It took Laurie a moment to understand the phrase. “Like automated dictation?” she asked. “I use that on my phone to dictate e-mails.”
“Exactly. If you have any doubts, we can clear them up right now.” He picked up his telephone and dialed a number. “The Under Suspicion folks are here. Can you pop up?”
A minute later, a handsome man in his late fifties walked into Dwight’s office. He was dressed casually in a lightweight madras shirt and khaki pants, but the look suited him well, with his tan and a full head of dark waves. He introduced himself as Richard Hathaway.
“We were just talking about Susan’s work with you at UCLA,” Laurie said.
“Such a waste. That sounds cold, I know. Any loss of a young life is a waste. But Susan was bright. She wasn’t twenty-four/seven at the keyboard, the way some programmers are.” He gave Dwight a smile. “But she was creative. Her ability to connect socially-in a way some of us computer types struggle with-helped her connect technology to real life.”
“I’ll step out for a moment,” Dwight offered. “Mrs. Moran has something she needs to ask you.”
Once she was alone with the former professor, Laurie asked if Susan had been working on a particular project.
“It might help to understand how I ran my lab. Computer work can be solitary, so my research assistants acted primarily as teaching assistants for my intro classes. They might also help on isolated portions of my own work, which at the time was in software pipelining-a technique for overlapping loop iterations. And of course you have no idea what any of that means, right?”
“Nope.”
“Nor should you. It’s a method of program optimization, interesting only to people who write code. Anyway, I selected students whose own independent projects during freshman year showed promise. Susan’s was speech-to-text, what most of us would call dictation. It was all pretty rudimentary in the nineties, but Steve Jobs could never have given us Siri without basic speech-recognition function. If she had lived-well, who knows?”
“Did she work with Dwight on REACH?”
“REACH didn’t exist yet. But she and Dwight worked in proximity to each other, if that’s what you mean. But Dwight’s work was quite different. As you probably know, REACH launched a new way to locate information on the Internet, back when people were still calling it the World Wide Web. No, that wasn’t anything like Susan’s area of interest.”
“Professor-”
“Please, ‘Richard’ is fine. I retired from the academy long ago, and even then, I didn’t particularly care for the titles.”
“You seem young to be retired.”
“And I’ve been retired a long time. I left UCLA to help Dwight build REACH. Imagine being a sophomore in college and having captains of industry fighting to get a meeting with you. I recognize brilliance when I see it, and I was willing to support him full-time while he insisted on finishing up at UCLA-to make his parents proud, if you can believe it. I thought it would be a pit stop for me as I transitioned to the private sector, and yet here I am, twenty years later.”
“That’s nice that the two of you are so close.”
“It may sound corny, but I don’t have any kids of my own. Dwight-well, yes, we are indeed close.”
“I get the impression that Dwight might be more comfortable speaking with our host, Alex Buckley, if he has an old friend like you around.” What she meant was that Hathaway would present far better on television than the unpolished Dwight Cook. “Is it possible you could join us for filming in Los Angeles? The current plan is to locate a house somewhere near the university.”
“Absolutely,” he said. “Whatever you need.”
Keith Ratner’s accusation of a professional rivalry between Susan and Dwight seemed far-fetched when first offered. Now both Dwight and Professor Hathaway had debunked it. Laurie would confirm with Rosemary and Nicole that Susan had never had run-ins with Dwight, because it was essential that she follow every possible lead.
But every fiber of Laurie’s being told her that the real answers to Susan’s death could only be found in Los Angeles.
30
Dwight was alone again in his office once Hathaway offered to escort the TV people out of their maze of a building.
He could tell from the look Hathaway gave him as he walked out that he wasn’t pleased with the producer’s questions about REACH, but at least they hadn’t wandered into thorny territory. The notion that Susan had anything to do with the technology was completely off base.
Still, he wished he could rewind the clock and start the morning over again. He planned to bring up the subject of Laurie’s late husband as a way to make his contact with her more personal. But the overture had gone over like a ton of bricks. When Dwight and Hathaway first started meeting with venture capitalists, Hathaway had told him, You’re just so blunt! I’m talking blunt like a ten-pound mallet. That’s fine when you’re talking to me, but when it comes to money, you’ve got to learn some nuance.
Their relationship was blunt by design. Dwight’s mind wandered to that Friday night of his sophomore year when Hathaway had stumbled upon him in the lab, catching Dwight hacking into the registrar’s office’s database. Though he wasn’t cheating or changing grades, Dwight wanted to prove to himself that he could slip through the virtual walls of his own university. It was illegal, and a violation of the school’s code of conduct, plus Dwight had been stupid enough to do it on the computer lab’s equipment, which the university often monitored. Hathaway said he believed that Dwight had no ill motives and would defend him to the university, but he felt obligated to notify the administration to protect his own lab.
Dwight was so upset about disappointing his mentor that he came to the lab late the following night, intending to clean out his workstation and leave a letter of resignation. Instead of finding the lab empty, Dwight found a female student he recognized from the Intro to Computer Science class for which he was a teaching assistant. She was leaving Hathaway’s office. Dwight couldn’t help but think of the campus whispers about the most “crush-worthy” teacher.
He might have slipped out of the lab, resigning as intended, if the soles of his tennis shoes hadn’t squeaked against the tile floors. Hathaway emerged from his office and explained that he saw no reason to report Dwight’s hacking to the university after all. The administration would only blow the activities out of proportion, failing to understand the natural curiosity of someone with Dwight’s blossoming talents. He forced Dwight to promise, however, that he would channel those skills into legitimate work-the kind that could earn a young man a fortune in Silicon Valley.
That conversation eventually gave rise to a strange kind of friendship. The student-teacher, mentor-mentee relationship became more peer-to-peer, marked by utter mutual honesty. Hathaway was the first adult to ever treat Dwight like a real person, not like a broken child who needed to be fixed or isolated. In return, Dwight accepted Hathaway, even if he was a little shady. How else would REACH have ever started if he and Hathaway had not trusted each other completely?
If only Dwight had Hathaway’s knack for schmoozing. Maybe he could have mentioned Laurie’s husband without sticking his foot in his mouth. He hoped he hadn’t offended her so much that she would cut him from the production.
Once everyone was gathered in Los Angeles, all he’d need was a few seconds of access to each person’s cell phone, and all their texts, e-mails, and phone calls would be downloaded automatically to Dwight’s computer. The problem was, he didn’t know whether they’d all show up for filming at once or if their appointments would be back-to-back.