3 Time to Steele (17 page)

“You got it, partner,” I said. “But, if you don’t mind my asking…what are
we
going to do?”

Shay smiled. “We’re going to find Buford Gill.”

27

Our first stop was back at Taxation and Revenue where we managed to locate our young, bowtie-clad friend Teller and get him to track down yet another Gill name for us. Unfortunately, our luck held steady from earlier in the morning.

Teller produced the file they had for Gill Sr., but it was marked as severely delinquent. According to the records, Gill Sr. hadn’t paid his taxes in close to a decade, and that meant he wasn’t anywhere near the address they had on file for him, otherwise the city’s ordained tax thugs would’ve collected on his debts long ago.

Luckily for me, the pretty head my partner carried around on her shoulders had more than cooking tips, chemical know-how, and gumption coursing through it, which is how we found ourselves elbow deep in the scientific periodicals section of the New Welwic Municipal Library.

I dug out a pile of research journals from a gloomy stack and lifted them into my arms, filling my lungs with the scent of their dusty, acid-eaten pages. Turning, I headed back along the deserted aisle, my footsteps sounding off the marble floor beneath me before echoing off the walls a good hundred paces away. Grunting under the weight of the manuscripts, I worked my way back to a long refectory table situated under a high arching window at the side of the periodicals wing. I dropped the journals onto the polished wooden surface with a thud.

Shay looked up from her article. Somehow, she’d finagled it so whenever it was time to grab more journals, I was the one who did the heavy lifting. Imagine that.

I sat down across from her and picked up a few items off the top of the recently-deposited pile. Two of them were from
Physica Modernica
and one was from the far more rationally titled
The Journal of Astrophysics
. Flipping open the first issue of
Physica Modernica
, I checked the table of contents and found Buford Gill’s entry, a mouthful if I’d ever seen one. It was called:
A Treatise on the Physiomechanical Principles governing Tangential Motion in the Phase Field, Part 1: Theoretical Proofs Concerning the LaTrobe Vector in Inverse Space.

My eyes glazed over as soon as they hit the page. Luckily, I wasn’t particularly interested in anything Gill had to say on phase fields and inverse vectors. I only cared about the portion at the top of the article, under the title, that contained the man’s contact information. I cracked a knuckle, closed the journal, and tossed it to the side.

“I don’t know how you managed to come out so normal, considering your dad’s a scientist,” I said to Shay. “I feel like anyone raised in one of those households is practically exposed to a foreign language.”

“Chemistry isn’t quite so bad as physics in that regard,” said Shay as she turned a page. “At least, I think so. But maybe I’m biased because I grew up with a chemist and I understand the lingo.”

I grabbed another journal, the astrophysics one this time. A glance at the table of contents revealed a more normal-sounding article, albeit one whose title I still didn’t understand:
A Prediction of Tidal Radii based on Orbital Eccentricities.
What did an orbit’s quirks have to do with tides? Or was I missing something?

After glancing at the article’s contact information, I tossed the journal in the pile with the rest of the rejects.

“This is useless,” I said. “All these old journals list Buford Gill’s work address at The University of New Welwic’s Department of Physics and Chemistry, except for the newer ones that list a separate address at the Department of Physics and Astronomy. Either way, we know he hasn’t worked at the university in years. And the few journals that show his home address list the same place we got from Taxation and Revenue. We’re not going to find him this way.”

Shay glanced at me and smiled. “Well, not with that attitude we’re not. Try thinking outside the box.”

“I thought I was pretty good at that,” I said, “but sifting through these papers makes me feel like I didn’t even know there
was
a box.”

Shay lifted her head from her manuscript and looked at me. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Everyone’s talents are different. I doubt Gill Sr. could do what you do.”

I snorted.

“I’m serious,” said Shay. “He’s clearly a genius, but a lot of people like him struggle in all kinds of other areas, from their ability to interact socially to application of common sense. If you plopped the man into the middle of a crime scene, chances are he’d be as useful at solving a murder as a bricklayer or a window washer.”

I glanced at my partner, at how the sun at her back glimmered off her dark brown hair, how it illuminated the tips of her pointy ears while sending the rest into shadow, and how, despite any and all physical explanations a man like Buford Gill might be able to provide to the contrary, her smile always seemed to shine despite the angle of the sun.

“Thanks,” I said.

Shay smiled demurely and turned her head back to her reading material.

“So,” I said, “have you come up with any bright ideas about how these articles might help us track down Professor Gill?”

“I have,” said Shay. “Two, actually.”

“Really?”

Shay looked up again and tapped the pages of the magazine she was reading. “Yes. These are some of the most recent journals in which Gill Sr. published.”

“I know,” I said. “You were all too eager to dive into them when presented with the option of doing that or digging out more from the stacks. I’m telling you, that sandwich you ate isn’t going to do any good unless you put in some long hours of heavy lifting to go along with it. I’m thinking we should put you on a regimen.”

My partner smiled and shook her head, ignoring my witty tangent. “My point was going to be that even though none of these recent articles list a contact address for Gill, they do provide clues. For one thing, Buford published two articles this past year in the same journal,
Philosophical Science Letters
—” She tapped the periodicals in question. “—which just so happens to have its offices right here in New Welwic. If Gill sent his articles to the journal headquarters via courier, it’s possible he left them with a return address for correspondence. Or, perhaps he dropped by the offices himself. Maybe someone there knows where we might be able to find him.

“And there’s more. Both of the articles published in
Philosophical Science Letters
list a coauthor, someone by the name of S. Tanner. Unfortunately, they don’t list an address, personal or professional, but if we could find this person, chances are they could point us in the direction of Gill.”

I scrubbed a hand across my mouth and chin as I grunted.

“What is it?” said Shay.

“I’m trying to figure out how I didn’t see that earlier,” I said, which wasn’t a lie, but it wasn’t the whole truth either. I had a fairly good idea of what had distracted me, and she had pointy ears, dark hair, and a smile that shone even outside of direct sunlight, apparently. Thankfully, my partner cracked as many head-scratchers as she prevented me from solving with her feminine wiles, so I suppose the overall situation was a zero-sum game, although it did make me look like a fool in front of the other detectives on occasion…

“So, if you’ve figured that out, what are we sitting around here for?” I asked.

Shay shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I got caught up reading this article on space tensors.”

“You know, I was sort of kidding earlier about the whole separate language business,” I said, “but now I’m changing my mind.”

“Look, I don’t understand
all
of it,” said Shay. “But sometimes it’s interesting to delve into the mind of a genius, just to see what’s lurking there.”

Was that a not-so-subtle dig at me?

“Well, your passing interest in geometrical tensors can wait,” I said as I stood. “We’ve still got a murderer on the loose, in case you don’t remember. So let’s wrap this up. And while we’re at it, let’s bring some of these journals with us for evidence purposes. You’ll have to put them on your library card, though.”

Shay furrowed her brows. “Huh? Why?”

“Because the librarians here still haven’t forgiven me for the last…
incident
. As it turns out, they frown upon people who overturn a centuries’ worth of documents from a series of library stacks in one full-bodied blow. Now come on, let’s hustle.”

28

The address we gleaned from the pages of
Philosophical Science Letters
led us to a nondescript, four-story, multi-tenant office building on the north side of town, west of the Earl. I stood with Steele across from the second floor landing outside a door with a frosted glass pane set into it at roughly face height, assuming one was human or elven. Etched into the glass were the words “Philosophical Science Letters” and the address.

“I think we’ve found the right place,” I said.

“What gave you that idea?” said Steele as she knocked, making the door rattle in its frame.

“Just a hunch,” I said. “I’m clever like that.”

A tired voice responded from the other side of the glass, one that quivered and creaked, possibly from disuse. “Come in.”

I wrenched on the doorknob and opened the door—or at least tried to. It stuck on something after I’d pushed it to about a thirty degree angle.

“Oh, sorry about that,” came the voice again. “Here, give me a moment.”

I heard a rustling of paper and a soft scuffing of shoes on lumber. The door jerked in its hinges, and I heard a muffled curse.

“Oh forget it,” said the voice. “Look, you’ll just have to wriggle your way around. I’m sorry. I hope you’re not one of the city’s jumbo-sized inhabitants, otherwise you simply won’t be able to fit.”

I looked in through the door gap, but all I could see was a wall covered floor to ceiling with journal reprints held in place by round metal tacks affixed to the upper left-hand corners.

“After you,” I said to Steele.

She shot me a fake smile. “You’re such a gentleman.”

Steele slipped a foot into the opening and slid around the not even halfway open door, her slim frame making the curve with ease. As I readied myself to follow, I heard her voice from the other side of the door.

“You, uh…might have to suck it in, Daggers. It’s a little tight in here.”

“Yes, yes, I know,” said the mystery voice. “I’m terribly sorry about the mess. It piles up over the years, you understand. And I can’t get rid of it. Too attached to it, you see. Although I suppose I could put some into storage, but I don’t know how I’d manage that in my condition. Regardless, there’s a path there to the left. If you shuffle a little…”

I shoved myself sideways into the opening and squirmed around the edge of the door, barely squeezing my bulk through the gap, at which point I understood Shay’s comment. It didn’t refer to the entryway, but rather the office as a whole.

Mountains of paper occupied almost every cubic inch of the room, in every way, shape, and form: books, magazines, journals, pamphlets, and circulars, some bound in hard or soft covers, others loosely collated with staples and binder clips and shiny brass brads. Some sat on their sides on bookshelves, which occupied two full walls of the room, but the majority stood in huge stacks on the floor or rose up in a massive, rectangular pile in the middle of the space. Only after I caught a glimmer of glossy wood from underneath the pages did I realize there was probably a desk underneath the mound.

Narrow corridors snaked around the room, allowing passage to the far corners and the various stacks of knowledge that resided there, assuming you were the sort of person who enjoyed jogging and had an aversion to food.

The latter at least seemed to apply to the source of the quavering voice: an old, rail-thin man, probably in his seventies, with thinning gray hair, knobby hands, wearing wire-rimmed spectacles and sporting a conspicuous liver spot on his forehead over his right brow. Either he or something in the room smelled like my grandfather’s prized sweater collection. We locked eyes.

“Um…hi,” I said.

“Oh, uh, yes. Hello.” The old man blinked and shook his head. “Where are my manners? I’m Dr. Lester French, editor-in-chief of Philosophical Science Letters. How may I be of service?”

Shay spoke up. “I’m Detective Steele. This is Detective Daggers. Do you mind if we ask you a few questions?”

“Detectives?”
Lester’s eyebrows shot up. “Don’t tell me there’s an academic fraud scandal brewing?”

“No, Dr. French,” said Steele. “That’s not the sort of…
crime
we investigate.”

Lester sighed. “Oh. Thank goodness. There’s nothing worse than fraud. That sort of thing can affix a black stamp to a scholarly journal for years.”

“Well,
you
may think there’s nothing worse than fraud,” I said, sidling past a particularly wobbly-looking stack of reprints. “But I assure you the victims in our department think there’s at least one crime worse.”

Based on the look the old guy gave me, I don’t think he got my joke.

“Yes, uh, well, anyway,” he said, “why don’t we sit and discuss…whatever it is you wish to discuss.”

“We’d be happy to,” said Steele with a raised eyebrow, “but if you don’t mind my asking…where are the chairs?”

“Oh, they’re there,” said Lester. “I’m sure of it. You might need to rearrange a few things to get to them, and move a few papers once you get there—”

“It’s alright,” I said. “We’ll stand.”

The old man looked pained. “You won’t hold it against me if I sit, of course? My arthritis acts up more than it used to. It’s a miracle I can still get up and down the stairs every day.”

Steele and I both nodded. With a sigh, the old man shuffled back behind the massive pile of documents that covered his desk and collapsed into his chair, which I could actually see once I got close enough to peer over the mound of paper.