The Square Root of Murder (14 page)

“Don’t worry about it,” I said to Ariana. “I can pick up something.”

“I want to come. You’ve been avoiding me since all this happened.”

“That was yesterday.”

“See you around six. I have some new organics that are just what you need.”

“Okay, thanks.” There was no use arguing with Ariana once she went into her incense mode. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she came ready to smudge my home and yard. “I have a meeting at three so I should definitely be home by six.”

“Who are you meeting with?” she asked.

“Huh? Oh, sorry, gotta go.” I clicked off with great relief. I’d rather tell Ariana after the fact about a successful session at police headquarters than risk potential confusion when she gave me advice on how to determine Archie’s aura. Which she would certainly do. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know Archie’s aura even if I had the skills to detect it. I did want to know his birthday, however.

Bruce was next. I told him how nice it was to see my photo on the dresser in his home away from home.

“How was it between Gil and Rachel?” he asked.

“What do you mean? Gil was very nice about showing us around and lending us her room, until the Bat Phone rang.”

“I heard about that. Glad you could see the crew in action. We don’t just watch movies, you know.”

Not so fast. “What’s this about Gil and Rachel?” I asked

“Nothing really.”

I let out an exasperated sigh. “Bruce.” I tried to sound like a stern mother. Or dean.

“Okay. It’s just that Gil’s always had a thing about Rachel and Hal.”

This was news. “Rachel and Hal?”

“You know, whether they were an item.”

Not only news, but shocking news. “I can’t believe you never told me this.”

“Thought you knew.”

“Hal was Rachel’s freshman adviser and they’ve always been close. Well, not close close. You mean there was talk?”

“Just talk. I’m sorry I brought it up. I figured you knew but didn’t want the talk to grow. I was impressed at your integrity, but now I see you didn’t know.”

Bruce laughed; I didn’t.

“Where did you hear this talk?”

Bruce’s long breath told me he was sorry he mentioned it. Too bad. Too late. “Gil brought it up once or twice, but not lately I don’t think. Ernie told me she asked him for advice about it once. Ernie’s the nurse that’s on shift with her a lot. She asked him, should she confront her husband, that kind of thing. Then I think Sim got wind of it, too, and had a couple of talks with her.”

Who would have thought? The MAstar trailer was gossip central, as bad as the Clara Barton, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Paul Revere dorms.

“What other Henley gossip are you keeping from me?”

“Not a thing. What’s new with you?” he asked, sounding eager to move on.

“I’m just leaving campus.”

“I’d have thought the campus was still a crime scene.”

“Nah.”

“Where are you headed?”

“I’m going home, then I have a meeting with Virgil’s partner.”

“Archie? Watch out for him. He’s single and, you might say, hot. What’s he want with you?”

“We’re going to compare notes,” I said, checking my rearview mirror for a state trooper on lie patrol.

“You’re not getting into any trouble, are you?

“Pfft. Why would you think that?”

“Let’s see. No reason. Except”—I heard a snap of his fingers—“oh, yeah, there was the time you put together a petition to get rid of the Chairman of the Board of Trustees—”

“He was breaking labor laws by posting jobs he’d already wired for his friends.”

“I love how naïve you are about how things are done in the real world.”

“Well, if that’s reality, I’ll take . . . math.”

Bruce laughed but he wasn’t finished with me. “And then there was the week you went to Washington to track down the fraud issue, and the proposals you submit every month to get credit for interns in spite of all the precedents against it, and—”

“I get it. But this time is different,” I said, turning a corner. “I’m not sticking my neck out.”

The sound of heavy cartons thunking around in my trunk flooded my ears.

 

 

I’d decided not to leave my car with its special load parked in town, even though it would be in or near the police station lot. Actually, that was not a plus—I didn’t want my special load anywhere near the police.

Thoughts of Rachel and Hal together swirled around my head. How could I have missed that? If there was anything to miss. One thing I was sure of, I’d now be focusing on how Rachel and Hal acted when I was in the same room with them.

I pulled into my driveway and hit the garage door opener. Attaching a garage had been one of the best home improvement ideas my mother and I had come up with. We appreciated it in all seasons. Today it served as a dumping ground for my boxes. I pushed aside shopping bags of clothing destined for a charity drive and unloaded the cartons onto a long workbench that the construction foreman had told me would come in handy whether or not I was a tinkerer. He’d been right.

I ran into my house and changed into a clean shirt, wanting no dust mites from a former crime scene falling off my torso in the middle of a police interview. I hadn’t eaten since my candlelight breakfast with Bruce, so I spent ninety seconds putting together a peanut butter and rhubarb jam sandwich on whole wheat. I shoved the edge of the uncut sandwich between my teeth in a most lady-like manner, and ran out again to meet Archie.

Back in my car, I pressed the button on my opener and watched my garage door descend, locking in the boxes, inch by inch.

The miserably hot day that began with my interview with Rachel in a trailer was to continue with one in Henley’s rundown old police building, in a part of town I seldom visited. My local travel was restricted to campus, MAstar now and then, and Ariana’s shop.

The town budget hadn’t allowed for an upgrade to the Henley PD parking lot, which was now full. Did all these vehicles belong to suspects in Keith’s murder? I didn’t recognize any of them as belonging to Franklin Hall faculty. Perhaps the criminal element I knew so little about was experiencing a surge in activity that caused an overflow in and around police headquarters.

I looked for easy street parking and found a spot mercifully under a tree three long blocks away, making me even happier that I’d left the valuable cartons at home.

The police station stood alone in a large area once occupied by a host of city buildings, including the library, performing arts auditorium, city hall, and the courthouse. One by one, the various components of civic life moved to a new building in a government center close to downtown. Chain-link fences marked off vacant lots that were their former turf. The police station was the last building standing.

By the time I walked the three sparsely shaded blocks, my clean shirt might as well have been dipped in water and wrung out. I entered through swinging doors that lead to a shabby lobby, not at all like the cool, cavernous entryway to the new library, for example, or the inviting dome of the snazzy new city hall/courthouse combo.

Three narrow hallways radiated from the central desk that was staffed by a civilian volunteer, a thirtysomething woman whom, surprisingly, I recognized from a math anxiety class I’d given at an adult ed school. I made a note to mention this to Ariana, who thought I didn’t know anyone in town.

I’d called the class “Getting Past Ten.” I couldn’t remember the volunteer’s name, but I did remember that she’d been one of the quickest to catch on to arithmetic tricks I’d proposed. She’d taken the class to prepare for an administration of justice exam. I hoped it worked and that she had a more permanent job than the volunteer desk.

Terri Gable, I now saw from her name tag, brightened at my approach. A nice change. “Dr. Knowles. I’ve been meaning to email you. Those little tricks of yours have come in sooooo handy.” Terri had turned
so
into a short tune, about eight bars long.

“I’m glad to hear it.”

“Like multiplying by eleven in your head. Sooooo cool. Not that I have to do it that often, it just makes me more comfortable with numbers.”

“That’s music to my ears,” I told her, sincerely. I didn’t mention that my weekend was sorely in need of music.

“You’re here to see Archie?”

My “yes” was weak. I would have preferred to stand there and do arithmetic for the rest of the afternoon with the chubby, curly-haired woman.

“I’ll walk you down.”

Terri waddled slightly in front of me, past several bustling offices. It seemed there was a lot of paperwork to law enforcement. Old model fax machines rolled out documents and keyboards clacked.

“Busy place,” I said, to fill in a hole in our conversation. My other option would have been to mention a new mathcast I’d seen on squaring two-digit numbers, but I didn’t want to overdo the math connection.

Terri apologized in advance for the room I’d be waiting in. “It’s really warm in there,” she said. “I don’t know why Archie told me to put you in Interview Two, when there are better ones available with more comfortable chairs and a working A/C and all.”

I had some idea why.

Terri dropped me off in a dismal, stifling room with stagnant air. The furniture in Interview Two was worse than that in MAstar’s trailers, by a factor of ten. I figured they were castoffs from the government departments that had left this part of town for the right side of the tracks.

Of the two gray metal chairs in the room, I chose the one with the least number of rips in its faux-cushioned seat. There was no clock in the room and since I tended not to wear a watch in the summer, the better to avoid a rash, I had no idea how many minutes ticked by. I alternated between letting my head hang freely from my neck onto my chest, to sitting up straight and stretching my neck backward. I paced for a while, but the room was so small the laps made me dizzy. No position was comfortable, but shifting my body around gave my muscles momentary relief.

I tried to use the time to organize my thoughts, but there was no controlling them in this hostile environment. Images of my three students, Pam, Liz, and Casey, wearing evil masks crowded my mind and alternated with videos of Keith Appleton falling off his chair repeatedly, clutching his throat and taking his last breath each time. In the mental video, Hal and Rachel were off in a corner while Gil searched for them, a hatchet in her hand. Who said mathematicians weren’t creative?

I wished with all my heart that Pam had let her two friends—followers, I now saw—finish their sentences. Besides that, something else nagged at me. Something one of them said at the party? On the phone the night of Keith’s murder? Probably something from the statistics seminar, like Casey’s mixing up means and medians.

I shook my head to clear it. Bad move. A new headache set in.

I wondered how long Archie would leave me to sweat, literally.

The answer came when the door opened and Archie appeared. The large clock on the hallway wall behind him read five after four. I’d been ten minutes early, therefore, I’d been captive for seventy-five sweltering, mind-numbing minutes.

“Sorry,” Archie said as he entered Interview Two looking cool and crisp, and hardly sorry. He’d probably spent the time with a cold pack around his neck.

In spite of his name—which called to mind a bumbling, wrinkled old caricature of a detective—Archie looked like Hollywood’s idea of the insightful young cop who one-ups his dumpy-looking colleagues and his boss and takes down the serial killer. His well-groomed, sharp look, the opposite of Virgil’s, unnerved me.

“Can I get you some coffee?” he asked.

A hot drink. Just what I needed. I almost laughed.

I shook my head. “No, thanks.”

“A soda?”

Another shake. “I’m good.”

I kept my hands on my lap, careful not to touch anything. I pictured what Archie would do after I left, pulling out a handkerchief, picking up a soda can, and shipping it off for DNA analysis. Of course my fingerprints and DNA would be all over Keith’s office anyway, but with legitimate reasons as well as the one bad one. Still, one couldn’t be too careful.

Archie took the seat opposite me. Although he loosened his tie, he managed to sustain the in-charge male model look.

“So, Dr. Knowles.”

“Sophie,” I said, eager to put this experience on an informal, less stressful level.

“Sophie, then.” If this was Archie, yielding, I’d hate to see his rigid side. “How well did you know Dr. Appleton?”

An easy one. I cleared my throat. “He was a colleague. We saw each other several times a week in Franklin Hall, plus there were faculty meetings, committees, the usual.”

“Would you say you two were close?”

“No, not close,” I answered, putting a spin on
close
, marking it as truly the wrong word.

“Would you say you were competitors, then?”

“No, not at all.”

“Not even a little?”

“No,” I insisted.

“I have in my notes that Dr. Appleton just won an award of some kind. Were you up for that award also?”

“You mean the Mass Association of Chemists naming him a Fellow? No, I don’t belong to that group. It’s not my field.”

“What about Henley College awards? For good teaching, publishing, that kind of thing?”

“We’ve both had our share. We weren’t competing for them.”

He scratched his head. “No offense, but it’s kind of hard to believe.”

“We’re in completely different fields. Differential equations”—I pointed to my chest—“and protein purification.” I cast my hand away from my body to indicate where Keith might be, were he still alive. I tried not to sound exasperated.

Archie appeared to be writing this explanation in his notebook, but I couldn’t see the details. I wouldn’t have been surprised if he were writing, “Beer, Chips, Beef Jerky.” I was tempted to spell “protein purification” for him.