The Quotient of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles) (12 page)

Wendy continued, talking about the carillon in the same beautiful terms that I’d heard Randy Stephens and our students talk about it. I thought of carillonist Jenn Marshall and wondered if there’d been any change in her condition. I hadn’t had any messages from those who might know. Between the accumulating snow outside and my concerns about matters at home, suddenly I felt every mile of the distance between Henley and Boston.

“But you didn’t come to hear about my music hobby. I should ask if there’s anything else you wanted to know.”

My response surprised me. “I guess my main question is why do you think Ted thought he needed to warn you that I might visit?”

Wendy’s laugh was almost sad, and I knew it didn’t come easily. “Apparently he has a high regard for your investigative skills. He didn’t want to encourage you in any way.”

“Why not? If there was something new to be discovered, wouldn’t he be happy?”

“Ted was very close to Mr. Packard. He didn’t want to see the family name dragged out again after all these years, and put through some press wringer.”

“But if it turned out that someone had hurt Kirsten, wouldn’t Ted, and whatever family is left, want to know?”

“Kirsten is dead. Nothing can change that.”

Uh-oh, this sounded like Ted talking.

“Did the police ever question you?”

She nodded. “I told them what I knew.”

“Including the names of the guys Kirsten was hanging out with?”

She frowned and lowered her eyes. I detected the slightest “no” gesture. “I didn’t even know their real names. They had crazy nicknames. Like, ‘Big Dog’ was the guy who was always barking orders to the others. You could tell he wanted to be the leader, but he kind of lost out to this other guy they called ‘Einstein.’ Big Dog stopped coming around, but there was ‘Ponytail,’ because he had one, of course, real stringy and dirty, who was always there, and maybe some others, but those were the regulars. Especially Einstein and Ponytail.”

“Even nicknames might have helped the police—”

“Nothing was going to bring Kirsten back,” she interrupted, repeating the mantra, louder now.

I thought this would be a good time for me to pull back, lest I lose her. But Wendy went on.

“Why should I have sullied her name and ruined her family’s life by listing every peccadillo, every shady friend she ever had? And it wasn’t like I didn’t have enough to worry about myself, with my physics and math classes.”

I swallowed hard. Was I really hearing about a withholding of valuable information from the police? A cover-up?

Wendy sensed my discomfort, and, I felt, tried to return to script. “At the time, I believed that it was for the best,” she said. “And the medical examiner ruled her death a suicide, so . . .”

Wendy trailed off, perhaps seeing the fallacy in her thinking, in the coaching Ted had most likely given her.

“And now? Do you still think it was for the best?”

“I don’t know. I wish I’d spoken up.”

I barely heard her. “What would you have said? Would you have given the police the names of Kirsten’s friends?”

“I didn’t know their names. I told you.”

“Did Ted know about Kirsten’s friends?”

Wendy seemed to be considering how to answer. I thought I’d help her out.

“I know Ted and Kirsten’s father were close friends since college. Did Ted know about these shady friends?”

Wendy wrung her hands. “You’ll have to ask Ted. . . . I think I’ve given you enough time.”

What happened to “I’m glad you’re here”? I pressed on. “Did you have suspicions about anything really serious, like the bank robberies that were rumored?”

Wendy stood up. My signal to leave. “I have nothing more to add.” Should I take that as a “yes” to my question? That there had been more than pranks?

“Was it Ted who convinced you to hold everything back from the police? To protect the family?”

“I told you, I have nothing more to say.” Wendy, now cold and withdrawn, looked down on me.

Resigned, I stood. I dug in the pocket of my purse, past the puzzle pieces, and handed her my card. “Will you call me if you want to talk again?”

She hesitated, then took my card without a word. She turned to the window, her back to me, facing a heavy snowfall.

I whispered my thanks and left.

I left the library, realizing I’d blown it. I’d pushed too hard. Would Wendy have said more if I hadn’t been so aggressive toward the end of our meeting? I wondered if I’d ever have a chance to talk to Wendy Carlson again.

She’d been warming up to me, possibly forgetting whatever formula Ted might have given her. Then, I’d all but accused her of obstruction of justice for not telling the police about the squirrelly men in Kirsten’s life. She’d shut down.

But wasn’t that exactly what she’d done twenty-five years ago—obstruct justice? Even if I had no business grilling her, didn’t I now have an obligation to tell Virgil? I struggled with the dilemma. And with the weather.

Wind and snow whipped my face as I walked toward the parking structure where I’d left my car. Snow was coming down, fast and furious, piling up on the sidewalks and streets. It was one thing to admire the beautiful snowscape in Childe Hassam’s
Boston Common at Twilight
at the MFA; it was another to drive for an hour or more while your windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the whiteout.

It would be dumb to drive now, but frustrating not to be home. I needed to sit somewhere warm and think about what to do next. If I made a call to Virgil, I had only my word to back me up. Wendy could deny she’d ever mentioned that Kirsten had been hanging around with a group of losers who were capable of anything. She could claim she’d hardly talked to me, except for a casual chat between an alum and a Henley professor who happened to be in town. Could the HPD question Wendy twenty-five years later? Could she be prosecuted if they determined she’d impeded an investigation? She was only a teenager at the time. How about Ted, who’d been old enough to know better? I knew there was no statute of limitations on murder, but who said there was a murder involved?

Other than me, that is, more convinced than ever that Kirsten died at the hand of one or more of the rough types who lingered in Wendy’s memory. Through her roommate, Kirsten had access to a key to the tower, if a key was even needed back then as it was now, and might have used it as a trysting place, only to meet her death instead.

I crossed Huntington, heading for a bagel shop at the edge of the shopping center nearest me, my mind still on Wendy. I realized I didn’t know anything about her personal life. Had she ever married? Did she live alone? She didn’t wear a ring, but that didn’t mean much.

Whirr, whirr, whirr. Whirr, whirr, whirr.

No sooner had I turned my phone on but a call from Bruce was on tap. I could let it go to voice mail, but he wouldn’t give up. My message icon told me I had ten voice mails already, and I knew that several would be from Bruce. If I didn’t take a call from him soon, he’d worry. But if I clicked through, he’d hear the traffic noise and know I wasn’t at home making soup for dinner. From my position at one of the busiest corners in Boston, could I convince him that the car horns he was hearing were from rush hour on Henley Boulevard?

“Hey,” I said, all cheery and pretend warm.

The drivers of a fleet of cars and SUVs chose that moment to honk their horns to make a passage for a police car that flew screaming by me toward Copley Square.
Busted
.

“I knew it,” Bruce said. “You’re in Boston.”

“How’s your day?” I asked.

“Are you on the road?”

“No. I’m about to make a final decision.”

“Stay there, please. It’s worse down here than in Boston. We’ve got travelers’ advisories all over the news.”

“But you’re off work and we could—”

“Never mind that. You need to get a room there. Promise.”

I huffed and puffed. “Promise.”

“How did it go with the roommate?” Bruce asked.

“Nothing special.”

“No more information on the tower death?”

“No. It was good to meet her, though.”

“Maybe you’ve done all you can. Just let Virge go after Jenn’s attacker.”

“Uh-huh. Right.”

“You’re not telling me everything, are you?”

“We can talk more when I see you. I’ll text you when I have a room,” I said, and the long-suffering Bruce let me off the hook.

“I’ll give you a regular report on conditions down here,” he said.

What a sweetie.

I knew Bruce was right about the folly of trying to drive home. The snow swirled around me as I entered the lobby of the shopping center and the door banged behind me, blown shut by the wind.

I took a seat on a bench in the center court area, surrounded by high-end stores, many of which were closing up for the night. Bruce and I chatted awhile, then I braced myself for a reluctant overnight stay.

• • •

An hour later, I was ordering soup and salad from room service, which sounded better to me than a cold bagel. Since January was not exactly tourist season in Boston, I had no trouble getting a room in one of the big Copley Place anchor hotels. I figured it wouldn’t be so easy later, when there might be a crowd of workers realizing they couldn’t drive home. I wondered where Wendy lived, whether I should invite her to be my roommate. LOL at that idea.

I’d picked up overnight essentials in the hotel gift shop and taken advantage of a luxurious terry robe, compliments of the hotel. I had my own coffee and tea setup, two double beds, and a pile of fluffy towels. The minibar was stocked with liquor (a waste) in a rack on the door and candy (tempting) on the shelves. Maybe forced confinement wasn’t so bad after all. As long as I had Internet connectivity, which I did, for a small fee.

After my meal, my cleanup consisted of placing the tray on the floor outside the door. I could get used to this. I sipped tea, opened my laptop, and settled in. Nothing says “relax” like looking up bank robbery archives.

As I typed keywords into my search engine, I pitied anyone trying to profile me based on my browsing history. Today alone my searches ran from Archimedes to puzzles and games to bank robbery stats for Bristol County, with beading books (presents for Ariana) and fleece-lined boots (present for me) thrown in.

I was pleased to see that Henley and surrounding towns in Bristol County were singularly low in robberies. Occasionally a note had been passed to a teller, demanding all she had in her money drawer, but there had been nothing involving weapons or bodily harm to staff or customers. It gave me a warm feeling about my hometown.

Eventually, I realized that if Kirsten and her friends were planning to rob a bank, it would probably be in Boston, not small-town Henley or its neighbors. Boston wasn’t called the Bank Robbery Capital of America without good reason.

There were more than three hundred robberies a year in Boston, though not all of them involved banks. Two of the robberies were legendary, making most lists of “Crimes of the Century”—the Brink’s job in 1950, where eleven armed members of a gang, all of whom were eventually arrested, held up the Brink’s building and stole millions of dollars in cash, checks, and securities; and the Gardner Museum heist in 1990, where two men posing as cops walked off with an estimated three hundred million dollars in art. In both cases, the spoils remain unrecovered.

I made a guess that the robbery I was looking for was smaller than either the Brink’s or the Gardner job, both of which had been the subject of books, novels, feature films, and documentaries. For smaller efforts, I’d have to dig into police reports for the year Kirsten was a sophomore. It took a few minutes to call them up, but a Suffolk County website provided a long list of summaries for each year.

As I read through the paragraphs, I saw what excitement I’d been missing, focusing on differential equations instead of on the police blotter all these years. A seventy-year-old Chelsea, Massachusetts, man was turned in by his adult son who recognized him in surveillance photos of a local bank robbery. A Springfield woman fashionably dressed in a cloche hat, scarf, and dark glasses tossed an unknown green liquid at tellers and grabbed the cash available. A serial robber was caught after making off with loot from seven different banks in the greater Boston area, each time claiming he had a bomb strapped to his waist.

I must have been channeling my movie-loving boyfriend Bruce, whom I missed, because I kept thinking of the actors in Boston heist movies through the years, from Robert Mitchum in
The Friends of Eddie Coyle
to Ben Affleck in
The Town
.

Fascinating as the anecdotes were, I saw nothing that fit with what Wendy had told me, or with Judy’s and Fran’s reports on the gossip. I needed a story that included a woman not quite out of her teens. If the tale included the initials KP, so much the better.

On the fourth page of reports for Kirsten’s sophomore year, I found what I was looking for. Two suspects—an armed man in his early twenties and an unarmed woman, possibly a teenager, according to witnesses—were being sought for questioning in a string of small robberies in Boston and a major heist at a bank in nearby Brockton. I clicked on the next page for “More” and saw a photo of a third man, who’d been caught fleeing the scene of the last, biggest robbery.

I peered at his grainy countenance. I cringed at the sight of his stringy ponytail, added twenty-five years, and shaved his face. My lying-in-wait man. I got up from my desk-table combo, nearly knocking my chair over, as if Wendy’s “Ponytail” had just entered my hotel room. The long-ago robber was the man who’d been standing in the Henley College parking lot, watching me enter my car last night.

I slowed my breathing and went back for more.

The whole article was painfully brief, noting only that the man was being held for arraignment. So far, he hadn’t given up his partners.

If this truly was a big heist, there should be follow-up stories. I searched using as many keywords as I could reasonably relate to the story. Nothing came up, even though I pleaded with my computer each time the pinwheel spun, trying to honor my request. What was wrong with Boston reporters?

Skimpy as the data was, I had no doubt who the man was, and who his undisclosed partners had been. For better or worse, that’s how my mind did its calculations.

I looked out the window at the still-falling snow. I wanted to flee to the safety of my blue and white Henley cottage, though I knew better than to head out in this storm. “If
we
can’t fly,
you
shouldn’t drive,” Bruce always told me. I wished Bruce were with me now. I checked for the fourth time that the chain was pulled across my door, dragged the heavy desk chair over the carpet, and shoved it under the handle.

Foolish, I knew. My imagination was working overtime. I’d last seen the man in Henley, not Boston. I was actually safer here.

How come it didn’t feel that way?

• • •

Reading my math journals in bed seemed to calm me, except that every time I heard a noise in the hallway or a rattling of the window, I jumped. I was happy that Bruce checked in with me often, but the ringtone startled me, also, and I set the phone to vibrate to avoid the sudden sound.

I hadn’t told Bruce what I’d found in the police blotter. I debated calling Virgil. What could I tell them to get their attention? That I’d found an old police report and a newspaper photo of a bank robber from the eighties who looked like a man hanging around campus today? Oh, and that the eighties guy had a ponytail and so did the current guy. What a difference that made.

Maybe if I threw in my whole encounter with Wendy Carlson they’d see the connection I’d been trying to make all along. It couldn’t be coincidence that, according to Wendy, a guy named Ponytail hung out with her and her roommate at a diner in Henley, and a look-alike, from his hair to his mug, showed up a quarter of a century later on the same campus.

All I had to do was figure out how the carillon played into the story, other than as a curse to those who climbed the tower. That, and questions like “Why did he come back?” I assumed Ponytail the Younger spent some time in jail for the Brockton robbery. Did he take the fall (I really had to cut back on TV talk) or had he given up the names of his two partners? A new, wild thought came to me. What if Ponytail had eventually ratted on his associates, and Kirsten, unable to face prison and the scandal for her family, had chosen suicide instead?