Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon (18 page)
Read Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon Online
Authors: Donna Andrews
Tags: #Women detectives, #Mystery & Detective, #General, #Langslow; Meg (Fictitious character), #Women Sleuths, #Fiction, #Humorous, #Psychotherapists, #Receptionists, #Computer games
„Her office hours were over a long time ago,“ I said.
„This was urgent,“ he said.
„Men usually seem to think so, yes.“
„I needed to talk to her. Urgently. She agreed to meet me here.“
„Right,“ I said.
He could see I didn't believe him – he didn't look as if he expected me to. But at least he stopped babbling inanities.
„Show me some ID,“ I said.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out his wallet, and handed over a driver's license. The picture matched his face, or would when the swelling went down, and the name sounded vaguely familiar – about the way it would from seeing it on the visitor's list a couple of times. I pulled out my notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe and wrote down his name and address; my handwriting was somewhat more ragged than usual because I was still keeping one eye on him.
„I think you should leave now,“ I said as I flipped the driver's license onto the floor beside him. „If you still need Dr. Lorelei, why don't you meet her in the College Diner? It's open twenty-four hours, and they didn't have a murder on the premises yesterday, so the waitresses are probably a little less apt to kick first and ask questions later. I can send the doctor over when she shows up.“
„No, no. I'm feeling much better,“ he said. „Just apologize to her for dragging her out so late, okay?“
Somehow he didn't look better. He looked a little traumatized. I'd probably set his therapy back years. I'd feel sorry if it wasn't clear that the little swine was cheating on his wife.
He looked relieved. Perhaps he was expecting me to call the police. Which I still could, later, if I decided it was a good idea. Like if I checked the visitor's logs and found out he was at the office Monday.
I stood at a safe distance as he hauled himself to his feet and staggered out of the suite. I kept my eye on him for the whole five minutes it took for the elevator to lurch up to our floor and drag its doors open so he could limp inside.
If he really was expecting Dr. Lorelei, it might be interesting to catch her off guard when she arrived. Which might be very soon, if he had mistaken me for her. I turned out the overhead lights and my flashlight, and was about to hide behind the partition that separated the reception area from the rest of the office when it occurred to me that Dr. Lorelei might already be inside her office. But no, surely if she'd heard the commotion in the reception area, she'd have appeared already.
While I was debating where to hide, I heard a noise out in the hall. I pulled open the coat closet door, only to find the space in which I was planning to hide filled with a giant cardboard box. Dammit, nothing was supposed to be in the coat closet but visitor's coats and the fire extinguisher. I made a mental note to figure out tomorrow who had junked it up. Meanwhile, I ducked under the reception desk, barely making it out of sight before the door opened.
I heard cautious footsteps.
„Randall?“ a voice called. „Are you here?“
I stood up, turning on my flashlight as I did, and aiming it toward the voice. Dr. Lorelei stood, bunking, in my beam. She was wearing a slinky black dress and four-inch heels – which made her about six feet four inches.
„Fancy meeting you here,“ I said, putting one hand on my hip while keeping her pinned with the beam.
She looked uncomfortable but didn't say anything. Was she too surprised to talk, or was she trying to figure out what to say? Or perhaps just trying to wait me out. Two could play at that game.
But long before the pressure of my withering glance had a
chance to demoralize Dr. Lorelei to the point that she would confess her rendezvous – heck, if she wanted to confess to Ted's murder while she was at it, I wouldn't complain – the office door popped open behind her, and I saw the pasty face of the rabid fan who had been trying to sneak into the offices all week.
„Aarrgghh!“ I yelled, and flapped my arms, much the way I'd do to chase squirrels off Dad's bird feeder. The fan reacted much as the squirrels did: after a moment of frozen shock, she turned and ran.
And like the squirrels, she would probably lurk just out of sight, waiting for a chance to come back and steal something. I turned angrily to Dr. Lorelei.
„You see!“ I said. „That's why we can't have people leaving the doors unlocked all the time. I don't know whether it was you or one of the other therapists who told my brother that playing Lawyers from Hell was a silly, useless way for grown people to spend their time – well, fine, no one's forcing you to play it. But you have to realize that there are people who take it very, very seriously, and will stop at nothing to get some kind of inside information about the new release, and if you persist in leaving the doors unlocked, it's going to cause problems. For all we know, these crazy fans could have had something to do with the murder!“
Dr. Lorelei didn't say anything, but I saw her eyes dart sideways a couple of times to glance at the door. Did she think I was so unbalanced that she'd need to make a run for it?
Then I realized she might be thinking what had just occurred to me: if a crazy fan really did have something to do with the murder – and while I admit that having the police suspect my brother made me biased, I still thought the fans were logical suspects – then maybe the police should check them out. Only
I'd just chased the craziest of them all away, instead of trying to sic the police on her.
Oh, well. Odds were she'd be back tomorrow. In fact, if she didn't show up again fairly soon, that would be even more suspicious.
Dr. Lorelei finally found her voice. „I didn't leave the door open,“ she said. „I was just as surprised and shocked as you were to find it open.“
„Really,“ I said.
„I came down to meet a patient who's having a crisis,“ she said, glancing again at the door. „I need to let him in when he arrives.“
„If you mean Randall, he managed to find his own way in, and he seems to be over his crisis, so I sent him home.“
She opened and closed her mouth a few times, as if not sure what to say. „I don't know what you're thinking,“ she began.
Actually, from the look on her face, she'd probably already figured out what I was thinking. I'd have to ask one of my therapist relatives to be sure, but I had a pretty good idea that having an affair with a patient would be a first-class violation of Dr. Lorelei's professional ethics. Not to mention a violation of ordinary human morality – Randall was married, and so was Dr. Lorelei, unless the ring she wore on her left hand was some kind of camouflage to deflect the romantic fantasies of her patients.
But I wasn't mean enough to say all that. Okay, maybe I was mean enough, but something more interesting occurred to me instead, and I decided to take a wild chance.
„Is that what Ted was blackmailing you about?“ I asked. „Your affair with Randall?“
Bull's-eye. Even with just the flashlight beam for light, I could see her flinch.
„He wasn't blackmailing me,“ she said. „I mean, he tried, but I told him off. I never paid anything. Why should I –? I'm not having an affair. I'm having a small problem with a patient who has become obsessed with me, true, but I'm working that out.“
„And meeting him here at one A.M. was part of working it out?“ I asked, checking my watch.
„I should have known you'd assume the worst,“ she said, drawing herself up and turning on her heel.
„Doesn't much matter what I assume,“ I said, to her departing back. „Be interesting to hear what Chief Burke makes of it.“
Maybe it was my imagination, but I think her shoulders fell a little as I said that.
I watched as she crossed the lobby and disappeared down the stairway.
I'd guessed correctly – Ted had tried to blackmail her. Wasn't there an entry for The Valkyrie on his list of targets? That would fit Dr. Lorelei perfectly. But did this have anything to do with his murder?
Perhaps not, if her reason for showing up here was as innocent as she would like me to think. Then again, maybe even the appearance of an ethics violation would damage her career – especially her brand-new national radio show. And if she really was having an affair –?
Whether or not she was having an affair wasn't important, though I admit I was curious. What mattered was whether or not she'd kill to protect her professional reputation and her growing fame as the star of
Lorelei Listens.
And for my money, yes, she was ambitious enough. Not to mention the fact that, given her size and strength, she could probably have strangled Ted even without stunning him first.
Maybe I should be glad she left quietly.
Maybe I should have stayed in hiding instead of confronting her. And speaking of hiding – I checked the box in the coat closet and found it full of pink Affirmation Bears. So Dr. Brown would receive tomorrow's complaint about people usurping shared space for personal use. Or maybe I should focus on the safety angle – if a fire broke out and I reached into the closet, I wanted to put my hands on the extinguisher, not a fuzzy pink cheering section.
Should I wrestle the box into her office now? No. For now, I was going to make myself a copy of Ted's blackmail list, so no one would see me doing it in the morning, and leave it at the reception desk, with the keys. And then crawl around with the blick light, studying the mail cart track. The bears could hibernate where they were until morning, when Dr. Brown was available to move them herself.
I strolled through the opening and turned right, rounding a corner and walking down the north hall, which led, eventually, to the copier room.
And then I saw something down the hall and ducked into a nearby cube.
Admin
I peered carefully out of the cube. I'd seen someone in the computer lab. During the daytime there were always people in the lab, of course; even at midnight, which it very nearly was, seeing someone working late would not be odd – but this someone was sitting in the dark.
I'd never found out why, unlike the rest of the office, the computer lab had floor-to-ceiling glass walls. I didn't find the view of a large room full of hardware that aesthetically pleasing, but maybe I wasn't the intended audience. Maybe to the technically oriented, it was a symphony in plastic, metal, and silicon, a tone poem in black, white, gray, and beige.
Or maybe it was a security measure, so no one could easily get up to any kind of sabotage. Anyone who walked down the north corridor could see everything that was happening in the lab.
And anyone in the lab could see anyone who walked down the corridor.
I peered carefully out of the cube where I was hiding. My eyes were more adjusted to the dark now, and the flicker from several monitors gave enough light for me to recognize the occupant of the lab.
It was Roger.
He was making CD-ROMs. „Burning“ them, as the guys said. Mutant Wizards had several CD burners in the lab, so
the programmers could make a small quantity of CDs when they wanted to get people to test new versions of the game. As I watched, Roger punched a button on one of the CD burners. The drawer slid open. He removed the CD inside and put it on top of the inch-high stack of CDs beside the burner. Then he took a fresh CD from a stack to his left, placed it in the holder and pushed the drawer back in. His fingers flew over the keys for a few minutes, and then he sat back, clasped his arms behind his head, and went back to watching the various monitors and CD burners.
Of course, it was always possible that he had some legitimate reason for being there. Doing some urgent task related to the new release. And that he hated the fluorescent lights and preferred to sit in a room lit only by the glow of the monitors. And found it more convenient to sneak in the back door, rather than through the front door, where I'd have seen him. But still…
I ducked back into a cube and looked around. Luis's cube, I noticed. I rifled the papers by his phone and, as I'd hoped, found a copy of the emergency contact list. Roger was on it, and, more important, his work, home, and cell phones were listed.
I called his cell phone. After a couple of rings, he answered. „Yeah?“
„Roger!“ I exclaimed. „Thank God someone's got his phone on; I've been ringing people for fifteen minutes. Listen, you live pretty near the office, right?“
„Right,“ he said.
„Is there any chance you could do me a big favor and drop by the office really quickly?“
„Why?“ he asked. Not mentioning, of course, that he was already at the office, which anyone who was here for any honest reason would have said right away.
„I left Spike in his cage in the downstairs hall,“ I improvised. „Rob was supposed to pick him up, but I can't reach Rob – I'm beginning to worry that the police have taken him in again, and I don't want to abandon Spike there all night if Rob didn't have a chance to pick him up. Could you go over there and take a quick look?“
„Yeah, I guess so,“ he said. „Hang on.“
I heard some tapping noises through the phone, and then a door opening and closing as he left the computer lab. I waited until I heard the same noise again, this time from the reception area, and then I ran back to the computer lab, carefully opened the door, and tiptoed over to where I could see his monitor.
„Okay,“ I muttered. „I see why you're slinking around in the middle of the night.“
From the looks of it, Roger was being a very bad boy. One monitor showed a pornographic Web site. Not, as far as I could tell, a very good one. But perhaps the visitors didn't much care about the bad lighting and composition of the photos, or the fact that the women in them weren't particularly beautiful or enthusiastic about what they were doing. And I was sure no one else cared that the text – what there was of it – was poorly spelled and hideously ungrammatical. I was probably the only person who'd ever tried to read the text, aside from its author.
And, turning to a second monitor, I was pretty sure I knew who that author was. The screen was covered with unintelligible code. But if I glanced back and forth between the two monitors, I could see some of the text from the porn site on the second screen, interspersed with lines and lines of unintelligible gibberish pocked with brackets.
Apparently I'd interrupted Roger in the middle of updating his site. The cursor blinked right after the phrase „completely nekkid and reelly…“ – I restrained my impulse to correct
his spelling, and I didn't particularly want to know what adjective he'd been about to type.
Was this how he normally spent his evenings? I wondered. Or just the evenings when his inept attempts at connecting with real live women fizzled?
I turned back to the first monitor. Something about the site looked familiar. I grabbed the mouse and scrolled up to the top of the page. Red and yellow words flashed at me, just as they had done on the site I'd seen at home – the site whose address I'd found in Ted's cache. Different words, but same style – which means, unless all porn sites had the same graphic look, it was probably the same site.
I glanced at a third monitor, which seemed to be tracking the progress of Roger's CD creation. He was copying vast quantities of files onto the CD. File titles flashed briefly across the screen as they were copied, and from the titles, I deduced that he was copying porn files. Backing up his site, perhaps? Adding new material to it?
I didn't know enough to tell, and didn't really care. Whatever he was doing, it shouldn't be happening on Mutant Wizards property, with Mutant Wizards hardware. Tomorrow, I'd look for someone who could figure out what was happening. I grabbed a slip of paper and wrote down the address of the porn site, in case whoever I enlisted needed that to track it down.
„Meg?“
I jumped, and then realized that Roger's voice was coming from my cell phone.
„I'm in the lobby. The dog's not here. Anything else?“
„No,“ I said. „Thanks a million, Roger. Sorry to drag you over there at this time of night.“
If I were Roger, I'd at least have pretended to allow enough time to walk over to the office, I thought, with irritation. Was
he too stupid to think of that, or did he think I was? Either way, I needed to leave, now. But I wanted some evidence. I slipped a CD from the middle of Roger's completed stack. And then, in case he was keeping count, I tiptoed across the lab, grabbed a blank CD from the box where they were stored, and slipped it back at approximately the same place.
The lab itself seemed relatively soundproof – perhaps that explained why Roger had not emerged to check on any of the earlier events of the evening. But as I opened the door to the corridor, I heard the front door open and close. Clutching the contraband CD with my left fingertips, I eased the lab door slowly closed and slipped back down the hall and into a nearby cube.
Just in time. I saw Roger's shadowy figure pass by, and then I heard the computer lab door open and close.
I peeked out and peeked through the glass walls again. Roger was settled back in his chair, hands clasped behind his head, staring impassively at his monitors.
Time for me to disappear.
I tucked the CD into my purse and sneaked the long way back to the reception area. Even though I didn't think Roger could hear it, I made sure to open and close the office door as quietly as possible. And I knew better than to wait for the geriatric elevator; I tiptoed down the stairs and eased the door closed. And breathed a sigh of relief. Unless Roger left the windowless computer lab, I'd be undetected. I was safe.
Or maybe not, I realized as I turned and stepped out into the parking lot. Which was still almost empty. Aside from Frankie's van, my blue Toyota was the only car in the parking lot. And apart from me, the only person in sight was the huge biker who'd been lurking in our parking lot. At the moment, he was lurking beside my Toyota.
As I watched, he leaned down and peered under the car.
His back was to me, so I decided to sneak a little closer to see what he was up to.
He was at least six feet six inches tall, and remarkably broad. Aside from a slight potbelly, he seemed mostly muscle. He wore enormous canvas boots, greasy jeans, a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped out, and a denim vest with a florid painting of a winged ferret on the back. Chains jingled merrily from various parts of his outfit, and his arms sported a remarkable collection of tattoos, though his thick body hair made it hard to appreciate any of their details. Except for one: on a thinly forested patch of bulging bicep, I could decipher the words
born
TO LOSE. The effect was somewhat spoiled by the skull inserted between the
o
and the
s
of „lose.“ Although a miniature work of art in its own right – one eye-hole sported a rose, and the other a writhing worm – the skull was so nearly identical in size and shape to the o that it was clear that the tattoo artist hadn't been the world's best speller, and had originally inscribed „Born to Loose.“ You had to give the arm's owner points, I decided. He was at least literate enough to consider fixing the typo worth additional pain and possibly more money.
But literate or not, he wasn't the sort of person one wants to find hovering over one's car in a deserted parking lot at – good grief! – 1:05 A.M. Perhaps if it had been earlier, I would have gone back inside to wait him out or call the police. But 1 was tired, cranky, and, I suppose, a little reckless.
Assailants aren't looking for opponents, I said to myself, recalling the words my karate instructor had always used. They're looking for victims. Don't look like a victim.
I slid my purse down to where I could use it for a purse fu block if needed, made sure my weight was balanced evenly, took a deep breath, stood up as straight as I could, and prepared to project fierceness and self-confidence as I strode forward.