The Scholar by Dervla McTiernan

Author:Dervla McTiernan [MCTIERNAN, DERVLA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2019-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

Cormac returned to the station. The team had pored over everything they could find about Della Lambert, which was little enough. She had no social media presence at all. A warrant for her calls and texts was working its way through the system at her phone company. The company had prioritised the request to track her phone, but the last signal they’d received had been a ping to the tower closest to the campus on the night that Della had died. Nothing more. Whoever had killed her had been smart enough to destroy the phone straight away.

McCarthy suggested accessing the Bio-Pharmaceutical Chemistry class list. With only twenty-five students some at least would remember Della, and it was possible she’d been on campus to visit one of them. It was a good idea, but a call to Nathan Egan found that he had already left campus and his mobile was diverting to voice mail. The university’s administrative staff wouldn’t release any student information without a warrant.

‘What’s happening with the swipe records?’ Cormac asked. ‘The records from the lab. Murtagh said they kept a record of everyone swiping in and out of the building. Had to for health and safety reasons, right? Have they sent that on?’

Fisher grimaced. ‘We got it, after a bit of pushing on our part and a bit of delay on theirs. He leaned over to his desk, pulled a thick bundle of printed A4 pages, stapled together, towards him. ‘This is the record for the last six months. The highlighted lines show when the ID Della Lambert was carrying accessed the building. And yes, it was used right up to the day before her death, but not on the Friday night.’

‘Carline told us she lost that ID at the beginning of the year,’ Cormac said. ‘She’s either lying about when she lost it, or Della was using it herself.’

‘Yeah, but why?’ Fisher said. ‘Why would she want to access the lab? And why so often? Unless it was some sort of like, industrial espionage.’ The look on Fisher’s face said he thought the idea was ridiculous. ‘But if it was, then why would she go so often or for so long, and why wouldn’t anyone ask her what she was doing there?’

‘Look at the records again. Did anyone swipe in at the same time as her? We need to correlate the records, see whose visits consistently overlapped with hers,’ Cormac said. He took the print out, found himself looking at an anonymous list of ID numbers and dates. He looked back at Fisher.

‘Yeah,’ said Fisher. ‘We don’t have the names to go with the ID numbers, and Darcy Therapeutics has refused to hand them over. Said it would be a breach of their privacy policy in the absence of a warrant.’

‘We don’t have enough for a warrant,’ Dave McCarthy said. ‘Judges will be careful with this one.’ Dave was right. No judge liked to have their decisions overturned by a higher court, so they were likely

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