Murder on Lovers' Lane (Brody and Hannigan Mysteries) (5 page)

With a grimace, she pushed her partner's voice out of her head and set about constructing a collage of photos and notes until she had a reasonably complete map of Dr. Flanders' Introduction to American Lit classroom.

At the head of the room was Dr. Flanders, with her long, tanned legs and honey-gold hair, her full, lush breasts and her knowing smile—and the interest in her periwinkle blue eyes whenever her gaze had settled on Brody's perfect, perfect face.  Hannigan had to clutch her pen tightly to keep from drawing a mustache and beard on the photo of the professor.

The students in the photos Brody had snapped seemed to be typically college-aged—eighteen to twenty-two.  Different sizes, different colors, different styles.  Some serious, some cut-ups.  Some carefree, some stressed out of their gourds.  A few students in their late twenties and a couple, like Hannigan and her partner, flirting with their mid-thirties.

The consensus around the squad room seemed to be that their killer was male, although that assumption was based mostly on the odds—most serial killers were male.  Brody's more specific profile of the killer had led them to Alvin Morehead—male, working in a thankless job and resenting the sexual freedoms and excesses of youth apparently denied to him.

Thing was, Hannigan still didn't think Brody's profile was off the mark.  Alvin Morehead also fit the victim profile Brody had worked up.  At twenty-eight, he had been young still.  He looked and apparently acted younger than his age.  He'd picked up a prostitute and taken her parking instead of to a motel, a definite sign of immaturity.  Hiring a prostitute put him in the "reckless sexual behavior" column as well.

Hannigan almost reached for the phone to call her partner to discuss her thoughts, but she tamped down the urge.  Let him have his day off. 

Maybe, if she was lucky, he'd forget what he'd seen in her eyes last night.  Maybe, if she was lucky, she'd forget what she'd seen in his.

Brody had spent all day Tuesday mentally practicing what he wanted to say to his partner when he saw her again.  It was therefore deflating to arrive at seven-thirty, ready to beard the lioness in their den, only to find the lieutenant had handed her over to Vice for the day. 

"Big prostitution sting going down today and McAllan is out with the flu," Lieutenant Crane told him when he asked.  "I said they could borrow Hannigan."

"She's already undercover—what if someone in our class saw her?"  Brody frowned.  It might do more than just screw up their assignment.  It might put Hannigan in danger.  What if the killer realized she was a cop?  She might be a tempting target to a cocky killer wanting to make a splash.

"Morrissey's keeping her off the street," Crane assured him.  "She's going to be on the arrest team, so your cover should be safe, unless one of those kids goes trolling for whores on the south side.  But she's worked Vice before and knows how it works, so she seemed the best choice."

Brody relaxed a little, but it was a relief when Hannigan called around noon during the sting team's lunch break.

"Just wanted to see if we were still going to go together to class tonight."  She sounded slightly out of breath, as if she'd called him seconds after taking down a perp.

"Sure," he said quickly, not sure whether he was relieved or disappointed by the neutral tone of her voice.  "Want me to pick you up, same time as last time?"

"No, I'll pick you up this time," she said quickly.  "Look, gotta go or I won't get any food.  See you tonight."

She hung up before he could say goodbye. Setting the phone down, he stared across the aisle at her empty desk, wishing he could have seen her face.  She could sometimes fool him with her voice, and even with her expression.  But her eyes—she never could lie with her eyes.

Her eyes had told him how much his touch had affected her.  The sparks flying from those smoky gray eyes had nearly set him on fire. 

It's just sex, Brody.  Chemical reactions in the human body.
He could almost hear her flat drawl in his ear.
Doesn't mean I actually want to get horizontal with you in particular.

He shoved the distractions from his mind and concentrated on the collage Hannigan had compiled from her notes and the photos taken with his phone.  She'd left the page in a folder on his desk, with a sticky note with one word printed on it in her bold, firm handwriting:  "Memorize."

So he went to work doing as she asked, letting the images settle in his mind.  Tables, desk, walls, chairs, people.  Filling in the missing pieces with his memory of Monday night's class, he added his own notes to the collage until he could close his eyes and picture the room just as it had been.

He remembered the scent Hannigan had worn, something light and crisp, with fruity tones.  Apples, he thought.  It wasn't her normal soap and water clean smell.  Despite her edgy choice of apparel, she hadn't worn much make-up at all, less than she wore at work.  Just a hint of dark pink lip gloss on her lips, a touch of color on her cheeks, the lack of adornment shaving years off her age.  Made him wonder why she wore make-up at all when she looked so appealing without it.

Made him wonder what she'd be wearing tonight.

Lunch at Kelly's was a boisterous affair, a far cry from the quieter lunches Hannigan was used to sharing with her partner.  No discussions of esoteric crime theory or statistical probabilities of spree murders, just good old fashioned male-dominated shit-shooting.  Growing up with brothers, Hannigan was used to swimming upstream in a flood of testosterone.  So were Jill Danbury and Lisa Mercolis, the two female vice cops playing the role of Hooker One and Hooker Two in today's big sting operation.

Lisa and Jill were both young, both blondes, but that's where the similarities ended.  Jill was tall, leggy and beautiful, while Lisa was shorter, pleasantly curvy and cute rather than pretty.

Right now, they were dressed in jeans and polo shirts, but those more conservative clothes would come off as soon as lunch was done, revealing tight tank tops and tiny shorts hidden beneath.  Then it would be back to the Southside again to troll for more johns.

"Having fun slumming with Vice again?" Jill asked in a tone that suggested she didn't really care; she just wanted to get some sort of dig in.

"Happy to do my part to police the sexual proclivities of my fellow man," she responded, and saw Jill's eyebrows notch upward.

"Proclivities," Jill repeated, seeming to savor the word.  "You can tell you hang out with Lee Brody these days."

"Is Brody as brainy as everybody says?" Lisa asked.

"Probably brainier," Hannigan answered with a smile, ignoring the speculative look Jill Danbury shot her way.

"Ms. Hannigan?"  A vaguely familiar voice drew Hannigan's attention away from her fellow police officers.  She found a thin, balding man in a suit standing next to their table.  It took a moment for her to recognize him.

"Dean Silor." 

He looked around the table at her fellow cops, who didn't let the newcomer interrupt their profane rehash of the last solicitation bust they'd made before breaking for lunch.  Distaste showed in every scandalized inch of his expression.

Hannigan stood and eased Dean Silor away from her table.  "Sorry about that, Dean Silor.  Policemen can be boisterous."

His eyes narrowed as he looked down at her casual attire—jeans, a polo shirt and tennis shoes.  "You look much more presentable today than the last time I saw you, Ms. Hannigan."

She tried to remember what she was wearing in his office the day she and Brody arranged to be part of Dr. Flanders' class.  "More presentable than my work suit?" she asked, confused.

"No. I meant your attire the other night for Dr. Flanders' class."  DeanSilor lowered his voice.  "Students are already bombarded with enough hypersexualized images.  I realize you were just trying to fit in, perhaps, dressing the way you believe students would dress—"

"The way they
do
dress, Dr. Silor.  I observed the quad after we left your office Monday," she said firmly, not ready to let a professor tell her how to do her job.  "We're trying to catch a killer.  I realize some of our methods may not please you, but we do know what we're doing."

"I hope so," Dean Silor said, sounding unconvinced.

"Hannigan, let's go."  Kowalski, Vice commander, sounded impatient. 

"I'm sorry, Dean Silor. I have to go."  She hurried to catch up with the rest of the sting crew as they paid up at the counter.

She looked back, wondering if she'd been too rude to the dean.  The last thing she needed to do was screw up their undercover assignment by losing her temper.  But Dean Silor was already in line at the counter, waiting to give his order.  He didn't look her way again.

Still, she spent the rest of the afternoon, in between takedowns of johns, reconsidering her wardrobe for that evening's class.

As Brody dressed for class that evening, he found himself wondering, yet again, what Hannigan would be wearing as an encore to her Monday night attire.  Before his imagination could take him too far into dangerous territory, her firm knock on the door dragged him back to reality.  He finished zipping his jeans and answered the door, not sure whether he was disappointed or relieved to discover Hannigan was more modestly dressed this evening, her dark blue, tailored blouse tucked into midrise jeans, no belly button, pierced or otherwise, visible.

"I ran into Dean Silor this afternoon," she told Brody as he buckled into the passenger seat next to her.  "He was getting lunch at the restaurant where the Vice crew was taking our chow break."

"Yeah?"

"Seems he was around campus Monday night and saw us.  Apparently my attire wasn't a good example to set around young, impressionable college girls."  She flashed him a smile that held a hint of grimace.

"Um, has he ever noticed what other coeds wear?"

"Well, I suppose he has a point."  She didn't look at him as she added, with the faintest hint of a smile, "It does pose a distraction to the other students."

He couldn't argue with that.  "Thanks for the collage, by the way. It helped refresh my memory of the classroom."

"I think we need to take note of any changes.  Anyone sitting in a different seat, and if so, who and where.  If the Lovers' Lane killer is in that classroom, something as simple as a change in seating could give him away."

They were among the last students in the classroom, on purpose.  The seats they'd occupied Monday night had not been filled.  Apparently everyone had settled on their spots for the length of the course, which made it a lot easier for Brody to tell if anyone was missing or out of place.

"Danielle Brubaker," Brody murmured after scanning the room twice to be certain the pretty blonde hadn't simply chosen a different seat.

Hannigan's gaze slid to the right front table.  "Hmm."

Dr. Flanders entered the classroom at that point, and Hannigan said nothing more for a while. 

The lesson moved away from the more titillating subject of eroticism versus Puritanism of Monday night's session, settling instead on early American female writers.  "Both
Charlotte Temple
by Susanna Rowson and
The Coquette
by Hannah Webster Foster are examples of sentimentalism, dealing with the perils of seduction and arguing, with subtle passion, for the equality of women.  They were dismissed, to some extent, because of that sentimentalism, but their style and subject, as well as their popularity, showed a broad and growing reaction against the Calvinist gloom and doom of their time."

Brody hid a smile, thinking about Dean Silor and his prim warning to Hannigan about her attire.  He had a feeling he knew which side of the argument ol' Doc Silor would have come down on back in the day.

On the other hand, he found that despite the milder subject matter of Dr. Flanders' class topic, the good professor herself hadn't changed much about her demeanor.  She wore another sundress, fitted and flattering to her lithe, curvy shape.  She had to be in her mid-thirties, but she showed few signs of having lost her youthful bloom.  Her skin was tanned and perfect, her features lovely in a classic way.  And unlike Hannigan, who seemed oblivious to her own feminine attractions. Dr. Flanders was acutely aware of the effect she had on her male—and even some of her female—students.

Brody found himself tuning out her words and paying more attention to her body language.  The artful positioning of her arms and hands to best show off the lovely swell of her breasts.  The slow, seductive grace of her body as she sat on the edge of her desk and took her own sweet time crossing her bare, well-toned legs.

"You're a pig," Hannigan whispered in his ear.

He looked down and found her eyes blazing up at him.  "I'm an observer," he whispered back, letting his gaze slide forward again.

Class dismissed around eight-thirty, and almost immediately, Hannigan made her way forward, toward the empty seat that Danielle Brubaker had occupied two nights earlier.  Brody started to follow.

"Mr. Brody?"  Dr. Flanders' low voice drew his attention away.  Turning, he found the professor seated on the edge of her desk, her legs still crossed, one foot kicking in a lazy rhythm.

He glanced down at his partner.  She rolled her eyes and continued on toward the front table.

Brody crossed to the desk.  "Yes, Dr. Flanders?"

"You seemed preoccupied this evening."  She smiled at him, and in that slow curve of her lips he saw that she knew—or thought she did—just what he'd been thinking about instead of literature.

There was something predatory about her sexuality, he thought.  Predatory enough to be dangerous?

"I hope you'll come prepared to participate next time," she said, each word oozing with sexual meaning.

"I'll do my best," he said, smiling back at her, even though he didn't find her nearly as attractive now as before.  The vibes she gave off were downright creepy.

He turned to find his partner talking to a girl at the front table.  He walked up behind her in time to hear the girl say, "She lives in Phillips." At Hannigan's look of uncertainty, the girl—Jan Neely, Brody's memory supplied—added, "That's the girls' dorm. Up the hill to the left—big red brick building, can't miss it."