Миранда Джеймс - No Cats Allowed

They both said good night in return, and I was halfway up the stairs, Diesel at my side, when I remembered my briefcase. This time I did turn around and go down the stairs. When I walked into the kitchen, Stewart was standing behind Haskell, still in his chair, massaging the deputy’s neck and shoulders.

“Sorry,” I said, “I forgot that I needed to get my briefcase out of the car. It’ll only take a moment.”

The two men nodded, and I hurried past them to the door. I flipped on the switch for the garage light and went to the car. I grabbed the briefcase and hurried back inside, turning off the light and locking the back door. “Good night again,” I said.

“See you in the morning,” Stewart called after me. He told Dante to stay, otherwise I think the poodle would have followed me upstairs for more playtime with Diesel.

I found my sweet boy on the bed when I got upstairs. He was already stretched out, no doubt tired from all the attention from his small and enthusiastic canine friend.

I put the briefcase on top of the chest of drawers and proceeded to change into my comfortable pajama shorts and T-shirt. I had about a hundred and fifty pages left in Lionheart , and I planned to read until it was time to call Helen Louise around ten.

A quarter of a frustrating hour later, however, I discovered that not even Penman’s masterful storytelling could keep my mind from jumping back and forth from the twelfth century to the present. Reluctantly I set the book aside, marked my place, and let my mind focus on the events of the day. Particularly on the terrifying event of the evening.

Had the shot been an attempt at murder? Or simply intimidation?

What was the point of intimidation? To keep me from going back to the library and perhaps reneging on my acceptance of the temporary position?

What good would that do, other than simply to delay the inevitable? At some point, the job would be filled, and the new library director would no doubt be asking the same questions about the budget that I would. If there were indeed problems with the budget other than those caused by Peter Vanderkeller, that is.

I hadn’t found anything in my studying of the figures today, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a problem concealed in them. I might have to dig deeper—a lot deeper—to find evidence of any malfeasance, if it was there.

I considered the other unanswered questions.

Why had Porter Stanley come to Athena in search of Reilly?

How did the intruder get into the library administration offices without a key?

Was there a connection between Stanley’s appearance and Reilly’s murder? Or only coincidence?

Hard luck on Stanley if it were the latter. Had he simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time? In other words, had he happened to witness Reilly’s murder?

Were the pranks against Reilly the work of the murderer? Or were murderer and prankster two different people?

After lying there a few minutes and going round and round over these questions, I decided I ought to write them all down. I often thought better, and more clearly, when I wrote things down.

I got out of bed to retrieve a notepad and pen from the briefcase. I settled back against my pillows and began to record my questions. When I’d finished, I read through them again. Diesel never stirred the entire time. He really must be tired , I thought.

I tapped the pen against the pad while I went over the questions yet again. As I did so, I noticed that the cap looked odd. I held it under the bedside light to examine it, and I realized that the cap contained a detachable part. I pulled it out and discovered that it was a thumb drive.

How clever, and how useful . Then I noticed the pen bore the logo of one of the library’s longtime vendors. Vendors often gave away promotional items like pens, thumb drives, notebooks, and so on. This was the first of its kind that I had seen. It wasn’t mine, so it had to be one of the ones from the director’s desk.

I looked at my list of questions again and ran down them. I tapped the pen against the paper a few more times. Then I stared at the cap of the pen. I pulled out the thumb drive and looked at it in sudden wonder.

Could this be what the intruder had been searching for?

TWENTY-NINE

I suddenly thought of Edgar Allen Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter.” Was the answer as simple as that?

One way to find out . Telling Diesel I would be back in a few minutes, I hurried downstairs to retrieve my laptop from the den. Quiet reigned on the first floor, with only a couple of lights on, and I figured Stewart and Haskell must be in Stewart’s rooms on the third floor. I scooped up the laptop and huffed my way back to my bedroom.

I had to sit on the bed for a minute to catch my breath. Diesel watched me, one eye open, then he yawned and went back to sleep.

Propped up in bed, I booted up the laptop, and when it was ready, I inserted the thumb drive. When the window popped up, asking what I wanted to do with the drive, I clicked on the option to view its files.

There were several folders listed, along with a few files not in folders. The folder names were dates preceded by the letters FY , and I figured that indicated fiscal years. I clicked on the first one, for two years past, and viewed a long list of files; some documents, others obviously spreadsheets. I scanned the names of these, and they corresponded with what I had already seen on the desktop computer in the director’s office.

Maybe this thumb drive was simply an ordinary backup, for the convenience of working offline perhaps. Otherwise the college network kept backups of everything, and there wasn’t much need for storage like this in the normal way of things.

I examined one of the spreadsheets that consisted of the library’s master budget for two fiscal years before. It looked fine to me, but I would have to compare it to the file on the college network.

I logged in to the network and then accessed the files linked to the account. It took me a few moments to find the directory I wanted, and then I had to scan the file names to find the right spreadsheet. I opened it, and then I went back and forth between the two.

After a couple of minutes of this, I concluded the files were exactly the same. The same number of line items, the same figures in each. The file on the thumb drive was only a copy.

I did a random check of three other files, and all turned out the same. Copies.

I stared at the screen. Was I wasting my time on this?

I examined the thumb drive’s directory more closely. I noticed a folder named Assets . I didn’t remember seeing a similar folder on the network drive, so I clicked on it.

The resulting list contained more spreadsheet files, a few word-processed documents, a number of PDFs, and several pictures. I clicked on the pictures first, and to my amazement I found myself staring at the picture of a ring.

This surely didn’t belong to the library. I knew there was no jewelry among the archival collections, other than a few military service medals donated by several families whose ancestors had attended the college before the Civil War.

The ring looked expensive. The large center stone appeared to be a cabochon-cut sapphire surrounded by diamonds. The diamonds were not small, either. It was a gorgeous piece, and I wondered to whom it belonged.

The next picture revealed a sapphire and diamond necklace, with matching earrings. The sapphires, though smaller in the necklace and earrings, were also en cabochon to match the ring. I counted at least forty diamonds among the three pieces, and I had no doubt this set was extremely valuable. The remaining four pictures revealed two bracelets, both emerald and diamond, three emerald rings with diamonds, and a handful of gemstones.