A Killing Spring (23 page)

“What are you going to do?”

She took out a tissue and wiped her eyes. “I thought I’d start by talking to the superintendent of the building where Reed died.” She looked at me hopefully, seeking approval.

I thought of Alma Stringer saying that if shit were luck, she wouldn’t have had a sniff. Finding another middle-aged matron in search of truth on her doorstep wasn’t going to make Alma feel any luckier. I reached out and touched Julie’s hand. “I’ve already talked to the landlady,” I said. “So have the police. I don’t think you’re going to get very far there. But if you think Reed’s death is connected with his work, why don’t you go through his papers?”

She blew her nose. “I can’t go through his papers,” she said. “They’re gone. I went up to the university the morning after I got back. I couldn’t even get into his office. There was a work crew there. They said the office had been vandalized. Apparently, somebody from the School of Journalism tried
to retrieve what they could, but there wasn’t much that was salvageable.”

Julie ran her fingers through her hair in a gesture of frustration. “Everything Reed was working on was at the university. He didn’t believe in bringing work home. He always said if you have to bring work home with you, your job needs redefining or you need retooling.”

“Would the people in his department know that everything he was working on was at the university?”

Julie nodded. “Everybody knew.”

The only association I’d made between the chaos in Kellee Savage’s place on Scarth Street and the scene at the J school had been the fact that both places had been an unholy mess. The vandalism at the university had so obviously been the work of gay-bashers that I hadn’t connected it with what I’d seen in Kellee’s room.

Julie leaned towards me. She was frowning. “You look as if you’re a million miles away,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said, “I guess I was wool-gathering. I’m back now.” But I wasn’t back, not really. I was still in room 6 of the house on Scarth Street, assessing the holes that were appearing in Ed Mariani’s theory that Kellee Savage had been blackmailing Reed Gallagher. The possibility that whoever had wrecked Reed Gallagher’s office had vandalized Kellee’s room on Scarth Street had ceased to be a long shot.

I thought again about Reed’s destroyed papers, and about Kellee’s fortress in Indian Head. Another possibility was beginning to seem less remote; there was a strong chance that the vandalism I’d seen had been a smoke screen thrown up to camouflage two coolly deliberate missions of search and destroy. If that hypothesis were true, there was an adversary out there who was far more deadly than a pack of hate-filled kids.

But who was that adversary? No matter how much I
wanted to turn from the thought, one name kept insinuating itself into my consciousness. From the beginning, Ed Mariani had been front and centre. He had been Reed’s rival for the position of head of the School of Journalism. He had been with Reed the night before he died. Suddenly, there were troubling memories: of Alex, perplexed by the presence of amyl nitrite at Reed’s death scene because amyl nitrite was most often used by gay men; of Ed seeking me out the night of Tom Kelsoe’s book launch; of Ed, Johnny-on-the-spot with a dinner invitation the day I’d been at the J school and seen the vandalism. He’d been there all along, offering explanations, shaping my perception of Reed Gallagher, and, finally, conjuring up the blackmail scenario that I’d seized on with such alacrity.

I’d been wrong about the blackmail. I was convinced of that now. But if I’d been mistaken about the blackmail, it was possible that my perception of other events had been faulty, too. I had to go back to the beginning, try to look at everything afresh. If Julie was right about Reed Gallagher’s sexual style, it was possible that the bizarre sexual scene the police had found when Reed Gallagher died was staged. And if Reed’s death scene were bogus, where was the truth?

When Julie left, I told her to take care of herself, and it wasn’t just a pleasantry. Something was very wrong. Remembering Kellee’s room in the house in Indian Head, I decided Julie wasn’t the only person who needed a reminder about being careful.

Neil McCallum answered the telephone on the first ring, and he sounded so sane and cheerful he seemed like a citizen of another planet. He and Chloe had been for a walk on the prairie, and they’d found crocuses.

“I wish I could see them,” I said.

“You can,” he said. “Just come out here. I’ll show you where they are.”

“It’s not that easy,” I said.

“Sure it is,” he said. “People always make easy things hard. I don’t get it.”

I laughed. “Neither do I. But Neil, I didn’t just call to talk. I wanted to ask you to keep a specially close watch on Kellee’s house. Make sure the front door and the door to her office are always locked.”

“I always do that.” He paused. “Have you heard something bad about Kellee?”

“No,” I said. “I haven’t heard anything. Honestly. But Neil, you’ve got to promise me you’ll be careful. If anyone you don’t know comes around, make sure you’ve got Chloe with you, and don’t tell them how sweet she is. Make them think she means business.”

“Like on
TV,”
he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Like on
TV.”

For a moment, Neil was silent. Then he said, “But this isn’t
TV
, and I’m getting scared.”

That night I couldn’t sleep. I was getting scared, too. For the first time since Alex had gone up north, I wanted him with me not because he was a man I cared about, but because he was a cop and he’d be able to put together the pieces. He had told me once that police investigations involved a lot of what he called mouse work. He’d pointed to the medicine wheel on his wall and talked about the Four Great Ways of Seeking Understanding. One of them was Brother Mouse’s: sniffing things out with his nose, seeing what’s up close, touching what he can with his whiskers. Alex had told me that when a police officer had a treasure trove of facts and information, it was time for him to stop seeing like a mouse and start seeing like an eagle. As I tossed and turned, mulling over my accumulation of fact and theory, only one thing was certain: as far
as insights were concerned, I’d never been more earth-bound in my life.

The next morning when I got to the university I went straight to Physical Plant. The cheerful woman who’d given me the extra key to the office for Ed Mariani was moving a tray of geranium slips in peat pots from a window on the west side of the office to a window on the east.

“Caught me,” she said, and the lilt of her native Jamaica warmed the room. “There’s so much light here, and I want my babies to get a good start. When spring comes, that garden of mine is my life. Now, don’t tell me, let me guess. You lost your extra key.”

“No,” I said. “It’s something else, but, in a way, it’s connected to the key. The man who’s sharing my office now is from the School of Journalism. I wondered if you’d heard how things were shaping up about that vandalism case.”

She looked fondly at her sturdy little geranium plants, then she turned back to me. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to be a Good Samaritan for a couple more weeks,” she said. “The vandals really did a job on that place.”

“Did the police catch them?”

She shook her head. “No. It’s scary too, because it looks like it might have been an inside job. We’ve put a security officer in there all night now and a surveillance camera, but, if you ask me, we’re closing the barn door after the pony’s gone.”

“What makes you think it’s an inside job?”

“Whoever did it had to get through the outside doors somehow, and the lock wasn’t forced. They must have had keys. There were no fingerprints, but that’s hardly a surprise since they used gloves.” She flexed her fingers. “Latex gloves. Ours. The gloves were traced to the Chemistry department, as were the lab coats.”

“Lab coats?”

“To keep the paint off their clothes, I guess. Anyway, we got the gloves and the lab coats back, and the computer they took. It was a Pentium 90 – cost five thousand dollars. And they just pitched it in the garbage bin back of the Owl.”

“When did you find it?”

“Last Friday. It hadn’t been there long. Whoever took it must have decided it was too hot to keep around. Those Pentiums are great little machines. The one in the garbage was still functioning, but the memory on the hard drive had been reformatted.”

“Who would go to all that trouble?”

She chuckled. “Somebody who had big plans, then got cold feet.”

“Do you know who the machine belonged to?”

She went over to her computer, tapped in the serial number, and shook her head sadly. “Reed Gallagher. Well, I guess he won’t be missing it now.”

“No,” I said, “I guess he won’t.”

When I went back to my office, Ed Mariani was there. The sight of him pouring boiling water into our Brown Betty disarmed me. How could I suspect such a gentle and giving man of … of what? I couldn’t even articulate in my own mind what I suspected Ed of doing.

He opened his arms in welcome. “You must have smelled the tea,” he said.

“I guess I did,” I said. I took off my coat, sat down in the student chair, and buried myself in my lecture notes.

“Anything new on Kellee Savage?”

I shook my head. “Nothing significant.”

Ed was watching me carefully. “Joanne, correct me if I’m wrong, but have I overstayed my welcome?”

“I just have to get ready for class, Ed.” When I glanced up,
he looked so wounded, I found myself thinking I must be crazy. But I had to be careful, too. I’d never been good at subterfuge. For the first time since we’d started sharing the office, the atmosphere between Ed and me was strained, and I was relieved when he finally picked up his books and headed out the door.

Val Massey appeared so quickly after Ed left that it was obvious he’d been waiting until I was alone. Like everyone who teaches these days, I’m careful about leaving the door open when a student is in the room, but when Val pulled the door closed behind him, I didn’t move to open it.

He looked terrible. He was pale, and there were deep shadows under his eyes. It was apparent he’d been through more than a few sleepless nights. I invited him to sit, but he went over and stood at the window as he’d done the day he’d come to my office and asked me if any of my children had ever got into a real mess. I bit my lip, remembering how I had jumped to what I believed was the heart of the problem, and how quickly I had assured him that I didn’t believe the charges that Kellee Savage was levelling at him.

But I was through being impetuous. Like Freudian analysts and good interviewers, I was going to count on the power of silence. It was an uncomfortable wait. If the silence between Ed and me had been awkward, the tension as I waited for Val Massey to talk was painful.

When he finally turned to face me, he didn’t waste time on a preamble.

“I was the one who borrowed Jumbo’s library card,” he said. “And I was the one who left the book for Kellee.” He lowered his voice. “I wrote that letter inside the book, too.”

It was news I was expecting, yet hearing the words was a blow. “Whatever made you do it, Val?”

“I don’t know,” he said miserably.

Suddenly I felt my resolve harden. “That’s not good
enough,” I said. “You don’t do something that cruel without a reason.”

He flinched, but he didn’t offer an explanation.

I got up from the desk and walked over to him. “Damn it, Val, I thought I knew you. I had a pretty good idea about what kind of person you were. For one thing, I thought you believed what you said in our seminar about the journalist’s obligation to protect the powerless.”

“She wasn’t powerless,” he said quietly. “She had her lies, and she was using them to destroy a decent human being.”

“But, Val, you started it. You just said you were the one who wrote that letter, and Kellee said there were incidents before that.”

Val laughed derisively. “Oh yes, there were other incidents, but I’ll bet she didn’t tell you about her part in them. Professor Kilbourn, whatever you may think, Kellee Savage is no victim. I know that what I did was wrong, but what she was threatening to do was worse. She was prepared to ruin someone’s career, even their life. All I was trying to do was muddy the waters.”

“Muddy the waters,” I repeated. “I don’t understand.”

Val averted his eyes. “Kellee was threatening to make her charges against … against this other person public. The things she was saying were crazy, but you have no idea how terrible the consequences would have been if people had believed her. We had to make sure people wouldn’t take what Kellee was saying seriously. It was like that story of the boy who cried wolf. We had to make certain that when Kellee talked, no one listened.”

“It got a little out of hand, didn’t it?” I said. “Kellee’s disappeared, Val.”

“And I’ve spent the last week trying to find her. I’ve tried to call her and I’ve talked to everybody who might have seen her. I feel sick about this whole thing. You’ve got to believe
me. I didn’t want Kellee to quit school. I just wanted to teach her a lesson. I couldn’t just sit by and let her destroy a person’s life, could I?”

“Whose life was she going to destroy?” I asked.

He shook his head vigorously. “No,” he said. “I can’t tell you that.”

“Was it another student, or someone on faculty?”

“I’ve told you everything I can,” he said. “If you have to take some sort of action against me, I understand, but please don’t involve Jumbo in this any more. He really was just doing a favour for a friend.”

“The way you were,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “The way I was.”

I came home to a crisis. Taylor had sliced her hand with a knife. The cut was a real bleeder, and she was wailing. Angus was holding a wad of paper towels against the wound with one hand and dialling my number at the university with the other.

I took a peek at the cut, reassured Taylor, and ran upstairs to the bathroom to get a sanitary napkin to act as a pressure bandage.

When I came back, I handed the napkin to Angus. “Wrap that tightly around the cut,” I said.

He looked at me in horror.