Anonymous Sources (5 page)

    

F
rom several hundred feet away, another man was watching.

He'd watched all morning as people came and went through the great swinging doors of Eliot House. He'd watched the television crews jostle for a shot, and the cops try to shoo them away.

He clenched and unclenched his fingers and then wrapped them tight around the paper cup of tea he'd bought, now cold. His hands would not stop shaking.

It was done, wasn't it? Not a perfect plan, admittedly. Such a scramble. But it was done. The boy was dead. He felt reasonably sure that
Thomas Carlyle had not had time to tell anyone what he'd heard, not even had time to suspect much.

But the man couldn't have taken the risk, could he? Not after all the planning, the years of training and patience and work. One stupid mistake, and it could have unraveled everything.

Two nights ago the man had tossed and turned in his bed, realizing the gravity of his error. By dawn he had decided: Carlyle must be silenced. And there was only one way to make absolutely certain of that. The man had never killed before. That was not his role in the network. But he could not see a way around it, and there had been no time. He tried to make it look like an accident. Perhaps he had succeeded; it would be some days yet before the autopsy report was finished.

The turn of events had shaken him. He had committed murder. The man looked down and made another effort to steady his hands. He should not be here, he knew. But he wanted to know what the people investigating the scene looked like. In case they found something. In case they came after him. As, in fact, one of them did.

But it took her a while.

He wouldn't meet her face-to-face until nine days later.

    

    

T
he third and final time I sneaked into Eliot House was that evening.

I'd wasted a couple of hours on an awkward and not particularly fruitful attempt to speak to the Carlyle family. They own one of those mansions set back off Brattle Street. Glossy white paint, wide front steps, gas lanterns framing the door. I'd walked the twenty-five minutes from Eliot House and then cringed as I rang the doorbell. I'm not known for timidity when chasing a story, but it seemed in unspeakably poor taste to impose on a grieving family the day after their son had died, to ask . . . What? What could I possibly ask?

How do you feel?

Or:

Why might he have been drinking alone on the roof of his old college dorm last night?

Or, worse still:

Do you know of any reason why your son might have wanted to kill himself?

Awful. Hideous. They didn't pay me enough to do this.

I was rehearsing an opening along the lines of
How would you like people to remember your son?
when the door opened. To my relief, it was not Mr. or Mrs. Carlyle, but a younger man. Perhaps a friend of Thomas's. Or a family friend. He stepped onto the porch, half-closed the door behind him, and politely informed me that the Carlyles had no comment, no statement, would not be speaking to the press.

I nodded, tried again. “I understand. I would rather not be troubling you, really. And I'm so sorry for the family's loss. But I have to do my job, which is to write a story on what happened, and I want to get it right.”

I was talking fast, hoping he wouldn't shut the door in my face. “The statement the university put out said he'd just finished a year abroad in England. Was he back living here, at home?”

The man stood still for a moment, then shook his head. “No. I mean, he hadn't had time yet. He'd only just landed. He'd been back in the States for all of three hours, we think. His bags are all just . . .” The man gestured vaguely toward the inside of the house.

“It was a fellowship year he was doing, is that right? Do you know what he was studying?”

“Economics, I think. Or history. To tell you the truth, I don't think Thom was doing all that much studying this past year.” The man smiled sadly. “He'd met a girl. English. She was going to come over this summer. To meet everybody. He told Anna all about her.”

I noted the name. Anna. That must be Mrs. Carlyle.

“Thom and Anna are—were—they're very close. He called her, you know. On the way from the airport, when he landed. To tell her he was home safe. And that was yesterday and then a few hours later she gets a
call that he—that it—about what happened.” The man paused, cleared his throat, and turned to go back inside.

“Thank you. I'm so very sorry.” I heard the bolt slide into place. I started back down the driveway.

I knew I should head back to the newsroom. Start writing up what I had so far. It was late afternoon and Hyde Rawlins would be stalking the cubicles, chasing down what was on offer for tomorrow's front page.

But right now what I had was pretty thin. I didn't have a sense of what kind of guy Thom Carlyle had been. I didn't know why he'd fallen from the top of Eliot House. I wanted to be able to picture it, to see what he had seen in the moments before he fell.

And so I went back.

THIS TIME NO GUARD WAS
posted outside. The television trucks were gone too. Students were coming and going from the main doors, and I walked right in. The cops must have figured they'd collected whatever evidence they could find, and now dorm life was getting back to normal.

I checked the courtyard first. By this point I knew where I was going. The dark stain had been scrubbed away, but the ring of police tape was still there. People had left bouquets of flowers. I turned toward H-Entry.

Here the police tape was gone. I walked up a flight. Another one. No one stopped me. I could hear music from behind one of the doors. Students were home. There was no sign of cops. I kept climbing, but on the fifth floor I hit a dead end. At the end of the corridor was a door marked
LEONARD BERNSTEIN '39, MUSIC ROOM AND TOWER
. It was sealed with the
POLICE—DO NOT CROSS
tape. I jiggled the knob. Locked tight.

I slumped down against the wall and tried to imagine what had happened here last night. There were three possible explanations. The most likely, surely, was suicide. Thom might have climbed up the bell tower to throw himself from the top. Maybe the tower had some symbolic significance
from his undergraduate days here. Or maybe it was just a really tall tower—tall enough to guarantee you wouldn't survive a fall—for which he happened to have the key. The major problem with this theory was that so far I'd found no reason to believe he'd been depressed. I'd had the
Chronicle
reference librarians scour his record, his Facebook page, old
Crimson
cuttings. They'd found no trace of trouble, no hint of anything other than a nice kid with good grades and a lot of rowing trophies. You never know what's going on in someone's head. But from a practical standpoint, why would someone bent on killing himself have taken the time to wipe the railings free of fingerprints?

So maybe it was an accident. He might have been drunk. Leaned out too far, slipped. The autopsy would presumably turn up whatever drugs or alcohol were in his system. Galloni did say they found beer bottles up here. But he'd said a couple of bottles. I found it hard to believe a twenty-three-year-old athlete could have gotten drunk enough off two beers to fall off a roof. And there was still the issue with the fingerprints.

Which left the most sinister possibility. What if someone else was up here last night? Carlyle had been a big guy. He would not have gone without a struggle. I knew—the yellow cardigan story—that he had landed faceup, eyes open. But what if his skull was already shattered when he hit the ground?

    

    

THURSDAY, JUNE 24

BY NINE THE NEXT MORNING,
I was back at my desk. My byline was front page again in the morning paper. I had the details about Thom Carlyle falling from the bell tower instead of a fifth-floor bedroom. And I'd been the only one to report the fingerprints, or lack thereof.

I picked up the phone and dialed Lieutenant Galloni. I'd already bugged him twice yesterday to check facts, and I knew he would soon stop taking my calls.

But the Carlyles weren't talking. There was nothing more to see at Eliot House. The funeral wasn't scheduled yet, and the autopsy report might still be a day or two from completion. Meanwhile another
Chronicle
deadline was looming tonight, and right now I had no leads.

“Galloni,” he answered.

“Hi. Alex James here again. Just a quick question.”

“Look, I really can't—”

“I know. I don't want to get you in trouble. But I thought of something. The key. Didn't you say nobody had checked it out? From the janitor's office? I'm still trying to figure out what he was doing up there. You know, how he got up there.”

“Yeah. Make that two of us,” Galloni said wearily. “But there's no story with the key. We've got it.”

“You do?”

“We do. And if you promise to stop calling me, I'll tell you that it was in Carlyle's jeans pocket the whole time. Okay? Like I said, he must have had a copy from when he was a student there. Maybe he liked to play piano or something. There's a big old grand piano up there. Anyway, there's no mystery about how he got up there. He let himself in. Just wish I knew why.”