Free Forever Dead by Suzanne F. Kingsmill Page B

replaced. I turned to my laptop computer to boot it up, but I didn’t get far. The keyboard was drenched in some sort of fluid that had spread throughout the computer. A horrible feeling crept through me as I bent to sniff the keyboard. Formaldehyde. It was swimming in formaldehyde. Like an automaton I turned on the computer, but nothing happened. I remembered the death sentence handed out to the computer of a friend of mine, who had once spilled a glass of red wine on her computer. All my files gone. My raw data, gone. But I had backups. A pain in the ass to get them reinstalled, but at least I had them.Or did I?
    I turned from the room, took the stairs on the run, and raced into my office to the drawer where I kept my computer backup disks. I yanked it open and stared at the empty drawer. No disks. I pulled it all the way out and flung it on the floor, getting a precarious sense of relief from watching it splinter and shatter.
Not very well made
, I thought, in that strange displacing calm that disaster spawns. With a sinking heart, I remembered doing a backup the previous week and asking my grad student to put them in my office when the backup was done. But he’d lost his key to my office and had left the disks in the lab. I raced back upstairs and flung open every drawer and cupboard, but there were no disks. I turned in desperation to the computer and started madly pushing buttons, looking for a miracle I knew I wasn’t going to get. What can I say? I’m an indecisive fatalist. Sometimes.
    It was some time before I was aware that Martha was standing in the doorway, with a handkerchief draped decorously over her nose.
    â€œWho would want to do this to you Cordi?” she whispered. “In all my years here I’ve never seen anything like it. Nothing exciting ever happens around here, and then suddenly, in the space of weeks, you find a dead body, nearly die, and have your lab gratuitously fumigated?”
    I kicked the drawer with my foot. “Whoever it was, I’ve got to find them. I’ve got to get those disks back.” After months of lethargy induced by one of my black moods, it felt good to feel so motivated, even if it was out of fear.
    â€œBut, Cordi, what makes you think they’ll still have the disks?”
    I looked at Martha, giving the butterflies in my stomach a ride worthy of a sailboat in six-metre waves.I took a deep breath to calm the waves and swallowed hard. I thought I was a pessimist, but this horrible thought had miraculously eluded me.
    â€œBecause if they don’t, I’m history.”
    â€œYou sure are, my dear Cordi.”
    The voice grated every nerve in my body as I turned to face Jim Hilson. He walked in without being invited and casually picked up one of the fumigated cages.
    â€œOh, Cordi, this is just dreadful. Now you won’t be able to publish any papers.” He looked at me ruefully. You’re going to need a bit of luck, Cordi, to get out of this mess.” He smiled then and replaced the fumigated cage. “Cheers,” he said. And then he was gone. Just like that.

chapter six
    I spent the rest of the afternoon in the zoology building with the security people and police, bottling up my anger and panic and trying to appear stoic, when I actually felt totally destroyed. The harried diminutive blond female cop was very pleasant but not encouraging.
    â€œThe lock on the lab door was jimmied, but whoever did this had access to the main door or came in during normal hours and hid somewhere until later.”
    â€œThat could have been anyone,” I moaned. “All faculty members and grad students have a key to the main door, and people come in and out at all hours of the day and night to check on their experiments.”
    â€œSo technically anyone on staff could have let themselves in without being noticed?”
    I nodded, but I realized it was worse than that. “The building is open from nine to five and there is