Quoth the Raven(60)

“Head?” Gregor said. “I didn’t know Dr. Steele was Head.”

“He’s not. I’m not even sure he’s going to be, Mr. Demarkian. He’s just always saying he’s going to be. He says that’s what he was hired for.”

“Do you think that’s true?”

“I hope not.”

“I think I hope not right along with you.” Gregor drummed his fingers impatiently against the workbench, now almost clean. Jack had been working while they talked, without a break, not needing to concentrate to accomplish something he had accomplished so many times before. Gregor wished he hadn’t explained that a solderer was sometimes called a solder gun. It made the damn thing seem even more lethal than it looked.

“Let’s get back to this afternoon,” he said. “What was Miss Veer upset about in relation to Dr. Steele?”

“That he was trussing, of course.” Jack had taken the solderer apart and laid its pieces in a line along the workbench, to clean them individually. “Miss Veer takes care of everybody’s schedules and that sort of thing. Classes. Office hours. I guess Dr. Steele missed his whole day Tuesday, and then he wasn’t around this morning, either, and she was worried about it.”

“How worried?”

“Worried enough to want to call the police and report him missing,” Jack said. “That’s what she and Dr. Elkinson were talking about when I came up. Dr. Elkinson was trying to talk her out of it.”

“On what grounds?”

“On what grounds do you think? Verbally, anyway. Steele isn’t the world’s most trustworthy character. He doesn’t usually skip office hours and classes and things, but still. Personally, I think Dr. Elkinson doesn’t care one way or another if the man is dying in a ditch somewhere by the side of the road. I wouldn’t either.”

“Mmmm.” Gregor looked down and saw that he was still drumming his fingers against the workbench. He picked his hand up and put it in his lap. “Let’s go back to something else,” he said. “Miss Veer didn’t have any food on her tray but she wasn’t at the cash register yet. If she had gone back to get something to eat, could you speculate on what she might have taken?”

“Sure,” Jack said. “I used to work lunch in the cafeteria freshman year. That was the worst of it financially and I needed the two jobs. I’ve seen her once or twice since then, too. She always ate the same things.”

“Which were?”

“A chef’s salad with blue cheese dressing. A Belleville Lemon and Lime—that’s a regional brand of soda made locally. She drank the soda with the salad. She drank the tea after the salad. She’d put the tea in the bottom of the cup, dump water in on top of it and let the thing steep all through lunch. By the time she was ready to drink it, it was black.”

Gregor thought about it. In one way, it was perfect. He couldn’t imagine anything more appropriate in which to disguise lye—especially commercially produced lye products, like Drano or toilet bowl cleaner—than blue cheese dressing. The color was right. The consistency was right. Any small gummed-up wads of lye would look like minuscule pieces of cheese. Still, it wouldn’t work.

“It would have been all over everything,” he explained. “Pieces of lettuce and turkey and cucumber. Smears of dressing. Nobody could have removed all the traces or even removed a significant portion of them soon enough. It had to be something else. Something more self-contained.”

“Maybe she changed her pattern this afternoon because she was so worked up,” Jack said. “I’m sorry, Mr. Demarkian. I only saw what I saw. It wasn’t much.”

“That’s all right.”

Jack had the solderer put together, lying clean and shining in front of him on the workbench. “I’m done here now,” he said. “We could get on to what you wanted to come here for. I’m sorry I held you up.”

“That’s all right, too,” Gregor waved it away. “Are you sure I’m not holding you up? It’s not getting too late? What I want you to do may take some time.”

“Chessey will wait. If she doesn’t, I’ll wake her up.”

Gregor wanted to tell him not to get too cavalier about that young woman. She might be a little distraught at the moment, but she didn’t look like an eternal pushover. It wasn’t any of his business.

“That thing,” he said, pointing at the solderer. “Is it all cleaned up and ready to go again?”

“Sure.”

“Fine. Now I want you to make me something with it, or make this thing out of solder one way or another. A small cylinder, about half an inch across and less than a quarter of an inch thick, absolutely flat or even a little concave at one end, a little bumped out at the other.”