THE CASE OF THE Late-NIGHT WORKER

     Cory Cheeks might have been vice chairman of the SerenityNow! 
Institute, but his day had turned out to be something less than 
serene. To start with, this morning his assistant Jenny had spilled 
black coffee over the back of the roller chair in his newly 
re-decorated office. Then Cory's computer had gone haywire, freezing 
up on him constantly and making him lose hours' worth of work. And 
to top it off, while he was working late trying to finish the overdue 
report, Cory Cheeks was shot three times in the back and killed. 
     The body was discovered by the cleaning woman. When she entered 
his office that night, she thought it was empty. The chair back was 
facing her, a virtual wall of pure beige. Her expert eye quickly saw 
the three tiny blemishes on the fabric, three little, round holes. 
She came closer, rolling the chair away from the computer and toward 
the light. Cory Cheeks's corpse slumped forward, the holes in his 
back matching the bullet holes pumped into the chair. 
     Cory's death shocked his colleagues. "Everyone liked him," his 
assistant Jenny Sparrow sighed the next morning as she watered the 
potted flowers in her cubicle. "If there was going to be a murder 
here, I would have expected..." She left the sentence unfinished, 
piquing the interrogating officer's curiosity. The SerenityNow! 
Institute, it turned out, was a hotbed of seething emotions. 
     Jenny, for example, was having a feud with another administrative 
assistant, Bio Goat. Just the day before, the two of them had 
come to blows, resulting in Jenny's dramatic black eye. And then 
there was Goofy Giuffre, finance director. On the very day of the 
murder, Goofy had loudly threatened to kill Erika Medic, the 
SerenityNow! Institute's chairwoman, the woman who Goofy felt had 
passed him over for a much-deserved raise. 
     Goofy Giuffre seemed genuinely distressed by Cory's death. "He 
was godfather to my son. There's a lot of backbiting in the 
not-for-profit world, but everyone loved Cory." Following this Goofy 
broke down into tears.
     Bio Goat was equally distraught. "Normally, no one works late 
here-- except the chairwoman, Ms. Medic. If only Cory's computer 
hadn't been giving him such problems--" 
     Erika Medic occupied the office right next to the victim's. She 
tried to make light of the Institute's internal squabbling, but she 
was definitely nervous. "Tempers flare in the world of charity. But no 
one means it. It must have been an intruder." The executive rested her 
arm over the top of her chair, as if trying to hide the brown stain 
that poured down the tall chair back. "I mean, if there's even the 
suggestion that someone at the SerenityNow! Institute is a killer, 
that's going to ruin our fund-raising." 
     "Medic knows more than she's saying," the homicide captain 
muttered. "I think I know what happened." 





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