“Sorry,” Ashok said, looking anxious.

“Okay,” I said. “And legacy systems, if I remember correctly, are all the programs that have been around since the dinosaurs roamed the earth that the college is too cheap to replace.”

“Yeah,” Ashok said, smiling slightly, and looking a little more relaxed. “Anyway, it was the project from hell, right from day one. And Walker was a total idiot. The only reason our boss kept him around was that Walker had an in with some woman in accounting and could get her to sign off on stuff. Stuff that didn’t actually work, or at least not the way it was supposed to. I mean, if you ask me, it was a total scam.”

I winced slightly. Did this mean that Jasper had taken advantage of Karen? Or that Karen had been unwise enough to help her husband cover up his department’s failure?

“I gather he’s not working there anymore, either,” I said. “Did he leave voluntarily or . . . ”

“Fired,” Ashok said. “I guess they finally figured out what an idiot he was. I was gone by that time—bailed as soon as I could land the job here—but I heard about it from some of my friends who were still there. It was just a few months later. Jasper was out, and a lot of other people with him, so there must have been some kind of stink, but nobody really knew exactly what happened. But I bet it had something to do with what happened today.”

Ashok paused dramatically. Jack and I looked at each other and then back at Ashok. Jack broke down first.

“And what happened today?” he asked.

“The police,” Ashok said.

Thirteen

“Police?” I echoed.

“They showed up at the college data center an hour ago,” Ashok said. “And they’ve been seizing files and hardware and interrogating people ever since. And they’re asking a lot of questions about Walker.”

“Damn,” I said.

Ashok’s face fell and he looked at Jack as if for reassurance.

“Sorry,” I said. “That was directed at Walker, not you. How did you hear about this so fast, anyway?”

Ashok visibly relaxed.

“Some friends texted me the news about an hour ago. They couldn’t even IM me because the police had seized their computers.”

Text, IM—I found myself wondering if it would ever occur to any of them to pick up the phone and call each other to gossip, which would be my first instinct. And was the fact that I thought this a sign of culture clash or generation gap?

“What could he possibly have done?” I wondered aloud. “I mean, it must be something big, or the police wouldn’t be that hot about it, but if it’s big, it’s hard to believe it took them two years to discover it.”

Unless, of course, someone who still worked at the college had been covering it up for two years. Someone like Karen. Had she disappeared because she’d been covering up for Jasper and knew the police were about to pounce? Or had the crime come to light because her disappearance interrupted her cover-up? Of course, it was always possible that she’d disappeared for some other reason, and the police raid on the data center happening just after her disappearance was only a coincidence. Possible, but not, alas, very likely.