I staked out a carrel at the library, set up my tape machine and lap-top computer and started looking at Ledbetter’s files. It was like looking into a disciplined mind. His files were written in WordPerfect and were assigned by alphabetized category. "Mxxxxxxx.xxx" were manuscripts, "LTxxxxxx.xxx" were letters, "N" for notes, "G" for grant proposals, etc.

     The manuscripts had lots of experimental detail on selectins. His patent files, labelled "PT-xxxx", were more interesting. In fact, one file labelled "PT-SEL-E" had the complete text of the European application that I’d worked so hard to get.

     I spent the whole afternoon playing the tape into my hard drive and scanning files. Around 6:30 I packed my gear into my locker, dropped the film at the drugstore and went to Rebecca’s. When I walked in the door, she asked politely why I was unshaven. I made up a white lie about doing an all-nighter in the lab. She fixed me a nice dinner. I fell asleep in her bed around 9:00. The next morning, with classes to attend, I made little progress on the project. Suddenly, it was Friday evening and time to go to a movie. I was too preoccupied to enjoy it.

     Saturday morning I was once again in the library. I started a file called "CATALOG" and classified each of his files as I read through them. Classification was tricky because he had a lot of duplication with his backup diskettes, and I didn’t dare neglect anything.

     His "I-xxxx" files, containing his ideas, were most interesting. He was very systematic with these, too, dating them and cross-referencing everything. Starting about three years ago, he listed the different proteins and biologicals which he would bind to his selectins. He abbreviated the selectins with "Sel." His file "I-SEL-P" had all the useful proteins, together with their prices and cost per human treatment calculations. The calculations were quite similar to my calculations on Ashton’s toxins, except that none of the proteins were toxins. They were all diagnostics, or proteins like insulin and human growth factor. Another file "I-SEL-C" had listings and references to all the known microencapsulation systems, patented and common domain. But no toxins.

     A series of diary files, designated "DIA-xxx", looked promising. "DIA-COMM" recorded his daily commercial transactions, "DIA-SCI" logged his scientific transactions and "DIA-PT" was for his patenting projects. The diary entries had a formatted date supplied by the computer followed by abbreviated notes that were almost in code:

     After studying this for 10 minutes, I managed to translate it as: Evaluating a mouse experiment in which he had forced down the mouse’s throat 24 hours earlier a preparation containing albumin (alb) which was labelled with radioactive iodine (135-I) and chemically coupled to a lymphocyte selectin (L-sel).

     The remainder of the note said that the coupled albumin went from gut to bloodstream in about five hours. It took another five hours to get to the tissues, in which it was "incompletely distributed." He gave the mouse carcass to his assistant Dong Chiu (DC) to cut into thin baloney slices and lay on top of photographic film to get a cross-sectional picture of which organs picked up the radioactive albumin.

     But albumin was just a blood plasma protein — nothing lethal like a toxin. I practiced deciphering more entries and became skilled at reading his shorthand. Cataloging his files kept me busy well into the evening.

     Early Sunday morning, I was back in the library. The "LT-DEPT" file contained a collection of nasty memos from Ledbetter to Cooper, describing everything I’d already learned from McGregor, and more. Dr. Ledbetter wrote a litany of accusations against Cooper — accusations of lack of interest in the departmental intellectual life; of fostering cronyism; of misadvising graduate students; of neglecting pharmacology as a discipline; of replacing senior faculty with junior faculty for important departmental functions; of interfering with mentor/student relationships; and of instructing his departmental administrator to give Ledbetter slow service on accounting for his grants.

     Ledbetter’s accusations got nastier and nastier from one letter to the next, and he began sending copies to the Dean of the Medical School and the President of the University. He accused Cooper of squandering departmental money to pay his collaborators in other institutions, which was tantamount to buying publications. But even so, Cooper had fewer publications than Ledbetter. Ledbetter had medically relevant projects. Cooper published only on medically irrelevant barnacle experiments. I could almost feel the white-hot hatred.

     Yes, Ledbetter wanted Cooper dead. Yet, for all his fury, Ledbetter’s memos were still written in elegantly worded prose, with a steady flow of logic that worked like a geometrical proof, leading to one final inescapable conclusion: Cooper had to go. All I needed was an equally logically constructed murder plan.

     Next, I scrutinized Ledbetter’s commercial files which listed all the materials that came in and left in those Styrofoam boxes and how he microencapsulated them. The formulations were encoded by date, and sometimes there were notes to himself listing the notebook pages where his assistant had made entries.

     Ledbetter had one series of notebooks for formulations and another series for experiments. He was very meticulous in his note-keeping, although I did find one computer glitch where the whole text of a letter to a commercial supplier was deleted and something in German was in its place.

     It was all too interesting, and there was too much of it. I wasn’t a late-21st Century historian of science looking back on the brilliant Dr. Ledbetter. I was an amateur detective, working against the clock, with less than three weeks to get the answer and save Westley. And there were classes and exams to worry about.

     I was overwhelmed. The more I pored over Ledbetter’s files, the more I panicked. Damn! It was the equivalent of reading the Harvard Classics, a five-foot shelf of books. I worked well into Sunday evening without success.

     The next morning, I told Grant Shipley I was sick and asked him to take notes for me in my courses. Sitting at my carrel, I realized that I’d already covered 85 percent of the most promising stuff. Like a drowning swimmer pulled from shore in a riptide, I felt my strength failing. It was like that time in my freshman year at Swarthmore when I’d foolishly gone out drinking during the first three days of the exam week and tried to do an all-night cram for organic chemistry.

     What if Ledbetter had recorded his best stuff on the backs of envelopes and had burned them in an ashtray? My handwriting analysis showed he was secretive. Why would he trust his secrets to a computer?

     Now came stomach cramps — a psychosomatic reaction, no doubt, but very real. I skipped lunch, half out of fear that someone would see me walking to the hamburger joint and partially out of fear that I was wasting valuable time. By 2:00 in the afternoon, I had finished 100 percent of the best stuff and still had nothing. So I started working on the unlikely files: the personal letters, his collection of memorable quotes, his address file and various junk files of about 4,000 bytes.

     Ledbetter was not completely orderly. He left a lot of abstracts and short summaries scattered around, unconsolidated. There were also many little projects that didn’t get finished. I started going though his directory from A to Z, reviewing these. I didn’t find anything until I got to V. Here I came across a curious file named "VERGELTU". If it was some sort of a gel, then what did the prefix, ver, and the suffix, tu, mean? Or was it the verge of ltu? The contents of this file were the quintessence of his cryptic note-taking. Skimming quickly I saw this had to do with a "canine subj." This was interesting, because usually he never worked on anything larger than a rabbit. Reading on, I came across the words "cyanotic" and "tox." This sparked my interest, and I went back and read it carefully:

     I wondered if this could have been a dry run for the poisoning of Cooper. I read on:

     This just had to be important. What were those chemicals he used 200 and 100 milligrams of? I felt a surge of adrenaline. I was on the verge of cracking this nut! I remembered what old Grant Johnson had told us he did when he made a discovery: "The bigger the ‘discovery’, the slower and more cautiously I go. I take a deep breath and try to calm down. If my reasoning is right, the fucking experiment will repeat. If my reasoning is wrong, the experiment may not repeat or I might be somewhere out in left field."

     If I could just figure out what company made KN25, E7532 and Oregon #35! I selected the general "find" command in WordPerfect and punched in E7532. I waited 30 minutes, and the computer didn’t find anything. I tried the same thing with KN25, waited another 30 minutes, and also got nothing.

     My brain was too tired to consider anything but brute force. I selected the general "find" command and punched in "Oregon." The computer started to compile the names of the files which contained the word "Oregon." It was slow going, and the computer was coming up with a lot of files. My psychosomatic symptoms were gone, but I was weak as a kitten.

     I asked a student working behind me to watch out for my computer while I went out to eat. I turned down the screen, partially covered it up, and walked to the hamburger joint. It was 7:00, and I was in need of blood glucose elevation. After wolfing down a hamburger and fries, I was back at the library in less than a half-hour, arriving just as the search came to an end.

     The computer found 115 files containing the word "Oregon." After checking the first two, it became clear what was wrong with my search strategy. Oregon has a lot of scientists. It was always "Eugene, Oregon" followed by a zip code. The university there is apparently quite famous. Since I was looking for an Oregon pharmaceutical company, I tried again, searching for "{Hard return}Oregon." Using this strategy, I narrowed the 115 files down to two files.

     The first file was "I-SEL", Ledbetter’s idea file for selectin applications. It contained a letter to Oregon Biologicals of Gresham Oregon, inquiring about their mast cell stimulator product, #35. He wanted to know the EC50 for histamine release and the LD50 for rats or mice. Since "EC" stands for effective concentration and "LD" stands for lethal dose, he was essentially asking how much of this he would need to kill a man. I jumped out of my chair and took a little walk around the stacks. If I were a hound dog, I would have barked. I’d just crossed Ledbetter’s tracks and had gotten a good sniff. Now, to start tracking him!

     The second file containing "{Hard return}Oregon" was very interesting. I had seen it before. It was addressed to the same company, but the text of the letter consisted of a single sentence written in German. When I saw a day earlier, I thought it was a computer glitch. But now I knew it was substituted purposefully. It read:

     Damn it! Why hadn’t I taken German more seriously back in college? What was Forderung and how did it differ from Förderung? Damn those Umlauts! Downstairs in the reference section, I found a Deutsches Medizinisches Lexikon. I looked up the words while carrying it up the stairs to my carrel. Anforderung meant request. Förderung meant advancement. Sonder meant special.

     So he was requesting from Oregon Biologicals materials "to advance science through special experiments." There was only one way this made sense: His "advancement of science" was killing Cooper, and his "special experiments" were his method of doing it. And he had removed the order information from the letter and had substituted his sarcastic German, to keep it secret. It was all logical and self-consistent. But was it true? Well, the letter was written months before the dog experiment.

     The greasy burger and French fries churned in my stomach. The sugars, amino acids and fatty acids were getting absorbed in my gut, providing nourishment. But at the same time, the greasy fatty acids and their free radical fatty acid derivatives were upsetting my intestinal flora. The detergent/surfactant in the milk shake also did its part. So I had to expend mental energy keeping my GI system under control, as well keeping my mind on track. And my thoughts rattled in my skull like a wild monkey in a cage.