The Square Root of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles)

opportunities.
    I was safe. Gil needed to talk; that was all.
    Gil had mentioned a letter as the final straw. I went into the bluffing mode Ariana had taught me and that had served me well with the dean.
    “You needed to remove that letter from the files in Keith’s office.”
    Gil threw up her hands; her face took on an angry expression, directed at me.
    Not safe anymore, if I ever was.
    “See, you had to butt in and take those files away, Sophie. I was there, you know, parked right around the corner. I was on my way to go through his office but you got to it first. I knew immediately what you’d done. There just wasn’t time the day before to stand there and sift through all his poisonous correspondence.”
    Another nice choice of words. I needed Virgil’s advice on how to deal with a crazy killer. Actually I needed Virgil’s gun. With neither at my disposal, I chose the sympathetic route, at the same time looking around for something I could use as a weapon if the need arose. I held on as long as possible to the delusion that the need hadn’t already arisen.
    Ariana’s back room served as a storage area, among its many uses, with boxes and bits of inventory everywhere. The workshop table held unfinished projects and sharp tools—scissors, pliers, even a wrench—but none longer than a few inches. I’d have to close the gap between us to grab one, and even if I could bring myself to attack her at close range, it would be child’s play for her to take me down. I longed for a remotely operated weapon. The only one I had was my brain and it was currently on hold.
    I woke it up and tried my skills at communication.
    “I know you absolutely had to get that letter from Keith’s files,” I said, now a master of the big bluff.
    Gil’s face sank into a deeper frown and she stood still for a moment. “The all-powerful, well connected Keith Appleton drafted a letter to the doctoral committee at Massachusetts University requesting a review of Hal’s thesis and asking them to his revoke his degree.”
    I was genuinely shocked. “Why would he do that?”
    She gave me a screwy look. “You know how much he wanted to discredit my husband. He had no respect for MU, for one thing. Thought Henley should have as few faculty as possible from a state college. Hal and I think he had a physicist friend from some stupid Ivy League school that he wanted Fran to hire in Hal’s place.”
    “That sounds awful.” Agree with the captor, that was my plan.
    “Keith researched some archaic standards about how many words you’re allowed to cite from another work and claimed that Hal had violated an old guideline. He showed Hal the letter, offering not to send it if Hal withdrew his name as a candidate for the degree.”
    Gil bit her lip. Her eyes stared beyond me while her feet beat to an inaudible rhythm.
    “I’m so sorry,” I said, wondering too late how smart it was to keep reminding her of my presence.
    “We thought he’d changed his mind. We told him how much Hal needed this job, with Timmy headed for private school. Without the degree, he’d be so limited . . .” Gil threw her hands up. She’d made the best case she could. “But once Hal graduated, Keith brought the letter out again. I knew the police wouldn’t find it because he stuck it in a file labeled ‘Graduation Speeches.’ He had the nerve to show us where he was burying it.”
    Keith’s office was a veritable hot bed of material for a tabloid, all in plain sight under innocuous labels. I was more certain than ever that somewhere in those boxes I’d ferried out of Franklin Hall was a piece of paper with research on me that he’d been keeping for leverage, should he ever have needed it.
    Hal wasn’t in Keith’s department. Why would he bother vetting Hal’s thesis unless Gil was right and he simply wanted to hire his friend? Lucy’s defense of her boyfriend, that Keith wanted all medical workers to be from the top of their class, didn’t work here. Physicists didn’t do open heart surgery. But then, what did giving a baby up for adoption have to do with Dean Underwood’s academic credentials?
    I was back to labeling my deceased former colleague “ruthless.”
    “That was a terrible thing for Keith to do,” I told Gil.
    “See, I knew you’d understand all this, Sophie, and I wish there had been a way to get your support before all this happened.”
    Nothing had “happened.” Gil had killed Keith by her own hand. But once again I felt