The Case of the Deathwatch Beetle, Conclusion
At the best of times, walking in to find a stranger in her office would have annoyed Sarah Ananya. And the middle of the night was not the best of times.
Whoever they were, they were too old to be a student trying to steal test answers. Their well-fitted and natty suit, clean oxford shirt, and bobbed haircut were all a bit too neat for a university employee. And while the outfit might mark the individual as wealthy, or at least successful, there was something in the button nose and quick eyes that told the professor that they weren’t a donor who had decided to be presumptuous with their access to the university.
The stranger was slight enough that Ananya didn’t see them as a physical danger, though, so she drew herself up with the authority developed over years at the head of classrooms and research projects. She spoke clearly and loudly. “May I help you?”
Ananya, accustomed to dealing with immature undergraduates and sycophantic Ph.D. candidates, was surprised that her authoritarian tone didn’t elicit the usual startled jump. From behind the desk, the stranger raised their gaze to inspect Ananya, eyes lighting with recognition. This was joined with mischief as the stranger asked, “Sarah Ananya?”
“Doctor Ananya,” she corrected, reaching into her purse to grab the hard, cold thing in it. “And if you don’t tell me what you’re doing here I’m calling security.”
The mischief in the strangers eyes spread to deviltry in a smile. She stepped around the desk. “Of course.” The tenor of their voice made the professor decide the stranger was a woman. The clean, bright nails and smallness of her polished shoes cemented this assumption into place as the stranger said, “I’m Aggie McPherson.”
Dr. Ananya summoned up her best professorial disdain and stared down at the proffered hand before looking back up into the rather lovely violet eyes of the stranger. “Ms. McPherson, what are you doing here? These aren’t my office hours.”
Aggie’s smile didn’t falter. “I should hope not. It’s the middle of the night. Why are you here so late?”
“I’m trying to complete a project,” Ananya lied. She did it easily and rather well. She’d been getting a lot of practice lately.
The stranger’s countenance shifted to a feigned confusion that Ananya trusted even less than her friendliness. “I’m pretty sure your project’s done. It’s been done awhile hasn’t it? I mean, the test at the 22nd Street Y and then with Melissa Burbidge surely proves out your research.”
Ananya found with that statement all of the distress she had been trying to intimidate into this Aggie was suddenly flipped back onto her. It transfixed her in place so she could only reply, “What are you talking about?”
“Your murder of Melissa Burbidge, of course.”
Ananya pulled out the pistol from her purse. It was a .380 semi-automatic, not much bigger than her palm, but she could see the darkness of its muzzle reflected in the widening of the stranger’s pupils. In a rehearsed tone, the doctor stated something she had read from the internet about firearm rights. “I fear for my life.”
The small mouth of the stranger named Aggie hung open for a moment before it snapped shut and her eyes shifted from the pistol’s barrel to Ananya. “So I guess I was right.”
Ananya faltered, seeing too late the accusation as the trap it was. “What – ?”
“The homeless man you that hired to,” Aggie’s violet eyes became clouded with disgust and Anaya could almost see him vomiting onto Melissa in them, “meet Ms. Burbidge at the restaurant you two were going to lunch at. He’s dead too. Did you know that?”
The reminder of a second death that belonged to her steadied Ananya’s hand, allowing her to level the pistol. “Get out of my office.”
Aggie gently waved as if she gesturing for someone to come forward. “There was a police report, of course, about the incident at the restaurant and he was arrested for battery. His name was Gregor Sampson, if you care. Of course, by the time Ms. Burbidge hired me, he’d been released and he didn’t have a permanent address. I wasted a lot of time searching of shelters and the surrounding area until an associate of mine, Detective Soburne, let me know when Sampson turned up at the morgue.”
“Why would a police officer tell you that?”
“Rescuing someone from the Rat Cult tends to engender loyalty.” Aggie shrugged. “Anyway, they did an autopsy. And found this.” Seemingly from nowhere, she raised her hand to show a black beetle, small with outsized mandibles, immovable and inert, lacquered like her nails.
“Mr. Sampson also had a large amount of cash on him.” Aggie widened her eyes, as if this were weirder than the beetle she held. “Like a lot of cash.” The smile came back onto her lips and she stared past the pistol at Dr. Ananya. “So I started to wonder, why would a vagrant with so much money go into a restaurant to aggressively panhandle?” She cocked an eyebrow at the doctor who felt a flashback to her own time as a student, the pressure for an answer lying on her. When she produced none, Aggie said, “Because you sent him there, natch.”
Before Ananya could summon a denial, Aggie adjusted the lapels on her suit as if they might be bulletproof. “He had a key in his pocket for a locker at the YMCA on 22nd. I asked around, a few of the volunteers knew him. I flirted with one of the cuter ones until they mentioned he did a lot of panhandling out front, so I asked to take a look at some of the security camera footage. I started with the a few days before he met Ms. Burbidge. And guess who I saw talking to him?”
Aggie stared into Ananya, who felt nailed into place by the next question, “Did you know it would kill them both and not care? Or did you think the beetle would transfer from Gregor to Burbidge and it would only kill her?”
Despite having killed two people already, Ananya hesitated, finding it was much more difficult when you were face to face. The steadiness of the stranger didn’t help, her eyes hovering over the sights of the gun.
The doctor felt tiny beads of sweat and goosebumps from across her body, forcing her to steady her grip on the pistol. What was happening here? Why was she the one that was afraid?
Before she could answer those questions, the strange little woman asked her another. “So you figured out a way to get the Deathwatch Beetle to carry disease rather than just observe it. The autopsies showed both of them died from a traumatic pronouncement of Bardet-Biedl Syndrome, but the coroner told me that’s genetic. It isn’t transmissible.”
This deep demonstration of all her work, the knowledge of her guilt, suddenly flipped a switch in Ananya and she cocked the pistol’s hammer. “I don’t think I’ll answer that. I think you broke into my office, I found you here, and I shot you.”
“That might be even messier than how you killed Ms. Burbidge. And leave a lot more questions. People might even begin to look into your work on transfer of genetic disorders via non-standard disease vectors and realize it’s rather…” Aggie laid the beetle on the doctor’s desk and Ananya realized much of her critical work had been printed out and laid across it. “Insane.” Aggie nodded. “Yes, that’s the word. Insane. Or at least that’s what most people call black magic these days.”
“So as near as I can figure it, Burbidge discovered your work, and was going to order you to stop. You knew that, and decided to send her a bomb in the shape of Gregor Sampson. Which leaves me with only one question.”
Unable to translate the shaking in her hand into pulling the pistol’s trigger, Ananya asked, “What’s that?”
“Ms. Burbidge used to work in this building, didn’t she?”
“Yes. Why is that important?”
“Because she’s right behind you.”
With that statement, Ananya shuddered and couldn’t resist a glance behind. It was enough that she never saw the small stranger move, only felt a blinding flash of pain and the pistol lifted from her hand. A moment later, she was crumpled on her office floor staring at polished shoes. The legs the shoes belonged to slowly bent, bringing violet eyes and dark hair into Ananya’s view.
“You know, with most people, that wouldn’t work.” Aggie’s smile and mischievousness were gone, her skin gray in the half-light of the office. “But you believe in ghosts, don’t you Dr. Ananya?”
With hands as small as her feet, Aggie smoothly unloaded the pistol. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to prove you killed Sampson and Burbidge. But I’m going to do my best to make sure you’re haunted by them for the rest of your days.”
See the author’s published work here.
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Not sure why this turned into a longer piece, but I think I manage to get a complete story in. Still, feels kind of…meh.