Scoop to Kill (4 page)

“Alice Marie Anders,” Bree chided, “that’s a little harsh, don’t you think?”

“Mr. Harper asked what people were saying, and that’s what they’re saying,” Alice said. “It’s not my fault people didn’t like Bryan. He was a hard-ass.”

“Language,” Bree warned.

“Really? You’re going to complain about
my
language?”

Finn and Kyle both sputtered with laughter, but Bree just rolled her eyes.

“He was a jerk,” Alice insisted. “He spent all of his classes talking about the novels he was supposedly writing and how brilliant he was and how the faculty at Dickerson were totally overrated, never talked about the class readings at all, and then asked these crazy-hard questions. I don’t know anyone who got better than a C+ from him.”

We all looked at Emily for confirmation. She shrugged. “His teaching skills were not the best,” she said. “I told Dr. Landry that he shouldn’t put Bryan in the classroom, but we are incredibly short staffed. With more students coming to Dickerson and more required literature and writing requirements, the number of students the department is supposed to teach has doubled over the last twenty years, but the size of our faculty has stayed exactly the same. Landry loves his research, so he’s not about to increase the number of classes we each have to teach. As a result, he’ll put anyone with a pulse in front of a classroom.”

“Who’s this Landry person?” Finn asked.

“Jonas Landry. The department chair.”

“That reminds me,” Alice said. “I stopped by your office and picked up your grant proposal materials for you.” She pulled her keys out of her knapsack, and found a little white rectangle, about the size of a pack of gum, on the ring. “I downloaded it onto my flash drive,” she said.

“What is that thing?” I asked.

Everyone except Bree laughed, and I felt like an idiot.

“This is a flash drive,” Alice explained. “It’s like a little computer disk. Dr. Clowper, if you want to let me use your laptop, I’ll copy the file onto your desktop.”

“Sure,” Emily said, handing over her bag.

Alice pulled out Emily’s laptop and powered it up. “I found all the files you asked for—the budget justification, the research proposal—except the budget spreadsheet.”

Emily winced. “I probably saved that on the university network drive instead of my hard drive, and that drive is password protected. Stupid.”

“Well,” Alice continued, “I couldn’t find the electronic version of the budget, but I did find a printout in your top desk drawer, right where you said it would be.” She tugged a bright blue file folder out of her messenger bag and handed it across the table to Emily.

“Thanks, Alice. The deadline for the application is next week, and I don’t want to have to start from scratch. I can re-create the spreadsheet on my home computer, as long as I have the printout. I hope it wasn’t too much trouble.”

“Nope,” Alice said. She laughed. “Though I had to do some fast talking when Dr. Landry and Dr. Gunderson caught me in your office. Gunderson about flipped his lid, but Landry calmed him down. Gunderson’s such a fussbudget.”

Emily grimaced. “Sorry about that. But I promise they’re both harmless.”

“They’re the other two members of Bryan’s exam committee, right?” Finn asked. “What did they think of Bryan’s allegations?”

Emily took a sip of her water. “To be honest, I’m not really comfortable talking about that matter. I haven’t spoken yet with the provost or university counsel or my representative from the faculty senate, but even if the complaint against me is moot, I shouldn’t talk about Bryan.”

Finn reached across the table and rested a hand on her forearm. “Everyone here is on your side, Em. You can trust us.” He gave her arm a gentle squeeze. “I already told you this is off the record,” he added with a crooked smile.

Emily returned his smile, and I saw again that flash of warmth and intelligence in her eyes—the one I knew Finn saw when he looked at her.

Suddenly restless, I pushed away from the table, gesturing at Bree’s can to see if she wanted another. She shook her head, but I went to get one for myself.

“It’s not about trust,” Emily explained. “I really cannot comment on a student’s academic progress. There’s a federal law called FERPA—the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act—that prevents it. As long as the student’s over eighteen, we can’t even talk to our students’ parents about their grades.”

“What about when the student is over eighteen, but dead?” Bree asked, her tone arid.

Emily narrowed her eyes as she met Bree’s quizzical expression. “I honestly don’t know. That’s why I need to speak with the administration before I comment on Bryan’s status in the graduate program.”

“But you can talk about what a crappy teacher he was, huh?”

“His skills in the classroom had nothing to do with his progress toward his degree.”

Either Emily didn’t want us to know about her conflict with Bryan, or she was even more of a stickler for the rules than I was. Frankly, I was a little skeptical that the boy would go to such extremes over a single failing grade unless there was some truth to his allegations. In any event, she wasn’t going to talk about her beef with Bryan or his beef with her.

Alice finished working her magic with Emily’s laptop, handed the bag back, and dropped her keys—with their magical little computer disk—into her own satchel.

“What have you heard, Finn?” I asked. “Any details about what happened that day?”

Finn sighed. “Once again, Mike Carberry got the assignment.” Mike had seniority at the
Dalliance News-Letter
, and he went out drinking with half the police force. He tended to land all the big crime stories. “This time, it really makes sense, since we’ll want access to the victim’s family, and Cal McCormack is not my biggest fan.” Finn quirked an eyebrow in a silent salute to me.

Cal and Finn had been barely civil to one another since eighth grade. We’d all been in the same class, and back then Dalliance High was pretty small. Finn didn’t have much patience for Cal’s adherence to the rules, and when Cal narced on Finn for smuggling a pint bottle of rum into a school dance, his disdain turned to full-blown animosity. Meanwhile, Cal had always been protective of me, playing big brother even though we were of an age, and he made no secret that he didn’t approve of Finn’s rebellious ways. He worried that Finn would break my heart. Even though I was the one who dumped Finn in the end, Cal publicly laid the blame at Finn’s feet.

We were all grown-ups, now, but that history lingered just below the surface.

“Thankfully,” Finn continued, “Mike’s a talkative guy. The cops are still piecing together a time line, but it looks like Bryan was killed about an hour before he was found, somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven thirty a.m.”

“An hour?” I asked. “He was in that office for a whole hour without anyone finding him?”

Emily chimed in. “Most of the faculty and gradstudent offices are on the next hall over. We don’t have any reason to walk past the main office, much less go inside. And since it was a Saturday, none of the administrative staff—the receptionist, the office manager, the advisers—were working.”

“So what was Bryan doing in the office?” Bree asked.

“He was supposed to print off the program for the presentations and awards ceremony and then make copies before the formal program started at one o’clock,” Alice volunteered.

“He was
supposed
to do that on Friday,” Emily grumbled.

Alice nodded. “But he didn’t. Reggie told me he saw Bryan at around ten forty-five. Reggie had just arrived at Sinclair Hall and was on his way back to his office to enter some paper grades before the Honor’s Day program, and Bryan was heading to the front office to make the copies.”

Alice paused to dig through her backpack again, and pulled out a legal pad. She popped the cap off a ballpoint and began writing a list.

“So Reggie arrived at Sinclair at ten forty-five, and he saw Bryan in the hallway, heading to the front office.” She skipped a couple of lines and made a tick mark in the margin of the pad. “Around eleven thirty a.m., someone kills Bryan in the front office.” Another tick. “Bryan’s body is discovered at twelve twenty-eight p.m.”

Bree and I exchanged a look of concern. Alice had taken herself out of the story entirely, reducing the account to a clinical statement of times and events. At some point, she was going to have to come to grips with what she’d seen that day. But it was neither the time nor the place to push her.

Kyle, who’d been watching us from the periphery, spoke up. “What about the blood?”

“What do you mean?” Alice asked.

“Well, I heard this guy got his head bashed in with something heavy—”

“A heavy-duty stapler,” Finn offered. “One of those big ones that can staple a hundred pages together.”

“Right,” Kyle continued. “Someone beat him to death with a heavy metal object, so they must have had blood all over them, right? Whoever it was, it couldn’t have been someone who was at that big party. You all would have seen the blood.”

I thought the boy made an excellent point, but Emily shook her head.

“That probably rules out most of the guests, but all of us who work in Sinclair Hall, well, we basically live there. Between workout clothes and spare outfits for after all-nighters or for emergencies, like covering someone’s class, we all have clothes in our offices.”

“Still,” Alice said, smiling brightly at Kyle, causing Kyle’s cheeks to blaze, “that means whoever killed Bryan either worked in Sinclair Hall or wasn’t at the Honor’s Day events. That rules out a bunch of people right there. We just have to nail down who had the opportunity and the motive to kill Bryan.”

“Alice,” I said, “on Saturday, when Emily asked you where Bryan was, you said someone told you he was still running off the programs.”

“Reggie,” Alice confirmed with a nod.

It seemed to me that this Reggie guy had an awful lot of information about Bryan’s whereabouts on the morning of his death. “How did Reggie know that’s what Bryan was doing if they hadn’t seen each other since ten forty-five?”

Alice frowned. “I think Reggie just assumed that’s where Bryan was. Reggie came down to the atrium at about twelve fifteen, and he looked frazzled. I asked him what was wrong. At first he just waved off the question, and then he said Dr. Clowper was going to be pissed off.” Alice looked at Emily. “Sorry,” she said.

Emily shrugged.

“Anyway, he said he’d seen Bryan that morning and he still wasn’t done with the programs. Reggie’d offered to help him with the folding—they share an office, and it wouldn’t take Reggie long to enter his grades in his spreadsheet—but Bryan never came back to their office. Reggie said it was typical Bryan to leave you waiting for hours, and Bryan had probably found some hot undergrad to help him with the programs, so Reggie finally gave up and came down to the reception at twelve fifteen.”

I wondered why Reggie hadn’t checked the department office for Bryan. Maybe he just didn’t care whether Bryan got in more hot water with Emily Clowper over the unfinished programs. Or maybe he
had
looked for Bryan. Maybe he was frazzled because he’d found Bryan’s body. Or even because he’d killed him. Something there just wasn’t adding up.

Bree had gotten hung up on another part of Alice’s story. “Hot undergrad? Why a ‘hot’ undergrad?”

Alice rolled her eyes. “Everyone knows Bryan had a thing for pretty girls. He was always chatting them up in class and promising them extra credit if they’d help him with filing and stuff in his office. Totally creepy. I mean he’s their teacher, you know? That’s just weird.”

Some raw emotion flashed across Emily’s face, and her lips parted as though she were going to interject. But she relaxed and her expression returned to a stoic mask before I could decipher the reaction. Anger? Outrage? Jealousy?

My first instinct was to call her on it. Her relationship with Bryan Campbell was the nine-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, and I wanted to confront it. I had to think at least a little of their mutual animosity fell outside the reach of that federal privacy law. But before I could formulate a question that might actually get her talking, Finn tapped the corner of Alice’s legal pad.

“Ten forty-five to twelve thirty,” he said. “That’s a lot of time for Bryan to be MIA in a building crawling with people. Even if faculty didn’t regularly pop into the front office, surely someone—a custodian, a student, a parent, or guest—
someone
saw something.”

“The question is what did they see,” Bree said.

“No,” Emily responded. “The real question is why haven’t they come forward.”

T
hey laid Bryan Campbell to rest just a week after he died, on a dreary Saturday afternoon. I took Alice to the funeral at the Jessamine Street United Methodist Church. She said she wanted to be there to support her Dickerson classmates, but I suspected she planned to report back to Emily.

I went to support Cal.

Cal’s sister, Marla Campbell, stood in the vestibule of the church. The League of Methodist Ladies stood in a tight knot around her, propping her up beneath the weight of burying her son.

Marla took after Cal, tall and rawboned with eyes the scorching blue of a gas flame, but a more delicate chin and hair the color of butterscotch candy transformed Cal’s stark masculinity into fashion-model beauty. That afternoon, tears streaked her striking face, and a veil of grief dulled her eyes. All the women were dressed in unrelieved black, save Marla, who wore a corsage of crimson and gold—school colors for both the Dalliance High Wildcatters and the Dickerson Dust Devils—on the lapel of her prim black suit.

I ached for the woman, but we’d never been close, and I hated to intrude on the intimacy of her pain. Instead, while Alice wandered off to find her classmates and teachers, I searched out Cal McCormack.