The Quotient of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles) (15 page)

Our waitress chose that moment to bring coffee refills, and, less than a minute later, our blue plates. “Here you go, honey,” she said to me. “Here you go, Detective,” she said to Virge. “Try not to eat hers, too, okay?” And she winked away.

I was ready to push my plate toward Virgil in case he did need a second helping of everything. But once the aroma of coffee, apple, and sausage reached my nose, hunger took over and I plunged in on my breakfast, adjusting to the news of Ponytail’s death, thinking of not only his violent end, but his appearances in Henley across a span of a quarter century. What had he been doing in between?

Virgil swirled a line of ketchup over his scrambled eggs. His action started a tapestry in my head where Ponytail’s killer was trailing blood, from the tower with Kirsten a long time ago, to the pathway with Jenn, a few days ago, and now to the airfield. Why Jenn was in the middle of the timeline, I didn’t know. A random victim, was one guess. Poor Jenn. Wrong place, wrong time. Either that or there really was something to my Curse of the Carillon theory.

Not too long ago, I would have been thrilled to have an iota of evidence of the Kirsten-Jenn connection. Now it seemed closer, but the gap might as well have been as wide as the icy chasms I’d watched Bruce clear on videos from his extreme sports vacations.

“Did the other man do it?” I asked, getting back to Virgil at last. “The worker Ponytail is fighting with on the video? Remember, Lauren saw them arguing in the cafeteria, too?”

“I remember. We don’t know yet who killed him.”

“Are you checking on that other guy? Fighting with the victim—I’d think he’d be your chief suspect.” This from a highly decorated civilian.

I looked down to see that my mug was filled to the brim again. I guessed our waitress was used to clientele who required discretion; she’d learned to keep us happy without asking to look at pictures of summer vacation.

“We haven’t ID’d that guy yet,” Virgil said. “We have Pete Barker, the foreman, coming in this afternoon.”

I loved that Virgil was being so forthcoming. I was about to thank him for filling me in, when an alarm sounded in my head.

Fortunately, I’d already had enough coffee and devoured most of my eggs and half my pancakes by the time I realized what Virgil hadn’t told me yet.

“Ponytail’s murder isn’t the real reason you took me into custody.”

“You weren’t in custody. You were—”

“What are you not telling me, Virgil? Did you really think Ponytail’s killer was coming after me? Why would you think that?”

Virgil made a show of chewing a hunk of sausage, washing it down with coffee.

“A lot’s happened since you took off for the state capital.”

“From the top, Virgil.”

Virgil inhaled deeply. “I had this homicide. I had the mug shot you sent, from years ago. Then your friend came down to look at the video.”

“My friend?” I asked, then remembered—Judy Donohue was planning to schedule a viewing session.

“Judy,” we said together.

Virgil’s plate was clean, so I pushed my sausage toward him. He stabbed it and chewed slowly. I was making heroic efforts to be patient.

“She recognized the other worker,” he finally said. “The one Ponytail was fighting with.”

“He changed his jacket on the video, right?”

Virgil nodded. “And the coeds swooned over him,” he added.

I wanted to clue Virgil in that we didn’t call them coeds anymore, unless he meant the male students, who were new on campus. And at the one rave I’d been to, I was sure I didn’t see any swooning. Quite the opposite, as far as the amount of energy involved in the activity. “From where did Judy recognize him?”

“From the basement of Ben Franklin Hall. He was fixing your heater.”

The guy who, allegedly, killed Ponytail was Judy’s hunky guy? The buff guy downstairs in Franklin? More than strange. As far as I knew, construction workers didn’t fix heaters.

“He was in our basement?” I tried to come up with a reason why he might have been anywhere in Franklin Hall. The crew had their own portables, and if he didn’t like those, there were many closer men’s rooms near the work site. “He was snooping?”

“Looks that way.”

Another shiver ran through me as I conjured up the image of my students and me blithely calculating the slopes of curves and discussing Archimedes while one floor below us a potential killer lurked.

“Now I have the two guys fighting on your campus,” Virgil continued. “One is casing Franklin Hall, hypothetically, and the other was involved in a robbery twenty-five years ago, and turns up dead. I also have a student attacked on campus, a student who spends a lot of time in Franklin Hall.” He pointed his fork, licked clean, at me. “And a professor who spends more than a lot of time in Franklin Hall.” I drew in my breath. “And, may I add, said professor is nosy. So nosy, she pops off to Boston at the drop of a hat, in a snowstorm—”

“It wasn’t snowing when I started out.”

“I rest my case.”

“You also know, according to Wendy Carlson, my informant, that the dead guy was associated with a student who died on campus that same twenty-five years ago.”

“That’s even more hypothetical.”

“She named him.”

“‘Ponytail,’ you mean?”

“Yes, ‘Ponytail.’”

Virgil shrugged and I knew I almost had him.

I needed a chart. I took out a pen and plucked a napkin from the dispenser. Virgil sat back and let me draw. The center of the napkin became the dividing line between “then” and “now.” Under “then,” I wrote a list of names: Kirsten, Wendy, and the two thugs, as I thought of them, Einstein and Ponytail. Under “now,” I listed Wendy, Jenn, Ponytail, and the Unnamed Worker. Ted Morrell’s name also belonged on both lists. I thought of our physics chair, Wendy’s mentor, wondering how much he knew “then.” But Fran Emerson, currently of Rwanda, had also been at Henley then, as well as other faculty. I decided to leave faculty off the list for now.

I drew connections: Kirsten, Einstein, and Ponytail were connected by at least one robbery, and probably by other crimes, big and small. All three were connected to Wendy, at least personally if not as accomplice. The Unnamed Worker was connected to Ponytail, maybe through long-ago criminal pursuits, certainly through the fights on the “now” side of the line. It took only a minute to see the setup on the napkin as an equation. Kirsten plus Wendy plus Ponytail plus Einstein then, equals Wendy plus Ponytail plus Unknown Worker now.

“He has to be Einstein,” I said.

“Huh?” Virgil asked.

“The guy fighting with Ponytail. He must be the other guy Wendy identified as Kirsten’s friend. They called him Einstein.”

Virgil moved his head side to side. I realized he couldn’t commit to my conclusion, and strictly speaking, the “equals” sign in the equation I purported to solve was on shaky ground. An arrow might have been more appropriate, indicating travel from the eighties to the teens. Or, if I remembered my basic (and only) chemistry, a chemical reaction.

“I know it’s not all wrapped up, but I feel like we’re getting somewhere,” I said to Virgil. I sat back and enjoyed the warmth of a refilled mug in my hands. “Do we know Ponytail’s real name?” I asked.

“Not yet,” Virgil said. “We—that is, the Henley PD, not you and I—are running his prints.”

“If he was arrested for that robbery, he must be in the system, right? Don’t they keep evidence forever?”

“Technically yes and yes, but the system doesn’t always work on weekends. Or during the week, or . . . well, you know.”

I was sorry I brought it up. Not that I wasn’t sympathetic. But by now, I could practically replace Virgil in sounding off on the sad state of police forensics resources, especially compared to what TV crime dramas led the public to believe and to expect. To make his point at our last pizza night, Virgil had told Bruce and me about a medical examiner in the Midwest who had a backlog of eight hundred cases, all pending, thus hampering police investigations, depriving survivors of insurance benefits, and . . . He’d stopped only when the whistle blew for the start of a game on TV (my signal to retreat to my office).

“As I said, we have the construction foreman coming in later today, around four,” Virgil continued. “We’re hoping the video’s good enough for him to give us ID on both men.”

So the only question still was how the attack on Jenn Marshall fit into my equation.

“Once I sent you Ponytail’s photo, you knew he was the dead man at the airfield, right?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then you knew he wasn’t going after Wendy in Boston.”

“Uh-huh.”

I paused, my mind churning away as if I had a fifth-level brainteaser on my hands. “But maybe his killer would be after her. Is that what you were thinking? Wendy could be a loose end from the robbery or who knows what else?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Maybe Unnamed Worker, aka Einstein, even killed Kirsten.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m still not clear on why you’re protecting me. Why would Ponytail’s killer come after me? What makes you think he knew I was—”

“Asking around?” Virgil suggested. “Snooping? What makes me think he might have known that?”

“That’s it? Einstein knows I’ve been asking questions?”

Virgil blew out an unintentional whistle. “There’s something else.”

My heart raced as I thought of Jenn Marshall. Had she died? Had Ponytail’s killer decided to finish his attack on Jenn and gone after her in the hospital? Or was something wrong with Bruce? Had Bruce been in an accident? He had a dangerous job, dangerous hobbies. Had he gone off and hurt himself?

It was very strange that Bruce wasn’t here. What was more important than being with me after my stressful night? Virgil had said Bruce was “busy,” “tied up.” With what? Before my mind could go off track even further, into heartbreaking realms, I looked Virgil in the eye.

“I’m waiting, Virgil.” I picked up my fork and dipped a piece of pancake into a pool of maple syrup, hoping it might look like a threatening gesture—injury by a syrupy projectile.

“Your house was broken into last night.”

I dropped my fork, sending a sticky trail across the table. Virgil mumbled what I assumed was an apology, and motioned for our waitress. She arrived with a wet and suspiciously stained piece of terry cloth and spread the syrup around before capturing most of it.

I watched, dumb for the moment, then annoyed. First Pan’s and now Louie’s Dining Car. Why did everyone give me bad news while I was eating out? I’d soon be blacklisted at every decent restaurant in Henley.

I heard Virgil’s voice as if it were being filtered through all the ketchup, syrup, and whipped butter in the diner.

“Bruce says nothing was stolen, as far as he could tell, Sophie. Nothing even badly damaged. He’s there now, putting things back together.”

“Bruce is tied up, you said.”

Virgil nodded and put his hand on mine. “Not literally tied up, Sophie. He’s straightening things out at your house. He wanted to make sure you didn’t walk into a . . . a mess. I can take you home anytime you want.”

I nodded, letting the simple fact sink in. A breakin at my cottage. No one had been home; no one was hurt. I relaxed my shoulders. A breakin was nothing compared to an attack on someone I loved. Nothing to worry about.

Unless it was Ponytail’s killer. And he’d been looking for me. Which thought apparently occurred to Virgil and prompted him to send out the cavalry to save me.

I repeated to myself: Nothing to worry about. Nothing to worry about.

“Try to space out,” Virgil said, as he drove my car toward my home.

Easy for him say. My home might even now be harboring an intruder. What if someone was there, hurting Bruce at this moment? How could I be sure the guy had left? Or that he wouldn’t come back for regular visits?

“Are you spacing out?” Virgil asked.

“I’m trying.”

I focused on the winter trees and their bare branches, which made beautiful shadows on the snow. I noticed the few places where the snow hadn’t been trampled on, like the lawn of an elementary school, closed for the weekend. I imagined kids arriving later to build a snow fort or make snow angels. But not even all the angels, painted and sculpted, on display or in storage at the MFA could calm me down.

I tried preparing myself for the worst at my house—tables and chairs tipped over; dishes and vases in shatters; drawers and lamps overturned; carpets, pillows, and draperies slashed. I was on my way to mirrors with threatening messages written in blood, when I felt the car lurch.

“Sorry,” Virgil said, putting his hand on my arm. “I’m not used to this car.”

His studied expression told me he’d purposely maneuvered the jerky right turn, to jolt me out of my panicked, horror-movie state. He could probably tell his “space-out” suggestion hadn’t taken hold.

“Thanks,” I said, and he grinned.

“Better?” he asked.

“Much.”

I had to admit, things were falling into place, like a jigsaw puzzle in progress, and having a few pieces mesh was better than having them all upside down and scattered about. I couldn’t help wishing that a prettier picture were taking shape.

“Is there any feedback on that hundred-dollar bill I found in the bushes?” I asked Virgil, thinking of loose puzzle pieces.

“Not yet.”

“It’s probably still thawing out,” I offered, so Virgil wouldn’t start up again about the underfunded, understaffed forensics lab in Henley. I’d read recently in a news magazine that police in a city in China were using a newly developed chemical illumination process that provided better quality fingerprints. I had no plans to mention it to Virgil and get him riled up about US crime labs, as justified as his complaints were.

“ETA one minute,” Virgil said, as jargony as Bruce, turning onto my street with a smooth left turn.

I closed my eyes, counted to thirteen, my favorite prime number, and opened them to see my cottage, looking much the way I’d left it yesterday morning, except for a little more snow along the edges of the driveway. The outside was further enhanced by the presence of Bruce hurrying down the path to meet me. I barely let Virgil come to a full stop, then opened the car door and all but fell into Bruce’s arms.

Virgil stayed in my car, adjusting the seat and rearview mirror to my position, tapping away on his phone, giving us a few minutes.

“Welcome home,” Bruce said, holding tight.

I buried my face in his neck. Home had never looked so good. Never mind that the interior might look like a prehistoric ruin.

• • •

Prepared for disaster, I found instead a setting worthy of a magazine cover.

A vase of cut flowers, a fresh pot of coffee, and a pink box with my favorite éclairs warmed my kitchen, giving it the look of a staged home for a Realtor’s open house. Bruce did his best to tempt me with the pastry, though he must have known that I’d already celebrated my arrival in Henley with a huge Louie’s breakfast—part nutrition, part Virgil’s stalling tactic, I now realized—while my house was being fingerprinted and put back together after my intruder.

The walk-through could have been worse. That’s what I told myself as I picked a few books from the floor and deposited them on the desk in my office.

“Sorry,” Bruce said. “I thought you wanted them there.”

Virgil laughed. I gave Bruce a poke in the arm and a smile. I couldn’t deny that the floor of my office often served as a resting place for books in transition from my briefcase to a shelf.

Bruce and Virgil trailed me as I moved chairs around and plugged my laptop in place and adjusted the lampshade next to it. I scooped up a few beads that had slipped off their wire, an unfinished key ring project. Little things, put right, seemed to make a difference, to restore order. The men formed a wall behind me, in case I fainted, I supposed, though I wasn’t in the habit of swooning. If I were in a joking mood, I would have tested them by going slack and falling back into their arms, like the leaders of faculty retreats often had us do, “to build trust,” they claimed. Some other time, maybe.

Our tour ended back in the kitchen, where the three of us sat at the table. I watched Bruce and Virgil eat éclairs while I pummeled them with a barrage of questions. Their answers were unsurprisingly guarded.

“What time did the break-in happen?” (
Sometime after dark
, from Virgil.)

“Did you know about it when I talked to you from Boston? (
Yes
from Virgil; a sheepish
Uh-huh
from Bruce.)

“Who discovered the break-in?” (
Celia
from Virgil;
Evelyn
from Bruce, leading me to conclude that it was one or both of the elderly sisters who lived directly west of me. They’d called the police and reported suspicious activity in my driveway. I was grateful and proud of the HPD for acknowledging the sisters, who were easily rattled and called for help often.)

“How did he get in?” (
Through the patio doors off your bedroom
, from Virgil;
A new super lock is already in place
, from Bruce.)

“How bad was it here before Bruce cleaned up?” (
I didn’t see it
, from Virgil;
Not that bad, really
, from Bruce.)

“Do you think the guy was after me personally, to harm me, or did he want to shake me up by messing with my things?” (A shrug from each, then
Anybody’s guess
, from Virgil.)

“Did the officers who responded lift any fingerprints?” (
Oh yeah
, from Virgil.)

“Do you think you’ll get anything from the fingerprints?” (A shake of his head and
Probably not
, from Virgil.)

A wave of tiredness came over me. I put my head down, then raised it to speak. “If I say you both have to go so I can get some sleep, will you hold it against me?”

Bruce started off, and soon the faux Bellamy Brothers were belting out a song in my kitchen as they cleared the cups and plates. They danced toward the door. Not the reaction I’d expected when I paraphrased a favorite song of ours, but it was the best laugh I’d had in a long time.

“Will you let me know if anything develops?” I asked Virgil, at the door.

“Of course, I’ll add another sheet of carbon paper when I type up my report.”

“Good, I’ll need to know about whether you can dig Wendy’s number out of my phone, whether the hundred-dollar bill has any useful information stuck to it, and when you have complete IDs on the two workers.”

Virgil pretended to be writing on his hand. “Anything else?”

“Not at the moment, but I’ll see you at the station at four, when the foreman shows up to watch the video.”

“You don’t need to do that,” Bruce said. He’d returned from another quick walk-through, during which he’d checked all the locks. “Don’t set your alarm clock, okay? You should just sleep—”

“Bye, guys,” I said, with gentle shoves, and closed the door.

• • •

Through the patio doors of my breakfast nook, I watched Bruce and Virgil walk slowly down the driveway, heads together, talking. I had no doubt about the topic. They stood at the end of the walkway for a few minutes, until an unmarked, but clearly identifiable, police sedan pulled up. Virgil talked to the occupant, then he and Bruce drove away in Bruce’s car.

Progress, I thought. My posse was down to only one local unmarked car.

My first order of business: strip my bed. What if the intruder had sat on it, or even touched my pillows, perhaps leaning on one as he opened the drawer of my nightstand? It wasn’t practical for me to divest my home of every piece of furniture and all my possessions, but I could cleanse key areas.

I pulled the drapes across my glass patio doors, hiding the entryway that had provided access to my intruder. I threw all the bed linens into the laundry area—sheets, blanket, spread, pillowcases, mattress cover, bed skirt, shams—and ran a couple washes using hot water, a setting I rarely chose. I couldn’t guarantee that I wouldn’t toss all the linens in the trash once they were clean, but this was a start.

I showered (after a serious spraying of the tile) and put on my warmest fleece robe. I grabbed a pillow from the closet (the crime scene ones were history), wrapped a clean blanket around myself, and flopped onto my bare mattress.

I started counting, but didn’t get to thirteen.

• • •

I woke up to a phone call at two thirty in the afternoon. Judy Donohue apologized profusely when she realized I’d been sleeping. My foggy morning voice, no matter that it was midday, gave me away. I decided to spare her all the reasons for my disrupted schedule.

“No problem,” I said. “I need to get moving anyway.”

“You heard about the guy in the basement?” she asked.

“I did,” I said, as we both made audible shuddering sounds.

“What if I’d . . . ?” Judy trailed off.

“Let’s not go there,” I said.

“Agreed. Are you going to the police station for a look at the new video footage this afternoon?”

“Yes. You, too?”

Judy cleared her throat. “Detective Mitchell invited me to, if I was free.”

It wasn’t clear why I needed to know this, until Judy asked, “Do you think you could pick me up?”

“Uh, sure.” I untangled myself from the blanket and sat up against my headboard. It occurred to me that I hadn’t cleaned the wood, and the intruder might have . . . I climbed out of bed, brushed off a chair by the patio doors, and sat there, facing the patches of snow where my garden should have been.

“You’re probably wondering why I’m asking for a ride,” Judy said.

“Sort of, but I’m happy to do it. Did your car die?” I knew all about battery problems.

“No, no. Can I ask you something?”

“Of course. What’s up?”

Judy’s pause was long enough to make me worry. I hoped I didn’t have to add another friend-in-trouble to my list.

“What is it, Judy?”

“Okay. Is Detective Mitchell . . . Virgil . . . seeing anyone right now?”

What? Could Judy possibly mean what I thought she meant? Not literally, was Virgil at this moment looking a suspect in the eye, for example, but was Virgil
seeing
someone? As in
dating
?

My turn for a long pause, and Judy picked up on it.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, Sophie. Or if you don’t know, it’s okay. It’s just . . . I think I’m getting some signals, but I don’t want to make a fool of myself.”

It took great effort not to blurt out how shocked I was. To say that Virgil was not Judy’s type would be like saying that Julia Child and Mahatma Gandhi would have little in common on a dinner date. Since her divorce about three years ago, Judy had dated only men who looked like fitness instructors, one of whom had, in fact, been her personal trainer.

Virgil, on the other hand—well, Virgil considered lumbering up my long driveway to be his exercise for the week.

“No,” I managed. “Virgil’s not seeing anyone.” I thought about his strangely chipper behavior lately. “But he’s acting as though he’s about to start.”

“You’re sure? I mean, you think I should trust these signals?”

“I’m sure,” I said.

I heard a sigh. “Oh, good, then. You’re probably a little surprised, huh?”

We both took a minute for a laugh. “A little. But I’m thrilled for both of you.”

“It’s not like we’re engaged, Sophie.”

“Yet,” we both said, and laughed again.

“I’ll pick you up in about an hour.”

I’d realized, finally, that Judy wanted a ride to the station in case she and Virgil ended up leaving the HPD together. I was dumbstruck for a minute. Judy’s and Virgil’s paths had crossed many times through my association with both of them. Still, I’d never pictured them getting together. Also, I knew that in the same situation, I’d be taking my own car in case the evening didn’t work out well—which wasn’t the only clue that Judy was more adventurous than I could ever be.