Thirty-Seven
Sneaking across the Boise State campus in the frost-bitten darkness with Gucci by my side, I felt hopeful, terrified, and
very much alive. With a swipe of Gucci’s keycard, the side door to the forensics building clicked open. We slipped inside
just as plump snowflakes began to fall.
“Anyone shows up,” she said, unlocking the door to her lab, “we pretend you’re my auntie visiting from LA.” She switched on
the fluorescent lights.
“Wouldn’t it be more realistic to say I’m your hot big sister?” I grumbled. I had twenty years on her, but “auntie” was still
a bitter pill.
Beige machines ranging in size from a toaster to an industrial dryer filled the lab. Gucci wasted no time opening a tiny metal
portal on the front of a contraption that was straight out of an eighties sci-fi movie. She inserted the syringe and squirted
some of the corpse sorbet inside. “Not to brag, but I left no crumbs on that liver extraction.” She snapped the portal shut
and pushed a few buttons.
“What does this thing do?” I asked.
“It’s a gas spectrometer,” she said. “In three minutes it’ll test for narcotics, amphetamines, aspirin. Also fentanyl and
its two metabolites—norfentanyl and despropionylfentanyl—in case he got a bad batch of street drugs.”
“Any kind of OD would make my life so much easier. You’re absolutely glowing, by the way.” It was true. Gucci looked radiant
as a British baking show contestant who’d managed to pull off a perfect Bakewell tart.
“I can’t tell you how good it feels to do actual fieldwork,” Gucci said. “Having my research sidelined by a skeeve has been the worst. Academia will break your heart.”
“Not just academia,” I said, thinking of Mickey Larynx.
A series of peaks and valleys appeared in an electronic window on the side of the gas chromatograph machine. Gucci studied
them intently.
“Well?” I said.
“He’s got narcotics in his blood—”
I punched the air with my fist. “Woo-hoo!”
“—but not at anywhere near lethal levels,” she said. “He did not die of a pentazocine or fentanyl overdose.”
“Dammit!” The media and criminal court system would paint Miranda as a violent murderess. And I likely wouldn’t fare much
better.
“I’m so sorry, Tilly,” Gucci said.
“Before he died, the woman he attacked said he was wheezing,” I said. “And . . . and he looked like a monster.”
“Monster how?”
I shrugged. “Like this, maybe?” I made the face Miranda had shown me—mouth open and twisted, one eye squinted shut.
Her brow furrowed. “You didn’t tell me that. That doesn’t sound like opioids. But it might be— Wait. No. You know what?” she
said, perking up. “I could run a test in the mass spectrometer.”
“Assume I know as much about forensics as the average boomer dad knows about child-rearing.”
“Sorry. The mass spectrometer can test for drugs that won’t show up on a gas spectrometer. But it’ll take an hour.”
“Layna said she’ll babysit all night if I need her to,” I said.
In the adjacent lab room, the mass spectrometer loomed like an oversized copy machine with a robot head and arms. Gucci placed
a single drop of liver sample into a tube and inserted it via an airlock. With the machine running, Gucci switched off the
lights. “I don’t want to draw attention to the fact that we’re—” She stopped mid-sentence. “Do you hear that?”
Footsteps. The rattle of a doorknob.
Gucci’s eyes went wide and she gestured for me to hide. So much for introducing me as her hot aunt.
We crouched behind a lab bench as the intruders entered the next room. A man who clearly had a chub for the sound of his own
voice was saying, “You’re a talented girl, Chloe. I don’t think you know how talented.”
Next to me Gucci mimed a gagging motion.
“Thank you,” Chloe said. She sounded young, but was definitely a full-grown woman—not a girl.
“I’m excited to write your recommendation for the PhD program at Penn State,” the blowhard continued. “I even have a friend
there on the scholarship committee. I can give him a call.”
“Do you think I’ll be ready, Professor Bidelspach?” Chloe said. Her lack of confidence made me want to add watching Alien, Moana, and Mad Max: Fury Road to her homework for the semester.
“I think I can get you there,” Professor Bidelspach said.
“I haven’t even mastered bacterial oral decomposition,” she said.
“Oh, I can help you master oral, all right,” Professor Bidelspach said.
There is no grosser sound than a slurping, predatory kiss. Gucci and I stared at each other in horror. An eternal second passed.
For the sake of my future and my children’s future, I needed to stay silent during this grotesque abuse of power. But one
day Phoebe and Alice might be grad students too. I needed to do this for them.
Enough streetlamp light came in through the window for Gucci to see me wrap my hand around the base of a wheeled lab cart.
I asked permission with my eyes. She gave a little nod.
The cart sailed through the door and slammed against a lab bench. Professor Bidelspach let out a high-pitched shriek.
As fluorescents flooded the room, Professor Bidelspach skuttled away from Chloe like a cockroach in a midnight kitchen.
In his younger years, he might’ve been handsome, but now his blooming nose and sizeable paunch suggested a liver the size of a watermelon.
Meanwhile, Chloe looked as mortified as a teen whose parents have arrived at a keg party wearing matching sweatshirts that read: We love our chess champion daughter!
I stood up. “Professor Bidelspach,” I said sternly.
“We were just— I was just giving Chloe a tour of—” As he took in my puffy coat, sweatpants, and messy topknot, he seemed to
regain his confidence. “Who are you and why are you in my lab?”
“I’m the new acting provost of the graduate college,” I said in the most regal voice I could muster. “Here to do an after-hours
tour of campus with my assistant.”
From the other room, Gucci cleared her throat and rattled a lab stand to underline the fact of an additional witness. Professor
Bidelspach wilted.
“Chloe?” I said, gently. “If an older man with power over your career tells you that you’re special and then tries to get
in your pants, he doesn’t care about you. But that doesn’t mean you aren’t special. He’s right about that part, even if he
doesn’t know it. Why don’t you go on home?”
Chloe gave a teary nod and fled, the lab door slamming in her wake.
I glowered at the squirming professor. I’d heard of support groups where strangers act out the role of your family members
to allow you to heal old traumas. Right now, as far as my psyche was concerned, Professor Bidelskeeze was a stand-in for Mickey
Larynx.
“Professor Bidelspach,” I continued, “I expect you to turn in a write-up of what happened here to the dean. Tomorrow at eight
a.m. Two copies, please, because I’ll be reading it too. No obfuscations. No lies. I saw it. My assistant saw and heard it.
And I want Chloe’s name redacted from the matter. Do you understand? Just a history of these encounters and your part. You
can call her ‘my master’s student Jane Doe.’”
He looked sick.
“Unless? Chloe is an—”
“Undergrad,” he replied miserably. But then the swagger of an untouchable tenured professor returned. “I don’t think you understand. That girl seduced me. I’m the victim here.”
I puffed up like an offended dragon queen. “Don’t bullshit me, Professor Bidelspach,” I said. “I recorded an MP3 of your promises
and flattery followed by your advances.” I pulled my phone from my pocket and pretended to type away on it. “There! Emailed
to the dean, who’ll be quite interested to hear you’re offering rec letters and special tutoring in exchange for oral sex.
So I expect your honest account in the dean’s mailbox by eight a.m. tomorrow.” I pointed at the door of the lab with a trembling
finger. “Now go!”
Professor Bidelspach let out a sad little muffled sound and scurried out the door. I held my breath as his trundling steps
dissolved down the hallway.
“He’s gone!” I said, hurrying into the next room.
“That was some Wonder Woman shit!” Gucci gushed.
“Thank you! Thank you!” I said, taking a tiny bow. “Stand-up was my game, but I always thought I would’ve been decent at micro-impersonations
and—”
The beep of the mass spectrometer interrupted me. The test results were in.
“This guy’s blood shows near-lethal levels of botulism toxin,” Gucci said. She’d plunked into a wheelie office chair to study
a graph on the computer screen.
“What does that mean?” I demanded.
“Either he ate a bunch of spoiled canned food or—”
“We had Mormon neighbors when I was a kid,” I interrupted. “They were always rotating the canned goods out of their pantry
on account of botulism risk. The mom used to say a teaspoon of canned peaches gone bad could take out the whole town of Nampa.”
“Does the dead guy seem like he would’ve been eating spoiled Mormon canned goods?”
“Good point. So what’s the or?’”
“He could’ve been injected with a massive dose of Botox.”
“Botox!” I leaned against the nearest lab bench as my mind rippled and stretched to take in this new information—like that
long-ago day I found out Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg are friends.
“That would explain the wheezing,” Gucci said. “And it could’ve caused some facial paralysis, which would make him look—“
“Like a monster!” I cried.