A Faint Cold Fear (18 page)

'It's possible,' Sara said, wondering how Tessa's attack would fit in.

'Schaffer could have seen something,' Jeffrey continued.

'Maybe she saw something in the woods, someone there.'

'Or maybe whoever was waiting in the woods thought she saw something.'

'Do you think Tessa will ever remember what happened?'

'Amnesia is common with that sort of head wound.

I doubt she'll ever really remember, and even if she does, it wouldn't hold up under cross-examination.'

Sara did not add that she hoped her sister would never remember. The memory of Tessa's losing her child was hard enough for Sara. She could not imagine what it would be like for Tessa to live with those events constantly in her mind.

Sara changed the subject back to Ellen Schaffer.

'Did anyone see anything?'

'The whole house was out.'

'No one stayed home sick?' Sara asked, thinking that fifty college girls all going to class like they were supposed to was rare enough to make the papers.

'We canvassed the whole house,' Jeffrey told her.

'Everybody was accounted for.'

'Which house?'

'Keyes.'

'The smart kids,' Sara said, knowing this would explain why they were all in class. 'No one on campus heard the shot?'

'Some people came forward and said they heard what sounded like a car backfiring.' He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. 'She used a twelve-gauge pump-action.'

'Good God,' Sara said, knowing what the result of that would look like.

Jeffrey reached around to the backseat and pulled a file out of his briefcase.

'Close range,' he said, taking a color photo out of the file. 'The rifle was probably in her mouth. Her head could've muffled the sound like a silencer.'

Sara turned on the map light to look at the photograph.

It was worse than she had imagined.

'Jesus,' she mumbled. The autopsy was going to be difficult. She glanced at the clock on the radio.

They would not reach Grant until eight, depending on traffic. The two autopsies would take at least three to four hours each. Sara said a silent thank-you to Hare for offering to fill in for her tomorrow.

The way things looked, she would need the entire day to sleep.

'Sara?' Jeffrey asked.

'Sorry,' she said, taking the file from him. She opened it but her eyes blurred on the words. She concentrated on the pictures instead, flipping past the photo of the arrow drawn into the dirt to find the ones of the crime scene.

'Someone could've sneaked in through the window,'

Jeffrey continued. 'Maybe he was there already, hiding in the closet or something. She goes to the bathroom down the hall and comes back to her room and - boom. There he is, waiting.'

'Did you find prints?'

'He could have worn gloves,' Jeffrey said, not exactly answering her question.

'Women don't usually shoot themselves in the face,'

Sara conceded, looking at a close-up of Ellen Schaffer's desk. 'That's more something a man would do.' Sara had always thought the statistic sounded sexist, but the numbers proved it out.

'There's something wrong with this.' Jeffrey indicated the photograph. 'Not just because of the arrow.

Let's take that out of it, take out Tessa. The shooting still doesn't look right.'

'Why?'

'I wish I could tell you. It's just like with Rosen.

There's nothing I can put my finger on.'

Sara thought of Tessa lying in bed back at the hospital. She could still hear her sister's words, ordering Sara to find the person who had done this to all of them. The photograph of Schaffer's room brought back a memory for Sara. She had driven to Vassar with Tessa to help her get settled in. Tessa's dorm room had been decorated the same way as Ellen Schaffer's. Posters for the World Wildlife Federation and Greenpeace were tacked to the walls along with pictures of men torn from various magazines. A calendar hanging over one of the desks had important dates circled in red. The only thing that did not jibe was the array of gun-cleaning tools on the desk.

Sara flipped back to the report. She knew that reading without her glasses would give her a headache, but she wanted to feel like she was accomplishing something.

By the time she had finished reviewing all the information Jeffrey had compiled on Ellen Schaffer's death, Sara's head was pounding and her stomach was upset from reading in a moving car.

Jeffrey asked, 'What do you think?'

'I think…,' Sara began, looking down at the closed file. 'I think I don't know. Both deaths could be staged.

I suppose Schaffer could have been taken by surprise.

Maybe she was hit on the back of the head. Not that we know where the back of her head is.'

Sara pulled out several of the photographs, putting them in some kind of order, saying, 'She's lying on the couch. She could have been placed there. She could've lain down on her own. Her arm isn't long enough to reach the trigger, so she used her toe.

That's not uncommon. Sometimes people use clothes hangers.' She glanced back over the report, rereading Jeffrey's notes on the ammo discrepancy. 'Would she have known how dangerous it is to use the wrong ammunition?'

'I talked to her instructor. According to him, she was very careful with the gun.' Jeffrey paused. 'What's Grant Tech doing with a women's rifle team in the first place?'

'Title Nine,' Sara told him, referring to the legislation that forced universities to give women the same access to sports that men had. If the policy had been around when Sara was in high school, the women's tennis team would at least have gotten time on the school court. As it was, they had been forced to hit balls against the wall in the gymnasium - but only when the boys' basketball team wasn't practicing.

Sara said, 'I think it's great they have a chance to learn a new sport.'

Surprisingly, Jeffrey conceded, 'The team's pretty good. They've won all kinds of competitions.'

'So people at school who knew she was on the team would know she had a rifle.'

'Maybe.'

'She kept the gun in her room?'

'Both of them did,' Jeffrey told her. 'Her roommate was on the team, too.'

Sara thought of the gun. 'Did you take her prints yet?'

'Carlos took them,' he told her, then anticipated her next question. 'Schaffer's fingerprints are on the barrel, the pump, and what's left of the shell.'

'One shell?' Sara asked. As far as she knew, a pump-action rifle carried a three-shell magazine. Pumping the fore end would put another shell in the chamber for rapid fire.

'Yeah,' Jeffrey told her. 'One shell, the wrong caliber for the gun, the skeet choke screwed on so the barrel would be tighter.'

'Does her toe match the print on the trigger?'

Jeffrey admitted, 'I didn't even think to check.'

'We'll do it before the autopsy,' Sara told him. 'Do you think someone forced her to load the rifle, maybe someone who didn't know much about guns?'

'The first shell has a good chance of jamming in the barrel. If she didn't have another shell in the magazine, then she could buy herself some time. Maybe even turn the gun around and use it to hit the guy.'

'Wouldn't the shell explode in the barrel?'

'Not necessarily. If she had a full magazine, the second shell would hit the first and they would both explode near the chamber.'

Sara said, 'Maybe that's why she only loaded one.'

'She was either really smart or really stupid.'

Sara kept staring at the pictures. A lot of her cases were suicides, and this looked just like any other. If Andy Rosen had not died the day before, and Tessa had not been hurt, Sara and Jeffrey would not be asking these questions. Even the scrape on Andy's back would not have been enough to warrant opening a full investigation.

Sara asked, 'What connects them all?'

'I don't know,' Jeffrey said. 'Tessa's the wild card.

Schaffer and Rosen have the art class, but that's-'

'Is that Jewish?' Sara interrupted. 'Schaffer, I mean.'

'Rosen is,' Jeffrey said. 'I'm not sure about Schaffer.'

Sara felt anxiety take hold as she worked out a possible connection. 'Andy Rosen is Jewish. Ellen Schaffer might be. Tessa is dating a black man. Not just dating him, but having his child.'

'What are you saying?' Jeffrey said, though she knew he was following her.

'Either Andy was pushed or he jumped from a bridge that had racist graffiti spray-painted on it.'

Jeffrey stared straight ahead at the road, not speaking for at least a full minute. 'Do you think that's the connection?'

'I don't know,' Sara answered. 'There was a swastika on the bridge.'

'Beside, "Die Nigger,"' Jeffrey pointed out. 'Not Jews.' He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.

'If it was meant to be something against Andy because he was Jewish, then it would have been more specific.

It would have said "Die Jews."'

'What about the Star of David you found in the woods?'

'Maybe Andy walked through the woods and dropped it before he killed himself. We don't have anything that links it to Tessa's attacker.' He paused.

'Still, Rosen and Schaffer are Jewish names. That could be a connection.'

'There are a lot of Jewish kids on campus.'

'That's true.'

'Do you think this graffiti means there's some kind of white-supremacist group working here?'

'Who else would spray-paint that kind of shit around school?'

Sara tried to see the holes in her theory. 'The bridge wasn't painted recently.'

'I can ask around, but, no, it looks a couple of weeks old at least.'

'So what we're saying is that two weeks ago somebody painted the swastika and the slur on the bridge, knowing that yesterday he would push Andy Rosen over the side and then I would come along and bring Tessa, who would need to urinate and get stabbed in the forest?'

'It was your theory,' Jeffrey reminded her.

'I didn't say it was a good one,' Sara admitted. She rubbed her eyes, saying, 'I can barely see straight I'm so tired.'

'Do you want to try to sleep?'

She did, but Sara could only think of Tessa, and how the only thing she had asked her to do was find the man who had done this to her. She said, 'Let's drop the racist angle. Let's say these were staged to look like a suicide. Do you think it's best to hide the fact that two kids have been murdered?'

'Honestly?' Jeffrey asked. 'I don't know. I don't want to give the parents false hope, and I don't want to cause some sort of panic on the campus. And if these are murders, which we're not even sure they are, then maybe the guy will get cocky and make some mistakes.'

Sara knew what he meant. Despite popular belief, killers seldom wanted to get caught. Murder was the ultimate exercise in risk taking, and the more they got away with, the more they wanted to push the risks.

She asked, 'If someone is killing college students, what's the motivation?'

'The only thing I can come up with is drugs.'

Sara was about to ask if drugs were a problem on campus, then realized what a stupid question that was.

Instead she said, 'Did Ellen Schaffer use?'

'As far as I can tell, she was some kind of health nut, so I doubt it.' He looked in the side mirror before overtaking an eighteen-wheeler in the next lane. 'Rosen might have been, but there's a good case for him being clean, too.'

'What about the affair rumor?'

Jeffrey scowled. 'I don't even know if I trust Richard Carter. He's like a spoon always stirring things up.

And it's obvious he couldn't stand Andy. I wouldn't put it past him to start a rumor just so he can sit back and enjoy the show.'

'Well, let's say he's right,' Sara said. 'Could Andy's father have been having an affair with Schaffer?'

'She wasn't in any of his classes. She would have no reason to know him. She had plenty of guys her own age throwing themselves at her feet.'

'That might be a reason she would be attracted to an older man. He would seem more sophisticated.'

'Not Brian Keller,' he said. 'This guy isn't exactly Robert Redford.'

'You asked around?' she persisted. 'There's no connection?'

'Not that I could see,' he answered. 'I'm going to talk to him tomorrow, though. Maybe he'll offer something up.'

'Maybe he'll confess.'

Jeffrey shook his head. 'He was in Washington.

Frank verified it this afternoon.' After a few seconds, Jeffrey allowed, 'He could have hired someone.'

'What was his motivation?'

'Maybe…' Jeffrey let his voice trail off. 'Jesus, I don't know. We keep coming back to motivation.

Why would anyone do this? What do they have to gain?'

'People only kill for a handful of reasons,' Sara said. 'Money, drugs, or some emotional reason like jealousy or rage. Random murders would suggest a serial killer.'

'Christ,' Jeffrey said. 'Don't say that.'

'I'll admit it's not likely, but nothing makes sense.'

Sara paused. 'Then again, Andy could have jumped.

Ellen Schaffer could have already been depressed, and finding the body was some kind of trigger-' Sara caught herself. 'No pun intended.'

Jeffrey gave her a look.

'Maybe she just killed herself. Maybe both of them did.'

'What about Tess?'

'What about her?' she asked. 'It could be that her attack doesn't have anything to do with the two others.

If they're suicides, I mean.' Sara tried to think it through, but her mind could not put together the right clues. 'She could have come across someone doing something illegal in the woods.'

'We went back and forth over every inch and didn't find anything except the necklace,' Jeffrey said. 'Even then, why would the guy stick around and watch you and Tessa?'

'Maybe it was someone else watching… just a jogger in the woods.'

'Why would he run when he saw Lena?'

Sara exhaled slowly, thinking she was too sleep-deprived to understand any of this. 'I keep going back to that scrape on Andy's back. Maybe I'll find something in the autopsy.' She leaned her head in her hand, giving up on trying to be logical. 'What else is bothering you?'