you don’t spend the rest of the winter locked in your itty-bitty room.”
Lance looked from Jones to Thor. “Hardin wouldn’t do that.”
“He suggested it.” Thor let that sink in. “What were you doing in the computer lab late the night Patty was poisoned.”
Lance’s face crumpled, and Thor knew he was close to breaking.
Thor pushed harder. “You lied to us. Witnesses saw you there close to the time when the military satellite was hacked.”
Lance went pale. “It was hacked? You think I …”
“You’re the IT expert on station. We know you lied about where you were that night. The Pentagon is very interested in you, man. It doesn’t look good.”
Lance broke. “I hacked into Patty’s email.”
That wasn’t the answer Thor had expected. “You hacked into your girlfriend’s email. Why would you do that, Lance?”
“I thought she was seeing someone else. I didn’t go back to her room with her that night. She claimed she had work to do. Every night that week, she said she was busy. But she wasn’t in the Dark Sector Lab, and when I went to her room, she wasn’t there either—or she didn’t answer.”
Segal stepped forward. “What did you find in her email, lover boy?”
“Nothing—just the usual shit between her and Sam, emails from the university, messages from her parents.”
Segal sat. “You hacked into your girlfriend’s email because you were jealous. I find that interesting, don’t you, guys?”
Thor had to agree. “A jealous lover.”
“Jealous men do all kinds of reckless things,” Jones said.
“Why did you lie to us about where you were that night?” Segal asked.
“I knew it would look bad.”
Segal nodded. “Yeah, it does look bad. What did you do after you hacked Patty’s email? Did you confront her, pour some methanol in a nice bottle of wine for her?”
“No!” There was fear on Lance’s face now. “No, I didn’t kill her. I really liked her. I could never have done anything to hurt her.”
Segal kept at him. “Hacking her email wasn’t an act of love. You just admitted you were jealous. Today, you broke into Dr. Park’s room to steal Patty’s journal. That’s stalker behavior.”
“I just wanted the journal so I could see if she’d written about anyone else.”
“That still matters to you even though she’s dead?” Thor had never been able to understand why some men treated women like property. “Wouldn’t you rather live with the good memories than dredge up more pain for yourself?”
Lance squirmed. “Wouldn’t you want to know? What if this guy—whoever he was—had something to do with her death? Maybe she wrote about him. Maybe all the answers are there.”
Segal got them back on track. “What did you do after you hacked Patty’s email, Lance? Did you fight with her? Did you grab some methanol from the LO arch?”
“No! I went to her room. I knocked. She didn’t answer. Then I went to bed—and that’s the truth. The next morning, I heard that Sam had found her and taken her to the infirmary. I went to see what had happened, and … she was dead. I couldn’t believe it.”
His shoulders slumped, and he began to cry.
Thor stepped out of the room with Segal. “What do you think?”
“I think he’s telling the truth. Also, now we know that something unusual was going on with Patty—an affair or something else. We need to retrace her steps, find out what she was doing and who she was with that last week. We need that journal.”
“It’s locked away with the package.”
“You already secured it.” Segal looked pleased. “Perfect. When we’re done questioning the rest of the people on Shields’ list, we should read through her entries for her last week. Maybe she can give us the killer’s name.”
Thor was pretty certain Samantha wouldn’t like this. “Let’s get our stalker here back to his room and confine him there until we sort through this.”
They had four more persons of interest to question if they were going to make it through Shields’ list today.
Samantha struggled to concentrate as she recycled the fridges on the SPT, her thoughts jumbled, her emotions tangled. When she wasn’t trying to figure out who’d killed Patty, she was ranting at Lance in her head—or remembering the feel of Thor kissing her, touching her, driving himself into her. And, wow, was that a rare elliptical double-ringed galaxy?
Grief. Fear. Rage. Lust. Fascination.
It was like having a head full of ping-pong balls in constant motion.
She double-checked her work at every step as she performed the last calibrations to get the telescope scanning again