Josie Tucker Mysteries Box Set 2

by E M Kaplan

  “We’ll walk and meet you there,” she said. What she wanted to do was run up to her room to see what had happened to that darned knife. Maybe this one was just its coincidental lookalike. Although…Josie didn’t believe in coincidences.

  While Drew and Benjy waited for her outside, she dashed up the stairs and unlocked her door, taking a second or two to examine the handle and lock. Yeah, it was a flimsy setup—and Tiffany had proved that she and Tyshawn were able to pick the lock of Professor Sanborn’s office. How hard could it have been for either one of them to go into her room and get the broken-tipped knife?

  She slid open her desk drawer and retrieved both the envelope and all of the notes. She pinched the bridge of her nose. The knife was missing—no real surprise there. That it was the same weapon that had just been used to stab the professor wasn’t the upsetting part. No, she was severely wigged out that someone had entered her room and taken something with such ease.

  The violation of her privacy was enough to make her skin crawl.

  She looked around her tiny room, trying to make the heebie-jeebies go away. When her gaze fell on Benjy’s sleeping bag, she felt a lot better. And a crap-ton relieved. Her friends would have her back—no bad guys would get her while she was sleeping. Not while they were there. Not while Benjy was sleeping in front of the door.

  She’d once—jokingly—called him more loyal than a dog. Right now, she truly appreciated it. Her actual dog, Bert, wouldn’t stir if bad guy decided to break in. Not unless treats were involved.

  #

  “Thanks for talking with me—us,” Josie told Officer Krupkey. She needed to practice this whole inclusion thing if she was going to have an entourage. No more Lone Ranger routine for her. At least, not today. She could go rogue some other time.

  She’d filled her friends in on her last few days, leaving no details out—including how the knife that’d stabbed the professor had been taken from the very room they were sleeping in tonight. Drew and Benjy were appropriately alarmed. There was some gratifying scowling and posturing. Neither of them was particularly macho, but she appreciated the attempts. They were up to speed by the time they reached the campus police station housed in the Butler Building, according to the plaque outside the door.

  “What can I do for you?” Officer Krupkey didn’t look upset or hurried. As he sat behind his desk, his relaxed posture said just another day on the job despite the fact that a man had been poisoned yesterday and another one stabbed today. His desk was clean and well-organized, holding just a computer, a phone, and a picture frame that faced him.

  Unlike the ultra-sleek, glassy buildings on campus, the police station was perfectly square, brick, and ivy covered. It seemed to be a remnant of an older era, surrounded by modernization yet not having succumbed to it. Like the sole outpost of a colony in a foreign territory…or a museum. Josie found it comforting that an old building like the Butler Building was still in use. She just hoped it wasn’t as full of asbestos as she suspected. The next breath she took was instinctively shallower.

  “When you spoke to those two kids after you picked them up outside of Professor Sanborn’s office, you mentioned that you’d seen them on video. Is that how you caught them?”

  “That’s correct. About six years ago, we had a semi-high-profile sexual assault case. At that time, we didn’t have video footage. Now we have over three dozen cameras across campus.”

  “Let me guess,” Josie said. “Paid for by a grant from the victim’s family?” She didn’t remember hearing about the case—sadly, cases like that were a dime a dozen on college campuses, even a place with a no-frat rule. Usually drugs or alcohol was involved, and kids didn’t need a frat to get drunk or high. And those were just the reported incidents.

  “Actually, the defendant’s family paid for it.”

  “And was he acquitted?” Drew asked. “I’m assuming it was a ‘he.’”

  “Nope, not acquitted. Maybe that’s why they wanted the cameras—whether good or bad, they just wanted the truth. And to not have to rely on he-said, she-said statements. Pretty big of them to invest in someone else’s future, I have to say.”

  The station had a couple other officers. Benjy, who had gone into the hall to wait, had started chatting with the youngish guy sitting at the reception desk.

  Josie, ever the antsy one and not much for chatter, cut to the chase. “I’m interested in seeing some video from the last day or so. How much footage do you keep?” She’d heard that some banks kept surveillance footage for as much as a year back—that seemed like an incredible amount of data to her. At the other extreme were some local stores that kept only about 24 hours’ worth of video. That seemed almost useless.

  “Thanks to that defendant’s family, we were set up with a pretty advanced system for the time. A lot’s happened in the last six years in terms of technology, but we’ve been lucky to have funds set aside for upgrading every couple of years. So, long story short, we keep footage on disk for about a year. I guess the trustees figured we needed to cover ourselves liability-wise at least as long as the students were on campus each year. Kind of makes sense, I guess.”

  “There are two windows of time and locations I’m interested in seeing,” Josie said. “Are any cameras focused on the back entry of the Executive Club?” She wanted to see everyone who had access to the faculty dining hall’s kitchen the morning of Dean Handley’s poisoning.

  Sarah, the server in Josie’s Scooby gang, had said that she’d made the dean’s salad herself. Josie and Leah had run into Sarah when she was on her way to work at the dining hall. That meant—assuming the oleander leaves had been mixed directly into the dean’s salad— they had a distinct window of time to check.

  “Yeah, we can do that. I’m guessing the Northam guys will want to know that, too. This place is going to be crawling with them in no time thanks to that Ida Mae woman. Luckily, parents haven’t caught wind of the dean’s poisoning, but it’ll probably be out in the papers soon enough. Someone over in the Northam PD is in bed with the press,” he said with a hint of derision in his voice. Definitely some history there, Josie thought. He raised his voice, calling out to one of his fellow officers, “Hey, Stevie.”

  The young guy at the front desk looked over. “Yeah?”

  “Help Ms. Tucker here locate the video footage she needs. And let me know when you find it. I’ll have to dupe it to send it on to our brothers in blue in town.”

  “Yep,” the guy said. He went back to chatting with Benjy, but his fingers were flying on his keyboard at the same time.

  “Good thing we have Stevie—Bart Stevenson, that is. He knows his way around a computer for sure.”

  “You have three guys on shift at any given time?” Josie asked.

  “Yeah. Not usually a lot going on around here. Some alcohol poisoning—that’s usually the highlight of our night. A bunch of theft. Some assault when the kids are riled up about something, like right after they come back from vacation. That’s always a busy time for us.” He sat up in his chair, finally, and straightened his already neat three items on his desktop.

  “Do you like it here?” Josie had to ask. Drew gave her a surprised look, so she knew she’d been weird and probably had overstepped the boundaries of a normal conversation, but Officer Krupkey didn’t seem to mind.

  “Yeah. Bader’s been very good for me. I came here from Northam PD, as you may have already guessed.” He gave a half-smile. “My ex is still with them. He’s a cop, too, so coming over to the campus was the best thing I could have done for my blood pressure.”

  Josie nodded. That sounded like a soap opera for another day.

  “What about you?” he asked her. “Are these guys on your payroll?” He nodded at Drew and Benjy. Was that a joke? Had she cracked the stalwart officer’s defenses?

  “Old friends,” she said, and had to smile when Drew gave her a warm look.

  “Yeah,” Officer Krupkey said. “I see how it is. Can’t fool an old dog like me.”


  #

  “Okay,” Officer Stevie said, clicking around on the screen of his computer with blunt, lightning-fast fingers. “Let’s see what we have here.” He’d located the correct footage on their server and was fast-forwarding the video to get to the right window of time. After he got the right place queued up, he hit Play and they watched in silence, Josie and her two guys crowded around Stevie’s desk.

  “That was it?” she finally said.

  “I can go back and play it again,” he said, a crease lining his forehead. “But that really was it.”

  Nothing.

  Though a camera had been angled just right to catch the back door of the Executive Club’s rear entrance, the footage showed that no one had gone in or out the door until much later when both Linda, the cook, and Sarah had gone out to the tree-covered patio. Then, Josie herself had briefly joined them.

  “But that was much later, after the ambulance had left,” Josie told them.

  Officer Stevie backed up the footage, and they watched it again. One more time to be sure.

  “Nope. No one,” he said, which meant that whoever had contaminated the dean’s salad with oleander had to have entered the dining hall from the front. Either that, or the poisoner had sat with him, eating lunch, watching the dean while he chomped, open-mouthed, on the very leaves that would poison him.

  Josie asked to see footage from that morning from when the professor had been stabbed—there were cameras that covered both doors into her dorm. She estimated that a couple hundred kids lived in that building. When they viewed the morning footage, it was obvious they weren’t going to get a good lead. Other than Josie herself, no one went in or out during the pre-dawn hours leading up to the attack on the professor.

  “Where the heck are all the nerds who are supposed to be hitting the library as soon as they unlock the doors?” Benjy asked. “I remember people used to be waiting outside for it to open.”

  “Like you would know anything about that,” Josie said with a snort.

  Benjy shrugged, grinning. His new buddy, Officer Stevie laughed. Those two were hitting it off like puppies in a dog park. Instant BFFs. Personally, she had no experience with that. She typically took a good two or three years before she was comfortable calling someone by his first name.

  “Or the crew team going out for a morning run before they hit the river for a row? Or erg-ing or whatever,” Drew added. He had a point. While some kids hit the skids in terms of self-control during freshman year, others went the opposite direction and became health fanatics, compulsively measuring their diets and their training times.

  But Josie had a few ideas of her own. The knife had come from within the dormitory. No one had exited or entered the building either. That meant the perpetrator most likely had been in the building all night. He—or she—had either stayed overnight or was a resident.

  Additionally, the person had to have knowledge of the knife and where to find it—this fact significantly narrowed the list to herself, the Scooby gang, possibly the professor himself, or someone who might have witnessed the kids taking the envelope from the professor’s office.

  If the events of Dean Handley’s murder and Professor Sanborn’s stabbing were related—and honestly, how could they not be related?—it further narrowed down the list of suspects.

  Josie felt optimistic. This was pure mathematics. Although she’d almost flunked college math because her TA had been smoking hot and distracting, she’d been aces at Logic 101. She could make a couple of lists, cross-check them against each other, and voilà, and arrive at a shortlist of bad guys.

  Right?

  Chapter 27

  While Josie had been wool-gathering, Drew and Benjy had asked Officer Stevie to bring up a few more windows of time with various camera angles. They watched about two weeks’ worth of activity in the atrium at the student center where the pots of six-foot tall oleander stood. Speeding up the footage to about ten times real-life speed had them whizzing through days and days of the beehive-like motions of students and faculty alike at a breakneck rate. She imagined the buzz of their high-pitched bro-chuckles and shouts.

  Josie blinked a few times to keep from getting dizzy. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she said, on refocusing her eyes. “Go back a second. More, more, more…stop.”

  “Enhance, enhance, enhance,” Benjy said, smacking Stevie on the shoulder.

  “I can’t do that, man. I can zoom in, but no-can-do on working miracles. That’s only in the movies and at the NSA, probably. We’re just a 64-bit operation here.”

  Josie had no idea what any of that meant, though she had seen numerous spy movies where headphone-wearing technicians in vans seemed to work miracles with fuzzy images on computer screens. Good to know that isn’t always the reality.

  Josie ignored them, craning her neck to get closer to the screen. She checked the timestamp in the corner of the picture, which read 6:46 am, the morning of Dean Handley’s poisoning. If she wasn’t mistaken, standing near one of the pots at the left of the room were two women—Jane, the admin and Linda, the head cook from the Executive Club.

  “Okay, press Play—but can you go slow?”

  “That, I can do.”

  The images jumped into motion, Jane’s wiry thin build easily recognizable next to Linda’s heavier form. The two chatted casually, unhurried. On the surface, this could have been an entirely innocent conversation. In fact, Jane had mentioned that she’d been in charge of ordering the meal for the luncheon with Victoria Rothsfeld, the wealthy donor who was the impetus behind hiring Ida Mae to give a talk.

  The two women in the video wrapped up their discussion with a lot of nodding—the recording didn’t include audio. The scene looked pretty mundane, but then as they split apart, Linda turned too suddenly and bumped into the potted oleander.

  At first, it looked like the plant was going over—she was a substantial person, tall as well as broad—and the leafy stems that jutted up toward the ceiling rocked and shuddered.

  On the video, they saw the women laughing. Then they parted ways, and the plant was left swaying.

  #

  “Was that guilt? Did the video prove that woman cook did it? Because she definitely took some plant leaves. At least, I think so. Do you?” Drew asked.

  He and Josie were in his Jeep, driving to the garage in Framingham. Benjy followed behind them in the Green Giant. Drew had put Jethro Tull on his CD player. Aqualung was making her feel all mellow and out-of-bodyish, like she was taking a vacation from her campus internment, from her anxiety about Dr. Lisa First and The Kiss, from her immediate hunger, from this decade—Drew was into album rock.

  Josie shook her head. “No. It proves Linda had the means to kill the dean. We already know she was in the kitchen—and that no one else went in or out the back door during the time the salads were made. That shows opportunity. But we now don’t have a motive. I mean, why would she want to harm him or anyone?”

  She felt like she was lecturing, but she’d never had an audience for something like this. She always worked alone—not that she wasn’t enjoying the company. Honestly, she’d never felt this confident working a case before…even if it was a false sense of security.

  “Maybe there was some love triangle we don’t know about. Or what if Linda was pregnant with his child and he refused to go public with their relationship?” He gripped the steering wheel of his Jeep hard with his big hands, excited about his theories.

  Dear God, what kind of monster have I created?

  “Easy there, cowboy,” she said. She looked at him with one raised eyebrow. Funny, he looked like the same logical, common-sensical Drew on the outside. Who knew he had this incredibly cuckoo, soap-opera spinning capability inside his head? She was intrigued, honestly. This hidden ability was a whole new side of him.

  “I’ve got it,” he said, ignoring her. “Linda, the cook, was the dean’s secret wife. She wanted to go public with their relationship, but he thought she would be too damaging for his career.”

>   They rolled up to a stoplight, and Benjy pulled the Green Giant up alongside their passenger side. The big green car was much lower than Drew’s Jeep, but about twice as long. Maybe three times.

  “Drew has lost his ever-loving mind,” she told Benjy through their lowered windows.

  Benjy gave a big thumbs up and a grin, as if to say, Welcome to the club. He floored it when the light changed, leaving them in a cloud of black, noxious exhaust.

  “I hope he knows where he’s going,” Drew said.

  “I don’t think he ever knows where he’s going. But somehow, he never gets lost.”

  Drew turned off the music. “Okay, so tell me what your theory is, if you think mine are so outlandish.”

  “Outlandish. Do people still use that word? It sounds like you should say tut-tut and clean your monocle.” She had her feet up on the dash, which he didn’t mind as long as her shoes were reasonably clean. It was more comfortable for her this way because she was so damn short. Most regular chairs didn’t allow her feet to touch the floor. His car was fastidious and smelled liked him—soap and laundry detergent. She probably could just live in the passenger seat and be perfectly happy for the next ten years.

  And yeah, she was avoiding talking about Lisa First. All she needed was him and a tank of gas…and some lunch. Her stomach growled at that moment.

  “We’ll get some food after we drop off the car,” he said, addressing her stomach directly instead of speaking to her. He added in an overblown gangster voice, like James Cagney from an old black and white movie, “I know a place. The best food you ever had. And no ‘dirty rats.’” He dropped the voice impersonation. “But first, you have to tell me what you think is going on. And why aren’t we collecting evidence to turn over to the police investigators?”