The Square Root of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles)

looking over my shoulder and copying down my methods today.
    I entered “marijuana” followed by the dean’s alma mater and the date range.
    Much better. The first hit was a link to an article on a survey taken at the school in nineteen sixty-nine. An overwhelming eighty-one percent of students had tried marijuana at least once. The profile was of a twenty-one-year-old social sciences major at the college. The dean had majored in sociology. So far so good.
    I tried not to get caught up in all the graphs, a weakness of mine. I did stop to read the caption of a cartoon depicting a cop arresting a student. His partner says, “If pot gets legalized, we’ll have to start chasing real criminals again.” Not that the magazine was left-leaning at all.
    I skipped down to an article on marijuana arrests and read an article excerpted from a nineteen sixty-seven issue of a liberal magazine. The editors decried the excessive number of “pot busts” as they were called and the travesty of smearing the records of respected professionals. The article specified, without naming them, an English professor in New York, a NATO diplomat’s son, and a theology instructor in Illinois. I didn’t see a mention of “a future college dean.”
    Rrring. Rrring.
    For a moment, I thought I’d reached a file with sound. I’d moved to a photo search and it seemed one of the students being dragged away from a protest rally was screaming out at me.
    I’d gone past my two-hour Internet limit and it showed.
    I shook my head, rubbed my eyes, and clicked my phone on to talk to Ariana.
    “What’s new on the handwriting front?” she asked.
    How rude of me. I should have called Ariana immediately after my handwriting meeting with Virgil. I excused myself on the basis that the probable result—that Hal Bartholomew was a murderer—was too hard to bear.
    I gave Ariana a rundown without naming names. In case the FBI was listening. I promised details when we were together in person.
    “Virgil said he’d give the project to their specialist.”
    I heard something like a “humph” and then, “Whatever.”
    “Right now I’m buried in my computer investigating my dean,” I said.
    Ariana listened through a briefing on my latest thoughts on why Dean Underwood was so anxious to have the material in Keith’s office.
    “You think she was arrested for something?”
    “Yes,” I said, in a voice weakened by the lack of evidence to support my theory. “It’s just a guess. I don’t think she posed for a centerfold, or anything like that.”
    Ariana laughed. “You mean she didn’t make Miss January Nineteen Seventy?”
    “Ha.”
    “Maybe she was a ‘working girl’,” Ariana said, prompting a burst of schoolgirl giggles on both ends of the call.
    Ariana let me whine for a couple of minutes, about how arrest records were not available to the public, the search engines had been no help, and I didn’t have time or energy to hire a PI to track down all of Phyllis Underwood’s college friends. Whine, whine.
    “Bluff it,” Ariana said.
    “Excuse me? How do I do that?”
    “I do it all the time. Not with you, of course. Tell her you know what she did in college and see how she reacts.”
    “It sounds like a horror movie.” Bruce would have been able to give me the title.
    “Why don’t you come over? Mondays are always slow. We can role-play.”
    It was the best offer I’d had today.
     
     
    On the way to A Hill of Beads, I queried myself. What would I do with information on the dean’s past even if I had it? Confront her with it? Why? I no longer saw her strange behavior around the boxes as evidence of her guilt as Keith’s murderer. To my distress, Hal seemed to have the lock on that. I was simply curious.
    On the other hand, what if I could use the information to my advantage? I needed all the leverage I could get when negotiating with the dean.
    This train of thought was beginning to sound like a reverberating blackmail scenario. The dean had said she’d hold up my promotion if I continued to investigate. Now I might say, if you don’t hold up my promotion, I won’t tell everyone about your sordid past.
    It seemed I was taking over one of Keith’s projects—find dirt on everyone and use it against them. I wasn’t happy about it.

CHAPTER 23
     
    Ariana was with a customer when I arrived at her bright, attractive place of business. I stepped into the back to wait for her and noticed she’d changed the beaded curtain that