Death by Dissertation (32 page)

The telling of my fact-gathering took about thirty minutes, and neither Maggie nor Rob interrupted. I had to remember to keep my voice down so that I didn’t broadcast to the whole fourth floor. By the time I got to my conversation with Ruth, I was hoarse and my throat longed for water.

“Well, Andy,” Rob replied, “I have to hand it to you. I think you’re right. Dan has to be the murderer. If he’s trying to pass off someone else’s work as his own, then he might be willing to kill to keep it a secret. If anyone accused him of plagiarism, he would lose any chance of being considered by Harvard.”

Maggie nodded. “I agree with Rob. I don’t think any of us would pass up a chance like that easily.” She paused, and a shadow passed briefly across her face. “Besides, from what Dan told me, he had it pretty rough growing up in Boston, and Harvard represents something very important to him.”

I wanted to ask her what she thought about the validity of Dan’s story about Charlie, but I couldn’t rake up the nerve to do it. Almost as if reading my mind, however, Rob jumped in.

“You know,” he said, “I never knew about any connection between him and Charlie, but I did wonder if Dan was gay. Then, when Maggie started dating him last year, I decided I was wrong. But from what you’ve told us, Andy, I guess I was right all along.”

I glanced quickly at Maggie. She nodded. “That’s why Dan and I went out only twice,” she said. “I picked up on a lot of uncertainty from him. Plus, I caught him cruising other guys. I decided that I didn’t want to go through all that with him, no matter how attractive he was.”

The story Dan had told me that morning could very well have been the truth. That simply intensified his motives in murdering Charlie. He needed to keep quiet the fact that he was plagiarizing someone else’s work, and on top of that he was humiliated and angry over the way Charlie had treated him. Whitelock had gotten caught in the crossfire, though I in no way considered him blameless.

I couldn’t help but believe that Whitelock knew that Dan’s dissertation was really the work of Dunbar. But in Whitelock’s eyes, the fact that his doctoral student was heading off to a fellowship at Harvard more than compensated for the immorality of the situation.

Seeing that Maggie and Rob were waiting for me to say something, I quickly said aloud what I had just been thinking, and they agreed with me.

“But now what are we going to do?” Maggie asked. “Shouldn’t we be on the phone to Herrera right now?”

Both Rob and I nodded vigorously. “Now that we’ve talked it through,” I replied, “and neither of you thinks I’m crazy, then I feel better about calling Herrera. He can track Dan down and settle this whole thing.”

I stood up, and Rob shifted his chair. I looked out into the stacks and caught a glimpse of blond hair and the flash of a long-sleeved shirt. Someone was hiding and listening to us. I nudged Maggie and nodded toward the spot. Casually, she stood and took a step to the left, where she was in a position to see down the aisle.

She tensed, and Rob and I watched, immobilized. We could hear the thump of footsteps on the worn linoleum as someone started running through the stacks, away from us. It was Dan, and he had been listening, for who knew how long.

“After him,” Rob said as he began to run.

Maggie reacted immediately, cutting through the stacks to my right, in the direction of the front staircase on the south side of the building, trying to head Dan off before he could get out.

I felt frozen to the spot as I watched Maggie and Rob rocket off on the chase. Then I got my legs in gear and followed Rob. Once my legs started functioning, my brain did the same, and I suddenly had an idea where Dan might be headed, if Rob hadn’t managed to head him off at the pass, so to speak.

The eastern end of the floor had a staircase rarely used by students because of its inconvenient location and poor lighting. It had been the scene of an attempted rape several years earlier. The convenient feature of this staircase— convenient at least for Dan’s purposes, I thought grimly—was an emergency exit in the basement entrance. He could get out that way, rather than through the front door.

Ahead of me, Rob suddenly veered off through the stacks, and I thought he must have seen something, but I couldn’t believe that Dan would run around in circles on the fourth floor. I had almost reached the door to the stairs, and I pounded the last few steps to it. If Rob needed me, he’d give a holler. In my flight, I had barely had time to notice that a few carrels were occupied. Wonder what their occupants thought about this race through the stacks?

I yanked open the door to the stairway and stepped inside. Over my own heavy breathing, I could hear feet running lightly somewhere down below me. They had to belong to Dan. I yelled, “Stairs, Rob!”

Then I was off at breakneck speed. Though my face was streaming with sweat and my glasses had begun to slide, I managed, by some minor miracle, to keep them on. One hand on my glasses and one hand on the railing, I almost flew down the steps, my feet barely touching the treads.

When I reached the bottom of the stairs, I had so much momentum that I couldn’t stop, and I literally hit the door. If Dan wasn’t already out of the building, he certainly knew that someone was behind him. I jerked the door open and plunged into the murky shadows of the basement.

I paused to get my bearings. The door from the stairs opened onto a small room maybe tour feet square. Opposite the stairway door was an opening out into the basement stacks. To my right was another opening; this one led down a short hallway with storerooms off either side. At the end of the hallway was the emergency exit.

I peered through the dim light to the end of the short hallway. The exit sign glowed feebly in the gloom, and I could see a bunch of boxes piled in front of the door. The fire department wouldn’t like that. Certainly this wasn’t the first time the building had failed to come up to code, but for once I wasn’t complaining.

My breath quickened again. Those boxes in front of the door meant that Dan was still inside somewhere. He might have had time to get out of this hallway and out into the basement stacks, but he couldn’t run up the stairs to the first floor. Maggie was surely there by now, and I figured she’d probably had someone call the police. Dan must realize that he couldn’t get out that way.

I took a deep breath and began moving cautiously down the dark hallway. The storage rooms didn't have doors, and their openings were shrouded in the dark. I stuck to the center of the hallway, which was only about five feet wide, and tried to listen for sounds ot movement or breathing.

I heard nothing as I moved closer and closer to the pile of boxes in front of the emergency exit. As I stood next to the pile, I thought I heard a sound behind me. Someone grabbed my left arm and twisted it savagely behind my back. My glasses almost flew off my head from the impact.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Pain shot through my arm and nearly took my breath away. I tried to turn to get a look at Dan’s face, but he twisted my arm brutally, and I gave up. His ragged breathing matched my own.

We stood there for a moment, then Dan forced me into one of the storage rooms. Once we got past the darkness of the doorway and into the interior of the room, I could see the glimmerings of light from windows high on the wall. He pushed me up against the wall underneath one of the windows, and there was enough illumination to see his face and the room around us. He let go of me, and I subsided against a shelf, rubbing my arm, which had gone numb from the force of Dan’s grip.

Full bookshelves lined the walls, and I could see boxes of more books in the floor, but a wide swath through the center of the room was clear. Just about anything could happen, and no one would notice for a while. There was little chance that anyone would come along to interrupt whatever Dan was planning to do. Unless, I prayed fervently, Rob had heard me and followed me down the stairs.

“Why did you have to stick your nose in all this, Andy?” Dan asked abruptly. He stood in front of me, muscular and threatening.

I no longer had the energy to try to knock him out of the way and run for it. “Did you really think Rob and I were going to sit still and let either one of us be arrested for murder?” I said, my voice raspy from all the talking I had done earlier and from the exertion of the chase down the stairs. I swallowed, but that didn’t help much. “I’m afraid it’s too late to go back now. You’re not going to get very far if you run. You know that. Maggie and Rob have seen to it that the police are on the way.”

I wondered what was running through Dan’s mind. Maybe he had reached the point where he just didn’t care. I was praying that I could talk him out of doing something I’d regret. Besides, unless the police had strong evidence to link him to the crimes, who knew whether a jury would convict him on the motives and evidence I had ascribed to him?

“If you hadn’t been so damned nosy,” Dan said furiously, “no one would ever have connected me with this. And they didn’t have enough real evidence to make a charge stick against you or Rob.”

“Maybe not,” I responded. I stared at him through the murky light, trying to decide whether I had regained enough strength and energy to try to knock him out of the way. As I peered at him, over his shoulder I could see someone hovering in the doorway of the room. Rob was quietly sneaking up with a large book in his hands.

Dan stared at me, his eyes full of hatred. “You don’t know what I’ve been through, what it took for me to get this far, and now you’re ready to take it all away. Just like they did.”

Chilled, I realized that by “they” he meant Charlie Harper and Julian Whitelock. “Did it mean so much to you that you had to kill them?” I asked as gently as I could.

“You’d never understand,” he said. “Everything I ever wanted, about to fall out of my hands, because Charlie couldn’t leave me alone. He deserved what he got, dammit. He pushed me too far, once and for all.” Dan seemed to have forgotten me, and I was afraid he’d sense Rob sneaking up on him if I didn’t do something.

“One thing I don’t understand,” I said in as calm a tone as I could muster, “is how you could live with yourself, knowing that you stole the work of a dead man. How could you do it?”

He laughed bitterly. “A hell of a lot of good it was going to do him, wasn’t it? He didn’t need a good job or a good reputation. I needed it. So I took it.”

I was chilled by the sheer, brutal self-interest of his actions. “Was he that much better than you, Dan?” I had to keep him distracted for a moment longer; Rob was getting closer. “Did you hate him because he was brilliant and you aren’t? What will you do when Harvard finds out?”

I had gone too far. Before I could stop him, he had his hands around my throat, squeezing the dickens out of my vocal cords, trying to bang my head against the shelves behind me, all the while screaming at me.

I was beginning to have trouble with my vision as I struggled to loosen Dan’s hands from around my neck. I caught a glimpse of Rob, who became a blur of motion in the dim light. At the last second, Dan sensed there was someone behind him, but he realized it too late. The heavy book in Rob’s hands connected with Dan’s head. The crack of head against book was so loud, I thought his skull must surely be fractured.

He toppled sideways to the floor, and I slumped against the wall, rubbing my throat gently with my right hand and the back of my head with my left. Rob dropped the book on Dan’s head for insurance. After the second loud whack, Dan was out cold.

My knees suddenly gave way beneath me, and I slid bumpily down the shelves until I was sitting on the floor. Rob stood like an avenging fury over his prey, and I pulled off my glasses and wiped across my sweaty face with an ice- cold hand.

“Thanks,” I tried to say, but my throat was dry and bruised, so what came out sounded totally different. I had a sudden strong urge to start giggling, though it wouldn’t have done much for the pounding in my head.

“You’re more than welcome,” Rob said wryly. “Are you all right?”

Just then Maggie came into view, followed by two campus cops, both waving flashlights. The big beefy men were not the same officers I had encountered earlier in the week.

“What’s going on here?” one of them barked, as they pushed Maggie and Rob out of the way.

Slowly I stood up, then pointed down at Dan, still out cold at my feet. One of the officers shone his light down on him. “The man on the floor tried to strangle me.” I then gestured toward Rob. “If it hadn’t been for him, I’d probably be dead by now.”

Rob nodded in confirmation. “You need to keep an eye on him, Officer,” he said, pointing down at Dan. “We think this is the man who is responsible for the murders here on campus.”

“Is that so?” the policeman responded. Motioning for us to step away, he stooped over Dan and checked him out, while the other officer used his radio to contact campus police headquarters.

Maggie, Rob, and I were all relieved to hear that Lieutenant Herrera was on the way. The campus cop looked like he wanted to lock us all up.

Dan, who was coming around, began muttering and cursing. The officers got him on his feet and marched him out of the storage room, ordering Maggie, Rob, and me to follow. Rob had his arm around me, for which I was thankful. I still felt a little weak in the knees. As we headed up the stairs to the first-floor foyer, Maggie told me that she had brought the campus police down to the basement. Rob had figured that Dan would try to get to the emergency exit if he couldn’t make it to the front entrance of the library. Even if Maggie and the cops hadn’t found us so quickly, I wasn’t that worried. Rob was obviously more than a match for Dan. And I might have managed to get out of the situation myself. A quick knee to the crotch would probably have done the trick—
if I had thought of it at the time,
that is, I told myself ruefully.

There we all stood, in the brightly lit foyer of the library, waiting for Herrera. I glanced down at myself and realized what a sorry sight I must be, sweaty, smelly, and grimy. Nobody had cleaned those rooms in the basement in decades, to judge by the dust I had picked up. Rob and Maggie, of course, looked cool as proverbial cucumbers. Dan stood there stoically, his eyes closed, as if he might be trying to shut out everything. Passersby goggled at us, but no one said anything.