Do or Die Read Online Free PDF Page B

was crammed with notes, articles and papers, but there was no diary, address book or appointment calendar to shed light on his activities. If Jonathan Blair kept any personal records, he kept them elsewhere.
    On the desk lay a computer printout of a complex statistical analysis which Jonathan had obviously been studying. Red underlinings and asterisks peppered the pages. Was this what Jonathan had been working on the night before his death, when he had come down to his mother, upset and wanting to talk? Green examined the printout curiously but could make little sense of it. He had been forced to confront statistics for his forensic science course at the police academy as well as his masters thesis in criminology, but he had avoided them when possible ever since.
    He was puzzled, however, by the array of numbers on the desk of an English literature student, and became even more so when he turned to the books on the shelves. He expected Chaucer, Dickens and an entire shelf of Shakespearean plays.Instead, he found formidable tomes on disorders of the limbic system and the neuropsychology of memory. Suddenly he remembered Marianne Blair’s use of the word ‘lab’ and cursed himself for failing to pick up on it. In the excitement of Sullivan’s tale earlier, they had both made the leap from the place where Jonathan was stabbed to the subject matter he was studying. A rookie’s error in logic, which neither should have made.
    Pulling out the nearest book on the brain, he headed back downstairs and found Marianne Blair on the phone in the living room, looking all business.
    â€œWhat was Jonathan working on at the university?” Startled, she swung on him and pressed her hand over the receiver. “He was doing his Masters in cognitive neuroscience, conducting research on auditory channels in the brain.”
    â€œDoes he have an office at the university?” “A lab. At least he has a desk, computer and files somewhere. I’ve never been there.”
    â€œDid he have an associate? Was he working with anyone?” “Oh yes. There’s a whole group of graduate students, most of whom are on the list I gave you. They’re all working under Dr. Myles Halton.”
    There was respect in her voice as she uttered the name, as if her accomplishments were nothing compared to his.
    Green had never heard of him. “Is that supposed to mean something?”
    â€œTo a neuropsychologist, yes. He’s one of the up-and-coming experts on language and the brain. Students from all over Canada, even the world, would sell their souls for the chance to work with him.”
    *    *    *
    The ten detectives from the Major Crimes Squad had been waiting for half an hour by the time Green barrelled through the door of the conference room. Sullivan had installed them in the unrenovated briefing room walled in blackboards and cork, for which Green secretly thanked him. How he hated the high-tech flash that passed for progress in modern meetings. More time was wasted fiddling with control buttons than it took to fill an entire chalkboard with facts.
    Sullivan had used the waiting time to brief them on the background of the case and to pin sketches and photographs of the scene to the cork board on the wall. It took Green an additional ten minutes to report on his visit to the Blair house.
    â€œYou are to keep the procedural screw-ups strictly to yourselves,” he admonished in the most inspectorish tone he could muster. “I’ve looked at the case, and I don’t think the crime scene would have told us a hell of a lot more anyway. Jonathan Blair was a quiet, law-abiding kid with no priors, not even a speeding ticket. There aren’t any obvious motives for his murder, and we certainly have no ready suspects. But we’ve got more than enough leads to follow. As the facts stand now, and ruling out robbery and psychos, there are three possible motives. The first two,