giant cinnamon roll, opened a bottle of cream soda, and plunged his face into the roll.

“Uh, I just lost my appetite, and that's saying something,” Rex said. “What you think that pastry made of, Simon?”

Simon ignored him, demolishing the cinnamon roll in three bites. “I understand my services are needed,” he said in that deep voice that surprised Ruby every time she heard it in class. He had to be faking it.

“Yeah,” said Ruby, glancing over at Rex. His services, thank you so much. “We, uh, we've been looking into this case . . . ”

“I am aware of your pursuits,” came the deep voice. “I have eyes and ears.” He glanced at Sharon. “And I have associates who keep me informed.” He then cleared his throat, took a long hit on the soda, burped, and said, “Half-life.”

“Huh?” Rex said.

“In your equation.
T-1/2
means
half-life
,” replied Simon. “It's pharmacokinetics. The study of what a body does to
substances, how it breaks down and gets rid of them. The half-life is the amount of time it takes the body to eliminate half of a substance. Different times for different substances.”

“Gracias, Einstein, we already know all that,” Rex said.

“Then perhaps our business is done,” said Simon, whipping out a cell phone and slouching in his chair. It looked to Ruby like he had some video game going.

“Perhaps not,” Sharon said. She turned to Ruby. “Look, he knows a bunch about the buildings, don't ask me how. Can we just, I don't know, see how it goes for a while?”

Ruby scanned the others' faces: Rex exasperated, Sharon impatient, Simon pretending he wasn't listening. “A while,” she said. “Get me back into the badge tracking system.”

She explained their hunch: that someone was helping Roman, and if so probably met him sometime the day of the murder.

In moments Sharon was into the system, the others peering over her shoulders at the nearest library desktop. The familiar door numbers scrolled by on the screen, and again Ruby felt light-headed. “Go down farther, earlier,” she said. “And we're looking for Double-O Seven, remember.”

“Is that a joke?” said Simon.

“No, it's the number—Roman's number,” Ruby said.

And there was 007 Roman, coming back from the men's room at around 4 o'clock; and before that, from the kitchen;
and at his lunchtime, he went up to the ground floor to his locker area to have lunch. All normal.

“Wait. Back it up. D16 again, see it?” Rex seemed to have memorized all the door numbers.

“Where is it—oh yeah, there, he goes in there at, ooh, at 1:21,” Sharon said. “And then at 1:38 he's going back into the kitchen.”

“Same room where he met Lydia later,” Rex said. “Right, Ruby?”

She had to check her notes. “Yeah, same one. Any other numbers going in there?”

Sharon scrolled up and down. “Oh no, not one. Nothing . . . Simon?”

“You called.” He was standing right behind her, squinting at the screen.

“Make yourself useful,” Sharon continued. “This door we're looking at goes into a small tech room down the hall and around the corner from the kitchen. You're the map guy. Tell me whether there's another entrance.”

Simon was studying what looked like one of his mazes, rubbing his chin. He probably had a pipe at home, Ruby thought.

“Yes,” he said finally. “The small tech room has another door that goes out to this little courtyard out back. According to my layout, which is accurate.”

“Arg,” said Sharon. “If there was someone in there with Roman, he or she could have come in and out through that back door, not using a badge at all.”

Ruby tried to imagine it. A person crossing that courtyard behind Rama's office twice, in the middle of the day. “No, I don't think so. Do one thing: Check the front door and elevator just before Roman went in there—right around 1:20.”

“You mean—Oh, look,” said Sharon. Someone had come in, right through the front door and down the elevator, just after 1:20. Roman could have let the person into the tech room. It was a number that started with 222—and whoever it was exited the building not long after Roman left the small room.

“Ruby Rose, look at you,” said Rex. “Now, what d'you know about that number, Sharon? Is that a student, or what?”

“Oh no, shoot, I don't know. It looks like a miscellaneous number. Could be anyone's.” Sharon was working the computer. “Wait, I see. It's a general passkey. The kind they give to visitors, totally anonymous. Of course. This person is not stupid.”

“Well, it means something already,” Rex said. “We know it's not Lydia and it's not Victor; we can scratch them off. If our theory is true, anyway.”

Sharon pulled her chair closer to the computer and said,
“No reason I can't search the whole system for this number”—when the screen froze.

The girl clicked and clicked, but there was a humming sound; Ruby peeked at the other screens in the cluster just as they all went black.

“How extraordinary,” Simon said. “All the computers in this whole library seem to have simultaneously—”

“Pick up everything, now, they on us like white on rice,” Rex said. “Time to move our getaway sticks.”

“Our what?” said Sharon.

“Legs—let's go!” Ruby said.

Ruby made sure their table was clear before leading everybody along the wall toward the main lobby. She had no interest in going the other direction toward the hallways leading to the main school. Still dead quiet, and they were into the stacks now, under some cover, close to the doorway leading out to the main library lobby.

“Listen,” Ruby said. “For one second.”

The mumble of heavy soles on the stone floor, a whispered voice behind them, everyone down now, near the floor. Between the shelves Ruby and the others saw legs swarming around the computer cluster, now fanning out. “Follow me,” Rex said. “Look natural.”

He stood and slipped through the door to the lobby, just a student with his books under his arm. The others trailed,
smiling hello to the woman in the main information booth near the door. Briskly now, across the lobby—other kids were coming through, and teachers; it was busy—and here was an entire High Honors group coming down the stairs.

“Everyone, excuse me, your attention, please.” A voice over the intercom.

Campus police officers were slipping into the lobby behind them, two moving quickly toward the main door, another to the information lady. “Excuse me. Everyone in the library please gather in the lobby. Everyone, please. Campus police are searching for a lost child in the building.”

“So let's get lost,” Ruby said. She led the others through the stirring crowd of students, across the lobby, and into the far wing, history and literature. The back of that wing was under construction—she could see the workers from the second-floor window of the Regular Ranch. There must be a way out.

“C'mon,” Ruby said; there were students strolling in the opposite direction, some college students, and then the lights went up—way bright—and a red light blinked somewhere up high.

“Whoa, are you kidding?” Rex said. “When'd they get these lights? Ruby, someone wants us bad.”

“Quiet, quiet. Let's find that construction area,” she said.

There it was, in the back: a wall of plywood, a door cut in
the middle with
Men Working
in orange spray paint across it. Ruby turned the handle: locked. Rex grabbed it and turned with all his might.

“Are you absolutely sure that this is our best—” Simon was saying when Rex said, “Outta the way,” and threw his shoulder into the door. It snapped open and Rex landed on the floor on the other side, covered with white dust.

“Look, the Pillsbury Doughboy,” Simon said, but there was no time. Ruby yelled, “Go, go,” put her head down, and banged into a giant blue tarp, which shuddered and lifted. They were outside, in back of the library.

The gang split in two.

Fall, Ruby thought as she and Rex plunged into the bushes and leaves that ringed the library building, everything orangey and earth-smelling. Why was she thinking about the season now? “Where you think they went?”

“I don't know,” answered Rex. “Across that way, the other side of the campus, the Manor, whatever they call that nice neighborhood.”

“They live over there, in those big houses?”

“Simon and Sharon? Where you think they live . . . in Davenport with Ronny?”

Ruby got on her knees and peeked through the bushes. They crawled along the base of the building and turned the corner. In the failing light she could make out the DeWitt
front gate and beyond that a few lights in the familiar silhouettes of the brick apartments along College Avenue. Blue-red tracers swept the area, lights from a campus police car, maybe two.

Some memory came of a campout or fireworks back home. She shivered. “What now?”

“Dark soon,” Rex said. “When it's night, we'll mosey out right through the main gate like a couple of students. Which we are, in fact.”

Down low, knees damp and cold, they inched closer to the library main entrance to get a better look. They stopped just this side of one of the science library's broad windows, still glowing with the turned-up lights. Waited.

“Looks like cops are letting people out one at a time,” said Rex, up on his knees, peering over the bushes. “Some of them coming up this way, too; a little darker and we can just step out and walk.”

Restless, Ruby turned, pushed herself up, and peeked through one of the library windows. She sat back down suddenly.

“Oh no,” she said.

“What happened?” Rex said.

“Nothing. But have a look in there.”

Rex looked and then sat back down, eyes wide. “What's
she
doing in there?”

Ruby felt like crying but couldn't. “Mrs. Whitmore, Mrs. Whitmore . . . We've never even seen her come out of her apartment, and now she's in the forensics library with the campus police?”

The newspaper article was more than thirty years old and so yellow, it was hard to read. But one line near the end was clear enough: “Mrs. Clara Whitmore, a forensic assistant in the office of chief toxicologist Dr. R. J. Ramachandran, said the driver's blood contained traces of narcotics, as well as alcohol.”

Ruby read it again. Dr. R. J. Ramachandran? Could there be two people with that name?

She reached over and punched Rex, who was fast asleep, his head resting on an open folder of old newspaper clippings.

“Huh . . . Where am I?”

“Downtown library. You've been asleep for an hour. Wake up and look at this.”