Scoop to Kill (18 page)

“No, thanks.”

We’d turned to head to the stairs, Alice leading the way, when we ran into Ashley on her way to the machines. She looked a little unsteady, like maybe she was still a little tipsy from the night before.

“Hi, Ashley,” Alice said.

“Nnngh,” Ashley moaned. She lurched past us, swiped her ID card through the reader built into the machine, and drew out a can of ginger ale.

Poor kid.

I shooed Alice away, so Ashley could nurse her hangover in peace.

Even though my mama drank her way to an early grave, I didn’t have a problem with partying. Bree and I had both imbibed. Especially Bree. As long as you could say “no,” and you didn’t put yourself in harm’s way, I didn’t judge. But Bree called her daughter “Saint Alice” for a reason: we loved her to itty-bitty pieces, but she was a prig.

“That’s not the best way to start the semester,” Alice muttered as we hiked up the stairs.

“What? Ashley?”

“Mmmm-hmmm. We’re going to go through this material fast, so if she falls behind . . .” She shook her head and clucked like an old schoolmarm.

“Lighten up, Alice. For all you know, Ashley’s already gotten ahead on the reading and will ace all the tests.”

Alice huffed in disbelief. “Right. If she’s not careful, she’ll fail this class again.”

“Again?”

Alice peeked over her shoulder to make sure we were alone. “Yeah, she took this class last fall. From what I heard, she blew it off all semester and then whined her way into an incomplete.”

“A what?”

“An incomplete. It’s a grade. If you get sick or something at the end of a semester, after the deadline to drop a class, you can request an incomplete. You just have to finish up the work the next term, and then the grade gets changed to whatever you earned.”

“Was Ashley sick?” I asked with surprise. The girl I’d seen near the end of last October seemed the very picture of health.

Alice rolled her eyes. “No, she just got all weepy and said that she was broken up over Brittanie Brinkman dying, since they were sorority sisters and all.”

Now it was my turn to scoff. I talked with Ashley just after Brittanie was murdered, and I knew for a fact that Ashley despised Brittanie and didn’t care a lick about the other girl’s death.

“I know, right? Anyway, she got her incomplete from Bryan. Grade changes were due the week before spring finals—I walked a couple of the forms over to the registrar’s office for Dr. Clowper—and I’m guessing Ashley must have failed, because otherwise she wouldn’t be here today.”

We reached the top of the stairs, and Alice glanced at her phone to check the time. “We’ve still got a few minutes. Let’s get some sun.”

Together, we pushed through the back doors of Sinclair and found ourselves on a little patio, ringed by iron benches and delicate crepe myrtles, aflame with fuchsia flowers.

“So if she failed this class once, why would she take it again?” I asked, as I perched on one of the benches. Beads of rainwater from the night before still dotted the seat, so I didn’t slide back far. “I mean, she must not have liked the class, so why put herself through it again?”

Alice leaned against the brick wall of the building and tilted her face up to the sun. “We don’t just take classes we like. To graduate, you have to take classes in a lot of different areas. I think Ashley’s majoring in kinesiology.”

“Wh—?”

“It’s like gym for grown-ups. For people who want to be personal trainers or work for sports teams.” I thought that sounded like a pretty cool job, actually, and probably pretty lucrative, but Alice described it with complete disdain. “But everyone has to take a literature class to graduate, even the gym rats.”

I glanced down at my watch. “Wow. Our reprieve is almost up. Back to the salt mines, kiddo.”

She sighed. “I thought this would be a great summer.”

I wrapped my arm around her neck in a playful headlock, careful not to spill soda on her twinset or her shiny hair. “It is a great summer. You’ve got the coolest job ever. And this teaching assistant thing is not too shabby, either.”

“Ha, ha.”

I planted a kiss on the side of her head. “Don’t let this Reggie character get you down, Alice,” I whispered against her hair.

She pulled away and yanked open the door for me. “Just another fish in the sea?” she asked.

“Not even that. Just another bubble in a sea of fish farts.”

That drew a genuine laugh from her lips. “I’m not sure all men are fish farts,” she said. “But we sure know how to pick ’em.”

“Amen.”

F
inn called me late that afternoon. His voice held equal parts fatigue and excitement.

“I found something on Ostergard’s blog,” he announced without preamble. “I don’t know if it’s motive for murder, but it’ll make one hell of a feature story for the
News-Letter
.”

We arranged to meet back at Sinclair Hall to confront Landry together. I called ahead to arrange the meeting, using the fund-raiser for Bryan as a pretext.

Landry greeted us in the hallway outside the English department office. He offered me a tight smile, but didn’t offer his hand to either of us.

“Mr. Harper, isn’t it? I wasn’t expecting you. Are you doing a story on the benefit?”

“I’m afraid not, Dr. Landry,” Finn said. “Maybe we should discuss this in private?”

Landry glanced over our shoulders toward the door, as though he were contemplating making a run for it, but ultimately he pasted a wan smile on his face and led us through the maze of hallways to his office.

Given his stature in the department, he commanded a corner office, complete with a brass nameplate on the wall.

Inside, the decor reflected his interest in Scandinavian film. Austere black and white landscapes covered the walls and a large, bare glass-topped desk dominated the space.

Landry gestured for us to take the slim wooden side chairs set before the desk, while he settled into the black leather seat behind it.

“Dr. Landry,” Finn said, “I’m gonna cut to the chase here. We know that you fabricated the interviews in your book.”

“Excuse me?”

Landry might study film, but he lacked acting skills. His effort at outrage fell completely flat, and there wasn’t a hint of surprise on his face.

“You thanked Walder Ostergard for arranging your interviews with Rasmussen, but in the months before you allegedly met with Rasmussen, Ostergard was on location in Romania, working on a film for some Spanish director.”

Landry waved his hand dismissively. “Mr. Harper, surely in this day and age you don’t think a little thing like an ocean would prevent me from communicating with Ostergard.”

“Hmmm. And how did you do that? Did you manage to fly to Romania and back some weekend, in between teaching your classes and managing the university’s search for a new provost?”

“No, actually. I had no need to travel. The Internet is a wonderful thing.”

Finn smiled, a cat with a rat in his grasp. “It is. Walder Ostergard certainly thought so. He blogged almost every day, except for those months he was in Romania.”

“Oh?” I detected a faint tremor in Landry’s voice.

“Yessiree. Big ol’ gap in the blog for those months. Which he explained on his return to LA. He offered a rather colorful account of the mountainous area in which they filmed and its utter lack of modern amenities. Such as Internet connections.”

Landry shrugged. “I don’t know how regular his access was, but I assure you we managed to connect during his time there. He must have taken a weekend in Bucharest at some point.”

“Maybe,” Finn conceded. “But the funny thing is that he mentions talking to you on his blog. It’s just six months
after
you allegedly met with Rasmussen. He ranted about another foolish intellectual, this one from Texas of all places, trying to use him to get to Rasmussen. He didn’t have very kind things to say about your parentage, I’m afraid.”

The color drained from Landry’s face.

“Emily commented once about how long it took you to get that book done and out the door. You’d completed the interviews so long ago, why didn’t you just finish the manuscript? But I’m guessing you were waiting for both Rasmussen and Ostergard to die, so you could spin your story of getting the interviews without anyone around to refute it. But you didn’t count on Ostergard blogging about everything from world politics to his bathroom habits. And you didn’t count on his blog staying up and accessible after his death.”

At first, Landry didn’t respond. The dark eyes behind his spectacles glittered with calculation. He steepled his hands and gently tapped his lips with his forefingers. I must admit I felt a stab of joy watching him squirm. I didn’t imagine Sally Landry would thank me, but I felt as though we were defending her honor.

“What do you want?” he said finally.

Finn laughed. “Just the truth.”

“Right,” Landry scoffed.

I jumped in then. “Bryan figured out what you’d done, didn’t he? And that was why you killed him.”

“What? Good Lord, I didn’t kill anyone!”

Finn shrugged. “I think we’ll just have to let the police figure that one out.”

And I planned to tell the police that Landry had eaten dinner at a swanky Italian restaurant the night Emily died. The night I found a serving of restaurant tiramisu on her kitchen counter. After all, if Landry killed Bryan to cover his fraud, he could have just as easily killed Emily for the same reason.

“No,” Landry pleaded. “I didn’t kill Bryan. He . . . He did know that the interviews were faked, but we’d reached an agreement.”

“Blackmail?” Finn asked.

“Of a sort,” Landry conceded.

I felt a thrill of excitement. I couldn’t believe I’d been right that night at the Bar None. I had suspected that Bryan had been blackmailing Landry, I’d just been wrong about the subject of the extortion.

“Bryan knew better than to ask for money,” Landry continued. “Teaching isn’t especially lucrative. But he needed something more than money. He needed my support in the department. I passed him on his exams, even though his answers were execrable, and I agreed to support him in his appeal of his failure.”

Finn straightened. “You were going to help him destroy Emily Clowper’s career?”

Landry looked pained. “He hardly needed my help. She was the only one who voted to fail him, so even if Gunderson and I tried to remain neutral, our approval of his initial answers alone made her look guilty. I tried to make Emily see the futility of her position, but she was so obstinate.”

That solved one mystery. Emily had been the lone holdout, the only person standing between Bryan and his graduate career.

Finn narrowed his eyes. “Blackmailers don’t usually settle for one payment. They come back to the well again and again.”

“Not Bryan. Look, I told you I didn’t have money to give the boy, and he didn’t seem to need it. He seemed pretty flush with cash, actually. And he had an incentive to keep my secret. The success of this book will make my career and put Dickerson’s graduate program on the map. Bryan was hitching his wagon to my star. Destroying my career would hurt him, too.

“Besides,” he said, “I couldn’t have killed Bryan. I was supposed to have brunch that morning with the college’s media representative. He didn’t show, but from ten until after noon, I was across campus at the faculty club dining room.”

“Brunch by yourself. That’s not much of an alibi,” Finn said. “Do you have a receipt?”

Landry’s face fell, but almost as quickly, a grin spread across his face. “No, no receipt. But I used my i-Cash. There should be a record of my initial order, and my dessert order, in the university’s computer system.”

Finn stood, and I followed suit. “Like I said, we’ll let the police sort this out.”

“I’m begging you,” Landry said. “You don’t have any reason to care about me, but I know you care about this town and this school. Another scandal will destroy the whole community.”

Finn stepped aside to allow me to leave ahead of him, but I stopped in the doorway and stared down Landry. “You’re underestimating the strength of this town,” I said. “Ain’t nothing you can throw at us that will destroy us.”

I left then, with Finn hot on my heels.

When we reached the parking lot, I spun around to face Finn.

“You’re not going to let him skate on this, are you?”

“Oh, hell no,” Finn replied. “I’ll wait until after the benefit for Bryan, so that Landry can help drum up money and Cal’s family can have an evening of peace.”

He tipped back his head, and I almost gasped at the rage in Finn’s eyes. Rage and pain.

“But after the benefit, I’m gonna nail that jerk to the wall for what he did to Emily.”

I
’d never thought of Alice as the swooning type, but when Kyle confidently declared he could hack into the Dickerson i-Cash system, she came darn close.

Finn gave the kid a high five.

“I’m gonna pretend I didn’t hear any of that,” I said. “This is supposed to be your wholesome activity, working at the A-la-mode to keep you out of trouble. Your mama would have my hide if she knew I was contributing to your delinquency.”

Kyle smirked. “Even if you told my mom what I did, she wouldn’t understand.”

I felt a pang of sympathy for his mom. I didn’t understand one hundred percent what he planned to do, but I knew it couldn’t possibly be legal.

“I’m going to need a faster connection than McKlesky and Howard’s crappy open Wi-Fi network. We’ve got good service at home.”

“I’m coming with you,” Alice said.

“Nuh-uh. You’re not going anywhere,” Bree said. “At least, not without me.”

Kyle looked nervously between Bree and Alice. He’d witnessed their verbal brawls before, and I could tell he didn’t much fancy being caught in the middle of one.