Jamie Brodie 01 - Cited to Death

me answer some of the questions that he left for me. I would like to meet with you in person, at a place of your choosing. Please.
    Thank you,
    Ben Goldstein
    I showed it to Pete. "Whad do you dink?"
    "Well, he did say please." Pete frowned. "It sounds like he's worried about something. He may be innocent in this and trying to figure out what's going on himself."
    "Do you dink I should dalk to him?"
    "I think we should talk to him. You're not doing anything by yourself that's remotely related to your fraud case."
    I nodded. I would have argued with him if I'd been healthy, but... "Where?"
    "Here."
    I was surprised. "But den he'll know where we live. If he's one of de bad guys."
    Pete laughed. "Hon, if he's one of the bad guys, he already knows where we live."
    True.
    "Okay. Dis evening?"
    "Sure."
    Ben's phone number was at the bottom of his email. I called him. He said, "What's wrong with your voice?"
    "I got socked in de jaw las' nighd. S'ill hurds do dalk."
    "Wow." He paused. "I don't want to talk about any of this on the phone, or anywhere near my office. Can I come to your place?"
    I gave him directions. If he did already know where we lived, he was doing a good job of acting like he didn't. I hung up and looked at Pete. "Seben o'clock."
    I spent the rest of the day alternating between dozing, drinking soup and milkshakes, and watching old movies. Pete alternated between doing laundry, fixing me soup and milkshakes, and grading papers. At precisely 7:00, the doorbell rang.
    Pete answered the door. Ben was still wearing an expensive suit, but his tie was askew and he looked rumpled and tired. He introduced himself to Pete, then came in and got his first glimpse of my face. "Holy mother of God! You didn't just get socked in the jaw!"
    I shook my head.
    "What the hell happened?"
    Pete gave him a severely abridged version. Ben couldn't stop staring. If he was faking surprise, he was doing a fabulous job. He sat on the chair next to the new window; Pete sat down on the sofa next to me. Pete started the conversation. "So, Dan left you a note."
    "Yeah." Ben looked at Pete and me sitting next to each other. "Are you two a couple?"
    Pete waited for me to answer; I felt him tense up a bit. I nodded. "Mmm hmm."
    Pete relaxed. I could almost feel him smile.
    Ben stood up and handed me a folded sheet of paper, then sat back down. The handwriting was Dan's. I unfolded it and read.
    Dear Ben,
    If you find this, then I'm gone. I'm so sorry. If I had known where this would lead, I would have approached it differently.
    Take this to a guy named Jamie Brodie, who's a librarian at UCLA. He’s been working on a problem for me. He'll tell you what this is and why you need to know about it. Then you'll have to decide what to do about it.
    All my love forever,
    Dan
    Underneath the signature was the citation for the Welsh article, in Welsh.
    I handed the note back to Ben. He folded it carefully and put it back in his jacket pocket. "Do you know what that means?"
    I nodded. "Do you remember de firs' ardicle you wrode wi' Oliver and Wray?"
    "Sure."
    I leaned over and handed him my laptop, with the translation of the Welsh article open on the screen. "Read dis."
    He started reading. His eyes got bigger as he went. He stopped reading and started scrolling through pages, reading bits and pieces. "This is..." He looked up at me, aghast. "This is our article, word for word."
    Pete took over. "The only thing that's different is the statistical section, and it's only different because your article used a higher p value than Hughes and Llewellyn did."
    "I did the stats for this article." Ben seemed to be in mild shock. "They gave me the numbers and told me what p values to use." He looked up, his eyes wide. "I didn't do any of the research on this article. They told me they'd list me as an author if I ran the stats for them. It was my first publication."
    Pete asked, "Who gave you the numbers? Both Wray and Oliver?"
    "No. It was Dr. Oliver." The full force of the discovery hit Ben. "So our article is plagiarized from this one? Word for word?"
    "It seems that way."
    Ben was dazed for a moment, then looked back up at us. "Tell me how you found out about this."
    Pete told him the whole story, from my receipt of Dan's letter to last night's break-in. "Frankly, we weren't sure you weren't involved."
    Ben was angry, but not at us. "Oh, no. Fuck, no." He got up and started pacing, then turned back to us. "So someone killed Danny because he found this