Dead Man's Bones (24 page)

“I want to tell you about it,” she said urgently. “I need to ask your advice. About what I should do next.”

I sat forward in the chair. “I can’t act as your lawyer. I can refer you to someone else, but I can’t take your case.”

“No,” she said hurriedly. “That’s not what I want. But I thought, with your legal background, you might be—”

“And I can’t promise not to share what you tell me with my husband.”

A shadow of pain crossed her face. “He already knows . . . everything. There are no more secrets.”

I was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of pity. Whatever she had done to bring her to this place in her life, whatever choices she had made, voluntary or involuntary—that was all in the past. She was facing a difficult, painful future.

“I’m sorry,” I said quietly.

She was silent for a few moments, her fingers pleating the sheet in her lap. “I lied about my undergraduate degree at the University of Mexico.” She spoke slowly, as if she were testifying in court, as if every word had to be measured, had to be verified against some internal catalogue of facts. I said nothing.

She took a deep breath. “I was in my last semester, twelve—no, thirteen—hours away from graduation, when I met my husband, the man I later . . . married.” She came to a stop, as if the word
married
had surprised her, had tripped her up.

The silence lengthened. Was this all she was going to tell me, or was there more? “He was an American?” I prodded.

She nodded. “His name was Thomas. He was an anthropologist from LSU, doing a dig near Mexico City. We fell in love.” She stopped. It was as if she was listening to herself say something she’d said many times before, but hearing it, really hearing it, for the first time. She bit her lip.

“No, I want to tell the truth. He didn’t love me. For him, it was entirely sexual. For me, it was . . . wanting to go to the United States. To become a U.S. citizen.” She looked at me. “Can you understand that?”

“Yes,” I said cautiously, although I couldn’t understand marrying someone in order to become a citizen. Marriage is dicey enough when you do it because you love someone. For any other reason—

“Then you understand that I couldn’t say no. I couldn’t even say, wait. Thomas wouldn’t have waited, of course.”

She scrutinized my face, as if trying to discover how I felt about what she was saying. “I didn’t think it would ever matter. About the degree, I mean.”

“When did it begin to matter?” I asked. “When you applied to graduate school?”

She shook her head. “Not then. Thomas was the department’s graduate adviser, you see. He said he’d fix my transcript so it wouldn’t raise any questions. It didn’t even matter later, when I began to work in the forensics lab, and they asked me to teach a class. Then they asked me to join the faculty. By that time, Thomas and I . . .”

She paused, her lips twisting in what might have been a smile. “By that time, he’d found someone else, someone younger. Another sexual thing. And I had found the work I wanted to do for the rest of my life. It seemed like a fair trade. I had my work. He had his . . . lover.”

“But to get the faculty position, you had to give them a undergraduate transcript, didn’t you?”

She shook her head. “They already had it on file. The one Thomas ‘fixed.’ And of course they had the transcript of my graduate work—all A’s, with outstanding recommendations. And I had several major publications. One on forensic three-dimensional facial reconstruction, another on the use of the computer in facial reconstruction. And then I edited the textbook, and I was all set. For life, I thought.”

“What happened?”

She tilted her head. Her eyes glinted. “I came to CTSU. Ralph Morgan—a faculty member who lost some of his funding to my program—began to ask questions. He met Thomas at a conference, and the two of them got drunk together. Thomas . . .”

“Spilled the beans,” I said.

She held out her hand, flat, and turned it over. “I’m sure he didn’t do it on purpose. It reflects badly on him, too, of course. Altering the transcript, I mean.”

“This man, Ralph Morgan—he went to the department head here at CTSU?”

“And the dean. That’s when they asked your husband to investigate. I learned all this,” she added, “from a secretary in the department, somebody who’s had problems with Morgan. She overheard them say that McQuaid was going to LSU to interview Thomas. I . . . I felt desperate. I would lose everything. My whole life was wrecked . . .” She ducked her head. “I couldn’t think of any way out, except . . .”

So it wasn’t an accident. The silence dragged out like a long punishment, aching and heavy. Finally, in an effort to bring us back to some sort of practicality, I asked, “What are you thinking of doing? Will you try to fight it?”

Her smile was bleak. “I don’t suppose it would do any good. Do you?”

“No,” I said, with an honesty that matched hers. “You falsified the transcript—if not you, then your husband, acting for you and with your consent. LSU can choose to revoke your graduate degree. CTSU can certainly end your employment.”

“In either case, it’s the end of my academic career,” she said bitterly. “And my career in forensic science. I can never testify as an expert witness—I’d be discredited in an instant.” Her voice was ragged. “Any report I file can be challenged on the grounds that I falsified my credentials.”

I nodded. The university and the courtroom are both brutal places, where small falsehoods can destroy large reputations. “It might be easier to submit your resignation before they convene a formal hearing. Easier on you, I mean.”

Her lips trembled. She suddenly looked very young, very vulnerable. “I don’t know what to do.”

“You can go back to Mexico and finish your degree,” I said. “I’m sure you’ll find other opportunities in anthropology.” I was reaching, and I knew it. Finishing her degree wouldn’t be easy, since most of the course work was out of date by now and would have to be repeated. And short of working as a lab assistant—

“I’m not sure that finishing the degree is the answer,” she said. Her voice was flat, resigned. “But I’ve already decided to go back to Cuernavaca, at least for a while. My mother’s ill. She’s been asking me to come home.”

I regarded her for a moment. I could think of only one other question. “Have you told the sheriff?”

It wasn’t just their relationship—whatever it was, or might have been—that was at stake here. It was the report she had submitted on the bones in the cave.

Alana shook her head, and I saw the pain in her eyes, a pain that matched the pain I had seen in his. It told me that there was probably more between them than either of them could or would acknowledge, to me, anyway. Blackie is a scrupulously honest man who cannot tolerate deceit. She probably knew that much about him, and knew that it would mean the end of their relationship.

“Do you want me to tell him?” I asked.

“He has to know.” I heard the catch in her voice. She let out her breath as if she had been holding it for a long time. “I would rather you told him than your husband.”

It wasn’t an easy thing to do, but I didn’t try to soften the blow. I knew that Blackie would want to hear the story straight up and clear, not muffled with efforts at explanation.

He listened without saying anything, his jaw rock-hard, his eyes on my face. When I finished, he looked away.

“Too bad,” he said. I heard the finality in his voice. He is a man who draws lines in the dirt, and once they’re crossed, there’s no going back. “What’s she going to do?”

“I suggested that she submit her resignation, rather than wait for the university to take action. Her mother’s ill and wants her to come home.”

“Best thing.” He straightened his shoulders. “Too bad,” he said again, and now there was a startled regret in his voice, as if crossing the line had cost more than he expected.

I studied his face, thinking that—this once—he might say more. But he straightened his shoulders, gave me a tight smile, and said, “Thanks. I’ll walk you to your car.”

“ATTEMPTED suicide!” McQuaid stared at me in astonishment. “Sweet Jesus. Is she going to be okay?”

“Depends on what you mean by ‘okay,’” I said dryly. “I imagine this sort of thing is like an earthquake, or a flood. Your house is gone, and your livelihood, but you’re alive. She’s alive.”

“It’s a bad business,” McQuaid said, shaking his head. “It’s been making me sick for a couple of weeks, ever since Morgan began raising the issue and the dean asked me to look into it.”

“I suppose there’s nothing Alana can do that will change the situation at the university,” I said. “Negotiation? Some kind of a deal?”

The storm had arrived just as I got home, with hard rain blown at an angle to the road by a fierce wind. Brian had called to say that he was at Jake’s, and he’d stay there until it let up and Jake’s mom could drive him home—which from the sound of it, might be a while.

“No deal.” McQuaid shook his head. “Morgan’s got a real burr in his butt and a couple of his buddies are siding with him. The dean made a big mistake on this one. Instead of coming up with new money, he moved fifty thousand out of Morgan’s program and put it into a fund for Montoya’s lab equipment. So Morgan is out to sink her
and
the program, and he’s got the ammunition, too. My investigation only confirmed what Morgan told the dean. Alana Montoya is history.”

“Academic politics,” I said resentfully.

“It’s not just politics,” he replied, in a reasonable tone. “Universities take a dim view of forged credentials, which is what this amounts to. If you can’t trust a transcript, what the hell can you trust? It’s the bottom line.”

I turned away. “I hope there’ll be some action taken against her ex-husband. After all, he was the one who doctored her transcript in the first place. He told her it would be okay.” But even as I said the words, I knew it was hopeless. The man would only deny the charge, and there probably wasn’t a shred of evidence to prove it.

“They’re not going to touch him.” McQuaid smiled thinly. “Even if what she says is true—maybe it is, maybe it isn’t—he’s a big guy in his field. He brings in a lot of research funding. And there’s nothing wrong with
his
transcripts.”

“Hell,” I said disgustedly. “Talk about ugly.”

It’s true that the shops are closed on Mondays and that my day gets off to a slower start, but I still have plenty of work. This Monday, I stopped at the shop and picked up Big Red Mama. Ruby and a couple of helpers had dealt with the leftovers on Friday night, but they’d left a few things at the theater, serving dishes and things like that. I used my cell phone to make sure that somebody would be there to let me in, and then drove over.

There were several cars in the parking lot, and when I went into the theater, I found a half-dozen people there, doing various odd jobs. There had apparently been some debate about canceling the Saturday night performance, given the shooting, but the board had decided to carry on, and Marian and Jean were in the office, tallying up the take. Chris had stopped by on her way to work to check on some makeup items. Two guys were pushing brooms, and Max Baumeister, dressed in an orange zip-front jumpsuit—not very flattering, with his paunch—was doing some touch-up painting on one of the sets.

There was a loud clamor for an eyewitness account of what had happened Friday night when I followed Sheila to the scene of the shooting. And since the story, most of it, anyway, had appeared in the Saturday
Enterprise
, I didn’t see any problem with telling them what I’d seen.

Everyone had a different take on it. Marian and Jean, who had both worked with Hank, couldn’t understand what he was doing in the Obermann house with a knife.

“Hank was a really gentle guy,” Marian said, with a shake of his head. “He might mouth off when he got mad, or stamp off the job in a huff, but he always got over it.”

“He took care of his dad while old Gabe was dying of cancer,” Jean put in.

“And she threw Gabe out,” Chris added. She works at a beauty shop in Austin, where she does makeovers, and she’s a walking advertisement for her makeup artistry. Her long blonde hair was twisted in an artful loop that looked casually gorgeous. “Jane Obermann, I mean. I wonder if Hank was carrying a grudge.”

“You know about that?” I asked. Seemed like everyone knew a little piece of the story.

“Well, sure,” Chris said, batting her long eyelashes. “Hank was doing some work at my mother’s house about that time. I was living there then, and every day he’d give us the blow-by-blow. He was really upset about the way his dad was being treated.” She glanced around the theater. “It’s good that we have this place, and I certainly hate to look a gift horse in the mouth. But if you ask my opinion, Jane Obermann could have waited for a few months and let Gabe die in peace.”