Tricky Twenty-Two (Stephanie Plum 22)

“Where’s Lula?” Julie asked.

“She’s waiting in the car. I thought you might not want to talk in front of her.”

“Thank you,” Julie said. “This is difficult.”

“I get the part about feeling the deck is stacked against you on the assault charge,” I said to Gobbles. “But there’s more, right?”

“There’s more,” Gobbles said, “but it’s all in bits and missing pieces.”

“Start with Professor Pooka,” I said. “How long has he been the Zeta advisor?”

“Not long. No one wanted to be our faculty advisor, and Pooka pulled the short straw. He was appointed by Dean Mintner.”

“When did this happen?” I asked him.

“The end of the spring semester. We were on probation and our faculty advisor quit.”

“And why does Mintner hate Zeta?”

“Have you seen the movie Animal House?”

“Yep.”

“Well, we’re pretty much patterned after that. It’s like all the nuts and misfits rolled downhill and ended up in Zeta.”

“Okay, I have enough background. Tell me about the real problem.”

“When we came back to school this year we decided to do something cool for homecoming. I had the idea to shoot off fireworks, and someone said they should be special and reflect the unique qualities of Zeta. So we decided to make them smell like a fart. Stink-bomb fireworks.”

I was starting to understand Mintner’s problem with Zeta.

“The thing is we couldn’t find the exact fireworks we were looking for, and we didn’t have a lot of money, so we decided to build our own. It’s not like they’re complicated. All fireworks have the same basic components. Aaron Becker and I took the project over and started to built some prototypes. Everything went great in the beginning, but we couldn’t get enough lift when we added the stink bomb. Pooka wasn’t just the Zeta advisor, he was also my faculty advisor, so I asked him for help. His area of expertise is biology, but I knew he built rockets as a hobby. I thought he’d be able to steer us toward a better bursting charge.”

“Is it legal to build your own fireworks like that?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it. Anyway, Pooka saw what we were doing and got really excited. He was all on board. He knew how to make the fireworks a lot bigger. And he found a source for a better stink bomb container. It’s not like you can put a stink bomb in any old thing. Problem was he took over. He had a special lock put on the cellar door, and Becker, Pooka, and I were the only ones with keys. He said he wanted the fireworks to be a surprise. The thing is, it started out as a fun project and before we knew it Becker and I had a top-secret chore on our hands. We had to do test runs in the middle of the night to make sure everything would work right. We couldn’t let any of the other brothers in to take a look. And then Pooka changed out the locks a second time, and Becker and I didn’t get keys.”

“Why did you let him get away with that?”

“I didn’t care about locks and fireworks. It was after I got arrested, and I was scared I was going to jail. And that was when Becker disappeared.”

“Tell her more about Becker,” Julie said.

“Becker didn’t have the jail problems I had, and he didn’t like that he didn’t have keys to the cellar,” Gobbles said. “He was imagining all sorts of horrible things happening down there. Everything from white slavery to illegal immigrants to radioactive rats.”

“What did you think was going on?” I asked Gobbles.

“I wasn’t sure anything was going on. What I saw was that Pooka was losing it. I thought something had happened that sent him over the edge, and he was getting increasingly paranoid. I told Becker to get out of Pooka’s space and let him calm down, but Becker was on a mission to get a key.”

“Did he get one?”

“I don’t know. He’s gone. The locks were changed in the morning and Becker disappeared that night. He sent me a text message saying he had to get away for a while, and that was the last I heard. He hasn’t answered any of my texts or calls.”

“Did you go to the police?”

“I called Becker at home and talked to his parents. They said I shouldn’t worry, that he’d called them and said he was on a field trip, doing research.”

“You don’t believe it?”