Forever Dead (15 page)

I tried to say something, anything, but what do you say to a story like that?

“He changed after that. Never the same again, they say. Some men can get over their grief, but his daughter is always there to remind him, I guess. He moonlights at other jobs to help pay for the poor kid. Shows, too. His work here is suffering, and Davies is sitting on him pretty hard.”

Again, I had absolutely nothing to say. All I could think of was the pain the man had gone through.

“But it's not all bad. He and Diamond have just done a paper together, but Diamond wanted to postpone publication for some reason, so it's on hold. Don was really disappointed — so was I, because my name is going to be on it too. Diamond wouldn't tell Don why, just asked him
to be patient. When the paper gets published it will give Don a boost and hopefully help to get him some more funding. At first Diamond really was doing him a favour collaborating like that, but then Don's data turned out to be good, so I guess Diamond was right to take him on. Surprised everyone, though, because Don's work hadn't been very good since the accident. Sloppy, you know.” She shrugged and said, “Diamond was a good man. He didn't deserve such an awful death.” Roberta hastily wiped her eyes with her sleeve, and I wondered if the tears were for Diamond or Don.

I stood there like an idiot trying to think of something to say, but there really wasn't anything that would make her feel better. I gave her some time to get herself back together again and then gently asked, “Does Don have a semi-permanent camp like Diamond's?”

She shook her head. “Only Diamond did.” She said slowly, “You see, he loved the bush. Often went up just to write his reports and to get away from his students. Even if he had no fieldwork to do. Sometimes I think he started doing it to get away from his wife. Often he'd go up just for a night, mark some papers, and come back in time for afternoon lectures. I used to have a bird, 'cause I demonstrated his comparative anatomy class and I was always afraid he'd miss classes.”

“That's a hell of a portage to get to his place for just an overnighter.”

I was remembering the rain-mucked steep cliff paths and treacherous footing Ryan and I had stumbled over in our haste to get help. Even in excellent shape it wasn't your average sort of daily walk.

“Oh, that route. You been there? Canoeist, right?”

I nodded. “It was a bitch.”

She laughed. “Yeah, only the canoeists take that route. Diamond hardly ever used it, and no one at the station did.
There's another path, only a quarter-mile from the road through the forest. Easy footing. He'd drive up, park his car just out of sight in the bush, and walk in. Take him ten minutes at most. And he was real close to the barricade. He set it up just on the road between the biology station turn off and his portage. Very convenient for him. He sometimes slept at his camp when he was on the barricade.”

“You were part of that group, right?”

“What? The barricade? Oh sure. It was a hoot. We'd all go up as often as we could, take our sleeping bags and stuff. Diamond made sure there was all kinds of food and stuff, and his friend Shannon oversaw all the cooking. Just like camp.”

“Is the barricade still up?”

“It's on hold. We got an injunction before Diamond died, but it was overturned. I don't think we'll stop the logging now, especially now that Diamond is gone. He was the leader.”

“Did the rest of the faculty support the cause?”

“A lot of us did, but Davies was furious. Diamond's graduate student, Patrick Whyte, wasn't too enamoured with it either. Not sure why. He's usually a gung-ho environmentalist, but then he's been working his butt off to get his thesis done by Christmas so he's not had much time to get involved, I guess.”

She didn't sound very convinced.

“He and Diamond actually had a vicious row over the barricade. Patrick thought it was stupid and would just make things worse, but there was no swaying Diamond. He was a stubborn son of a bitch. Even Davies had no effect on him. He just railroaded over everyone when he thought something was right.”

I picked up the roster and began flipping through it.

“I have to get back to work,” she said. “Just leave the roster on the table when you're finished, 'kay?”

I thanked her and turned my attention to the roster. Fifteen minutes later I had it all. Diamond had died sometime on the eleventh of July, four days before he was due back. Leslie had signed out on July 5, returning July 13, the day before Ryan and I had stumbled upon the body. Don and Roberta had left July 8, returning July 11. Patrick had signed out from July 7 to July 11. Even Eric Davies had been out in the bush July 10 to 12 along with two grad students. And who knew how many people were manning the barricade a mere ten-minute walk from where Diamond's body was found at his camp?

With so many people in the bush the week Diamond died, why had it taken so long for his body to be discovered?

I found Leslie in among a whole truckload of boxes in Diamond's old office. His name was still on the door, and the snarling face of a Canada lynx growled out at me. I knocked, and a moment later Leslie appeared at the door eating an apple. Her black closely cropped hair made her face look quite masculine, but the rest of her was definitely a woman.

“Well, so we meet again.”

“Looks like you got promoted?”

“Yeah. Soon to be full professor from associate. But what a way to do it, eh? Over Diamond's dead body. Nothing like taking over the responsibilities of a dead man.” I was startled by the bitterness in her voice, but then she smiled and I thought maybe I had been mistaken.

“We never properly introduced ourselves back up there in the woods. Leslie Mitchell.” She hastily switched
the apple to her left hand, wiped her right hand on her pants, and held it out to me.

“Cordi O'Callaghan,” I said as I gripped her hand in mine. I winced at the strength of it. This was getting to be ridiculous. Had everyone learned that a limp grip labelled you a wimp? The harder you squeeze the more important you are?

“Come on in,” she said and led me into the chaos of her office. There were boxes everywhere, all in various stages of being unpacked.

She knelt down in front of a box and started rifling through its contents.

“You're an entomologist aren't you?” she asked.

“A zoologist, really, but I often work with insects.”

“And you've lost all your specimens, as well as your disks.” She looked up at me, and seeing my surprised look she laughed. “This is a small university. Nothing is private here, and we stick by each other. Don just phoned to warn me you were coming around.”

She sat back on her heels, a file folder in each hand.

“Being a zoologist I know what it's like to lose data or have an experiment go wrong and the hopes of tenure with it. I gather you were hoping to recover the disks. What makes you think they'd still be around?”

“Hope. Desperation. I don't know. They weren't trashed at my office. They were physically removed, so I have some hope they're still around, that whoever took them realizes what they mean and won't destroy them. There's nothing on them that would be the least bit useful to anyone but me.”

The words hung in the air. The silence lengthened. She dropped the folders back into the box.

“Not even to another zoologist or entomologist?”

I paused, startled by her question. I hadn't really given that possibility much thought. What if someone
had wanted my data to beat me to publication and the stolen disks had nothing to do with Diamond? Ridiculous. My work just wasn't important enough, even if there was another team working on it. If I had some new breakthrough, then it would be different, but …

“Not interesting enough,” I said, and felt a pang of anger that my work really wasn't something someone would want to steal.

“That doesn't mean it isn't interesting to someone else,” she said. “What were you working on, besides the larvae?”

“Basic taxonomy. Nothing earth-shattering. Some succession work and some stuff with praying mantids. I can't see that anyone would be interested, except me.”

“You're probably right.”

I tried not to look hurt at this cryptic dismissal of my work.

“It was only a suggestion, but maybe you should be looking somewhere else besides here. Why do you think Diamond's death is related to the theft of your disks anyway?”

“Don seems to have told you everything.”

Leslie rocked on her heels.

“Yeah, well, he said you had some crazy idea that the larvae you found on Diamond's body indicated that he had been moved a long way from where he died. Even if your accidental attempt at forensic entomology can tell you that, what the hell does it mean? It makes no sense. I mean, why would anyone want to move his body somewhere else? It's ludicrous.”

She yanked another box over to her side and rummaged inside.

“Because his death might not be what it seems.”

Leslie slowly turned to look at me, her face blank and unreadable. “What's that supposed to mean?”

When I didn't answer she waved her hand impatiently.

“You can't get more straightforward than being killed by a bear. You really are desperate, aren't you? Sounds as though you're grasping at straws. Can't say I blame you, though,” she added.

I watched as she emptied out the box and started sorting out the papers that had been in it. Finally, as I had hoped, she broke the silence.

“Did you ever actually meet Diamond?”

“No. I knew of his work, of course, but I never met him.”

“Yeah, well, he was well-liked by most people. He'll be sorely missed. If you're suggesting his death was anything but a horrible accident …”

“I'm not suggesting that, but was there anything Diamond was doing that could have made people angry enough or frightened enough to explain why his body was moved?”

“You mean like a sick prank or something? If you look hard enough everyone has enemies. But Diamond just got really careless. His campsite was a literal siren call of food. The cops said he even left a Mars bar in his tent, for God's sake.”

She shrugged, and I waited, hoping for more.

“What do you want me to say? He got careless. I've been there, know what it's like. But this time I got the consolation prize. I got his job. Lousy way to get it, and people calling me callous behind my back. What do they expect me to do? Say no to a promotion I've sought all my life? Sure, we were rivals — no secret there. I wanted his job. God knows I deserved it. But I didn't want it this way. I've just learned the hard way to take what I can get in a deck stacked in favour of men. You got tenure?”

“No.”

“See? And you're not likely to even have a chance at getting it without your disks, right?”

The look on my face must have said it all.

“What research are you working on?” I asked, wanting to get the spotlight off me. I hated it when my questions came back at me.

“Oh, I'm quite eclectic. Move around and fill in the gaps left by my colleagues. Some taxonomy. I've worked with parasites and planaria, and done some studies with mice. I've spent the last few years working on moose and their predators, and a new project that I hope will prove very interesting.”

“What's that?”

“Don't have enough data to go public yet or know for sure if the hypothesis will stand, so I'd rather not say just yet.” She smiled. She was actually quite pretty when her face lit up like that.

“It's a new angle, may not pan out … but I have to wait and organize the data before I make it public. You know how it is with us scientists. Paranoid that someone else will beat us to it.”

The phone rang, and Leslie grabbed for it.

“Mitchell here.” I watched as she threw me a grimace and said into the phone, “Really Davies, don't you have anything better to do than that? I'll get it to you as soon as I have a moment. Yeah, she's here. Why? You want me to send her over? Okay. No problem. I'll tell her.”

She hung up the phone and stared through me.

“Odious little man, that Davies. Always skulking about trying to dig up dirt. Seems to hate us all. Can't imagine what turns a man to hate so much.” She refocused her eyes on me and said, “He wants to see you. Two doors down and on the left.”

She turned back to her boxes and I started to leave, then hesitated.

“Why did it take so long for Diamond's body to be discovered? Surely someone from the biology station would have gone up to his camp?”

“He never encouraged anyone to go up there. In fact, he actively discouraged anyone unless it was a dire emergency. We left him to his own devices. Didn't make any difference to us. Even his women never went up there. It was his sacred turf. He guarded it like a cornered sow. We simply respected that, and by the time you found his body he wasn't due out for another day.”

I thanked Leslie for answering my questions, but as I left, I hesitated in the hall outside her door, aware that something she had said had twigged something important somewhere in my mind. Problem was I couldn't quite grasp what it had been before it was gone.

I followed Leslie's instructions and found Davies sitting at his desk. He was a small man, no taller than I was, in his early sixties with a halo of white hair punctuating a bright red dome and a bristly, charcoal grey Groucho mustache. He was flipping through some files in the open drawer of a desk, but when he saw me he jumped to his feet and scurried around his desk to meet me at the door. He did rather give the impression of a rooster with his bald red head and jerky movements.

“You must be Dr. O'Callaghan.” His voice was cold but surprisingly beautiful with a deep, lilting, musical sound at odds with his size. He could have had a career in radio. He didn't offer his hand or ask me in, so I stood in the doorway and waited. “May I ask you what you think you're doing going around asking questions you have no business asking?”