"I do not. There's some superstition about violent deaths and strong emotions, but it's rare enough that I doubt that's real. We find them with magic: that's the spell I mentioned, it points out vampires within a quarter-mile or so. As far as I know it doesn't see the deaths that create them."

James is still here and is looking queasy. Shirley stayed outside.

"And a lot of the detective work that would help find out would interfere with keeping everything secret."

She sighs. It would, in some ways, be very convenient if Theodore was lying to keep all the interesting thing for himself, but her best guess is that he isn't.

"What sort of structure do you have going on, are you a corporation with NDAs or something more informal? Oh, and we should make a plan for retaining access to this room after the conference ends."

"Pretty informal, there aren't enough of us for a system. Mostly it's families who police their own. Though if this thing isn't unique... I'm not sure how well we're going to manage it."

Now that he thinks about it, sousveillance would be a problem soon, too, even without these magic doors. Crap.

"Do you know what fraction of people can get this room without knowing it's here, or whether it'll disappear if nobody's in it for a while? We could just keep it shut and, uh, sneak in at night sometimes."

"Absolutely no clue. I have not heard of supernatural doors as a thing, before today. Like I said, I'm curious. At most the cost is getting a hotel room here any day we want to check back, which is within reach if I get some help. I'm just a legal clerk but one of the junior partners is in the know and a good friend."

"I live in Boston, and this is clearly the sort of thing worth dropping out of school and moving for if necessary, but if I don't have any brilliant labor-intensive ideas by the end of the conference I would prefer a solution where I just took the train up sometimes."

"I mainly meant that a room at this hotel gives an excuse to be wandering in this part of the building whenever. Well, presumably."

"Yeah. One day at a time as we come up with ideas and to make sure it's still there, and just, keep doing what we were doing in the meantime." It really feels like discovering magic should be more disruptive than that, but honestly this is kind of crummy magic so it's not that surprising.

"That makes sense. Though, I'm thinking a bit about this and getting concerned. I happened to notice this time, but probably there are other magic doors somewhere far off and unnoticed, and if that's true, us secret-keepers are going to have to break the veil in a planned way to avoid the 'half-informed idiots committing suicide' problem. Which... well, I suspect that will be keeping me busy for a while."

"Yeah, if this happened once it can happen again, and everyone has cameras and the ability to talk to the whole world at once. Any way I can help with the reveal?"

"Investigating it while still looking like sober reasonable scientists... probably helps. I'll probably come up with something more later, we should all exchange contact information."

"...The detection spell has a variant for detecting any magic happening, which is how I saw this. And we can teach it to you, but probably I won't, I'm not a very careful teacher."

She is a sober, reasonable scientist, to the extent that humans at her own degree of rationality can be called reasonable generally, unless she's hallucinating and just got called out by her own hallucination. She takes a stab at waking up just in case; no dice. "A magic-detection spell is the sort of thing I would be tempted to overuse, so even though I really want to learn it eventually I'm not in a hurry. And yes, we should definitely exchange contact information." She sets about doing this.

"Oh, hey, what happens if someone remote-controls a robot to do a spell in another building? Does it lock onto the mental component and blow them up anyway?"

"...Huh. The mental part is the most critical, and also there are mental side effects - spells hurt, though successes don't do lasting damage - so I'd expect it to affect the person, or else not work at all. But I don't think it's been tried. Something else to test... but definitely under an NDA."

And then they investigated it, with lots of difficult legal wrangling that would be boring to read about.