Dear Irene (3 page)

“You failed me. There wasn’t anything in the newspaper about it.”

“I’ve been away from work for a while.”

“Yes. You were hurt. Your foot is in a new cast. And although you’re out of the sling, there’s something wrong with your arm.”

“Sweet Jesus,” I whispered. I tried tapping the splint on the top of my computer monitor to try to get someone to look my way.

“What?” he asked.

“I didn’t have time to get anything written up,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t figure out what I was trying to do.

“Well, you’ll know better next time.”

He hung up. Just then, three different people took notice, Lydia among them. Their expressions plainly said they thought I was having some kind of fit.

I swore as I hung up the phone.

“What’s wrong?” Lydia asked.

“That was him!”

“Who?”

“Thanatos. The letter writer.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” I sat down and shook my head. Fought down nausea. The phone rang again and I just stared at it. Lydia picked it up.

“Irene Kelly’s desk… No, she’s right here, Frank.” She handed the phone to me.

“Frank? Frank, he just called me. He’s seen me. He knows I’m wearing a cast and that my arm is hurt—”

“Whoa, slow down. Who called you?”

“Thanatos. The letter writer. The killer.”

“He called you at the paper?”

“Yes.”

He was quiet for a moment, then asked, “Did he threaten you?”

“No. He just kept talking about next time—”

“Tell me exactly what he said.”

I repeated the conversation. This time, there was a long silence.

“I don’t like it,” he said at last.

“I’m not so hot about it myself. We found the envelope, by the way. He mailed it from the college post office.”

“Are you okay? You sound upset. I can understand why—”

“I’ll be all right. Just shook me up.”

“How about if I come by in a few minutes? I need to talk to John anyway.”

I felt some of my tension ease. “I’ll warn him you’re on your way.”

We said good-bye and I went off in search of John. He was talking to Stuart but broke off when he saw me hobbling in his direction. He met me halfway. I told him what had happened. He was scowling when I said, “Frank’s on his way over. He said he needed to talk to you.”

“Yeah, well, I need to talk to him, too.”

I didn’t know what to make of that.

I spent the twenty minutes or so that I waited for Frank trying to figure out why the letter writer had contacted me. I logged on to the computer and called up an index of stories I had written in the past six months. Nothing seemed to fit; no stories on ancient or modern Greece, nothing on mythology, nothing on the college or its professors. My stories mainly focused on local politics and government; outside of some implausible connection to ancient Greek city-states, it didn’t make sense that I should be the person he contacted. Why write to me? I wasn’t even well-versed in mythology.

I made a note to ask Jack for recommendations on mythology books.

I searched the computer for stories that might have appeared in the
Express
about Professor Edna Blaylock. Zilch. “Peacocks” didn’t pan out, either. There had been a few stories about the zoo itself, but unless Thanatos was upset about the zoo changing its hours or getting a new bear, I couldn’t find the connection.

Although this first round of inquiries didn’t prove fruitful, it did have the effect of helping me to calm down. I was still unnerved by the idea that Thanatos had watched me, but by the time Frank arrived, I had stopped feeling like my knees were made of gelatin.

Geoff, the security guard for the building, must have let John know that Frank was on his way to the newsroom, because he stepped out of his office just as Frank entered the room.

“So, when’s the wedding?” he boomed.

“It’s up to Irene,” Frank answered, making his way to my desk. John met him there with an extended hand.

“I haven’t had a chance to offer my congratulations, Frank.”

Frank thanked him and shook his hand. At the same time, he studied me.

“I’m okay,” I said, answering the unspoken question.

He didn’t seem convinced, but asked his other questions aloud. The first was, “Did the call come through the switchboard, or directly to you?”

I felt like an idiot for not checking that myself, and started to call the switchboard operator when John said, “Never mind, Kelly. I already called Doris. She hasn’t transferred any calls to you today. Must have come through direct.”

“Then it’s most likely someone you’ve met, perhaps given your business card to, right?” Frank asked.

“Maybe,” John said, before I could answer. “But it’s not that hard to learn someone’s direct dial number. There are a number of ways to do it. You could ask the switchboard operator for the number; she’ll usually give it out for anyone who’s not in upper management. If you wanted to be a little more sneaky about it, you could call another department, say, ‘Oops, I was trying to reach Irene Kelly. The operator must have transferred me to you by mistake. Could you tell me Irene’s extension?’”

“Even if it’s someone with a card — I’ve given out a lot of them,” I said. “I had a new direct dial number when I came back to the paper, so I had to let people know how to reach me. I had to re-establish contact with a lot of old sources, and I had to meet some new ones. And on almost every story, I end up giving a card to someone.”

“Well, it’s something to think about,” Frank said. “Maybe you’ll recall someone who mentioned this history professor to you, or who seemed interested in you in some unusual way — or who just seemed odd.”

“‘Odd’ will not narrow the list much.”

“Probably not. You said you found the envelope?”

I nodded, and handed it to him.

“Lydia!” John shouted, startling me. “Find something to keep Miss Kelly busy for a while.”

“Wait a minute—” I protested.

“You can live without him for five more minutes, can’t you, Kelly? You haven’t gone
that
soft on me, have you?”

I could sense something was up and that John was in a conspiratorial mood. But I couldn’t figure out a way to object before they walked off into John’s office, Frank turning at the last moment to give me a shrug of feigned helplessness.

I practiced breaking pencils with one hand while Lydia tried to find something for me to do.

“I
F HE DIDN’T KILL HER
in her office, he made a damned good start there.”

Pete Baird, Frank’s partner, had accepted our invitation to join us for dinner that night. While Frank acted as chef, Pete was filling me in on the progress they had made in the Blaylock case. “There was blood splattered everywhere — over her desk, the windows, her books, the floor, her papers. The guy went nuts. Really sprayed the place. I doubt she walked out of there, anyway. We’ll know more when the lab and coroner’s reports come in.”

You get two homicide detectives together, you have to be prepared not to let much of anything ruin your appetite.

“She was killed there,” Frank said, coating some orange roughy fillets with a mixture of herbs and a small amount of olive oil. “All the blows were to her skull. He was hitting her hard.”

“He?” I asked.

“Figure of speech,” Pete said. “But didn’t you say the voice on the phone was a man’s voice?”

“It was synthesized. No telling. But I admit the letter made me think the writer is a man. Thanatos is a male character in mythology, for starters. Clio is female, a woman was killed. Cassandra was a woman. But maybe the killer is a woman who wants us to think she’s a man, to throw us off her trail.”

“If the killer’s a woman,” Frank said, “she’s a very strong woman.”

“Why strong? You told me that you thought the professor was sitting at her desk, bent over some papers…”

“Right. Her desk faces some windows. It was late at night. If she had been looking up, she might have seen his reflection in the windows. Might not have made a difference if she had seen him, but in any case, there was no sign of a struggle on her part. I think he got her with the first blow.”

“Exactly,” I said. “One good blow to the head and she wouldn’t have put up much of a struggle. So the killer wouldn’t need to be strong.”

“If the body had been left there, I’d agree,” Pete said. “But after making all that mess, the killer was very neat. Must have bagged her — or at least wrapped her head up, because there wasn’t so much as a drop of blood out in the hallway. My guess is that he was wearing something over his own clothing — coveralls, maybe — because he couldn’t have been in that room or picked her up and carried her out without getting anything on himself. The professor wasn’t a very big woman, but even if she only weighed about a hundred pounds, that’s a lot to lug around. He carried her downstairs, took her to a vehicle, drove to the zoo, and then dumped her over a fence and in with the birds. Leaves her wallet and all her identification on her, so that we know exactly who we’ve got.”

“He’s damned sure of himself,” Frank said, putting the fish under the broiler. “No question about that.”

“Yeah, and not just because he left her ID,” Pete said. “You ever been around peacocks? They’re noisy suckers. He had to know that someone was going to hear all that racket.”

“Zoo keepers might be used to it,” I said.

“The birds were raising Cain. They’re beautiful, but not pleasant, if you know what I mean. In fact, they—” Pete halted when he caught Frank shaking his head. “Sorry. We shouldn’t be talking about this before dinner.”

If it was something that bad, I wasn’t going to challenge him.

“You said the chair of the history department let you into Dr. Blaylock’s office,” I said. “Was it locked?”

Pete nodded. “Yeah. But the killer probably just locked the door after he left. Hiding the mess for a while.”

“He didn’t need a key to lock it?”

“No, the history offices are in one of the older buildings. Some of the buildings on campus, especially the ones where they keep a lot of equipment — art studios, science buildings, the gym — those buildings have electronic locks that open with key cards. They lock automatically when the door shuts. But the college couldn’t afford to put them everywhere, so lots of the classrooms and faculty offices are standard-type locks. Use a key to get in, but once you’re in, you have to push a button lock on the other side to lock yourself in.”

“And you don’t think she locked herself in?”

“No, probably not. She taught a class on Wednesday nights, and had a habit of working late in her office after the class. She usually had the door open or unlocked, from what the other faculty and her students say.”

“So we’ve got one of two possibilities,” I said. “Either she invited the killer in or he entered without her knowing he was there.”

“You ask me, she didn’t know he was there. Probably never knew what hit her — BAM! — and she’s out. He keeps going at her, but not ’cause she’s fighting him.”

Throughout dinner, I picked up other details.

No one at the college or the zoo reported seeing anything suspicious before the body was found, but it would not have been difficult to move around unnoticed at either place during the hours in question, sometime between midnight and four in the morning.

The professor was fifty-four years old. Her colleagues described her as a vivacious woman who wore her years well. She lived alone. She seemed quite devoted to her students; she often held meetings of her graduate seminars in her home, and willingly gave of her time to students who needed extra help. She taught a seminar in twentieth-century U.S. history on Wednesday nights, and was doing some research on the Truman administration. It was not uncommon for her to work late in her office on her research and writing. When she was killed, she had been working on an article she hoped to submit to the
Journal of American History
.

After Pete left, Frank and I sat together in the living room. I asked him about his meeting with John. At first he claimed that they were just talking about cooperation between the newspaper and the police on the Blaylock case.

“No sale,” I said. “You wouldn’t need to exclude me from that conversation.”

“Okay, so maybe we talked about you. What of it?”

“What of it? I’ll tell you what of it. Shall I go into Captain Bredloe’s office and have a nice long talk with him about you?”

“Be my guest.”

“You wouldn’t like it.”

He was quiet for a moment then said, “No, I guess not. Look, John’s just concerned about you.”

“Concerned how?”

“Well, in a fatherly kind of way, I guess.”

“Fatherly? You mean as in
Father Knows Best
? As in ‘Well, son, we men folk need to protect our little gals’?”

“I don’t mean that at all…”

“I got scared today,” I went on, ignoring his protest. “
Anybody
would have been scared, I think. But because of this damned splint and cast, my being scared looks different to him. John doesn’t think I’m ready to come back to work.”

There was a long pause before he said, “Well, yes. That came up in the conversation.”

I stood up. “You know what I want?”

“Irene…”

“Faith. Faith in my ability to function. Less help. Less control by well-meaning but—”

“No one is trying to control you—”

“Bullshit. Oh, it’s all in the name of taking care of me, mind you. Friends. People who just want to make sure I’m all right. I’m all right!”

He was silent.

“He had no business talking to you about my ability to do my job!”

“You’re right.”

“Absolutely none.”

“None whatsoever.”

“You’re not even a relative.”

A pause. “No.”

“You’re just… you’re just…” I was losing steam. I sat down next to him. “Why am I yelling at you? It’s not your fault.”

“No, it’s not.” He said it without looking at me.

“Sorry.”

He didn’t say anything. It was then I realized it wasn’t anger that was keeping him quiet.

“You’re better than a relative,” I tried. “Much better.”

Still nothing. For a few seconds, I felt like I might start crying or something.