The Square Root of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles)

Appleton unfolded with more twists and turns than the most difficult metal twisty puzzle. I envisioned his calendar: Ten A.M., offer Woody the janitor a generous condolence gift. Noon, wander the second floor physics labs in Ben Franklin Hall and find a way to insult Hal Bartholomew. One P.M., send Delia the niece an unsolicited financial aid package for a private high school. Spend the rest of the afternoon digging into the dean’s past for leverage and thinking of ways to thwart Sophie Knowles’s policies and procedures recommendations.
    Then there was Hal himself and the side I never could have predicted. And three cute young things, college chemistry majors, who were unethical and bold enough to sit at a computer and change their grades in the very room where their teacher lay dead. Granted, according to Rachel, only his feet were clearly visible, but they knew about the rest of him.
    I thought of another favorite von Neumann quote, “If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is.”
    Enough said.
    My next creative venture was to think of something to tell Ariana about the dean’s dark past. I figured the best bet was to let her assume that we’d been right. The notion that an authority figure had been a pothead in the sixties would make her happy and keep her quiet.
    For Courtney—why had I built up my urgent meeting in her mind?—I’d cover that tomorrow. I’d wait until tomorrow also to talk to Rachel and the rest of my colleagues. I might even be ready to address the Big Three junior chem majors and find out how they fared at the police station.
    For tonight, I wanted to focus on a quiet, crime-free dinner.
    I called Bruce. As I expected, he respected my wish not to talk about Hal’s confession and arrest. Instead, I explained the logistics that would eventually end in my serving him dinner.
    “Where are you?” I asked.
    “Goofing off in your house.”
    “Doing what?”
    “I’m having fun with a little mental arithmetic.”
    Funny guy. “No, really. Did you finish your gardening?”
    “I did indeed. You’ll see the results this evening. And now I’m watching an old Hitchcock.”
    “That I believe.”
    “Sounds like there’s something you want me to be doing,” Bruce said. “Can I pick up something?”
    I reminded him of his niece’s tenth birthday. “You could start rooting around in my box that has new greeting cards and pick one for Melanie. We should get it mailed soon.”
    “You want me to write it out?”
    “You’re her uncle; I’m sure she’d prefer to have it be in your handwriting.”
    “I don’t think she’s ever seen my handwriting. You’re the one who always takes care of that.”
    That was Bruce. Ask him to take out the trash twice a day and he wouldn’t balk, but writing out cards, whether Christmas, sympathy, birthday, thank you, even to his own family—that was my job.
    Wait. That was my job. And probably the woman’s job in nine out of ten relationships or marriages.
    Blat blat.
    I heard a loud noise in my head, like the sound my computer threw out when I made a wrong move during a math game.
    Blat blat. A loud noise battered my brain.
    Hal didn’t write the cards Virgil handed over to his expert. Gil did.
    “Sophie?”
    Had Bruce heard the blatting, too, or was he wondering where I’d gone? I tried to process this new insight. Gil, a nurse, and also a murderer? Didn’t nurses promise to do no harm, like doctors? If not, they should.
    “Never mind Melanie’s card for now,” I said. “New topic.”
    “Shoot.”
    “First, would there be handwriting samples of the staff at MAstar? Do you guys ever write notes to each other?”
    “We don’t exactly write notes to each other, but we do have to keep logs and occasionally we handwrite reports on what happened during the shift. The computer goes down a lot or someone might be in the middle of a game, and if your shift is up you just want to get everything down as quickly as possible while it’s fresh. You know, there might have been a particular challenge up there or on the ground and you need to get it on paper.”
    “What about the flight nurses?”
    “Same thing. Plus the nurses sign daily logs. They have to leave a handwritten count of all the controlled medications.” He paused. “Is any of this helpful?”
    “Immeasurably.”
    My mind raced. I needed two handwriting samples, one we could be sure was Hal’s, and one we