Leight strokes Peter's hair absently but doesn't comment.
"All right," Peter gives in. "A code to what?"
"Don't know yet." Then his hand stops, clenches. "What were you saying earlier? About lycorine?"
"That Dara was poisoned with it?"
"And how did you find out?"
Peter's brain is having trouble catching up. "I met up with the Captain earlier. I thought—well, I tried to tell you."
There's a flurry of motion as Leight rolls Peter over so that they're facing each other. His eyes are bright, sharp, insistent, and so is his voice. "Where?"
"Dara's room. It wasn't—"
"Describe it."
"Barren," Peter supplies, trying hard to reconstruct the scene when there are so many sensations vastly more pleasant on which he could focus. "Plain. Neat, I guess."
"Neat," Leight repeats, robotic.
"Yes," Peter confirms. "Now are you going to tell me what you're thinking?"
"Dara's office wasn't neat."
"It wasn't," Peter confirms again. His heart rate's picking up, but he doesn't know why. He can't tell quite what Leight is getting at.
"Was there anything else unusual about the room? Were there any books? Magazines? Newspapers?"
"Now that you mention it," recollection dawns, "there was a binder full of newspaper clippings."
"Any common theme?"
"Myanmar."
"Brilliant." Without warning, Leight kisses him squarely and chastely. He pulls back, disentangles himself, and stands up. "Get dressed and call the Captain, will you?"
"Mal, it's after midnight."
"So?"
Peter realizes there isn't any point in arguing. The battle's long lost.
Peter pulls the fleece blanket tighter around his shoulders and tries to curl himself into a smaller ball. The conference room is freezing because the homicide division of the police department does not deem it necessary to pay for heating between the hours of one and five in the morning.
The Captain and the Lieutenant are slumped half-asleep at the other end of the long table while Peter shivers alongside Leight, who has pictures, articles, and equations spread all around him as he works to crack the code. Leight stifles a grunt, and Peter perks up. "Have you got it?"
got it?"
When Leight looks up, his blue-gray eyes resemble a cloudy day. He looks tired, exhausted; he is spread too thin. He has never sounded so small as he does when he whispers, "There's too much noise."
Peter doesn't understand. The conference room—and the building itself, for that matter—is perfectly silent. The Captain and the Lieutenant aren't snoring.
The mice that everyone knows live in the walls aren't squeaking. The loudest noises are Peter's shivering and Leight's own grunting. To Peter, it doesn't compute. He nods anyway, not wanting to disrupt Leight any more than he already has.
"Wait," Leight says, "keep talking, Peter, please."
"But you said it was too loud," Peter whispers. "I don't want to bother you—"
"You won't," Leight insists. "Please. Keep asking me questions."
"All right," Peter agrees slightly louder. "What are you thinking?"
Leight admits, "I can't crack the code. I know it has to be some sort of polynumeric substitution cipher, but I can't crack it. There are two sets of numbers—the answers written on the board and the actual answers. I need a key. I thought it might be in these articles, but I'm not finding it."
"Wait, what's a polynumeric substitution cipher?"
"Each number can represent multiple numbers. 1 could be A, L, or P while 2 could be F, J, or Z. But there are too many options, and I'm not sure which set of numbers we're supposed to be working with. We don't even know who was—" Leight breaks off.
"What is it?"
"The key—it's who was going to see these numbers."
"A number of people had access to Dara's office. Faculty, janitorial staff, students—"
"Students," Leight nods. "The kid who found the body when he came to office hours—what was his name?"
Peter pauses, looks through a few files, then supplies, "Kyle Yates."
"What do we know about him?"
Peter shoots a quick glance at the Captain and the Lieutenant, but they're snoring. He goes through the file they've assembled on Yates. "He's a sophomore at Crick, majoring in biochemistry, minoring in math. He works at the hospital ten hours a week, participates in a few clubs, and somehow manages to maintain a near-perfect GPA."
"Which class was he taking from Dara?"
"Calculus IV."
"Did he take Calc III from Dara last semester?"
Peter flips to a later page. "Looks like it, yes. He got an A."
"Brilliant. What are those extracurricular?"
"Southeast Asian Students Society, Amnesty International, World Food—"
"Let me guess, British father, Southeast Asian mother hailing from a country currently experiencing a rice blight?"
Peter flips another page, his brow furrowed, his heart racing as the excitement of Leight's deductions catches up with him. "You're right; the mother's Burmese."
"Brilliant."
"Have you got it?"
"The articles aren't the key; they're the door. The key is whichever textbook the Calc IV class used."
"Zill and Cullen's Advanced Engineering Mathematics, apparently."
"Was Dara's copy in his office?"
Peter pales, frowns, and begins studying the pictures of the bookshelves. "I don't know."
"I'll save you the time," Leight responds with a smug smile, "it wasn't. Whoever poisoned the tea took it. It's because he had to rummage for it that the bookshelves were such a mess when Dara's home was perfectly neat."
"Yates wasn't the murderer?"
"Of course not. He was working with Dara."
"To do what, exactly?"
"Why," Leight's smile is cruel, inspired, captivated and captivating, "to bioengineer an unstoppable strain of rice blight, of course."
Peter stares. "You're kidding."
"Not at all. Dara was consumed by his hatred of the regime. It was the reason he left, but he never quite got over it. The binder full of articles is fairly solid evidence of that. Somehow, he and Yates concocted this plan—and someone found out and killed him for it."
"But who?"
"Someone who had access to the building and a source of lycorine, but that doesn't help at all. Lycorine is dreadfully common, and we've already established that plenty of people had access. So, something more restrictive. How did anyone know what was going on? Someone must have seen the code—the code and the book together—someone who saw Yates with his calculus book. Someone from Myanmar, with a strong attachment to the homeland."
Peter thumbs through Yates's file for the fourth time in search of the missing piece of the puzzle. It has to be someone who knew Yates, who saw him on a fairly regular basis in a location where he might have his backpack.
Another professor? A classmate? A coworker? It hits him like a stroke of lightning. He meters his breathing and counts seconds as he tries to disentangle the revelation. He double checks his reasoning, but it's solid. "Mal?"
Leight doesn't look up. "Yes?"
"How famous do you think you are?"
At that, Leight does look up. He faces Peter with a furrowed brow. "What sort of a question is that?"
"An important one," Peter retorts. "Would you expect an average person to know anything about your reputation?"
Leight cocks his head to one side as he considers. "It depends. Does this average person have an above-average interest in crime?"
Peter shakes his head.
"Then no, it's unlikely such a person would have any idea that there's a Sherlock Holmes impersonator protecting the city."
"Please Mal," Peter groans, "be serious."
"Why? It's so much more entertaining to be juvenile."
"Grab your deerstalker then," Peter shrugs off the fleece blanket as he stands up. "I know who did it."
.
.