Jamie Brodie 01 - Cited to Death

a cause of death?"
    "Not yet. My brother is a homicide detective with LAPD. He’ll get the autopsy report when it’s released, but it’s too soon. You know how that goes."
    "I sure do. I was with LAPD for 15 years. Are they investigating this as a homicide?"
    "No, sir. They're not investigating it at all."
    "Hmm." Blake tapped the edge of the copied letter on the arm of the chair, thinking. "So if your buddy was involved in something weird...could your request of the articles have triggered something? Pointed someone out there in your direction?"
    "Well, it did point Dr. Oliver in my direction. But he seemed harmless. And he seemed satisfied with my explanation about why I wanted his article."
    “Huh.” Blake reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of gum. Dentyne. He stuffed two more sticks into his mouth. I wondered how many he already had in there.
    "You're a librarian. You know about electronic databases."
    "Yes, sir."
    "So you know that it's possible to create alerts. If an article gets published on a particular subject, you get an email alert, and you can retrieve the article from the database."
    "Right."
    "So...this Oliver guy has an alert set up to notify him when someone downloads his article. Maybe he’s not the only one who did that. What do you know about the other authors?"
    “Nothing. I did meet one of the other authors at my friend’s funeral. He said he was my friend’s boyfriend. He didn’t say anything about articles.”
    Blake was chomping away on his gum. Maybe it helped him think. “Boyfriend, huh? You think this is some kind of weird gay thing?”
    Oh brother . “No.”
    “Hmph.” Blake sounded like he was going to reserve judgment on that point for now. Probably conjuring up a gang of murderous gay hackers based in West Hollywood. He looked back at the titles in Dan's letter. "Stem cell research, huh?"
    "Yeah. I've read the second one, but I’m waiting for the first one to come through interlibrary loan."
    "What language is that?"
    "Welsh."
    "Weird. Okay. And so far, nothing has turned up in the article that seems...worthy of instigating computer sabotage?"
    "No. Not at all. And the authors of the article aren't affiliated with UCLA. They're at Cedars and they're on the clinical faculty at USC."
    “Okay.” Another stick of Dentyne disappeared into Blake’s jaw. Where was he putting it all? “Let’s shift gears. Tell me more about Ms. DeLong.”
    “She was in library school with me and Dan. The guy who died. She’s the librarian at Pasadena High. She’s…” I realized I didn’t really know all that much about Diane. “She’s a friend.” That sounded lame even to me.
    Blake drummed his fingers on his desk for a minute. "Okay. Here's what we'll do. I'm going to take your computer with me and see what's been done to it, and I’ll have a chat with your friend, Ms. DeLong. In the meantime, can you switch the computers you use every day?"
    I winced. "Yeah...it'll be inconvenient, but I can do it."
    "Good." Blake slapped his knees and stood up. "Let’s get this thing taken apart."
    I heaved the tower off the floor, and we unhooked everything. Blake picked it up. “I’ll let you know what I find.”
    “Okay, thank you.” I saw him out.
    Finally, I had time to start repairing the mess that the burglar had made. I got busy replacing books on my shelves, which lined the room. I created a pile with the loose papers and file folders. I’d address those at some other time. I was kicking up a lot of dust, and I didn’t want to start wheezing. But I did want to get the books re-shelved – the natural obsessive-compulsive tendencies of a librarian to organize, I guess. I finished that and took a puff from my inhaler that I kept in my desk drawer. It was getting low; I’d have to bring a replacement next week.
    It was time for my reference shift. Right on time, Clinton appeared at the reference desk. I wasn’t busy at that moment, and he walked right up to me.
    “Hi, Clinton.”
    He looked at me gravely. “The word of the day is chrestomathy .”
    I had to ask him how to spell that one. I wrote it on a card; he bowed and walked away. I looked it up. It meant a collection of selected literary passages .
    Ooo-kay . Not sure I could use that one in a sentence by the end of the day.
    Once I was done at reference, I finished re-shelving in my office, then decided to do a quick Google check on the authors of both of the articles. The Americans were easy to find. Tristan