game, I’d play, too. Anything to buy us a few more minutes, and maybe a chance of getting out of this pickle.
“Little things,” I said. Beside me, I felt Alice shift in her seat, heard the faint click of her fingers on the computer keyboard. I kept talking to keep Gunderson’s attention on me rather than her. “The pieces have been there all along—you had opportunity to kill Bryan, and you could easily hide the blood from your crime beneath your academic robes. Rosemary said you’d been working late, so you might well have run into Emily here the night she died. In fact, it was probably your tiramisu on the counter at her house. Between your wife and Ginger, you probably knew enough about insulin and diabetes to manipulate her sugar levels to incapacitate her until you could kill her. Then there were all the hints in what Bryan said and did before he died, comments about percentages and safe bets. You also seemed to have more money than other members of the faculty.”
I shrugged. “I never would have put it all together, though, if I hadn’t seen that French lesson on the whiteboard today. The night she died, Emily said something about a key, but it didn’t make sense until I realized that she meant q-u-i, not k-e-y. And then . . . well, then it just fell into place,” I concluded lamely.
George sighed. “Yes, Reggie mentioned you had been agitated about that French lesson. Still, you were perfectly pleasant at dinner. I thought perhaps you’d failed to connect the dots. But then your cousin said you’d had a sudden inspiration and had hared off across campus. It had to be something important to take you away from the party. I knew then that you’d draw the inevitable conclusion.” He shook his head sadly. “I didn’t mean to do it, you know.”
Was he serious? He stole tens of thousands of dollars over the course of years . . . Oops?
He squeezed his eyes closed and tilted his head, like he was trying to stretch out a stiff neck. Before I could take advantage of his distraction, his eyes popped open and he steadied the gun on me.
“I just . . . I need you to understand.”
“I understand,” I lied.
He laughed, a raw, desperate sound. “Anything to calm the crazy man? I’m afraid I’m not crazy, Ms. Jones. Just cornered. I . . . I’m not a bad man. I never wanted to hurt anyone.”
Which would be cold comfort, indeed, to Bryan and Emily.
“Three years ago my Rosemary was diagnosed with breast cancer,” he said. “You cannot imagine what it was like, holding her hand through the chemotherapy, holding back her hair when she was sick and too weak to do it herself. My beautiful girl.”
Despite the gravity of my situation, I felt a welling of emotion for this man, so obviously in love with his wife and so helpless in the face of her disease.
“God, the morning they wheeled her into the operating room for her surgery, she looked so small and frail in the bed. I wanted to go with her, to be with her, but she had to face it alone.” He shrugged. “I was unmanned.”
“She knew you loved her,” I said.
“Yes, but love doesn’t save your life. Medicine does.” He shook his head tightly. “And then the bills started rolling in. I thought we had good insurance, but . . .” His voice trailed off.
“I couldn’t let us lose everything, Ms. Jones. My Rosemary had suffered enough. She’d supported me through graduate school, picked up and moved across the country when I got my first academic job, endured the loneliness of my pre-tenure years when I was consumed by work. When I traveled for my research, she stayed here, alone, in this backwater town and never once complained. The thought of her spending her golden years in poverty again, all because she’d married a man who loved ideas more than money . . . I couldn’t let that happen.”
“Of course not,” I murmured soothingly.
“So I took some money. Just enough to cover the bills. I wasn’t greedy. I just shuffled it from one bloated research account to another. Rosemary’s happiness was worth more than a new computer that could solve a complex equation in thirty seconds instead of a minute.”
I nodded again, but my attention had shifted to the door behind Gunderson. There was a tiny square window in that door, and I thought I