A Function of Murder (22 page)

“Hi, Elysse,” I said, as calmly as I could.

“I think we ought to meet, don’t you, Professor? I mean, sometimes it’s hard to express
yourself by emails.”

I almost jumped in with
Yourself or myself
? But, no, I’d better think before saying anything sarcastic out loud. What if she
was recording the call for future use in a deposition? Or for posting on YouTube?

“When would be good for you?” I asked. Safe enough.

“I’m going to be on campus tomorrow morning. I could meet you in your office.”

I had no plans for tomorrow other than to, possibly, attend the service for Mayor
Graves. I could make it easy for Elysse, or I could make it difficult.

I chose something in between. “I can meet you at eight thirty,” I said. Matter-of-fact,
not snarky, but fully aware of the sleeping habits of most students, recently graduated
or not.

“That’s kind of early.”

I didn’t hear a question, so I didn’t respond. This was not the Professor Sophie Knowles
I was proud of, letting someone stew, especially a student. Power corrupts? I hated
to think it was true.

Elysse blinked first, after a heavy sigh. “Okay, I guess I can do that.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” I said.

“So, are we good, Professor Knowles?”

I took a breath. “I’ll see you in my office tomorrow, Elysse.”

I thought of taking the leftover donuts to the meeting, but that would have been cruel
and unusual.

I hoped by tomorrow morning, I’d have lost this attitude and would be ready to be
“good” with Elysse.

What should have been a twenty-minute drive from Zeeman to my home was taking twice
as long as traffic wisely slowed down during heavy spurts.

I’d gotten off track with my suspect list. And I’d forgotten to look for food. At
times like this, I missed Ariana. Her approach to problem solving was decidedly not
logical, which was not to say illogical. How her perspective aided me in my analytical
approach didn’t exactly compute, but it worked every time.
What would Ariana do?
I asked myself.

She’d wisely tell me I was doing too much thinking-while-driving, especially in the
rain. I took some relaxing breaths and a swig from my water bottle. I fished in my
purse on the passenger seat and found a chocolate ball. Since it was wrapped in red
foil, I figured it was from Valentine’s Day. Only three months old. It would do.

A little stale, the candy still worked its magic and my mind was ready to shift back
into gear, in harmony with
the world. Ariana would have been proud of me, making do, without the benefit of hot
tea. I acknowledged the reaction I was having to what was undoubtedly the nastiest
graduation weekend I’d ever experienced. Could it have been only two days ago? I couldn’t
remember a single incident in the past when students, like Nicole Johnson and Jeanne
Flowers, had openly dissed the commencement speaker, our own mayor, no less, at what
was supposed to be a party in their honor. Had either of them been unhappy enough
to stab him? It was hard to picture.

It wasn’t hard to envision Nicole Johnson’s father, Nicholas, in a heightened state
of anger, however. I tapped the wheel with three fingers, one for each suspect, but
had to withdraw the last one as I recalled again the sight of Mr. Johnson driving
off with his family. He couldn’t have been near the campus at the time of the murder,
unless he traveled faster than light. I wondered if that would even do it. I’d have
to ask a physics prof.

I was left still with Richardson and Collins.

I got sidetracked, not for the first time, wondering if Collins had gone into Franklin
Hall looking not specifically for the mayor, but for what Graves left in my office.
Maybe Collins picked the lock and retrieved whatever Graves had put in there, when
Woody was out of sight. No wonder I couldn’t find it.

I sat at another light and watched the windshield wipers do their orderly thing, back
and forth. I wanted to reach out and stop them, freeze them in one spot. My usual
method of rearranging a headful of scattered thoughts and facts wasn’t working as
well as it should have. Still, I had to continue to get all my—emphasis on
my
—suspects in one virtual room. I needed a Starbucks; if I was lucky, one that carried
their special dark chocolate–covered grahams. Starbucks were everywhere except when
you were in desperate need of a mocha and fresh chocolate. Independents
were more difficult to spot, but I kept my eye out for a large neon outline of a coffee
cup or a clever name like the Coffee Filter.

I pushed on, leaving the expressway for city streets.

The bouncy Sizemore sibs showed up in the lineup of my puzzled mind. I could see why
Monty and Mayor Graves were at odds if there had been conflict of interest while they
did business together.

I remembered when Monty had just been hired into the adjunct faculty and was trying
like crazy to make his mark as a person of importance. He’d made a big deal of the
fact that his management consulting company had landed a contract with the city’s
public works department. He and his colleagues had undertaken a major project: assessing
and evaluating Henley’s infrastructure. I’d listened as Monty took over an informal
gathering at lunch, boasting about his ideas for improving road and sidewalk maintenance,
outsourcing the waste management function, meeting with union reps, and, in general,
being the best thing that had ever happened, not only to Henley College, but to the
city of Henley as well. When the news came out that the mayor had terminated their
agreement, Monty was silent. It was hard to believe that, according to Kira, it was
our trash that had proven his downfall.

Was it because Monty had a reasonable motive for murder that I listed him as suspect
number three, after Richardson and Collins, or was I acting simply out of vengeance,
because he and his sister had sided with Elysse and her Facebook Friends instead of
with me, their colleague? Maybe that was also enough to make Chris suspect number
four. Why not? I needed a female on the list, and Chris had, after all, reacted out
of proportion to the stakes during the vote on whether the mayor would be our speaker.

I recognized a hulking shortcoming in my method of lining up suspects. Unlike the
procedure the Henley PD
was tasked to follow, mine focused merely on motive. I’d been neglecting to factor
in means and opportunity, which would have taken real police work.

But I doubted even the police would fare well in trying to investigate the means,
a simple letter opener, unless they’d found a unique set of fingerprints on the handle.
The Henley College letter opener was ubiquitous, in offices throughout the campus
and somewhere in the homes of its twenty thousand or so alumnae. Or in the city of
Henley landfill, into which they might have been unceremoniously tossed. There was
no record or serial number on the letter openers as there would have been for a gun.
No lot number or license application. No way of tracking chain of custody. The killer
was either brilliant in choosing such a weapon, or incredibly lucky to be standing
near it when he or she needed it.

As for opportunity, I could set myself up with a clipboard and some good walking shoes
and find out who had been on campus at the time the mayor had come stumbling toward
the fountain—toward me, actually—at ten fifteen on Saturday night.

At one time, even pedestrians had to log in after dark to enter a campus gate. Like
overall national security in the last ten years, security on the Henley campus had
gotten tighter and more sophisticated. The question was whether our system of cameras
did as good a job as the old method of posting a guard at every entrance. If we’d
gone with the lowest bidder on the cameras, maybe not. In any case, I was sure that,
after the events of this past weekend, a high-level meeting of the college administrators
and trustees was planned—or had already been held—to evaluate our entire security
system. And to decide on a new present for our graduates.

I imagined the police had already looked at footage from Saturday evening. I wished
I’d thought to ask Virgil about it at Sunday morning’s donut feast. I doubted he’d
have been any more forthcoming about being hunched over
a set of monitors all night than he’d been about anything else regarding the case.

Too bad my old friend, Charlie, in the campus security office, had retired. I figured
it wouldn’t work to query the new guy while introducing myself to him for the first
time. One more dead end among many.

I was fairly convinced that if means and opportunity had already been easily determined
by either a clear set of prints on the letter opener or a sharp image of the stabbing
on a security monitor, the killer would have been apprehended and we’d all know about
it.

Clearly, I was on the right track by focusing on motive. It was such a heady thought
that I wondered why I’d never considered entering the police academy.

Rring, rring. Rring, rring.

This time, I welcomed a distraction and clicked on without hesitation.

“Sophie? Fran here.” Whew, someone on my Favorites list. “Where are you?” she asked.

“Driving back from Zeeman in the pouring rain. You sound excited.”

“I’ll bet you haven’t heard.”

“These days, you can count on that.”

“They’ve arrested someone from the campus.”

No wonder phone calls were discouraged while driving. It was all I could do to keep
in my lane and not drift into a parked car. “Who?” I asked, gripping the wheel. “Who
was arrested?”

“I don’t know.”

“Are you trying to cause an accident?”

“Sorry to get your hopes up. And I didn’t realize you were driving or I’d have waited.”

“No, you wouldn’t have.”

“Of course not. Courtney called me.”

“Courtney, the dean’s secretary? Courtney, the junior chem major? Or Courtney—”

“The dean’s Courtney,” Fran interrupted. “So, very decent cred.”

Courtney Dixon was a good buddy to Fran and me, keeping us tuned to the pulse of the
campus and the whims of the academic dean, briefing us ahead of time about the agenda
when we were summoned to her boss’s office. A young woman with the reddest curly locks
I’d ever seen in person, Courtney had the level head and calm manner of an old woman
with gray hair wrapped in a bun. Her cred was the best, as Fran said.

“I’m listening,” I said to Fran.

“Courtney tried to reach you, by the way, but couldn’t get through. I figured you
had your phone off during class.”

The rain was heavy and I needed to concentrate on driving or on Fran. I chose Fran
and pulled over at the next strip mall. I sat facing a chain shoe store and wondered
what it would be like to be a clerk there and have no homework, no students to worry
about.
The grass is always greener.
I wondered why Margaret’s sayings were so much on my mind lately. Maybe because she’d
always seemed to have the answers.

“Tell me everything,” I said.

“There’s not that much to tell yet. Courtney was in the student union building going
over some things with the construction crew for the remodel of the gym. You know,
the girls have been complaining about the showers and the crappy lockers for the past
hundred years; the boys are here one year, put in a complaint, and voilà, we fix the
problem.”

“What else is new?” I asked. I knew Fran would take it as I’d intended, a rhetorical
question with many levels of meaning.

“Courtney happened to see a cop car out the window over by Admin. She waited a couple
of minutes, then saw them come out of the building taking someone with them in the
car. She was kicking herself for not being in her office, where she’d have been up
close and personal to the action.”

“Did she see handcuffs?”

“I don’t know. Why?” Fran asked.

“They could have just been taking someone in for questioning.”

“I love knowing someone with insider information on police procedure,” Fran said.
“I’ve been dying to talk to you. No one’s around campus today, except a few people
upstairs in Franklin. Either people are gone or they don’t have a clue about the pickup.”

“Lucky humanities types don’t have labs to clean up and equipment to put away.”

Not that Fran and I had much more than plotters and calculators to worry about. We
did have assorted boxes of manipulables for our teacher training seminar, but nothing
like the overwhelming number of pieces of glassware, magnets, and specimens on the
floors above us in Franklin.

“Wouldn’t it be great to have this ordeal over with, so we can stop worrying about
our majors?”

I knew Fran meant Kira most of all. She was as concerned as I was about Kira’s current
state and what may or may not have been going on between her and the mayor and what
it may or may not have led to. I’d told Fran about the one-way emails I’d seen, swearing
her to secrecy. I knew we both had Kira’s best interests at heart, and I needed all
the help I could get to figure out what had been going on around me all semester.