Death of the Ayn Rand Scholar by Gray Cavender (classic literature list txt) 📕

Eventually, the bus was through the intersection. Paying attention to her surroundings now—Geneva was still several blocks away—she noticed that the water main construction was still underway. She wondered if they would ever finish this project. Even though it was getting late in the afternoon, the construction crew was still at it.

Between Cairo and Del Rio, the bus passed close by two workers. One worker was on the street and he was handing something to his partner down in the trench. The trench guy, who was standing almost chest high in there, had to reach up for the object, which looked like some kind of a big wrench.

And in that instant, with those construction workers now frozen in time, Jillian literally sucked in a breath and held it…and she knew. Maybe there was no Indiana Jones soundtrack with John Williams’ trumpets to herald it, but this was her ‘ah ha’ moment. The pieces, most of them anyway, had come together. She knew. SHE KNEW!

She could barely wait for the bus to stop near her condo. She didn’t want to say anything in the bus in front of the other passengers, but she was dialing even as she exited. Instead of walking to her condo, she went directly to her car. Before backing out of her parking space, she called Wes.

When he didn’t pick-up, she waited for his voice mail, then said, ”Wes, I’m home but driving back to ASU PD. Now! I’ll head immediately over to the BAC Building. It’s Professor Roberts, Wes. He killed Professor Siemens. In her BAC office. And I think he moved her body across campus IN THE TUNNELS! I’ll call for back-up.”

As she pulled out of her parking lot and headed toward ASU PD, Jillian thought of Wes’ story about the tunnels. He said it had been when Barak Obama had visited. Someone—did Wes say it was the Secret Service, she didn’t remember—had wanted to station police officers down there, and then seal them off…for security reasons. Fortunately, people from the cable company had warned against that. They were down in the tunnels a lot, and knew that if they were closed-off, you’d have to have respirators or breathing the asbestos in that enclosed space would be fatal.

What had most amazed Jillian about the tunnels is that, until she started the job at ASU PD, she’d never heard of them. She’d gotten two degrees from ASU, had crisscrossed the campus a zillion times, and never knew about the elaborate network of tunnels beneath her. Like most students, it never occurred to her to wonder why there were no telephone wires strung overhead like everywhere else in Tempe.

The original tunnels had been constructed 80 some-odd years ago. They’d been expanded over the years as ASU grew and as new communication technologies came along. All of ASU’s pipes (water, heating, cooling) and wires and com technology were underground…ten, sometimes fifteen feet underground.

She learned about the tunnels not long after she started working at ASU PD, and got the tour that was standard operating procedure for new officers. She descended with a couple of other rookies one day during her first month at ASU PD, led by an ASU Facilities Management supervisor. They entered just outside Hayden Library. Jillian again shook her head in amazement: she’d stood a few feet from that entrance no telling how many times because it was near the MU and Wilson Hall, and had never noticed it.

Jillian and the other two rookies followed the supervisor down the ladder into the tunnels. At the bottom, she saw that this wing—it started about five feet from the ladder—was secured by a locked gate…with bars that she could see through it. The supervisor had a key. He told them that there were motion sensors as well, but he’d called ahead and they had been de-activated in their sector and in the others that they would visit that day.

The tunnel was wide and with a fairly high ceiling…all but the tallest of them could stand upright and they could also easily walk through two abreast. In other sectors, the tunnels were even larger; in others, sometimes smaller. Although there was fluorescent lighting, it was weird down there...very claustrophobic. There were pipes everywhere. Jillian remembered asbestos warning signs and also that at some ‘intersections’ there were directions posted on the concrete walls for getting to other sectors. The supervisor said there were almost five miles of tunnels, and that you could traverse most of the ASU campus underground.

That day, they’d also entered at two other entrances as a part of their tour. As best Jillian could remember, there were 50+ entrances to the tunnels, some outside, some in the basements of buildings. Probably the patrol officers would know how many and where they were since they had to patrol them, at least topside.

She remembered that one rookie had asked if the tunnels were ever breached. The supervisor said “yes,” but only rarely. He’d said there were stories about frat initiations that involved breaking in, shoving pledges down there, and having them find their way out to some designated space…maybe an entrance in the basement of a campus building. The supervisor said that this was a dangerous prank because of the asbestos. If workers were down in the tunnels for very long, they wore respirators. That’s what Wes had said, too.

And, that was the reason why a large-scale asbestos abatement project was now underway. Workers were in the tunnels daily and had been for several weeks. That’s why there were all those barriers topside across campus.

For the project, the monitoring sensors were turned off and the gates were unlocked to allow the crews easy access throughout the underground maze. There were crews working all across the campus.

But in the midst of this project, something unforeseen had happened: the tunnels had caved-in at several places on campus. Jillian thought she’d read in an update that there were two