The Professor (12 page)

Mahaffey lunged at the older man, but stopped inches from him.

“Come on.” Robbins straightened and held his ground, daring him to attack.

“You are so full of shit. I didn’t touch that girl.” Anger burned brightly in Mahaffey’s eyes. His hands clenched; his whole body went rigid.

The detective kept pushing. “Where’d you go when you left the food court? She left with you, didn’t she?”

“I was at work on Monday.” Mahaffey was shaking, barely holding his temper in check. “All day? You didn’t find time to slip out to the parking lot for a quickie?”

“Don’t talk about her like that. Emily wasn’t a slut.”

“Somebody was getting some,” Robbins taunted. “’Course they weren’t real bright. No condom. Lot of ’jac in her.”

Mahaffey whirled and slammed his fist into a locker. “Bastard,” he whispered. He cradled his hand, using the physical pain as an excuse for the emotion in his face and voice.

“Where’d you go that morning? You take a little ride that ended at the park?”

Still clutching his hand, Mahaffey straightened defiantly. “Back to work. Ask my boss, if you haven’t already.”

“And after that?”

“To class.”

“What class?”

“Accounting. I had a test that day.”

“You’re a student at Windsor?”

He shook his head. “Tech.”

Robbins rocked back on his heels with a knowing look. “That’s right behind
Lynches Woods.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Mahaffey’s voice was tight. “I drive by that park, and I want to kill the bastard who did that to her.”

“Not the smartest thing to say to a cop.” Robbins leaned against the door frame, eyeing Mahaffey.

“I don’t care.” The kid was cracking. “How would you feel if it was your girl? If someone…” He stopped, swallowed and looked away. The muscles in his jaw jumped spastically.

Like killing him.

“I don’t know,” Robbins said skeptically. “Nine times out of ten, a girl gets killed, her husband or boyfriend did it.”

“I love that girl,” Mahaffey burst out. “I would never hurt her. Her old man ordered me out of his house like I was some yard nigger. So Emily came to me.” He thumped his hand against his chest. “She knew what mattered, what was in our hearts. Not our skin, our
hearts
. We talked about marriage, the future. I’d never hurt her.” Tears filled his eyes and he turned away, his lips thinning as he struggled to hold his grief inside.

“We know you’re hurting,” Mick said. “But you knew her better than anybody else. What’d she tell you?”

Mahaffey shook his head, still working his jaw and blinking his eyes.

“Talk to me, Robbie. I need the truth.”

The kid’s laugh was harsh. He shot a glare at Robbins. “What do you care about the truth?”

“I care about who killed Ms. Geiger,” he said. “I don’t think you did it, but you might know who did.”

Mahaffey shook his head, sullen now that his anger was spent. “I don’t know nothin’.”

“You might. Tell me what was happening.”

Mick held his breath while the younger man silently debated cooperating. Finally, he crossed his arms and slouched against the locker behind him. “Some guy was stalking her. She said she felt him all the time, following her, but she never saw anybody. She got these weird e-mails.”

“She deleted most of them. What did they say?”

“Weird shit.” Mahaffey shook his head. “At first, she said it was creepy. He kinda came on to her, like some pervert. She could tell he was watching her.”

“How?”

“Things he said about what she wore, where she went. The longer it went on, the more he sent.”

“What do you mean?”

“Toward the end…” Mahaffey’s voice cracked and he looked away for a minute. “He was sending them constantly. Emily was scared. She didn’t know what to do. I wanted her to tell somebody…” He flicked at glance at Mick that said
somebody
was the cops. “But we thought maybe it was just more…of the crap we put up with.”

The couple probably had caught some harassment when they were together in public, Mick thought. “Why didn’t you report it?”

“He started going on about Emily’s ‘secret.’”

“Secret?”

Mahaffey swallowed, his tough shell slipping a little more. “Us. He taunted her, threatened to tell her parents about us. I didn’t want her to catch shit from them over me. At the end, the bastard was trash-talking bad. Said he’d do to her what we were doing, but we weren’t…you know.” He stopped and bit his lip.

Protecting her to the end.

Tears brightened Mahaffey’s eyes. “The bastard made her miserable, and then he killed her.” Ducking his head, he stabbed his fingers across his face.

“We’ll find him. We’ll make him pay.”

“Sure.” Mahaffey pushed away from the locker. “Like you found him after the first two.”

The stinging comeback had its intended effect. Mick gritted his teeth. “We’ll find him.”

Early Tuesday morning

Mick stopped at the Holiday Inn’s office to check out rather than simply leaving the key card in the room. The night clerk confirmed the details in Robbins’s written report. The woman had a clear view of the highway from her seat at the counter. She’d been watching the road the morning Emily Geiger’s body was found, waiting for her boyfriend to bring her a forgotten textbook. The twenty-four-hour gas station to the left had done a sporadic business, but only one car drove past from the right—the direction of Lynches Woods.

Mick pulled out of the motel parking lot, then made a quick left onto Broad Street. Two-story, gingerbread-trimmed, wooden structures built in the twenties, lined the road. Newberry had prospered as a rail center before the Depression wiped out the economy. The outer fringes of the downtown business district looked like they’d never recovered. The buildings seemed tired, in need of both paint and customers.

As he approached the town square, evidence of recent prosperity appeared. Awnings fluttered above freshly washed windows. An air of genteel affluence permeated the atmosphere. Most of the buildings were classic revival structures from the 1900s or Victorians built a quarter-century earlier.

The courthouse anchored the square. Doric columns rose two stories to a pediment above massive double doors. A bas-relief filled the triangle created by the pediment. Added after the Civil War, it showed the American eagle grasping an uprooted palmetto tree. A defiant gamecock at one end of the tree balanced an olive-branch-bearing dove at the other. Given the number of people he’d met who resented the federal government, he wasn’t sure the scale should be in balance.

He turned right at the intersection. Various businesses, most of them catering to tourists, surrounded the shady memorial square behind the courthouse. A man sweeping the sidewalk in front of Martin’s Grille looked up and waved as Mick drove past.

People here moved slower than they did in Greenville or Columbia. The town reminded him of the way Conway used to be. Small, neighborly; everyone knew everyone else. They were quick to gossip, quick to help. As a kid, news of his exploits had occasionally beaten him home. After his father died, though, the house was buried in casseroles and home-baked cookies, as neighbors stuck to the Southern adage, if you love them, feed them.

The Newberry PD building was maybe a mile from the courthouse. He parked beside a cruiser and went inside. He was stirring sweetener into his coffee when Robbins wandered in, yawning. Pointing to the photo hanging above the coffeepot, Mick said, “Y’all have too much time on your hands.”

Someone had carefully altered the logo on the side of a Newberry County sheriff’s unit to read:
We’ll kick your asses… And eat your doughnuts too.

Robbins glanced at the picture as he dumped three packets of sugar into his mug. “There are worse things.”

He couldn’t disagree.

After spreading his files on a training room table, he sipped coffee and studied the car list. It didn’t make sense to work the list without the VIN information. There were simply too many cars. He slumped in his chair and stared at the large-scale map on the
opposite wall.

The interview with Mahaffey had produced a big fat zero, simply confirming things they already knew.

Robbins, trailed by Jordan, wandered into the room. The older detective tossed a stack of papers onto the table. “For what it’s worth, here are the local tire dealers.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Jordan talked to them yesterday while we were interviewing the black kid.”

“And?”

The rookie sighed. “They keep records by customer, not car. They played with their inventory records and pulled out who bought Goodyear Eagle GT14s. We can run them against the car list, match the owners, but a lot of the sales were just cash sales.”

“No customer listed?”

“Right.”

“Well, maybe we’ll get lucky.”

“We could use a break,” Jordan said as he handed over the CD.

“I’ve been reading everything I can about serial killers,” Robbins said, his eyes on the map. “We need to figure out his home territory.”

Mick rose and stood beside the map. “Greenville, Spartanburg, Newberry.” His finger followed the lopsided triangle. Color-coded pins marked each victim’s sphere: where they lived, their schools and friends; the mall, Lynches Woods. Nothing overlapped. “It’s got to be somewhere in the middle.”

His eyes drifted over the map, moving to the center of the triangle. Clinton.

And Meg.

He immediately separated the two. There could be no intersection there. To think it made it possible. That was unacceptable.

“Somewhere in there.” Robbins slurped some coffee. “If they’re part of the landscape, like everybody says, we’re gonna look stupid when he turns up right under our noses.”

“So what are we missing?”

“If I knew that, would we be standing here?”

“Have I told you recently what a tremendous help you are?”

Robbins grinned behind his coffee mug. “I hear you’re getting e-mail.”

He nodded at his laptop. “Today’s is open, on top.”

Robbins moved and read over Jordan’s shoulder. “Sick little fucker.”

“He’s enjoying rubbing our noses in it.”

“What’s he trying to do, convert you to the dark side?” Robbins asked.

“Who knows? I wonder if this is how he starts with the women, trying to pull them in.”

“You show these to that shrink? Not the asshole, the other one.”

“Dr. Mathews? Yeah, I sent him copies. I’m sure he’ll have something to say about them.” He sighed and began packing his briefcase and laptop. “Thanks for the tire customer list. E-mail the rest as they come in. We’ll see what we get. I ought to get back to Greenville.”

“We were about to give you your own desk,” Robbins said.

“There could be worse things.” He paused. “I’m going by the mall one more time. Want to come along?”

“Sure. I’m not getting anything done here.”

Thirty minutes later, Robbins followed him into the food court. “What is it you think you’re gonna find that you didn’t get yesterday? And don’t tell me you need another greeting card.”

Mick allowed himself one flash of Meg. He’d sent the card, lobbing the ball into her court, but he knew it’d take more effort than that to break through the barriers surrounding her. “I’m going to make one more sweep through the stores around the food court. Maybe we missed somebody yesterday.”

The health food store and the athletic shoe place yielded nothing new. They entered the The Boutique next, one of the few non-chain outlets. Midmorning on a Tuesday, traffic was low. Only one woman browsed the upscale woman’s store. A salesperson hovered at her elbow. Mick recognized some of designer brands as ones Jess, his ex-girlfriend, wore. He wondered who bought clothing like this in Newberry.

The manager was shuffling papers at the register. She looked up as the men approached. He caught her double take and silently cursed the genetics that had built his face. At times, he used it to his advantage. Other times, it was a pain in the ass.

The woman was in her late thirties and attractive more from grooming than nature. Her carefully highlighted brown hair feathered away from her face, pulling attention from the softening jawline and the creases beside her eyes and mouth. Her suit was expensive and well-cut, subtly balancing her heavy hips by emphasizing an otherwise modest bust. The color flattered her deeply tanned skin. Striking a pose, she offered a brilliant smile. “May I help you gentlemen?”

She hadn’t even glanced at Robbins.

“I’m Agent O’Shaughnessy,” he said. “This is Detective Robbins.”

“Nancy Henry,” she replied, extending her hand. She held his a beat too long after barely pressing Robbins’s fingers.

“Detectives Robbins and Jordan interviewed the store managers last week, when Ms. Geiger disappeared. I don’t remember seeing your name.”

It was as natural as breathing. The subtle emphasis on certain words—“
your
name”—to convey meaning.
I would’ve remembered you.

She smiled, a discreet gleam lighting her eyes. “I was out of town last week. I left Monday afternoon for a week in Vegas.”

Subtext:
I’m a party girl. I like to have a good time.

“That explains the tan.” He watched her turn up the voltage. Damn, he was going to have to charm her if he hoped to get anything useful. He knew from long experience the actual words didn’t matter. It was his attitude, the confidence, the knowledge he had the elusive “it.” Most of the time, it was effortless. Today, it felt overwhelming. He mustered a smile. “It doesn’t look like the tanning bed variety.”

“I tan
au naturel
.”

He raised an eyebrow. “Pretty risky.”

She smiled appreciatively. “You don’t strike me as risk-adverse.”

“I might surprise you.” He gave her just the right amount of a smile. “We have a few questions.”

“Come on back to my office. You know, I meant to call you this morning, the police, that is,” she said over her shoulder.

She was putting everything she had into her walk. He glanced at Robbins. The
older cop’s eyes were on her undulating hips. His face wore an approving smile.

Mick controlled the impulse to roll his eyes.

“When I got home last night, I heard about Emily Geiger,” Ms. Henry continued. “I’d hoped she’d be found. Alive, I mean.”

Her office was small, but tastefully decorated with a mahogany desk and two visitors’ chairs. She paused just inside the door. “Please, sit down.”

She brushed against Mick as he passed. He figured it was deliberate. “Do you have some information about Ms. Geiger?” he asked as she settled at her desk.

“I don’t know if this will help or not, but I saw her that morning when I was opening the store. Emily looked like she didn’t feel well. An older man was with her. I think he was helping her to the restroom. I guess she left after that.”

He controlled his exterior physical reaction, but his heart rate jumped. “Can you describe the man?”

“The man? I don’t know. I only saw him for a minute. You know, he wasn’t that old now that I think about it.”

She was trying to make eye contact. He knew without looking that Robbins had a stupid grin on his face. “That was your first impression?”

“Well, yes. Maybe it was his attitude. You know,
concerned
. Not like he was
interested
, if you know what I mean.”

Oh, I know exactly what you mean
. “Your store, your appearance, both say you handle high-end fashion.”

She smiled, self-deprecating, but clearly pleased he’d noticed.

“You pick up details, probably without realizing you do it. I’ll bet you saw more than you give yourself credit. Go back for a minute, and walk me through that day.”

She ran through her regular morning routine, ending with raising the storefront grate. “What time do you open?”

“Ten.” She tossed her hair and smiled. “It gives me time to recover from the previous night.”

“Or for a leisurely morning,” he replied with a slow smile.

Her eyes registered the possibility. “Normally, I like to take it slow and easy, but I was a little rushed that morning. I was leaving town that afternoon. I had everything in overdrive.”

“I bet you’re something when you get going.”

“Oh, you’d be surprised.” She was clearly enjoying herself. “Anyway, I opened the grate about five ’til and did a quick scope to get a feel for the traffic. The mall walkers were already gone.”

Mall walkers? Had anybody talked to them?
“You mean, those people who do laps?”

“Yeah. The oldies and the moldies—ninety-two or two-ninety-two.”

Age and weight.
“With sensible shoes,” he added, eyeing her heels.

She rotated her ankle and pointed her toe, emphasizing her calves. “Somebody’d have to shoot me to make me wear a pair of those things.”

“We try not to shoot people,” he said with faux seriousness.

“I bet you have a big gun.” She smoothed her hands over her thighs, ostensibly removing a wrinkle from her skirt.

“State secret.” He smiled. “I can’t even show you my department-issued one.”

She pretended to pout.

“So you checked the mall traffic. How was it that morning?”

Ms. Henry propped her elbow on the desk and rested her chin on her hand. Her nails were manicured. Rings just this side of flashy decorated several fingers. “Typical Monday. A few moms with strollers at Penney’s. Some teenagers at Claire’s. Emily was at a table in the food court. The man— I thought it was her father at first—had his back to me, but he was standing beside her table.”

She’d seen the man who was probably the killer. “What happened next?”

“I was turning to go back inside when something caught my eye. You know how movement at the edge gets you?” She considered her setup line a second, then added, “Some unexpected move.”

“Subtle things catch my attention too.”

She did the eye thing again, but she toned it down. “Emily sorta swayed and grabbed at the table. I looked back—that woman instinct, you know—to see if she needed help, but the man leaned over and steadied her. She stood there a second, like she might throw up or something.”

“She looked ill?” Sometimes roofies initially made the victim feel terribly drunk. In some people, the physical symptoms included nausea and dizziness.

“Maybe she had morning sickness.”

“What?” he asked, startled. Had anybody considered that? Dr. Spindler hadn’t mentioned it in the autopsy. What if she’d terminated the pregnancy? Would it show up postmortem? If the women were pregnant, maybe they’d sought counseling or went to the same clinic. It was the kind of thing they’d hide from their parents. It could be the point where it all intersected.

“It happens,” Ms. Henry said dryly. “I’d seen her in the mall before with her boyfriend. There wasn’t massive PDA, but they were pretty snuggly.”

Public displays of affection, he translated. Mahaffey claimed they weren’t intimate. “Tell me about the man.”

“I didn’t pay much attention to him. He was just
there
, you know?”