Smoky Mountain Mystery 01 - Out on a Limb (23 page)

“No.”

“Can you think of anybody who might
wanna
hurt you?”

She shook her head slightly. He could tell the movement made her dizzy because she closed her eyes.

“Is there anybody you’d like me to call for you?”
Leon
asked.

She clutched his hand, and said in a husky whisper, “Jameson Knob … black light the cabinet … wait … glow after five seconds … get those. Please … don’t tell any
… .”

He felt her grip loosen. She’d lost consciousness again.

Henry and Phoebe had parted ways so each of them could continue their work day. After Phoebe drove off, Henry decided to take another trip to
Knoxville
, this time to the Biology Department at the
University
of
Tennessee
, making sure to time his visit during a
Myxo
Madness event that Professor Whittington was leading so he wouldn’t be around. Henry would normally have removed his flat hat as he entered a building, but with it on, he knew he represented a trusted and beloved American icon. He needed all the help he could get with his investigation, even if it was from a costume, so he left it on.

He perused the building directory,
then
followed arrows on the wall, reading the label on every door as he walked down a long hallway. Near the far end he found the Dean’s office. A pretty young girl with bright blue hair was manning the reception desk. Henry smiled at her and tried to look lost.

“
Whatcha
lookin
for?” she said with an answering smile.

“I’m not sure,” Henry replied.

“Well, then you’ve come to the right place,” she said. “Take a
fella
like you
outta
the woods and set
em
down in a place like this and they
git
all discombobulated, don’t they? A compass won’t do you a bit of good in here.”

“True,” said Henry.

“How can I help?”

Henry looked at her and decided a friendly blue-haired girl would appreciate the direct approach, so he said softly, “I’m
tryin
to get the dirt on Conrad Whittington, if there is any.”

“Oh,” she said, pursing her lips as she glanced over her shoulder. She swiveled her chair so her back was to her boss’s door.

“Anything you’re
willin
to tell me?” he said speaking quietly.

The girl whispered, “Is he in trouble?”

“He might be,” Henry said, leaning in so he could whisper, too.

“Good. Cause he’s a sleaze ball.”

“Oh really?”
Henry said, leaning even closer. “Do tell.”

She thought for a moment,
then
said, “He likes people to think he’s just a boring old fart, but he’s mean as hell.
A predator.
And a bully.”

Henry raised his eyebrows.

“The word is that Ph.D. candidates around him have a tendency to drop out without getting a degree, several of them after completing all the course work and turning in dissertations. Nobody seems to know why. Whatever’s going on there, so far he’s been able to cover his tracks.

“He’s been divorced several times,
prob’ly
because he chases women students. His ex-wives hate him and are after him for unpaid alimony.
Lotsa
people call here
complainin
about delays in us depositing his salary checks.
But that’s some cock ‘n bull story he’s
givin
out,” she whispered so softly he was nearly lip reading.

Anything else she’d been about to say was prevented by the entrance of a short, balding man who stepped out of the inner office and said, “Jolene, this is a place of business, not a night club.”

Then he turned to Henry, who was still leaning close to the girl, and said in an unfriendly tone, “May I help you?”

It was obvious that Henry wouldn’t be getting any useful information from the Dean, and the girl’s sudden stiffening made him cautious, so he winked at her and said, “Not unless you can make this sweet thing go out with me.”

Then before the Dean had time to throw him out, he left, waving a friendly goodbye to Jolene.

Henry wandered the halls until he found a door that said “Mycology Lab.” Three young people walked by carrying trays of bark with oozing growths on them. There were two men and a woman. He followed them inside.

After they’d set their trays down, he asked, “Any of you folks have classes with Whittington?”

His authoritative looks and the way he left off the Professor’s title made them curious.

“I do,” said the guy who was wearing a baseball cap.

“I’m
tryin
to find out whatever you’re
willin
to tell me about him.”

None of the students said anything.

“I don’t need to know your names,” Henry said. “And what you tell me won’t go any further. I know he isn’t what he seems.”

The three exchanged looks,
then
the woman spoke, “He’s a creep,” she said.
“Always hitting on the women.
If you say
no
, he acts like he was just kidding, but then you get a bad grade.”

“He’s notorious for using students as research assistants and then stealing their work,” said the taller of the men. “Everybody knows he does it, but nothing’s ever done to stop him. I mean, lots of the
profs
do that, it’s sort of how things work at a university, but, he’s the
worst
. And when he’s confident he won’t get caught, he’s ruthless. Just ask some of the people he’s used and then forced out of the doctoral program.”

“Yeah, he acts sorta geeky, like he’s absent-minded, but it’s fake,” said the young man in the baseball cap. “He knows exactly what he’s doing. Students are afraid of him, but you don’t dare challenge him.”

“Can you show me Ivy Iverson’s lab area?”

“Sure,” said the young woman. “It’s over here.”

She showed Henry how to read the labels on the boxes and the four of them looked through Ivy’s specimens and papers, but saw nothing that bore a recent date.

“I know she’s been going out a lot lately and collecting,” said the student with the baseball cap. “I don’t understand why her specimens aren’t here.”

 “Where else might she keep them?” Henry asked.

The young man shrugged.

“Let me rephrase that,” said Henry. “If you were
gonna
hide
somethin
you were
workin
on, how would you do it?”

“You can hide a
myxo
in plain sight and nobody would think anything about it,” the taller man said. “Unless they were an expert, and even then it’s hard to tell exactly what you’ve got.”

“Where else might she keep specimens?” Henry asked.

“Jameson Knob,” the young woman said. “I think she may have been working out of the research station at there. Maybe she’s keeping her recent stuff there.”

Henry knew the place. It was a large tract of mountaintop land with a modern house on it donated to the
Great Smoky Mountains
National Park
by a philanthropic family. The house had recently been remodeled to provide living quarters and lab space for use by visiting scientists. The place was not used much, especially in the winter, because it was hard to get to. It was on the
North Carolina
side of the mountain at the end of a tough drive.

Henry thanked the students and left the lab.

He’d gotten what he came for. Now he had enough information to formulate a picture. Professor Whittington was a bully, a womanizer, a thief, a liar, and heavily in debt.
In other words, a Grade A sociopath and a highly motivated criminal.
What he didn’t know was the connection was between the Professor and Ivy’s disappearance, if any.

But perhaps a visit to Jameson Knob would fill in some of the blanks.

Although neither of them realized it, while Henry was at the main campus off Cumberland Avenue, Phoebe was just across the river at the University of Tennessee Hospital, next door to the world famous Body Farm.

She’d decided to take a few more hours off work and have a chat with an old friend, Professor Charles Goldman, M.D.

Charlie, a radiologist, was usually to be found somewhere in the vast windowless basement of the hospital because that was where the radioactive materials and devices were kept. It was a rabbit warren where most of the rooms were maintained in an eternal twilight to make it easier to read the myriad kinds of ghostly images the radiology department worked with:
MRIs
,
MRAs
, CT and PET scans, ultrasonic and fluoroscopic images, bone scans, and the so-called plain films, which weren’t actually on film anymore.

Phoebe didn’t want to use a cell phone inside a hospital, so she called Charlie’s pager from the public phone that hung on the wall in the main lobby. From where she stood she could see the double doors marking the entrance to the Radiology Department.

When his pager answered, she punched in the number she was calling from and hung up. She stood next to the phone and less than a minute later it rang. “Hey, Charlie, it’s Phoebe. I’m in the lobby, but I think this is about as far as I can make it without
gettin
lost. Do you mind
comin
to get me?”

Charlie laughed and said, “Smart move, I’m in one of the new reading rooms we’ve made since we’ve gotten computerized. You’d never be able to find me. It’s one of the great things about this job.
So many places to hide!”

It took nearly ten minutes for Charlie to appear at the double doors. He was easy to recognize even though she hadn’t seen him in a few years. He was slightly over six feet tall with curly, prematurely silver hair and dark blue eyes. His coloring and starched white lab
coat were
perfectly suited to the silvery world he worked in. It was radiological
camo
.

He intentionally cultivated a professorial look with a closely trimmed white beard, but he was so muscular he ended up looking like a cross between Sigmund Freud and a pro football player instead. Charlie’s beeper went off before he had time to greet Phoebe. He looked down at it and said, “Do you mind coming with me?”

Phoebe was happy to go with him. She loved getting to see all the images and watch him help other
doctors
figure out what was going on with a patient.

“What’s up?” he asked, as they walked into the netherworld.

“I need some information on an impossibly obscure topic,” she said.

“Ever hear of Google?” he asked.

“You’re more fun,” she said. Charlie was a genius who read nearly everything and remembered most of it.

“And the topic is?”

“Slime.”

“When the topic of slime comes up, you think of
me
?” he said. “I’m not sure I should be flattered.”

“You’re the smartest guy I know.”