Free Sounds of Murder by Patricia Rockwell Page A

makes it sound as
if I'm in court. I'm not certain if anything I said yesterday is
accurate. I was so distraught, she thought. She put her hand to her
head and rested her elbow on her desk.
    "I know that it's hard to think back," he
started. Out came the handkerchief. Pamela tried to avoid
cringing.
    "Detective," she interrupted, "To be frank,
thinking back is all I can do. I can't get any of it out of my
mind. I’d like a break from it for just a brief moment, but no one
will let me do that." She contorted her face and rubbed her
eyes.
    "I'm truly sorry, ma'am," he said, reaching
for a tissue from a container at the edge of her desk and handing
it to her.
    "No, no," she said, brushing it away,
thinking of the germs transferring from his large hanky to her
tissue. "I'm fine, really. Let's just get on with it. What else do
you need to know?"
    "Dr. Barnes," he said, "You say that you can
think of nothing else. While you’re thinking...have you remembered
any information that you didn't mention when we spoke yesterday? I
mean, you were traumatized. You’d just discovered a colleague,
murdered. You undoubtedly were upset and not thinking clearly. Now,
after a passage of time, you might remember things that you didn't
yesterday."
    "Detective," she said simply, "To be frank, I
don't remember what I said to you yesterday."
    "Let me review the highlights of your
testimony," he replied, opening his notebook. At this, he quickly
ran through several pages of his notes, very thorough ones, she
observed.
    "All right, all right," she said, thinking.
"One thing I did remember was the computer screen--it was on."
    And that was strange to you?" he asked.
    "Not strange," she said, "But it did suggest
why Charlotte was in the lab. The computers in the first row are
equipped with special subscription databases that we don't have
available on our office computers. I believe I mentioned that."
    "And you think," he completed her thought,
"that Dr. Clark was probably in the lab using this subscription
service?"
    "I would say it was likely," answered Pamela.
"Charlotte visited the lab often to check on research studies of
hers being conducted there, but there were no subjects or graduate
assistants there last night, which I know because my assistant Kent
checked the lab sign-up sheet and my experiment was the only one
scheduled in the lab this week and there was no one scheduled to be
working in the lab last night because he was in class—with me. So,
I can only assume Charlotte was there to use the databases."
    "All right," he said, jotting this
information in his notebook. "Is there any other reason Dr. Clark
might have been in the lab late at night at that carrel?"
    "It would be unlikely," responded Pamela,
"that she’d be recording. Her uses of the lab tend toward survey
data collection for her studies on addiction. She's world famous,
you know."
    "So I keep hearing," he said, reaching again
for his hanky and letting loose another blow. He replaced the hanky
in his pocket and Pamela breathed in relief. “Would the computer
screen be on if Dr. Clark were recording?"
    "Not necessarily," said Pamela, "You can
record directly by using the toggle switch on the computer desk.
However, if you want to keep a copy of what you record, you’d have
the screen on and a file selected. I didn't see anything like that,
so I doubt she was recording."
    Shoop paused and stared at her a bit, then
scribbled a few notes in his small pad. Then he asked, "So, would
there be anything else she might have been doing there in the lab
in that first row of computers?"
    "No," said Pamela firmly, "she’d either be
using the databases or recording. If she wanted to do anything
else, such as general Internet research or writing, there’d be no
reason to do it in the lab. She could use her office computer."
    "Good," he noted. "Assuming she was using
this special database service, what sorts of things might she be
doing with that information?"
    Pamela rolled her eyes and