W is for Wasted (Kinsey Millhone Mystery)

sympathy he’ll get. An entire year’s work down the drain when he was doing so well .”
    “I thought even with a crash, there were ways to restore the files.”
    “He could spill a cup of coffee down his CPU or the lab might catch fire. He could go in and change a few numbers. The data could be sitting right there, but he’d be the only one who’d have access because no one else would know the magic key strokes.”
    “If I told you I had the charts in my possession, would that help?”
    “It might. Look, I’m not the only one aware of what’s going on. There’s a postdoc in the lab who’s seen the same things I have. Little signs of Linton’s cooking, little things that don’t quite add up.”
    “Would this postdoc agree to talk to me?”
    “No. He’s married and has kids. You think he’d risk his livelihood? I can promise you he won’t. Even if he did agree, you wouldn’t have any idea what he was talking about.”
    “Isn’t there anything I can do?”
    She smiled briefly. “You can do what I’m doing. Pack a bag and flee.”
    After I left, I sat in the car as usual, making copious notes. Altogether, I was looking at two full decks of index cards, but this was new. Something had gone wrong in Arkansas. Linton suffered a nervous breakdown and because of it, he switched his career path from surgical oncology to scientific research, which looked like a nice safe place to land. Then Sebastian Glenn had died. Once things started going wrong, he was back in the same place he’d been, only now he was married and had more to lose.
    •   •   •
    Saturday morning, I drove the Mustang to the car wash to be detailed in preparation for Drew’s taking possession. Miguel, who was doing the work, said it’d take an hour and a half. That was fine with me. My schedule was clear and I had time to spare. I told him I’d be in the waiting room, which was replete with two metal folding chairs and a wall-mounted display of car accessories for sale. I took out my paperback and settled in to read. This was a Robert Parker novel in which Spenser and Hawk busted up bad guys so often it cheered me no end.
    Ten minutes went by and Miguel appeared. He might have been nineteen, remarkably poised for a guy who was working so hard to grow a mustache with so little to show for it. Miguel’s auto-detailing business was called Detailing by Miguel. He wore a black T-shirt with the company name emblazoned on it in red.
    He stood with his arms crossed, his hands pressed into opposite armpits. “You want me to leave the gun under the seat or put it somewhere else?”
    I ran the sentence through my head, diagraming the parts of speech as I recited it to myself. I keep my H&K in my briefcase, which I knew full well I’d moved from the trunk of the car to the studio before I’d left home. “I don’t have a gun in the car.”
    “Lady, I don’t mean to be fresh, but you do now.”
    “I do?”
    I slid the book into my bag and followed him out the back door and across the lot, passing the two lanes where cars were lined up to be vacuumed in preparation for a wash. He ran his one-man enterprise under a temporary awning that shielded him from the sun while he rubbed paste wax onto auto exteriors. With mine, he was still in the process of prepping the interior. The driver’s-side door stood open and his Shop-Vac was close by. He pointed and stepped back, saying, “I didn’t touch it.”
    I leaned into the backseat and angled myself so I could see what he was talking about. On the floor under the driver’s-side seat there was a .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun nestled up against the rail.
    I stared at it for a moment and then backed up a step so I could pull myself upright. I left the car door open. I glanced at Miguel and said, “Hang on.”
    I hadn’t put the gun under the seat. That much I knew. The only .45-caliber semiautomatic I’d heard mentioned of late was one of two guns missing in Pete Wolinsky’s shooting death two months before. Cheney had mentioned it Monday night when he showed up at Rosie’s. I had no way to calculate how many thousands of semiautomatics were floating around in the world. The number must have been astronomical, so what were the chances of that particular gun having been used in the robbery that ended Pete’s life?
    I hadn’t parked the Mustang anywhere near the bird refuge in months. The closest I’d come was the night I’d trundled along at two miles an hour,