The Quotient of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles) (16 page)

The thought, once I got past the unexpectedness of it, really did thrill me. As far as Bruce and I knew, Virgil hadn’t dated at all since his wife died a few years ago. His personal attention went to his son, who was now in college.

I clicked off with Judy, thoughts of double-dating for pizza night dancing in my head. My phone rang again immediately. Bruce this time.

“Hey. Have a good sleep?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, though now that I was awake, I felt all the unresolved issues of the last few days pile up on my shoulders. Jenn’s attack. My computer and credit card problems. The short life of Kirsten Packard. The missing Wendy Carlson. The violation of my personal space. The murdered Ponytail. And someone who called himself Einstein, of all people.

“Who was on the phone? I heard you mention Virgil.”

“You’re not going to believe this. Judy Donohue asked me if—wait, how did you know . . . ?”

“I’m here. Walking toward you now,” he said. “I didn’t want to pop up in front of you and scare you.”

“You’re here?”

And there he was, in the doorway to my bedroom. How had I not seen the signs, like the pile of clean, dry, folded bedclothes on my vanity chair? And the extra blanket thrown across my bed.

“When did you get here?” I asked.

“I never really left,” he said, as we hung up and faced each other. “I dropped Virge off at the station and slipped back in.”

“I didn’t hear you.”

“I pulled your door shut and stayed at the other end of the house. I’d make a good spy.”

Or a good intruder.
I shook that image away and pointed to the clean laundry. “And you did all that?”

He looked proud of himself, as he should have. “I also stripped and washed the stuff on the guest bed. It’s all made up so you can sleep there if you want until this bed’s ready. In between, I’ve been watching
Top Gun
with the headphones on so I wouldn’t disturb you.”

“No wonder I slept so well,” I said. “Thank you.”

“You didn’t think I was going to leave you here alone after all that’s been going on?”

I gave him my biggest smile and my best hug. “I should have known better,” I said.

It wasn’t until we were on our way to pick up Judy that I remembered to tell Bruce about her potential pending date with Virgil.

“Did Virgil say anything to you about it?” I asked.

Bruce zipped his lips.

I poked his arm. “C’mon. I told you what I know.”

Bruce grinned at me from behind the wheel of my car. We’d taken my Honda, the better to fit another passenger. I gave him a look designed to elicit information, part coy, part threatening.

“I’ve been dying to tell you,” he said, with a big smile. “It seems your girlfriend might have been putting out vibes to my buddy that she was available. He didn’t want to make a fool of himself, though, so he asked me to ask you to ask her . . . Sound familiar?”

“Sounds like junior high. It also fits Judy. She’s not shy, but she wouldn’t want to fall on her face either.”

“You had too many more important things going on the last few days and I never got around to bringing it up with you.”

“This is very important,” I said, excited, happy to deal with an issue that wasn’t life or death. “This means there’s mutual interest.” I punched the air with my fist. “I like it.”

I felt like a schoolgirl who’d found her best friend a date for the prom. Not that I had any extra dates at the time.

• • •

Judy was ready and waiting, exiting her home as we pulled up. As usual she looked well put together. She was known for following the latest fashion trends but held to the old rule that a lady’s shoes must always match her purse. Today both were a bright green, the perfect complement to her red blond hair. It was clear that her outfit was chosen with Virgil in mind. Her wool coat was a classic style, nothing a model would wear swinging down a runway. From under her coat, part of what I recognized as her newest sweater set was visible—conservative, but not my mother’s sweater set. The shawl cardigan was short, with a draped front, and buttonless. My summary: up to date, but within Virgil’s comfort zone.

“How do I look?” she asked, as she climbed into the backseat.

“You look terrific,” I said, with the enthusiasm I felt.

“Perfect for an evening at a police station,” Bruce said.

“I don’t think that’s what she wants to hear,” I said.

Judy laughed. “It’s exactly what I want to hear.”

I couldn’t remember seeing her in a better mood.

• • •

When we arrived, Pete Barker, the construction foreman for the Henley College carillon project, was in a private viewing session with Virgil and his investigative team. Barker was going over footage the rest of us had already seen, in particular, the Fighting Workers scene. I tried not to be too peeved that Virgil didn’t invite civilians, that is, me, to the early showing. With any luck, Barker would come through and we’d soon know the names of the two men—the real names of Ponytail and the Unknown Worker, plus Unknown’s nickname. I was rooting for “Einstein.”

I used the waiting time at the HPD to clear up other nuisances of the week, making a side trip to the service desk to file the official report of credit card fraud first. While I waited my turn, I scanned the pamphlet rack—information on personal safety, vehicle theft, and managing disruptive behavior. I wondered if the last one applied to classrooms. I thought of my violated home—was it too late for me to read the one on crime prevention?

A small child in front of me dropped the pamphlet she was playing with. I sincerely hoped the child was at the police station for a happy reason, such as getting fingerprinted for security purposes, or visiting a relative on the force.

I picked up the pamphlet, since Mom had another toddler in her arms, and, when no one in the family wanted it back, I looked through it myself. “The Henley City Flag” was its title. I had no idea we had our own flag, let alone that the colors were continental blue and buff, that it was silk, and had to be exactly five feet in length and three and a half feet in width, or any proportion thereof. I amused myself by calculating other permitted sizes, from two and a half feet long by one and three-quarters feet wide on the low end. I stopped at twenty-five feet long by seventeen and a half feet wide on the high end.

I scanned a pamphlet on email scams, but none of the examples fit my problem. I didn’t need a lecture about not handing over a few thousand of my dollars in order to collect untold millions from overseas. The leaflet did remind me that I still had to clear up my current email spam problem. When I checked earlier this afternoon, I found my inbox once again loaded with unwanted ads, in duplicate. No sooner did I delete the offending emails than they were back. I’d thought of asking Ted if he could do something about it, but he’d been so contrary recently, I hated to ask him. I did have a host of student whiz kids, like Andrew Davies, whom I could call on. I’d take care of that tomorrow.

By the time Bruce came to collect me for another show of surveillance footage, I’d completed the forms for both my credit card fraud and my home breakin. I was ready for a movie.

• • •

The HPD interview room, our theater for the afternoon, was decidedly less attractive than the music room on campus. Peeling paint; cracked, stained linoleum; duct-taped furniture; water marks on the ceiling. A true fixer-upper. Except that the place was scheduled to be abandoned soon, sour odors and all. I was happier than ever that I’d contributed to the new building fund.

What made the room even less inviting was the fact that I’d been in this run-down facility only a few hours ago, undergoing transfer from one police department to another.

Bruce and I took two seats in the closer of two semicircles that had formed around the video, with foreman Pete Barker, a short, balding man, in the center. I was glad to see a few different faculty members and one or two from the Admin staff who hadn’t come to the first session.

I leaned over to Bruce. “Did you know that Henley has a city flag?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said. “It’s continental blue and buff, the official colors of the city.”

I frowned at him. “Who are you? I don’t even know you.”

I was surprised when Andrew entered the room and took the seat next to me. I gave him a big smile, in preparation for asking a big favor soon.

“No one else wanted to come, but I want to do everything I can,” Andrew said, in a sad tone, his mouth turned down. By “no one” I assumed he meant Willa, Lauren, Brent, and Patty, the students with whom he’d been traveling lately.

I gave him a pat on the back, realizing how much I’d missed contact with my students this weekend. Like most teachers, I seldom had a day “off” from them. There was always an email or text question to answer.
What are your office hours this week? Is there a book I can read that explains limits better than our textbook?
(Usually meaning better than I had done in class.) Or an invitation to an informal gathering
. We’re getting together at the Mortarboard tonight. Come on over. Willa’s playing classical guitar.
(Which could mean they’d discovered Peter, Paul and Mary.)

Hanging out with students, as we faculty all did to some extent, was a learning experience in itself. We had constant reminders that this was a generation who had never seen an airplane ticket, who watched TV shows almost anywhere but on a TV screen, and for whom partially exposed undergarments had always been a fashion standard.

I’d just gotten a quick update from Andrew on Jenn’s condition (nothing changed) and on Mr. and Mrs. Marshall (up in the air about moving Jenn to a hospital nearer home) when a knock—
tap, tap, tap
—sounded from the table that held the A/V system. Virgil calling us to attention. Conversations came to a halt.

Virgil introduced foreman Pete Barker—a stocky man and the best-dressed guy in the room, with wool pants and a sharp, blue gray sports coat—then announced that we were about to watch new footage from the Coffee Filter and the bank next door to it, on Main Street. I almost raised my hand to ask what were the names Barker had come up with for his two employees who couldn’t seem to get along. I looked at Bruce who apparently read my mind, maybe because I’d whined a lot in the last half hour about not being privy to the invitation-only session where Barker was to ID his workers. Bruce shook his head, ever so slightly, but I got the message and behaved.

I’d also been trying very hard to keep myself from studying the interaction between Virgil and Judy. Impossible. As we entered, I’d watched him take her coat. (Was that a broader grin than I’d ever seen on Virgil? A gleam in his eye?) Then he’d pulled out a chair for her. (Did she always tilt her head when she smiled? Flip her newly bobbed hair like that?) I guessed we wouldn’t be driving Judy home.

Virgil briefed us on the video we’d already seen of activities on campus, and what we were about to see on the new footage from the Coffee Filter and the bank. I couldn’t help thinking of all the segments of “Previously on . . .” at the start of episodes of serialized TV dramas.

The first DVD was queued up with footage from the Coffee Filter, from a camera pointing toward our campus. Unfortunately, the camera captured only a small section of the narrow pathway between the Clara Barton dorm and the Student Union building, the area I’d visited the day after Jenn’s attack. The image fell short of including the bush from which I’d plucked a one-hundred-dollar bill.

“You can see part of the pathway where Jenn Marshall was walking that day,” Virgil narrated. “Unlucky for us, neither this footage nor what we have from the bank shows the actual attack.”

I sensed a collective sigh of relief. As much as we wanted to help, I didn’t think any of us looked forward to watching the assault on our student and friend.

The video rolled on with its image of half of a well-trodden path, blackened old snow mounds on each side. We did learn that Jenn’s attack had happened on the half of the path that was closer to the interior of the campus than to the street. Not much that we didn’t already know from the commuters who came upon the struggle.

About three minutes in, finally, we saw some action. A lone figure, probably male, came into view, walking off college property and toward the camera—in the same direction Jenn had most likely been headed—approaching Main Street. The audience leaned forward. Was this the man who attacked Jenn? It was hard to tell if he was one of the workers we’d seen on the earlier video. I wanted it to be Einstein, but truthfully, there was no way to be sure. He wore a common jacket, muffler, and cap, and there wasn’t much of a reference in the frame to gauge how tall he was. He was carrying some kind of bag, but it was impossible to identify what in particular he was toting, since the bag was slung over his shoulder with most of it on his back. It might have been Jenn’s backpack. It might also have been his lunch or a set of golf clubs.

Virgil stopped the video. “You see this guy? Anyone recognize him? From anywhere?”

A disappointing chorus of “No” and “Nuh-uh” arose.

“Does he look like one of the workers?” Virgil asked, pressing for a lead. “Maybe you recognize the clothes he’s wearing, the way he walks? Some gesture? Anything?”

The answer came in the form of shrugs and “I don’t knows” and “no ideas,” even from the boss of the site, Pete Barker.

Virgil continued. “He’s walking away from where Jenn Marshall was attacked, during the right timeframe, but he’s not running. Remember, our three witnesses claimed they chased the attacker along Main Street. As you’ll see in a minute, the footage from the bank shows this same thing. The guy saunters along Main on the campus side, as if he had all the time in the world, until he just walks out of the frame. He’s not running from anyone. So, either he’s not the attacker, or . . .”

Virgil waited for someone to finish his sentence. I knew the classroom trick to engage people (make sure they were awake) and decided to help him out.

“Or the commuter students didn’t chase him as they claimed,” I suggested.

Scattered “Hmms” filled the room.

“That could very well be,” Virgil said. I suspected it wasn’t a new idea to him. “Initially, we heard that one guy stayed back with the victim and called nine-one-one, and the other two chased the attacker around to Main Street. But this video could mean—”