Dominance (11 page)

“I know how devious Aldiss is, how deceptive he can be.”

Her eyes fell to the balls of dust that traced the floor. “He didn't have anything to do with Michael's murder,” she said again, softer this time.

Keller started to say something, then stopped himself. “Let's not do this, Alex. It's been four years since I've seen you. I want to talk to you again. Get to know you again. It's horrible what happened to Michael, but we've finally got our chance to start over.”

The apprehension was still there, the clawing thought that Keller was one of the very people Aldiss had instructed her to watch. He knew as much as any of the rest of them about the Dumant murders, and for this reason she would have to observe him just as impartially as she would the others.

“Let me ask you something,” he said.

“Anything.”

“Do you read anymore?”

She opened her mouth, faltered. What kind of question was that for a lit professor?

“Of course you do,” he said. “I read about you in the alumni newsletter. I know what you do for a living. I mean I'm not a stalker or anything”—Keller laughed—“but I know, okay?” He stopped, glanced off toward the window. “I couldn't do what you do. I coach varsity football at a nowhere high school, and I don't read anything. Even the books my students read I just scan, or I go off memory from classes I took at Jasper.”

Puzzled, Alex waited for him to go on.

“I'm afraid if I read something I'll go back to Fallows, and I'll fall into it again. Poof—right there, right back into the labyrinth. I'll end up just like Daniel ended up.”

He trailed off, and the room burned with silence. Then he looked at her again, tried to erase what he had just said with a shake of his head.

“Right now,” he said, “I would like to rest a bit. I couldn't sleep at all last night. I just kept thinking about Michael and Sally and the helplessness of it all.”

“Me too.”

Keller smiled, but cautiously.

“Your room's upstairs,” she said. “Melissa, Christian, Frank—oh, and his friend.” Alex raised her eyebrows toward the second floor. “They're all up there now. I've got somewhere to be in a few minutes, but I can show you.”

She led him to the stairs, and as he went up in front of her she noticed something odd. Something that spiked through her with a girlish shame.

Keller was not wearing a ring.

*   *   *

The last student was Lewis Prine. He was the warden of an asylum for the criminally insane in upstate Vermont and the man who had told her about the manuscript Stanley Fisk was said to be hiding in this very house.
It's there, Alex,
he'd told her again just months ago.
The third Fallows. It's somewhere in that mansion.

Prine never showed.

The lead detective was named Bradley Black, and he seemed to know that she was hiding something. They met that afternoon in a fourth-floor office of the Tower with the dean who had called her to Vermont the night before. Alex could meet neither man's gaze.

“Tell us,” said the detective now, his voice as slow and mellifluous as his eyes, “what Dr. Richard Aldiss knows.”

“It's going to take time,” she said. All the way across campus from the Fisk mansion, through the glassy, postmorning sun, she had thought,
He didn't do this. He couldn't have.
Now, sitting in Jasper College's ivy-choked administrative building with these two strange, officious men, Alex recounted the conversation. “The professor treats everything as if it's a puzzle. If he knows who murdered Michael Tanner, he will not be quick with his knowledge. You have to earn what you get from him.”

“Goddamn it,” spat Dean Anthony Rice. He looked at the detective. “You people are going to have to get a search warrant, go in there and—”

“No,” Alex said. “That's not the way to deal with him. You're going to have to let me do this. If Aldiss knows anything, I will get it. He trusts me.”

“Let's get real here, Dr. Shipley. Aldiss is toying with you. This is
what he does. He got off too easy the last time. He might not have killed those two students at Dumant—”

“He didn't.”

“—but he still got off way too damn easy. A lot of people at this college—people who know Aldiss very well—believe there is blood on his hands.” The dean paused, and Alex knew what was coming. “And, by extension, yours.”

She ignored it. “If he knows anything, then I will have it soon.”

“We may not have that much time.”

She bit her tongue.
No shit, Sherlock.

“How sure are you that he is copycatting the Dumant murders?” she asked.

Black's eyes slid to Rice, and the dean nodded. Then photographs appeared on the walnut desk, the topmost crevassed and browning and the others slick and warm and fresh. Alex spread them with her fingertips. She sucked in her breath.

They were crime scene photos. She had seen the older ones before, during the night class. Stark, hectic images of two empty apartments. Someone had written the date in chalk and placed a block in the bottom left-hand corner:
January 1982
. Blood slashed up the walls in a pattern that resembled the burning butterfly of the famous Rorschach inkblot test. There were two sets of photos for the two victims, both grad students in literature. Both had been murdered, like Michael Tanner, in their home libraries. She did not—could not—dwell on these pictures.

Her eyes moved to the newer shots, taken just the morning before. They were interiors of Michael Tanner's house across campus. These were digital photos, brilliant and clean, the Rorschach pattern on the wall almost identical to the others, except here it was a dark, electric crimson. Again there were books on the floor, spread in what appeared to be the same pattern as the others. A swimming pool of books piled in the room, carefully placed and evenly spread.
They could be the same fucking room,
Alex thought.
The same victim.

But no, she remembered. The other two were students, while Michael was—

A student as well, once upon a time. A student in the night class.

“Identical MO,” Black was saying, his voice slicing into her reverie. “Murder them in their homes and cover the bodies with books. Same type of victim aside from their gender. Same pattern of education, even the same program of study: literature, specifically modern lit. Superimpose the Tanner library on photographs of the apartments from Dumant and the similarities are striking. Beyond striking.”

Black paused, appraising her again in his careful way. “How well did you know Professor Tanner?” he asked. He made a show of flipping through his notes, the dry flick of the Gregg notebook the only sound in the room.

“Pretty well. Michael and I got together often at academic conferences. I always thought he was one of the most brilliant men in the comparative literature field, and that's including any of my colleagues at Harvard.”

“Did he ever speak to you about Richard Aldiss? Did he show any signs that he may have been holding on to the class? In an unhealthy way, I mean.”

“No. Never.”

“What about e-mails? Correspondence about the class, about Aldiss or the Dumant murders.”

Alex shook her head. “We all wanted to forget, Detective. The night class . . . it changed us. Some of us in profound ways. It wasn't something we wanted to dwell on.” Her mind flashed to her old friend Daniel Hayden and what happened to him, and then she shook it free. “It happened, and there's no taking it back—but nobody wants to relive it.”

She watched something pass over Black, something like the answer to a question that had not been asked. Alex knew it was that one phrase, the damning word right in the middle of it, ticking like a bomb:
changed.
She thought again of her meeting with Aldiss that morning.

“I want to see the library,” she said.

“Impossible,” said Rice.

“You're going to bring me back to Jasper to be your messenger, Dean Rice, and you're not going to tell me all you know? That's called tilting the playing field.”

“It's called due process. Tell us more about Aldiss.”

“The professor believes Sally Tanner is innocent.” A lie, but it was
worth a chance. Fuck them if they wouldn't share. A look passed between the two men.

“Has he spoken with either Tanner recently?”

“Your turn,” she said.

Black sighed and said, “You're a tough one, Dr. Shipley.”

She smiled.

“This killer,” Black continued, “he studied the murders at Dumant. I mean studied them intensely. Learned them. He was not just tipping his hat to those crimes, he was
re-creating them
. Everything, down to the flares on the Rorschach bloodstain and the books and the time of Michael Tanner's death—everything was the same.”

Re-creating them
, Alex thought. The phrase was like a flash, a pinpoint of hot light. She blinked twice, hard, trying to sweep it away.

“Aldiss knows more than he's saying,” Rice finally broke in. The dean sat forward, steepling his chin in his fat fingers. He was constant movement, the perfect antithesis to the still, methodical Black. “And he knows we know. We won't go on with this dance too much longer, Dr. Shipley. Tell him that. Tell him that if he has been in correspondence with someone who is interested in the Dumant murders, if he has been a
mentor
in any way with someone, then he will be dealt with. Deliver that message to him, will you?”

“Richard Aldiss doesn't take kindly to
messages
from interim deans,” she said.

Rice reddened, looked off toward the office's only window. Wind rattled the pane. For a moment the three of them sat silently.

Then Black said, “Thirty-seven hours have passed now. That's a world in terms of a murder investigation. If you can't get Aldiss to open up, then we will.”

“I'll go back to him later this evening.”

“We will be looking forward to your report,” Black said, standing. “And in the meantime, Dr. Shipley, it's nice of you to keep Dean Fisk company. You and the others.”

His gaze held on her.

The detective stood and walked her to the door, and in the corridor he stopped. “You will let us know if you find out anything of interest during your stay in the mansion.”

“Of course,” she said, and she began to walk away.

He caught her by the arm.

“They're saying things about Aldiss.”

She turned to face him. “Who, Detective?”

“The people at Jasper. Teachers, students. They say he's changed. He isn't the person he was when they brought him in to teach that class.”

“Is that right?”

Black shook his head. “All I'm saying is be careful. You might think you know Aldiss, you might think all you did back in '94 was the right thing to do. But this guy . . . I don't trust him, Dr. Shipley. You never know what kinds of tricks he has up his sleeve.”

“I just want to find out who killed my friend,” she said hotly. “If Aldiss can help me with that—and I think he can—then we have to use him. He is our best resource right now, and tonight I intend to go back and get some answers.”

“And if he's not who you think he is?” Black asked.

“Then I don't deserve anything I got for solving the night class riddle,” she said, turning away from him and beginning her walk down the cold hallway. “My whole life is a sham.”

Dean Stanley Fisk lived in a peeling old Victorian that sat on a hill high above campus. Fisk lived there alone now, his wife of forty years having passed away the previous semester. Rarely did you see the old emeritus out. Ribbon-cutting ceremonies, black-tie charity events—these were the things he was good for now. Mostly he stayed to himself, surveying the grounds of the Dean's House and keeping watch over the college he once ruled.

Now Alex knocked on the front door and heard the professor inside. The muted shuffling of footsteps was followed by a soft, lilting voice: “Coming.”

The door was flung open and a man stood in the threshold, blinking out the sunlight. At eighty years old, Stanley Fisk was a slumped man with energetic blue eyes. He wore a Jasper sweatshirt and a bathrobe that hung limply across his boyish shoulders. He had always been known around campus as an eccentric; Alex noticed a smudge of what seemed to be mascara slashing away from his right eye and thought,
This is the man whom Richard Aldiss's fate is resting on? Holy crap.

Fisk pushed his reading glasses up into his cotton-white hair and said, “Can I help you?”

“Dean Fisk, my name is Alex Shipley. I'm so sorry to bother you this early, but—”

“Early? Dear Lord, I've been up since dawn. What can I do for you?”

“I wanted—I needed to talk with you about something important.”

The old man cocked his head to the side. “Go on.”

“It's about Richard Aldiss. About the class he's teaching this semester. He said something last week, and I believe he . . . I think he might have been leading me to you.”

At first there was no movement from the old man, no tic of recognition. Fisk merely stood in the doorway and looked past her, where the Jasper architecture rose up from the crescent of campus and blended with the tree line fifty yards away.

Then, his voice slow and even, he said, “You found our book.”

Alex exhaled. “That's right.”

A smile broke across his face. The age lines seemed to disintegrate and, suddenly, Alex found herself looking at a much younger man.

“Well, come inside in that case,” he said, moving to the side so that she could step past him. “We have much to discuss.”

*   *   *

The living room was an homage to the old man's existence. A quilt had been thrown over the sofa, dog-eared books were stacked on the parquet floor, a withered apple tipped on its side on an end table. Clearly he spent his days here. The rest of the house was probably preserved in dust.