Scoop to Kill (2 page)

But, of course, real life didn’t have fairy-tale endings. I still needed to unload a lot of baggage from my marriage and divorce, and I struggled to untangle the dreamy memories of my high school heartthrob from the man he had become. Bottom line, we’d both done a lot of living since I broke his heart in the Tasty-Swirl parking lot when I was eighteen.

I still saw him out and about, at the cafés and shops that circled the courthouse square of Dalliance, Texas, and at the various events he covered as a reporter for the
Dalliance News-Letter
. But every single encounter reduced me to a stammering, gelatinous mess.

Dr. Emily Clowper held out her arms, and Finn stepped awkwardly into her embrace. I couldn’t bear to look at him, so I studied her, instead, seeing her this time the way a man would see her. Like the eye doctor switching from one lens to the next, my perception of her shifted from awkward and angular to tall and lithe, from cold and abrupt to smart and edgy.

When Finn stepped back, he looked at me, eyes narrowed and appraising. I prayed I didn’t look as miserable as I felt.

“Emily and I met when I lived in Minneapolis,” Finn offered.

Her smile widened into an almost girlish grin. “Many years and three moves ago. Back in my wild gradschool days.”

Finn held up a hand in protest. “Not that long ago. And not
that
wild.”

They both laughed, and I forced myself to join in. No matter how long ago they’d been together, their relationship was more recent than ours. And certainly more wild. Emily Clowper had known Finn as an adult, as a self-sufficient man, a person I’d only recently met.

I tried to find something clever to say. “How convenient that fate landed you both in the same Podunk town,” I said, then cringed. Even to my ears, my words sounded bitter. “I mean—”

A piercing scream rang through the room, echoing off the high ceiling and leaving an unnatural stillness in its wake.

Alice.

My legs were moving before my brain even finished the thought, but still I was three steps behind Bree as she sprinted across the tile floor of the atrium in her tight dress and hooker heels. I sensed movement behind me, others running toward the cry of distress, which had now settled into a keening wail.

Ahead of me, Bree took the half flight of steps from the atrium into the main body of Sinclair Hall two at a time, then disappeared through the heavy oak doors propped open for the festivities.

I took the corner onto the first floor in a blind panic and nearly fell over Bree, who’d come to a dead stop, staring in horror at the scene in the hallway.

Alice, our baby girl, stood beneath the harsh fluorescent lights, face the color of chalk, her prim white cotton dress shirt covered in blood.

“Bryan,” Alice gasped. “It’s Bryan.”

She raised one frail arm to point an accusatory finger, bone white and smeared with gore, toward the open doorway at her side. She looked like a grim apparition from a Shakespearean tragedy, a ghost come to torment the guilty and the damned.

My first thought was that this Bryan person had better run like the wind, because when Bree got her hands on the boy stupid enough to hurt her baby girl, she’d tear him limb from limb. Then Alice took one stumbling step before finding her sea legs and bolting down the hall into her mama’s arms. That’s when I realized that the blood streaking Alice’s shirt was not her own.

By then the guests from the Honor’s Day festivities, along with a hodgepodge of black-robed faculty and disheveled-looking students, had crowded into the hall around me. A few brave souls, including both Finn and Emily Clowper, rushed forward to peer into the office from which Alice had emerged. A bright red placard with gold lettering hung beside the door: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE.

“Someone call 911,” Finn yelled, as Emily staggered back and slumped against the corridor wall.

A bluff man in a Kelly green golf shirt and a navy blazer, surely the proud dad of one of the honored students, pushed past me. “I’m a doctor,” he declared.

Finn held out a hand to stop him. “I don’t think there’s anything you can do,” he said. “And I don’t think the police would want us mucking up their crime scene.” He looked past the good doctor’s shoulder and caught my gaze.

It seemed murder had come to Dalliance, Texas, once again.

I
t may be blasphemy to say it here in Texas, but if William Travis and his men had defended the Alamo the way Bree defended Alice that day, General Santa Anna would have scooted back to Mexico with his tail between his legs. I’m telling you, Bree was a sight to behold: half naked in her skimpy pink sundress, her hair teased seven ways from Sunday, purple-painted toenails peeping from three-inch-high strappy silver sandals, and a look in her eyes that could have brought a grown man to his knees.

If, that is, that grown man had been anyone other than Detective Cal McCormack. He’d heard the call come in over the scanner—that twenty-six-year-old doctoral student Bryan Campbell had been bludgeoned to death, apparently with an industrial-sized stapler— but he wasn’t on the case. The victim, Bryan, was Cal’s nephew, his older sister Marla’s boy.

Cal and I go way back, back to summer games of kickball and capture the flag. We weren’t close anymore, but I knew Cal McCormack as well as anyone. Laid-back, laconic, law-abiding Cal. That afternoon in Sinclair Hall, though, I saw a side of Cal McCormack I’d never seen before.

He was incandescent with fury.

“What the hell happened here?” he bellowed, towering over Alice as she huddled in the shelter of her mother’s arms.

Bree angled her body between Alice and the colossal cowboy and raised her chin to stare him in the eye. “Don’t you take that tone with my child, Cal McCormack.”

The Cal I knew would be chastened by a Southern woman asserting her motherly credentials, and would have tipped his hat (metaphorically speaking) and begged pardon. But this new Cal spun like a force of nature.

“Back off, Bree,” he barked. “Your child is covered in Bryan’s blood, and she’s going to tell me why.” He took another ominous step, crowding Bree and Alice against the wall. “Now.”

I recognized the mulish expression on my cousin’s face. Irresistible force had met immovable object, and nothing good could come from that. I decided I ought to wade in to prevent further bloodshed.

Carefully, I placed a gentle hand on Cal’s arm. His muscles vibrated like a tuning fork beneath my fingers.

“Cal,” I whispered.

“Not now, Tally,” he growled.

“Cal,” I said more forcefully. “You’re not going to get anywhere like this. Why don’t you walk with me a minute?”

He shook my hand off, but he backed away from Bree and Alice.

I followed as he stalked down the hall a few yards, then stopped and dropped onto one of the low benches that lined the walls. He scrubbed his face with his square, long-fingered hands.

“Christ a-mighty,” he sighed. “What am I going to tell Marla?”

I sat next to him, perching gingerly on the edge of the bench. “I’m so sorry, Cal.”

He looked down the hall, gaze resting briefly on Alice and Bree before focusing on the doorway to the English department office. Parents, students, and faculty had cleared away, leaving a harried knot of uniformed law enforcement: Dickerson University police, Dalliance police, and a couple of representatives of the Lantana County Sheriff’s Department. A muscle in Cal’s jaw bunched and released, as though he were chewing over a tough thought.

“Dammit,” he muttered. “I can’t even work the case. Can’t do shit.”

Cal and I hadn’t spoken much over the last twenty years, but I felt like I knew him pretty well. Cal’s grandma and mine were neighbors, and Cal and I had grown up within biking distance of each other. As kids, we’d matched wits with one another over games of Risk and Monopoly, played on the same peewee softball team, and dunked each other at the community swimming pool.

In high school, the fact that Cal had more money and was way more cool than me suddenly started to matter. He still came to my rescue on occasion—like when my mama got plastered and threatened to drive to Tulsa and shoot my daddy with Grandma Peachy’s shotgun—but we didn’t go to the same parties or hang out with the same kids anymore. Then, as adults, he’d gone into the military and I’d gotten married, so we didn’t really cross paths much until the trouble of the autumn before. Still, those lazy summer evenings of lightning bugs and flashlight tag bound us together as surely as blood.

Cal acted. He fought, he seized, he saved, he fixed, he did—having to sit on the sidelines while his family absorbed such a blow would kill him.

“Marla’s gonna need you by her side,” I said. “That’s the best place in the world for you to be.”

Once again, I laid my hand on his forearm. This time, he didn’t push me away. Instead, he covered my hand with his own.

“Detective McCormack?”

Cal and I jumped apart as though we’d been burned.

Emily Clowper stood before us, Finn at her side. Tentatively she extended a hand. “I’m Dr. Clowper. I was on Bryan’s committee. I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Cal bolted to his feet. He gave Emily’s hand a hard stare, but made no move to take it. His mama would have had a fit and dropped dead on the spot if she’d witnessed her son behaving so rudely.

“I know who you are,” Cal said, something dark and dangerous in his voice. “And I don’t imagine you’re sorry at all.”

What little color was left in Emily’s face drained away, and she let her proffered hand fall to her side.

“I beg your pardon?” she said.

“What happens to your hearing now that Bryan’s gone, huh?”

Blood rushed to Emily’s waxen cheeks, staining them a hectic crimson.

“Detective McCormack, university counsel has advised me not to discuss Bryan’s allegations or the upcoming hearing with anyone.”

“Sounds mighty convenient,” Cal snapped.

Emily shook her head. “Hardly,” she said. She looked like she was about to argue further with Cal, but Finn placed a restraining hand on her arm. He leaned in to whisper something in her ear. Whatever he said, it clicked with her. She heaved an impatient sigh, but then visibly collected herself.

“Once again, Detective McCormack, I’m sorry for your loss.” Without waiting for an answer, she walked away, turning the corner at the end of the hall and disappearing.

Cal watched her go, jaw hard and eyes harder, before turning on his heel and storming off in the opposite direction.

Once he was out of earshot, I faced Finn. “What the heck was that all about?”

He fidgeted with his camera strap, and I wasn’t sure he’d answer me. But then he shrugged. “It’s a long story,” he said. “Basically, Emily failed Bryan on some exam, and he claimed that she did it in retaliation because he refused her, uh, romantic advances.”

Sexual. Finn meant “sexual advances.” I tried to imagine the abrupt, prickly woman I’d met today making a pass at a younger man. It seemed far-fetched. But given the looks she’d exchanged with Finn, she clearly wasn’t a nun.

“That sounds pretty serious,” I said weakly.

“Apparently so,” Finn said. “Bryan had retained a lawyer and was threatening to sue the school, so there was a lot of pressure on the administration to act. The university had an administrative hearing scheduled for the week after next, after the semester ended. If the university determined Bryan was telling the truth, Emily probably would have lost her job. Finding another academic position after something like that would have been downright impossible. And there aren’t that many other jobs out there for people with Ph.D.’s in English.”

“Wow.” I searched Finn’s face, but his expression remained flat, impassive. “And now that Bryan’s dead?”

He shrugged again. “I’m not sure. Certainly no lawsuit. And from what Emily said, which wasn’t much, Bryan didn’t have any evidence. It was just her word against his. And he was lying.”

“According to Emily.”

He met my eyes, and I saw the conviction in his gaze. “Yes, according to Emily,” he conceded. “But she was telling the truth.”

“You’re sure?”

“I’m sure. Emily’s not perfect, but she’s a straight arrow. She’d never abuse her power over a student. And if she did, she wouldn’t be able to cover it up. There isn’t a deceptive bone in her body.”

“Hmmm.” In my experience, everyone kept secrets. Everyone lied, if the stakes were high enough.

Emily Clowper certainly had enough at stake to lie. But did she have enough at stake to kill?

B
y Monday morning, news of the murder at Dickerson University had spread like a west Texas brush fire, igniting latent town-gown animosity into a full-fledged inferno of speculation and name-calling. And rightly or wrongly, Dr. Emily Clowper was strapped to a stake right in the middle of it all.

Down-home, no-nonsense, small-town pride is as integral to life in Dalliance, Texas, as the gas-rich shale that runs beneath the arid north Texas soil. Big-box stores and suburban strip malls were cropping up out on FM 410, but the heart of the town still beat in the tiny courthouse square. Folks from outside Texas sometimes comment that the courthouse square reminds them of a medieval castle, guarded by a moat of one-way streets and knights in white pickup trucks. The town barely tolerated the highfalutin university on the best of days, and with trouble brewing on campus, the pickups were closing ranks.

Rants about an East Coast intellectual preying on a hometown boy and ivory-towered eggheads obstructing justice to protect their own filled the Op-Ed page of the
Dalliance News-Letter
(never mind that Emily Clowper was from Minnesota or that Dickerson had acted with lightning speed to place her on administrative leave pending the resolution of the police investigation). Meanwhile, the
Dickerson Daily
lamented the lack of objectivity of the Dalliance PD and fretted about a rush to judgment that might ruin the career of a promising young scholar (never mind that Cal McCormack had been barred from anything to do with the investigation or that the authorities officially denied that Emily was a suspect).