Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. Vol. 101, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 610 & 611, March 1993

They puzzled over the event for perhaps fifteen minutes before Kim called Richard, relying on him to alert the appropriate experts. They came immediately, a tall woman with flying straight hair and her companion whose thick glasses seemed to have become part of his face. They picked around among the debris, eyes bright with interest. This was something new to them as well.

“Computers don’t blow up,” the girl said.

“There had to be a bomb.” Behind the thick lenses her companion’s eyes widened.

“When did you last use the machine?”

“I printed out some disks.”

“Any sign of them?”

They were in the plastic box that had bounced off the far wall and landed on her bed. She opened it and showed them the five disks it contained.

“Five!” she exclaimed. “There are only five.”

“Only?”

She showed them the three copies she had made, and two of the disks she had been given by Janet Layton. And then she remembered.

“I left the third in the drive.”

“Can a computer disk be a bomb?” Emtee Dempsey asked.

Her question brought amused smiles to the two experts. The girl said, “Anything can be a bomb.”

“Michael Layton delivered his second bomb,” Emtee Dempsey said. “Posthumously.”

“Janet Layton gave them to me,” Kim reminded her.

“Yes. Yes, she did.”

Richard came and kept them up until three going over what had happened. Kim let Emtee Dempsey tell the story she herself had heard from Janet Layton. She went over in her mind the conversation she had had with Janet at the Layton home and then what she had said at Northwestern that afternoon. If Janet had told her the truth, the disks she had given Kim were copies of those her brother made, rather than his originals. If one of those disks had been made into a bomb, it had to have been by Janet. But why?

“I’ll ask her why. And I don’t intend to wait for daylight either.”

The next time Kim saw Janet Layton was under police auspices. The violet eyes widened when Kim came in.

“Oh.”

“I’m alive.”

“Thank God.”

She rose and reached a hand across the table. Mastering her aversion, Kim took the hand. Janet turned to Richard.

“Why didn’t you tell me she was unharmed?”

“I don’t talk to people who don’t talk to me.”

Janet talked now. What she had told Kim was true as far as it went; well, almost. She had not, years ago, made copies of the disks her brother asked her to bring, but everything else had happened as she had said.

“Regina told me to tell you what I did.”

“Regina Fastnekker!”

Janet nodded. “After Michael’s death, she called me. She asked me if I remembered delivering some computer disks to Michael long ago. Of course I did. She said she had them and felt they might help solve the mystery of Michael’s death. She asked if I would pass them on to you with just the message I gave you. You could decide, or Sister Mary Teresa could decide, what to do with them.”

Richard made a face. “She knew she could rely on the nosiness of you know who.”

But he was on his feet and heading out of the room. “I’m going to let you go,” he said to Janet.

“Come with me,” Kim said. There was no substitute for Emtee Dempsey’s hearing this story from Janet herself.

But the old nun merely nodded impatiently as Janet spoke. Her interest was entirely in Regina Fastnekker. Katherine, having heard of the second explosion on Walton Street, hurried over, but Janet stayed on, far from being the center of attention. Katherine was almost triumphant when she heard the news that the supposedly converted Regina Fastnekker had used Janet to deliver a second bomb to Walton Street.

“The brazen thing,” she fumed, a grim smile on her face.

“You think she blew up our car?”

“Of course. Your car, Michael Layton, and very nearly Sister Kimberly. Oh, I never believe these stories of radical conversion. People just don’t change character that easily.”

“She denied it, Katherine.”

“It’s part of her new persona. But the gall of the woman, to use the same pattern she always used before.”

“As if she were drawing attention to herself.”

“More insolence,” Katherine said.

Regina Fastnekker denied quite calmly through hours of interrogation that she had killed anybody. Richard, when he brought this news to Walton Street, regarded it as just what one would expect.

“But she does talk to you?”

“Talk?” He shook his head. “She goes on and on, like a TV preacher. How she has promised the Lord to tell the truth and that is what she is doing.”

“I suppose you have gone over the place where Regina lives?”

Richard nodded. “Nothing.”

“And this does not shake your confidence that she is responsible for these bombings?”

“You know what I think? I think she sat in prison all those years and planned this down to the minute. But she wasn’t going to risk being sent to prison again. She would do it and do it in a way that I would know she had done it and yet would not be able to prove she had.”

“Can you?”

“We will. We will.”