032 High Marks for Malice Read online

  The whole room glistened with slivers from what had been the screen of Line’s monitor. The draperies and rug were full of embedded shards of glass. The housing for the computer’s disk drives was in pieces. Only the detached keyboard had survived intact.

  Cass sat up, dazed. Blood trickled from her cheek. “Something hit me.”

  Nancy examined the wound and pronounced it a clean cut. “Antiseptic should take care of it,” she said. “You probably won’t even have a scar.”

  “I’ll take a scar over being dead any day,” Cass said, heading for the bathroom. “I’d be a mess if you hadn’t pushed me onto the floor, Ned. Thanks.”

  Ned’s expression was murderous as he surveyed the damage. “If I ever get my hands on the person who did this . . .”

  Nancy said, “We’re lucky to be alive. I’ll bet it was supposed to have blown up the instant it was plugged in. Those few moments when the cord sizzled saved us.”

  “For which I’ll be eternally grateful.” Ned started to clean up. “Well, I guess we can rule out Pickering. According to Cass, he doesn’t know enough about computers to work the job. Whoever rigged this knows electronics.”

  “True. But I heard two people in the carillon, remember? So we can’t forget about Pickering entirely.”

  Looking around, Nancy sighed. “I’m going to start charging Line for maid service,” she said with a wry smile. “Does he have a vacuum cleaner?”

  Returning from the bathroom, a tiny bandage on her cheek, Cass said, “In the closet,” and went to get it. “So what do we do now? After we finish here, I mean?” she asked, plugging in the vacuum.

  They batted ideas around while they cleaned for an hour. When they were done, they were no closer to solving the mystery.

  “We need a suspect who has easy access to the computer lab,” Nancy said.

  “That means the whole student body,” Cass moaned, stretching out on one of the love seats.

  “Not really. Practically everyone’s gone for the holidays. It has to be someone who’s still on campus or close by, and who knows computers inside and out.”

  “And, most important, someone who knows programming,” Ned added.

  Nancy nodded agreement. “Ned, do you think Maria Arnold fits the description?”

  He frowned in thought. “Yes, but I can’t believe she’d do that to a computer.”

  Suddenly Cass sat upright with a jerk. “Marty Chan!”

  “Who’s Marty Chan?” Nancy asked.

  “He’s a Basson graduate who teaches in the comp sei department. He worked very closely with Doc.”

  “He’s here? Now?”

  “It’s possible. I can give him a call.” Slumping back against the cushions, Cass shook her head. “But it couldn’t be Marty. He’s one of the nicest guys on campus.”

  Nancy considered the number of times that a nice guy turned out to be a murderer. “What excuse can we use to meet him?” she asked.

  “Why not ask him if we can salvage any part of Line’s computer?” Ned said. “I’m sure we can’t, but it’s as good a reason as any.”

  “Okay,” Cass said, and looked up the number for Marty Chan. She arranged for them to meet him after dinner, at seven.

  “Terrific,” Cass said with enthusiasm. “You’ll like him. He’s a really super guy.”

  “But don’t forget he’s also a suspect,” Nancy warned her. “And we may be his targets.”

  • • •

  Marty Chan lived in the basement apartment of an old Victorian row house behind the campus. It was within a stone’s throw of the carillon.

  “He could get in and out of the carillon easily,” Nancy said to Ned and Cass. She wondered if she would recognize his voice, but when he said hello it wasn’t familiar.

  Like her attacker, Marty Chan had a beard. When she looked at him carefully, though, she doubted that he was the one she’d wrestled with the night before.

  He was shorter and stockier and he wore thick glasses. She was sure he couldn’t see without them. Of course, he could have been wearing contacts, Nancy thought. Or he could have been the thug’s partner. She couldn’t rule anyone out at this point.

  Marty appeared to be genuinely concerned about Line. “I just got back from Baltimore this afternoon and Maria told me about him. I’m glad he’s okay. Now, what can I do for you?”

  Nancy removed the ruined carcass of Line’s computer from a large plastic bag she’d found in Line’s apartment. “Can this be repaired or should we trash it?”

  Marty winced, as if the sight pained him. “What happened to it?”

  Ned supplied the story. “I know the monitor’s had it, but I was hoping maybe the drives and the hard disk could be salvaged.”

  “Come on back.” Cradling the computer as if it were a baby, Marty led them to the rear of the apartment. A small room behind the kitchen served as his study. He examined the unit under a work light and magnifier, then looked up at them curiously.

  “Somebody doesn’t like computers,” he said tersely.

  “What do you mean?” Nancy asked.

  He held up a sooty finger. “Blasting powder, probably packed in the power unit. Plugging it in closed the circuit, which supplied the spark needed to ignite the powder.”

  “Very clever,” Nancy commented dryly.

  “This baby’s had it,” Marty went on. “There’s nothing you can do. This was Sheffield’s computer?”

  Ned nodded. “We hoped we could get it fixed by the time he got out of the hospital.”

  Marty shook his head. “Forget it. Even Doc couldn’t fix this.”

  “The teacher who committed suicide?” Ned asked.

  Marty’s mouth tightened. “Yes.”

  “Line didn’t believe he killed himself,” Nancy said softly. “Do you?”

  Marty’s jet black eyes grew hard and angry. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Why not?” Nancy asked.

  “You’d have to have known him. He loved life, loved teaching. He would never have deserted his students.”

  “There were no signs at all?” Nancy asked. “No depression? No changes in his personality?”

  Marty frowned. “Well, changes, yes. Something got under his skin over Thanksgiving. I figured at first it was a family problem, since he spent the holiday with his sister in Philly.”

  Cass chimed in, “Line mentioned that Doc was working on something special.” She nervously twisted a curl around her finger.

  Marty nodded. “He was always trying out new ideas. He started working on that one the Saturday after Thanksgiving. He must have hit a snag with it, because it made him mad. I’d never seen Doc angry before, except when he thought a student was being lazy.”

  “That idea of his must have been a real winner,” Ned ventured.

  “He went at it like a man with a mission,” Marty said slowly. After a moment of hesitation, he added, “And a man with a mission, especially an angry man, does not commit suicide. But a few days later he was dead.”

  “That leaves one alternative,” Nancy said, quietly.

  Marty swiveled around, his ebony eyes wide. “That’s right. He didn’t kill himself. Doc was murdered!”

  Nancy looked at Ned, who gave her a tiny nod. They had to trust him. “Marty, it looks as if Line was trying to finish whatever Doc was working on.

  Slowly, very slowly, Marty pulled himself erect in his chair. “And now he’s in a hospital, in critical condition. What’s going on around here?”

  “If we showed you the printouts Line had stashed in his locker, do you think you could help us figure them out?” Nancy asked.

  “You have them?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know a couple of programming languages,” Ned explained, “but these are beyond me. They may be just class assignments, but I don’t think so. They’re in the same language as this.” Ned dug in his wallet and handed Marty the line of print Line had left in the box of taffy.

  Marty scanned it, frowned, scanned it a
gain. “This is Chinese to me, pardon the pun. It would help if I saw the rest of what you have.”

  “We left the printouts in the trunk of the car,” Nancy said. “I’ll get them.” Ned handed her the keys.

  Outside, clouds hid the moon and the threatening rumble of thunder pierced the heavy silence. Weeping willow trees lined the sidewalks, obscuring the amber glow from the streetlights.

  Nancy opened the trunk and scooped the stack of paper into her arms. Balancing it carefully, she closed the lid and started back toward Marty’s apartment. She was halfway up the walk when an arm snaked across her throat from behind and held her, pinning her firmly against her attacker.

  “Move and I’ll break your lovely neck,” a voice grated in her ear.

  Nancy forced herself to stand absolutely still.

  “Good,” the voice said. “Now, pass that stack of paper back to me. Try anything fancy and you’re dead. And that, little girl, is a promise.”

  Chapter

  Eleven

  NANCY THOUGHT QUICKLY. If she could distract her attacker, she could use karate on him and escape with the printouts.

  Instead of handing him the printouts as he’d ordered, Nancy tossed them as high into the air as she could. The stack flew apart, the accordion-folded paper snaking across the walk, yard, and bushes.

  Her assailant gasped, and the arm around Nancy’s neck loosened as he made a futile grab for the reams of paper. It was the break Nancy needed. She raised her right knee and brought her foot down hard across the man’s instep. He howled in pain. She spun around and was face to face with her assailant. But she couldn’t see much—his face was hidden under a ski mask and he was dressed entirely in black.

  With a snarl, he lunged for her. Nancy sidestepped him easily and raised her arm to deliver a hard chop to the back of his neck. But she’d stepped on the very edge of the sidewalk. Her ankle twisted as her foot began to slip off the concrete.

  Her assailant rushed her again. Nancy went down, trying to roll as she fell, but there was a bush in her way. Then he was on her, his fingers digging into her neck.

  Marty’s front door opened. “Nancy? Need help?” Ned called. He started up the stairs from the basement, then spotted her struggling to free herself.

  “Hey!” Ned yelled and leaped up the remaining steps. “Let her go!” Grabbing a handful of the man’s dark turtleneck, Ned yanked him upright and delivered an uppercut that lifted him off his feet.

  Nancy’s attacker shook his head, as if to clear it, then lunged at Ned, butting him in the midsection. Ned grabbed him and they both tumbled into the bushes.

  “Hey, you guys all right?” Cass called from the doorway.

  The man in black slithered out of Ned’s grasp and ran off, limping.

  Ned scrambled to his feet. “Nan, are you all right?” She nodded. “We’re fine, Cass.”

  Nancy stood up carefully, testing her ankle. “What about our attacker, Ned?”

  “He’s long gone,” Ned said. He pulled Nancy close and buried his face in her hair. “I should have gone with you. I’m sorry—I wasn’t thinking.”

  Nancy hugged him back. “Forget it. You couldn’t have known. I’m almost glad it happened this way, because it showed us something: those papers of Line’s are as important to someone else as they are to us. And that someone is watching us.”

  “Yes, but who?” Ned asked.

  “And why?” Nancy added. She looked at the printouts, which now resembled long, fat streamers, draped over bushes and winter-dead plants. “Come on. Let’s get this together before someone else comes along and tries to take it.”

  It was a good half hour before Marty settled down to see what he could make of their find. It was only then that they discovered it consisted of several stacks, not just one.

  When he finally flipped through the sheets, Marty admitted to being as puzzled as Ned had been. “It’s no programming language I’ve ever seen,” he told them.

  “Do you think Doc might have written it?” Nancy asked.

  “I doubt it. I think I would recognize his work. It looks to me as if he was trying to figure out the purpose of the program, too.”

  Nancy leaned forward, intrigued. “You mean they’re all Doc’s printouts, not Line’s?”

  “No. Only a third of them are Doc’s. His password is at the beginning of this stack. Whenever you enter the network the students use, you have to type in your personal password or it won’t let you on.”

  “Why?” Nancy asked.

  “Look at it this way. The student network is like a room full of file cabinets. Each cabinet belongs to a particular student. He locks it using a secret password, which prevents other kids from opening it.”

  Suddenly his eyes lost focus in thought. “Wait a minute.” He flipped through the printouts again. “Hey,” he said softly.

  “Marty,” Nancy said, wondering if he was thinking the same thing she was. “If the others don’t have Doc’s password, then he broke into someone else’s file cabinet, right?”

  Marty gazed at her with new respect. “Exactly. Once he got there, he must have found this weird programming and was trying to work out what it was designed to do.”

  “The question is, did he succeed?” Nancy said. “And did Line?”

  Running a finger down a page, Marty was silent for a long moment. “I think Doc did. See, each command is numbered—five, ten, fifteen, anyone ever teach you not to step out from and so on. Commands twenty-five and thirty are blank. I figure they’re the ones that give the program the final okay to do whatever it’s supposed to do.”

  “Then why are they blank?” Cass asked.

  “Maybe the person wanted to hide a command, especially if he doesn’t want anyone to know how the program works or what it’s designed to do. These two commands are hidden. Even when you type in the right words on lines seven, twenty-five, and thirty, the words won’t show up on the screen.”

  “Sure,” Nancy said. “Anybody could be watching and see them.”

  Marty smiled at her. “Exactly. So these commands remain invisible, even if you print out all the rest of the program’s commands on paper. Invisible or not, the program knows it’s been told to do its job—whatever that is—and it does it.”

  Reading over Marty’s shoulder, Ned said, “I think I’m beginning to understand. If you typed in the wrong thing, the program would stop right there. It wouldn’t even print out the two line numbers. So Doc must have found the key.”

  “And was killed for it,” Nancy said.

  “Could this be one of the commands?” Ned pointed to the paper he’d found in the taffy.

  “Might be, but we need the second. One without the other won’t work,” Marty explained.

  “So now what?” Cass demanded. She sat on the edge of her chair, nervously rolling a piece of paper into a tube.

  “What’s that?” Nancy asked her.

  She shrugged. “Just an invitation to a reception. It was in the folds of one of the printouts I picked up outside.”

  “May I see it?” Nancy asked. Cass gave it to her. “ ‘Appreciation Night,’ ” Nancy read aloud. “ ‘Friday, November 25, Penn Pride Hotel, Philadelphia.’ ” She tapped the paper in thought. “Marty, didn’t you say Doc went to Philly for Thanksgiving?”

  “Yes. That must have been Doc’s. He mentioned going to a fancy dinner with his sister.”

  Nancy and Ned scanned the invitation. “ ‘To extend appreciation to those special few who’ve made extraordinary contributions to the community,’ ” Nancy read. There were notes in red in the margins. “Marty, is this Doc’s writing?” she asked.

  Pain streaked across his features. “That’s his, all right. The worst handwriting on campus.”

  “There’s a big asterisk beside the name of one of the men who received an award,” Nancy noted. “Andrew Bladinsburg. Can you make out the other things Doc wrote?”

  Marty held the invitation at arm’s length and read it with his eyes almost clo
sed. “That’s a number, a seventy with a big question mark behind it. I can’t make out the rest.”

  Nancy flipped to the short biography of Bladinsburg on the back. “Hey, he was a graduate of Basson!”

  “Maybe the number is the year he graduated,” Marty suggested.

  “But why did Doc keep this?” Nancy asked, her excitement rising. “And why stick it in the computer printouts which were so important to him, unless this was important, too? I think we’re on to something here.”

  Marty looked at his watch. “I hate to break this up, guys, but I have to go. I’ve got to pick up some software from a professor,” he said. “What about these printouts? Do you want me to keep them and try to figure them out?”

  Nancy hesitated, uncomfortable at the thought of letting them out of her hands. “I’d rather have copies made for you.”

  Marty’s expression said clearly that he understood. “Fine. I’ll be on campus all day tomorrow. Look for me in the comp sei complex.”

  Ned, Cass, and Nancy left, the printouts and invitation tucked safely in an old briefcase Marty lent them. Nancy smuggled the briefcase into the dorm under her coat. Considering how interested the thug in black had been to get his hands on it, she decided she would sleep with it under her pillow.

  • • •

  A brainstorming session over breakfast the next morning moved Maria into first place as their prime suspect.

  She was a computer science major with, Cass informed them, a straight-A average. She had been known to repair a computer, so she knew her way around its internal works. And she’d told Ned she knew several different programming languages.

  But several nagging questions remained for Nancy. “Why would Maria become involved in the murder of a favorite professor? For money?”

  “She admitted she needed it,” Ned said. “That’s why she gave up her Christmas vacation—to earn overtime pay.”

  “But there would have to be a lot more money involved than whatever she makes working in the computer lab,” Nancy mused. “Money for doing what? We’ll never know until we figure out what this mysterious computer program does.”