Resolve (6 page)

Hartz’s turn to swing the racquet. They were falling back in line with their routine.

“She was found strangled in the Hill District. You know the area?”

“I know of it, but I don’t go up there. No reason to, of course.”

Of course.
Because
of course
I didn’t have a reason to go to a high-crime, drug-infested area, detectives. I was an upstanding pillar of the community in one of the country’s most-respected institutions of higher education. Well . . . at least I was a well-liked fellow at a barely accredited college. The point was, didn’t they know that I had written journal articles that probably had been read by two or three pairs of people?

What the hell was Lindsay doing there anyway? I didn’t take her for a druggy, but I could see her as a party girl. I guess if she was naïve enough to go up there to buy some Ecstasy or weed, then that might explain some of this. However, in all of my time on the street I never, ever saw a drug-buy-gone-bad end in strangulation. It just doesn’t happen. Gunshot? Sure. Stabbing? No problem. Beaten to death, run over by a car, set on fire, drowned in the gutter . . . why not? But not strangled. I knew it didn’t make sense and so did the men standing in front of me. Strangulation is often a crime of passion committed by someone the victim knows. Someone the victim knows intimately. It’s usually a personal crime. Or, in some cases, a crime of blind rage.

“You teach Criminology courses, right? So I’m sure you know what the next question is,” Shand said in his best rapport-building tone.

“I was in my office grading papers until seven, and then I stopped by the Silesian Deli over on East Ohio Street for a few minutes and ate a sandwich. I left there and walked back to the assembly hall to catch an eight o’clock lecture. I was there until around ten.”

“And then?” Hartz prompted.

“Then I went home. I was there all night. And no, I was not alone. My wife was home.”

Hartz raised an eyebrow and did not wait for his counterpart to ask the obvious follow-up.

“And your wife will confirm you were there all night, I suppose.”

“Absolutely. She was in bed, but still awake when I got there.”

Shand scribbled and spoke. “What kind of lecture, Dr. Keller?”

“Cyprus,” I corrected again as another ice cube dropped from the back of my head to my neckline. “It was about how some studies have indicated positive associations between cognitive reasoning ability, auditory stimuli, and sexual virility in apes. So I brought a book of Sudoku puzzles and Barry White CDs up to the bedroom when I got home. My wife told me later that the studies must be flawed.”

I seriously need to pick better times for sarcasm and self-deprecating humor.

I expected a sliver of displeasure, but to my relief a slight grin actually crossed Shand’s face.

Seizing the opportunity I asked, “Can you guys tell me what the T.O.D. was? Maybe I can put your minds at ease.”

I was referring to the
time of death.
Building rapport through the use of a common language is Interviewing 101. Dr. Pompous needed to leave this stage and former Officer Keller, Baltimore PD needed to make an appearance. This was my way of saying,
See detectives! I know what T.O.D. stands for! I’m not some perverted, coed-chasing, cold-blooded murderer who leaves some poor girl’s body decomposing in gang territory. No sir. I’m one of you! Now let’s go down a beer and have a bunch of laughs about responding to suicide attempts gone terribly wrong, or dealing with skanky 300-pound barflies who offer us sexual favors if we don’t arrest them for walking through the bar’s parking lot wearing nothing but a toothless grin. Next round is on me!

Besides, the chances were good that my whereabouts could be accounted for at whatever time the murder actually occurred, but I wanted to make sure. I was at my office with Steven, then I used my credit card at the deli, then I sat in a lecture hall with seventy-five other people. I was feeling pretty good about my story, which just happened to be true.

Shand’s demeanor had lightened considerably as he disclosed, “The coroner places T.O.D. at approximately nine-thirty
P
.
M
. Who at the lecture could confirm that you were there?”

That’s why he had lightened up. The T.O.D. put me in the clear—assuming my alibi checked out. And what kind of idiot gives a bogus alibi that is easy to check?

“I sat in the back by myself,” I explained, “but there was a lady who had to scan my university ID into a portable card reader in order for me to get into the event for free. There was a line for university employees on one side of the lobby, and another line on the opposite side for everybody else because they had to have a ticket. You’ll find my ID was scanned around eight
P.M.
”

“Just out of curiosity, why did you sit by yourself? Didn’t you know anybody? It’s kind of a small school,” Hartz inquired as he again pulled his coat tight.

“Not very well,” I said, choosing to answer his second question. “The lecture wasn’t completely in my field, so most of the faculty members there were from other departments.” Then I added, “And I’m still pretty new here.”

Hartz continued with another question. “Where were you before coming to Three Rivers?”

Perfect. Time to fully introduce myself as one of the brotherhood.

“I was a probation officer in West Virginia. Baltimore PD before that,” I said with false dismissiveness and a slight wave of my hand.

Shand nodded with some level of appreciation and said, “Well, you know we’ll have to check your alibi. We have to follow up on everything. You know how this works since you were one of us. The D.A.’s office and the press . . . well . . . it’s a pretty college girl found dead in drug land. You understand.”

I nodded sympathetically as he went on.

“You said that the lecture wasn’t completely in your field. If you ask me, it sounds way out in left field for someone in your occupation.”

“It dealt with brain functioning, sexual behavior, and touched on aggressiveness. I’ve done some research on sexual predators. I thought there might be something useful for me there.”

“Was there?”

“Apparently an alibi.”

With a silent laugh he forged ahead with the next basic questions. “Do you know of anybody who would want to hurt Ms. Behram? Was she having any problems with anybody that you were aware of?”

“No, but I truly didn’t know much about her. Seemed like a sweet girl, and she may have been just a little misguided in her intentions when it came to me,” I asserted more calmly than before. I was still cold but I was starting to relax.

I took advantage of another short pause in the interview while Shand scribbled my response into his notepad. Hartz looked up at an obstinate tree struggling to produce buds. “By the way, how did you know she came to my office?” I asked as if I had just thought of the question.

Returning his focus to ground level, Hartz answered, “The victim’s roommate told us she had wanted to go clothes shopping with her, but Ms. Behram said that she needed to see if you were in your office, that she had to talk to you about something. Her roommate also mentioned that she thought Ms. Behram was seeing an older man, but she was secretive about it. The victim apparently made references to her “older boy-toy” when talking to her friends.”

He let that sink in.

“You understand how this could look, so I need you to be completely honest with us. Are you sure there wasn’t something more between you and the victim? Something more than a student-professor relationship?”

I could envision suspects looking up at this composed colossus and spilling their guts for no other reason than wanting to pacify the god of reckonings who was looming over them.

“Not in any way,” I vowed, while wiping my sleeve across my damp forehead. “If she was referring to me, and I don’t think she could have been, then she was very much mistaken. But Ms. Behram didn’t strike me as the kind of person to make a leap like that. I don’t think she was talking about me.”

Shand asked, “When she left your office, what was her state of mind?”

I stopped in my mental tracks as it occurred to me what had just happened. Unbelievable. I was finding it hard to believe that I taught this stuff for a living. It’s like a spider showing other spiders how to hunt for prey, but then he goes for a short eight-legged run and gets gobbled up by a bird.

Damn, I liked these guys!

They got me to lower my guard with subtle grins and by giving me some facts about the case. Just a small demonstration of how I was being trusted with information because I had an alibi. They implicitly acknowledged our bond of the badge and then they serve up a question like that. Beautiful work.

If I said that I have no idea what her state of mind was, then I would have appeared evasive, indicating that I’m probably hiding something. After all, what kind of former cop can’t read a twenty-two-year-old girl who’s infatuated with him? If I claimed that I
knew
her state of mind, then it could appear that I either knew her very well; or perhaps I had talked to her about the meeting later that evening and thus knew exactly what she was thinking at the time. Clever, clever. It was a no-win question, and the detective wanted to see how I would handle it.

I took a breath and addressed both of them.

“Detectives, all I can tell you is that I made it abundantly clear that there was no relationship between us and never would be. I can’t be certain of what was going through her mind, partly because after she had started asking me about the possibility of a relationship, she noticed Steven in the room. At that point, she looked more surprised, and probably embarrassed, than anything else. Then she said she would talk to me later and simply left the room. I never saw her again.”

My frustration was back now. Not at the detectives, but the fact that I had let my guard down. These guys played me beautifully and I had fallen for it. Hell, the T.O.D. may not have even been real. They may have gotten me focusing on a particular time frame only to see if I would get lazy with the rest of the timeline for my personal alibi. I was tired. I was cold. I was mad at myself. Truth be told, I was probably mad at Lindsay for putting me in this position. And then I was getting mad for letting myself get mad at a poor dead girl who probably had a very bright future ahead of her.

“You said Steven was about twenty-five years old.” Hartz’s words jarred me back from my internal version of corporal mortification.

“I did.”

“Did he know the victim?” Hartz prodded.

“A little, I guess. He helps out with the Victimology class, so he knows her from that.”

“Did he know her outside of class?” Hartz had something on his mind and took control of the questioning.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. What are you getting at, Detective?”

“Twenty-five
is
older than twenty-two.”

“You’re barking up the wrong tree. They weren’t romantically involved.”

“Thacker is a faculty member since he’s a graduate assistant, right? I would guess that he teaches some low-level classes?”

“Technically . . . I suppose he is. And he does. What difference does that make?”

“The roommate also mentioned that she thought the victim’s boyfriend worked for the university,” Hartz said, with some added emphasis on the word
boyfriend
.

As angry as I felt, I still hadn’t really raised my voice, but the knob on my volume control was definitely beginning to turn.

“Look. I wasn’t seeing her. Steven wasn’t seeing her. If she was seeing somebody who was a faculty member, then I sure don’t know who it was!”

Shand calmly turned the page of his notepad, raised his eyes and interjected with, “If Mr. Thacker was seeing her, and he thought that you wouldn’t approve of a relationship between them, then it makes perfect sense that he would hide that fact from you, doesn’t it?”

“No. He wasn’t seeing her. I’m certain.”

Hartz shot back, “You can’t know everything about everyone. You were a cop. You know that.”

“You’re off base here.”

Shand added, “Maybe he was afraid you would turn him in if he told you. Maybe Ms. Behram was actually there to talk to you about her relationship with
him
.”

“No.”

The voice from Hartz’s direction exclaimed, “That’s true! You said she was taken aback when she saw him in the room. Then she left without argument.”

“No. That’s not what I meant.”

Volume knob turned a millimeter more.

The two voices battering me were indistinguishable now.

“Dr. Keller, does Steven have a girlfriend?”

“No!”

“Well, there you go. Maybe she was his girlfriend.”

“No!”

“They may have been seeing each other right under your nose. You shouldn’t be embarrassed. People hide all sorts of things, Doc.”

“It’s Cyprus.”

“Maybe she actually used you to make Steven jealous. Maybe he got
really
jealous.”

“No!”

I was colder. More tired. More frustrated. Getting hungry. My head was starting to hurt and my shoulders ached. Too many thoughts raced through my head. This had to stop.

The rapid fire continued and I heard, “You have to admit, her sleeping with some twenty-five-year-old grad student makes more sense. And she was a hottie! I’m sure Steven would have jumped at that.”

“He didn’t!”

Volume knob a half-inch louder.

“You can’t know that.”

“He was probably seeing her for a while. You couldn’t have known.”

Shaking my head, “He wasn’t!”

An excited voice, “You can’t be sure. How could you know?”

“BECAUSE STEVEN THACKER IS GAY!”

Volume knob broken off—lying on the floor.

The sudden silence after the detective’s machine-gun repartee was jolting. I couldn’t hear a sound around me. Then it slowly came back into focus. Traffic in the distance. The harsh breeze scraping off the corner of the recreation building behind me.

Then the soft mumbling.

The footsteps behind me resuming.

The pairs and trios of students walking into and out of the building.