Formula for Murder by JUDITH MEHL Read Free Book Online Page B

applied for the grant. But no, he has to uphold the old ways. ‘A notebook is good enough for me,’ he says. Why do you have problems with it? Are the kids too lazy to run down a flight of stairs when they need to research something in biology?’
    “Boy, talk about the dark ages.”
    Abner fussed with his test tubes as if they were filled with holy water and complained further. “Worse, he wouldn’t consider any other research methods than his own. My work has been in the best journals and all he ever gave me was a snort. I don’t know why he even voted to have me hired. Or maybe he didn’t and the rest of the committee just overrode him. I’ve never known.”
    Kat saw a handwritten sheet next to his work. “Are those your notes? Do you need them?”
    “I used them to mix the formulas but I’m finished now.”
    Kat slipped the sheet into her bag and offered a few soothing comments, hoping to glean more information and distract him from questioning her reason for wanting the sample. She’d study it later.
    As he meticulously cleaned up his work and gathered his tubes and vials to be washed by one of the students, he speculated on Charlie’s demise. To Kat and Nick he just said, “Sure, I wished him dead. Wouldn’t have done it in a lab though. Why, one student’s work was wrecked! He’ll have to spend weeks recouping. And the other students working under Charlie for their honors projects, they’re in a pickle. Any prof worth his salt wouldn’t have killed Charlie midterm!”
    Kat, who had difficulty believing anyone with such an organized attitude would turn so passionately violent, was ready to assume the murderer was someone else, but Nick pursued more questioning.
    He queried whether Charlie’s research could have been the cause of the murder. Abner was hesitant.
    “Not in the sense that you mean—someone stealing it from him. I don’t know that it’s that valuable to the world.”
    “What do you mean? Why would he have spent so much time on it otherwise?”
    “He’s a scientist. Always looking for the answer to why. It’s just that I don’t think his conclusions have been proven yet. His work may not even have any merit to the company that financed it. That would be a kick. Maybe they found out it was worthless and knocked him off out of anger!”
    “Are you serious?”
    “Not likely, but it bears looking into. I suppose someone could have tried to steal his research. Or more likely he stole theirs and they came at him out of revenge.”
    “How likely is that?” Nick asked.
    “Not as unlikely as you might think. I’d heard there was a very suspicious incident of lab vandalism before I came. Later I heard rumors that all the vials were not accounted for, smashed or otherwise. If a vial of a purified enzyme was stolen, what better suspect than a prof crushed for time? He was so rushed to conclude his work and gain his glory I wouldn’t put it past him to have staged it all to take the vial himself.”
    “It was never looked into as far as I know,” Kat said.
    “Whose vial was it that you suspect was stolen rather than trashed?” Nick asked.
    “It belonged to a professor that’s no longer here. Can’t blame him for leaving. A lot of work went into purifying those enzymes. He still had his recipe, of course, but his attitude changed toward the university. I think he was afraid someone was out to destroy his work personally.”
    Kat resolved to check into the vandalism later and speculated on the best source of the facts, finally settling on Louise Feldman, the president’s secretary. She’d not only been here a quarter century but knew absolutely everything that happened on campus. The incident was in the news but she and Nick wanted more than the official spiel. Louise would be a better source than newspapers any day.
    Abner gave them the basics of enzyme purification in layman’s terms and concluded by saying, “There’s a lot of work to purifying an enzyme. Research money from