Dead In The Water (Rebecca Schwartz Mystery #4) (The Rebecca Schwartz Series)

convinced she’d be a free woman today if I’d put in a better performance.
    Anyway, I did well that day in the parking lot. I later looked up the actual figures on sea otters, and I wasn’t that far off. But to set the record straight, things are even worse than I thought—there are actually only seventeen hundred of them left in California, and opinions vary as to whether one oil spill would lubricate their way to oblivion. They eat only a quarter of their body weight daily, which may sound pitiful compared to the fanciful figure of my imagination, but for one of us, it would be about forty hamburgers.
    An abalone really is a snail.
    * * *
     
    Once inside, I followed Marty’s directions to the third floor, where, I had learned, most aquarium employees had their offices.
    What Marty hadn’t told me was that the place still looked like a sardine warehouse. No walls had been added, only those partitions that give you “modular” offices, or, in truth, no offices at all, but something more like library carrels. Hers was the fourth or fifth “office” on the right, she’d said—she couldn’t remember exactly, but I was to look for pictures of Libby and Keil.
    The way her directions went, you entered at the left, so you must cross to the row of cubicles at the far right, I thought. I was standing at the front of the huge room, trying to get my bearings, when a fast-moving figure cannoned down the left row, and passed me.
    The runner wore a baseball cap, jeans, and tennies, so that I hadn’t heard him until it was almost too late, and he had his head down, so I couldn’t see his face. From the back, I got a glimpse of a blue T-shirt that said Monterey Bay Aquarium between the shoulder blades. It was a slight figure, like a small man, but I couldn’t have sworn it wasn’t a woman or even a kid. I stepped out of the way just in time, feeling the breeze, and stood for a minute recovering my equilibrium.
    Then, without even considering the consequences, I wheeled and followed, back through the office door and down the stairs to a choice of three more doors. Fortunately, one was just snicking shut. I tried it, but I needed Marty’s key to open it. It took a couple of lifetimes, but still, when I was in, I could hear the muted thud of fast-moving Reeboks somewhere in the distance.
    I knew where I was, vaguely. I had come out near the aquarists’ offices, near the staff library. Marty and I had been here the night before. I retraced our steps through the volunteers’ offices, and the volunteer and staff lounge, and out to an area where you could go into one of several small rooms, go downstairs, or go through double doors into the behind-the-scenes feeding area. You would have to unlock a door to go behind the scenes, and once through the area, back in the aquarium proper, you wouldn’t be able to blend into the crowd, because the place was empty today. Figuring I might be wasting precious time, I peered into the graphics and publications offices, didn’t see places to hide, and hit the stairs.
    I didn’t hear a thing. Undaunted, I raced down them and tore open the door at the bottom, only to face a crowd of thousands. I was now on Cannery Row, and the cop who’d tried to tell me the white rat joke was on guard at this entrance. “I’ll bite,” he said. “How many cops
does
it take?”
    I stared at him, utterly uncomprehending.
    “To change a light bulb,” he said.
    “Listen, did a guy in a baseball hat just come through here?”
    “Uh-uh. I asked first.”
    “Officer, this is important. Anyway, I forget the punch line.”
    “Hey, Counselor, you know what? I got some good news for you. It’s not working out in those labs. They finally realized the rats were smarter.”
    Seething, I walked slowly back to the third floor, giving myself plenty of time to cool off. As soon as I opened the door of the huge warehouse of offices, I heard a voice—one I recognized as Warren Nowell’s—raised in what could only be a chewing-out.
    Gently I let myself in, tiptoed to Marty’s cubicle (the fifth one, it turned out), ducked into it, and peeked around the corner. At the front of the room—or the rear if you considered the entrance the front—there was a receptionist’s desk and a genuine private office to the right. A man—Nowell, by his voice—was standing in the doorway of the office, more or less yelling.
    “What the hell do you think you’re doing here? Don’t you realize you could be