Sounds of Murder (2 page)

"Consider this," she said, turning to the
chalkboard and taking a piece of chalk and dragging it firmly down
the board, making that unmistakable sound that makes a person's
teeth clench. The class cringed noticeably.

"Now," she asked, turning back to them. "What
was that?"

"Torture!" yelled one blond man near the
door. The class laughed in relief.

"In addition to torture?" asked Pamela.

"I’d call it—just noise," ventured one young
woman sitting close to Pamela’s end of the table.

"Just noise?" Pamela prompted.

"Yeah," added another male near the far end
of the table, close to the door.

"So, what is noise?" she asked. In her mind,
she couldn’t help but recall the noisy shouting match she had
witnessed just moments ago in the main office. She was still
mystified by its severity and its reason. Charlotte was notoriously
hot tempered, but this was the angriest she had ever heard her--so
angry, in fact, that Mitchell had seemed almost overwhelmed by her
fury.

Another young woman raised her hand. Pamela
nodded towards her.

"I’d say that noise is a sound that isn’t
attractive."

"And," continued Pamela, "what constitutes
'attractive'?"

The class was seemingly stumped. Pamela
waited. Then, she picked up one of the assigned articles.

"If you remember in this article, the author
presents a rather detailed discussion of the difference between
'sound' and 'noise.' Would anyone like to describe that
difference?" No one raised their hand.

"All right. Here's where all that technology
comes in." She turned to the chalkboard and drew a wavy, measured
line, and next to it, a very choppy, disjointed line of the same
length. "What did I draw?" she asked.

A tentative hand peeked up over an open
textbook.

"Helen?"

"I believe those are drawings of a vowel and
chalk being scraped over a chalkboard." She smiled sweetly at
Pamela.

"That’s actually more detailed than even I
was hoping for, Helen. Bravo! I’m just guessing at the vowel or
screeching chalk characteristics of these two masterful paintings
I’ve just created for you."

The class giggled. She liked to make them
laugh. All teachers, she realized had a bit of stand-up comic in
them. Even so, she was quite good at covering her true feelings
when she lectured—and right now her true feelings were centered on
the battle she had overheard earlier in the main office.

"What makes the first drawing different from
the second?" she asked.

"The first one is smooth and regular and the
second one is all over the place," said one young man.

"Right," answered Pamela. "The first one is
regular; it forms a pattern, just as does any ..." She looked
directly at the girl who’d brought up the "attractive" argument.
"Just as does any attractive sound, such as speech. The second
drawing is erratic; it has no regular pattern—it’s the pattern of
noise."

The class contemplated this distinction for a
while. The old analog clock on the wall audibly ticked off the
seconds.

"Now," said Pamela, "let's take a look at
some other characteristics of speech--our patterned sound.”

She drew another wavy line on the board.

"Let's assume," she said, "that this is the
acoustic output for a portion of speech. We have sophisticated
software that can analyze many acoustic features of speech and
other sounds--even of noise." She smiled and they all laughed.

"Let's say that this wavy line represents the
word 'cat.'" She pointed to the line and she then added a
horizontal and a vertical axis. "Now, what types of features of a
speaker's voice can we possibly determine by looking at this
acoustic output?"

A hand rose. "I believe if the word begins on
the left and ends on the right of the line, that you could measure
how long it took the speaker to say the word."

"Absolutely right," announced Pamela. "That
is, this acoustic wave provides us a measure of time--how long it
takes to produce a sound or sounds. What else?" She looked around
the room, hoping for someone else to volunteer.

Kent raised his hand.

"Mr. Drummond?" she asked.

"Not sure here, Dr. B., but I think the
height of the wave is a measure of how loud the sound is."

"Right again!" she claimed. "Excellent,
class! It appears you did read those impossible to understand
articles after all. The height of the wave is a measure of the
sound's amplitude or intensity--or in layman's terms--loudness."
She drew some dramatically larger wave forms and some dramatically
smaller forms and demonstrated the difference in their
loudness.

"There's one more feature you can extract
from looking at this form. Anyone know what it is?" she coaxed.

"Dr. Barnes, please don't jump on me if this
is wrong," offered the shy girl who had hidden behind her book,
"but I think the third feature you’re looking for is the number of
waves within a certain space."

"Yes, Peggy," said Pamela, "and what do we
call that?"

"I think it's pitch--or rather—frequency,"
responded the girl.

"A perfect score for my brilliant class,"
announced Pamela. The students were all looking around the room,
smiling and proud. Maybe, some were hoping, the “brilliant” label
would continue through until final grades. That’s what she loved
about graduate students; they often didn’t trust their own
instincts and they needed good instincts to be linguists or have
careers in acoustic technology—as many of them wanted. She knew
that. You had to be able to listen to sound and extract meaning
from it other than just the words--like the words she’d heard shot
back and forth between Charlotte and Mitchell earlier. Now what
meaning could she derive from that interchange? From the volume?
The tempo? The pitch?

"Yes," continued Pamela, "what we perceive as
pitch is really the number of waves or frequency of waves within a
certain space. That is, a high pitched sound," and Pamela sang a
very high note, "would have far more waves within a certain space,"
and she drew many evenly spaced waves together, "than a low pitched
sound," and she sang a low note, "which would have the waves longer
and spread out more like this" and she drew in the same space,
fewer evenly spaced waves together.

Pamela continued to explain acoustic
technology and soon, before she realized it, several hours had
whizzed by. With some final words and an explanation of next week’s
reading assignment, she dismissed the class for the evening. As she
was gathering her belongings, she called to Kent to come over.

"Kent," she said, "please, don't consider me
an old fogy, but would you be so kind as to go down and check on
the lab one more time? Just be sure it's locked."

"Sure, Dr. B.," he answered, "I'm on my way."
He headed out the door, taking his book sack with him. Pamela
followed the last few students out the door, and then turned and
closed the seminar door. This door, she mused, didn’t need to be
locked because there wasn't anything in this room of value--at
least not of value to most thieves who were looking for equipment
and devices that they could sell readily on the black market. The
department was more than worried about possible theft in their
multi-million dollar computer lab, but the rest of the old
dilapidated building contained little worth stealing. She headed
down the hallway towards the lab and the parking lot entrance. Just
then, Kent came running back towards her from the lab, yelling.

"Dr. Barnes! Dr. Barnes!" he screamed, "Come
quick! Come to the lab! It's horrible! Hurry!"

Chapter 2

Pamela followed Kent, running behind him
around the corner of the main hallway towards the experimental
computer laboratory at the far end of the side hallway. She could
see in the distance that the door to the lab was wide open and the
lights were on. Kent ran through the doorway and Pamela followed on
his heels. He went immediately to the first row of computer
carrels, to Carrel #4, one of the department’s special "souped up"
computers. Pamela could see a woman in the carrel bent over the
computer desk, a tousled head of blonde curls. As she drew closer,
she realized that the woman was Charlotte Clark.

"It's Dr. Clark," said Kent, "Dr. Barnes! I
think she's dead!"

Pamela's heart seemed to stop beating as she
froze in place, staring at Charlotte, who was seated, bent over the
desk. She saw immediately that the power cord from a set of
headphones was wrapped tightly around her neck, the headphones
themselves hanging uselessly down the side of Charlotte's neck. The
side of Charlotte's face was tinged grayish-blue.

"Oh, my God!" Pamela whispered, suddenly
digging in her purse on her shoulder. After a few seconds of
scrounging, she located her cell phone and tapped in the number for
the campus police. The call was answered immediately.

"Please," she spoke as calmly as she could,
"please, come quickly. Someone has been hurt...I think dead."

Kent stood by, slightly behind her, waiting
as she made the all important call. She continued to speak into her
cell phone.

"I'm at Blake Hall, on campus. The
experimental computer lab...on the main floor--on the north side,
by the parking lot entrance--all the way to the end of the side
hallway." She turned her head to Kent and whispered to him,
"They're on their way. Stay here."

"Don't worry, Dr. B." he responded, "I'm not
going anywhere."

She returned her attention to the cell phone
as she heard the voice ask additional questions.

"Yes, this is Dr. Barnes, Pamela Barnes. I'm
in the Psychology Department. I just found her...Dr.
Clark...here...in the lab." She looked over at Charlotte. "Please,
hurry!" she urged into the cell phone. Then she listened as the
voice at the other end was evidently giving her instructions.

"Okay, just a minute." She handed the cell
phone to Kent. "Hold this and stay on the line," she said to him.
Then she carefully bent over Charlotte Clark and placed her hand
firmly on Charlotte's neck, feeling for a pulse. There was none.
After a few seconds, she then gingerly bent down close to
Charlotte’s face to listen for breath noises. Charlotte's head was
turned to the left, her mouth open. Pamela placed her ear close to
Charlotte's mouth. All she sensed was the smell of cigarette
smoke—Charlotte was a habitual smoker. It was quite obvious to
Pamela that there was no breath coming from Charlotte Clark's body.
She was dead.

She then stood up and stepped back from the
body, her eyes never leaving the corpse. As she held her hand out
to Kent, he placed the cell phone back in it.

"I just checked for pulse and breathing
sounds," she told the police dispatcher on the phone. "I couldn't
feel or hear anything." She continued listening to the voice and
the obvious directions that were being given. "No," she answered
into the phone, "Don't worry. I won't touch anything. Yes, I’ll
stay right here." She turned her head to Kent and whispered to him,
"Kent, please go to the outside entrance and direct the campus
police here when they arrive. It should be any minute now."

"Right, Dr. B," he said, hurrying out the lab
door, "I'm on my way!"

With Kent's departure, Pamela was alone. As
she stared down at the body of Charlotte Clark, it suddenly dawned
on her exactly what she was seeing. This was not a natural death.
Charlotte didn't keel over from a sudden heart attack. The power
cord wrapped around her neck made it perfectly clear that Charlotte
had been murdered. Oh, my God, she thought. Here they were worried
about lab security because of the fear of theft. No one had even
considered the possibility that anyone was actually in physical
danger when they were alone in the lab. The lab was Charlotte's
domain--her pride and joy. It was her efforts that had secured the
funding for the lab. She spent many hours here. To think that she
would actually die in the place of her glory. It was horrible.

Poor Charlotte. No, thought Pamela, Charlotte
wasn’t one of her favorite persons. She was abrasive and
confrontational, but Pamela had never personally suffered any of
Charlotte’s verbal attacks—as Mitchell had earlier this evening.
Oh, my God, what had happened here tonight?

As she stood there looking at Charlotte and
contemplating all of the possibilities, she could hear Kent's voice
and the voices of several other people--probably the police--coming
down the hallway. Kent entered the lab, followed by medical
personnel and two uniformed officers who quickly took over. She and
Kent stood back, out of the way. The officers told them to wait
because the local detectives would want to question them when they
arrived.

She and Kent edged to the back of the lab and
sat in two carrels in the last row of computers where they waited
for at least twenty minutes. The lab was cold—to protect the
equipment—and well lit, much better lit than the rest of the old
building. Pamela found herself shivering; she wasn’t sure if it was
from the cold or her own fear. Finally, the local police arrived
and added to the crazy scene. Eventually, a tall man in a shabby
grey suit and overcoat strode over to them and introduced himself.
Pamela and Kent rose to greet him.

"Ms. Barnes?" he said, holding out his hand,
"I'm Detective Shoop." She shook his hand perfunctorily. "Ms.
Barnes," said Shoop, "were you the one who discovered the body?" He
had a droopy sad face with lids that hung over his eyes like
wrinkled prunes.

"No, my graduate assistant Kent Drummond,
here, did," she said.

"All right." The detective motioned for them
to be seated again as he pulled out a chair for himself from one of
the carrels, and the threesome gathered in a circle at the back of
the lab. "Let's talk about the details of all of this a bit," he
said.