Threads of Suspicion

by Dee Henderson

  “Agreed.” His perspective about God’s influence intrigued her. Evie thought God was often involved in the details of her work, but David had an assumption that seemed much more certain. She hoped he was right, for it implied her case could be solved after all.

  Her phone alarm dinged and she silenced it. “My interview with Jenna’s biology class TA is in ten minutes.”

  “I’ll let you get your questions organized,” David said, standing. “That ticket stub, Evie, it’s significant in at least one other way. It tells me your Jenna liked good music.”

  “Very true,” Evie said, appreciating the lighthearted point. David walked back to the conference room. She picked up her notepad and added another fact to her list.

  18. Jenna attended a Triple M concert the night she disappeared

  “Evie, when’s your next interview?” David asked later, stepping out of the conference room and sliding a stack of folders into a carry-on bag.

  “I’m meeting Jenna’s best friend in”—she checked the time—“thirty-six minutes.”

  “Mind if I tag along? I need a brief break from Saul before I start in on these conversations. I’ll be switching from family who loved him to some people who at least have a motive to wish him dead.”

  Evie understood that whiplash. “I’d welcome a second opinion on what Robin has to say.” She packed files in her backpack, not sure what she might actually need. “Why don’t you drive? I’m meeting Ann at noon. You can drop me off with her and then go talk with your favorite person of interest.”

  “That would be Everett Gibson,” David told her as they exited the office space. “He did six years for aggravated assault after beating a neighbor into a near coma. Cops strongly suspected Everett at the time, as he and the victim had past history, but they just couldn’t break the man’s alibi. Everett said he was settling a minor traffic fender bender with a judge’s wife—for cash, untraceable, wouldn’t you know—on the other side of town when the neighbor was attacked. An easy alibi to dismiss except the judge’s wife backed him up. The case stalled. Saul got hired to look at that alibi. He managed to prove the judge’s wife bought prescription painkillers off Everett on occasion, but that she hadn’t seen him on the day in question. Once Everett’s alibi was proven false, the case came together quickly. The man took a plea deal for the six years.”

  “When did he get released from jail?”

  “Two months before Saul disappeared. He continues to have a spotty record with the law. Everett’s now in the county lockup for trying to steal a truck off a used-car lot.”

  “At least you know where to find him.”

  David smiled. “There is that. Getting him to confess to Saul’s murder will be a challenge, given I don’t know that he did it and there’s zero evidence to suggest he did. For now, I just want to see how he reacts to Saul’s name. The guy has a temper. That can be useful.”

  Evie nodded. “It should be a revealing couple of hours for both of us.”

  Evie met Jenna’s best friend, Robin Landis, at a coffee shop across from the fashion design firm where she worked. David perched on a stool off to the left of their table, in comfortable hearing distance, but not in Robin’s line of sight. Robin was willing to help, yet she was so emotional about her missing friend that Evie wondered how many details were being lost because of her eagerness to be useful. Evie found herself deliberately slowing the pace to try to settle the woman. She circled the interview back through less overt topics, taking notes in longhand rather than shorthand just to slow down the process further.

  Eventually she asked, “Was Jenna having any problems with another student studying the same curriculum? A lab-assistant position a fellow student didn’t get, an internship with only one slot—anything that might have put her in competition with others in her degree track?”

  “That happens a lot when you get into the PhD programs, and Jenna was headed that route. She wanted to be a researcher at a biotech firm—it was a serious ‘major goal in life’ focus. She didn’t want to go the medical-degree route but wanted as much as she could learn about diseases, genetics, and research methods as she could cram into her schedule. She was insane to carry the course load she did, but she was impatient to get the knowledge.”

  “Any reason for that?” Evie asked, curious. “Someone in her family was sick? She lost someone to a genetic disease?”

  “Not that she ever said, and she would have. We were tight that way. It was more like, ‘I can be the Einstein of my generation in genetics, the Alan Turing of biology’—she would talk that way. She liked to discover things, understand things.”

  Evie remembered an Alan Turing biography on a side table in a photo of Jenna’s living room—something she’d been reading before she disappeared. “Was she a music lover? Was a concert something she would put into her schedule, even overloaded with studies as it was?”

  “Live music was a big deal for her,” Robin confirmed. “It was the only thing that would get her out of her serious study mode. She loved to sing, had a wonderful voice. I don’t know what happened to her music collection, but she had hundreds of songs in her playlists and knew all the lyrics to them. An interesting band, a musical—that was her entertainment, her reward for all the work she was putting in toward her degree. She didn’t have a lot of money, but her parents were good to her, slipping in a few extra dollars with her school fees for those kinds of evenings out.”

  “Triple M, the band in concert that night—was that Jenna’s choice or simply the band playing that Friday?”

  “The band playing that night. I don’t think she had a special interest in them, though Jenna loved the song ‘A Waiting Love.’ She sang along with it, gave us a solo on the walk home as she sang it again. Tiffany had gotten a block of tickets so we could go as a group, and when people heard it was Triple M, they cleared schedules to be able to go.

  “Jenna was delighted with the concert that night. The fact she had a boyfriend, it was a serious thing, and Triple M’s music was focused on songs like that—the music was right up her alley. Jenna figured another year and Steve would ask her to marry him. She was anticipating it, dreaming big and loving life. Not just having a great personal life, it was also doing something great for the world at large, and that’s why the studies mattered so much to her. She wanted to make a big difference in the world. Me”—Robin shrugged—“I just wanted to dream up fashionable clothes that didn’t go out of style within one season. Sometimes it’s weird, realizing we were such good friends. And now she’s the one gone. . . .”

  “She had a lot of photos of you in her albums,” Evie mentioned.

  Robin brightened. “That’s nice. We were close—a college camaraderie of doing life together for a time. Jenna sat through all my failed boyfriend sagas, handed over the tissues and shared the ice cream. She made life fun, you know? She made it possible to sparkle. She was wickedly smart to have selected those courses, but she wasn’t making a big deal about it. She just buckled down and did the work and could figure out hard things. She was kind of quiet, really calm, when the rest of us in the group had big highs and lows. I think that’s why she was a good fit with Steve. He had that steadiness about him too.”

  “How were things with her boyfriend? Was there a former boyfriend still in the picture who might cause her to rethink matters?”

  Robin shook her head. “It was Jenna and Steve all the way. He was working one of the sign-up tables on the quad when she was a newbie freshman going through orientation, and they struck up a conversation about the school paper and what he did. She didn’t sign up to join the newspaper, but she started hanging around there some to see what he was doing.

  “They clicked the first time they met, and it was Steve and Jenna pretty much thereafter—at least once he decided she wasn’t too young for him. That first year he was playing it very safe, just a friend, but you could tell he liked her, and he was wise enough to come back around and ask her out on that first date just before the year con
cluded. It was”—Robin crossed her fingers—“like that between them after that.”

  Evie appreciated the image Robin was sketching.

  “By the second year, it’s ‘we’re dating.’” Robin put it in air quotes. “Steve had made a point to meet her parents, and you could tell when around them, this is a couple that’s going to be exchanging rings. I think he was the one making sure she got her degree without distraction before things progressed. She would have already been engaged if she could have made the decision.

  “He wasn’t Mr. College trying out his wings, figuring out who he was and what he wanted. He was Steve Hamilton, solid guy, career figured out, plan in mind, and Jenna was part of the plan. They were cute together, happy, content.” Robin grinned. “That was so not a common thing on a college campus. Her friends were envious, me included, in a good way. She had a good thing and knew it. She wasn’t risking that by making a mistake, getting her head turned by looking at another attractive guy.”

  “They were a solid couple,” Evie reiterated. She tried to word the next question carefully. “Was anyone else interested in Jenna? A guy wishing Steve wasn’t around?”

  Robin thought about it. “Sure, there were guys who were interested in her. She was smart, but you could have a conversation with her. She was nice, and people noticed that. She had a relatively narrow course subject—maybe sixty people at most taking the same classes. There were guys she would have lunch with who formed a study group of sorts. Jenna mentioned a lot of them, but they were mostly tied to some class or another. She would occasionally connect two friends for a date. But if anyone was looking at Jenna with more than mild interest, she never mentioned it, and I never picked up on it.”

  Evie thought there was a line there worth pursuing further. “Was Jenna interceding in a friend’s life? Someone got pregnant and was deciding what to do, a bad boyfriend breakup, someone not going to make the grades to keep scholarship money, that kind of drama coming into Jenna’s life via someone else?”

  Robin smiled. “I would be most of that, with the exception of the pregnancy. My boyfriend and I were all over the map—together, then not, back together again. Or my roommates changed again and some worked out well, while others did not. College is about highs and lows when you’re twenty, emotions tended to run intense, and I wind up easily under stress. Add in finals week, the papers you had to write—there were pills floating around to keep you awake, others to wind you down. Jenna didn’t go there, but friends of hers would, creating its own unfolding mini-crisis. If you needed to chill out about your life, you ended up visiting Jenna and dumping your troubles on her.”

  Robin paused, thought about it, then said, “I can give you the names of those who would’ve been in that circle of friends, but honestly it was typical college stuff. Tragedies at the time, but looking back, nothing out of the ordinary. Nobody was dealing with a violent ex-boyfriend or a suicidal depression or a body-image illness like bulimia. It was having to tell your parents you got a C or D on a test, seeing your ex-boyfriend now dating one of your used-to-be-girlfriends, that kind of tragedy. Not big-sized crises. No one getting arrested, or even getting particularly drunk and stupid. Jenna stayed above that churn, but she was there as a friend when you needed her.”

  Evie was getting a good picture of her missing girl. “Jenna was a loyal friend.”

  “Exactly. To me, with Steve, with others around her, Jenna stuck with you. She wasn’t a fair-weather friend.”

  “Thanks, Robin. This was helpful.”

  “Truly?”

  “Yes.” Evie placed a card with her contact information on the table. “If you think of anything else that might shed light on what Jenna was like, or remember a particular friend she was helping around the time she disappeared, send me an email. Or just turn on a camera and chat about her, like you’ve done today, and send the video to me.”

  Robin fingered the card. “You’ll let me know how your investigation turns out?”

  “I will,” Evie assured her.

  Evie added a few impressions of Robin to her notes as David drove them to Brighton College, where she would meet up with Ann.

  “Jenna was a good kid,” David summed up. “Not the party girl or the leader, but a linchpin among her friends.”

  “A good description.” Evie considered a conclusion, tried it out in words. “I think Jenna would have opened her door that night, even at midnight, even if it was a guy, if it was someone she recognized.”

  “She’s thinking like a friend.”

  Evie nodded. “A boyfriend of a friend of hers—‘We broke up again tonight, you’ve got to talk some sense into her, Jenna,’ that kind of pitch.” Evie rolled the idea around in her thoughts, but it didn’t want to settle anywhere. She knew names of Jenna’s friends, only they weren’t individuals with personalities yet, just names. She needed to talk with more of them to better fit her conclusion.

  “Whoever did this likely shared her passion for music.”

  Evie glanced over at David.

  “She’s got the boyfriend in Steve,” David explained. “She’s not looking beyond him. Interested guy number two, how’s he going to get some of Jenna’s time? I bet he’s around when Steve’s out of town, sharing her interest in music. A guitar player, someone good on keyboards. Someone who could get Jenna’s free time by having the one thing she’s willing to let draw her out of her studies.”

  Evie realized where David was taking this. “Jealousy.”

  David nodded. “A tried-and-true motive for when a guy accidentally kills a girl. She didn’t attract a killer because she likes to study the human genome. It’s not just the Triple M concert. Music was the one avenue Jenna allowed in her life by her own choice. Music is how this guy found her. He knew her for years and wanted what Steve had—or he met her recently, but it’s the same drawing card. Music.”

  Evie saw the leap he had made. “I’m not looking at music because it was Jenna’s passion. I’m looking at music because it’s his.”

  “I think you’re looking for a music major, a music student.”

  “Someone who would hear her voice and think That’s lovely, share her passion, and think That’s my soul mate.”

  David nodded. “There’s your thread. If he’s on the campus with her, you’re going to find him through his music.”

  Evie lifted her backpack from the backseat to look for the provost’s office number, found the card, and made a call. While she got bounced around getting to the person who could find her the student rosters from that time, she glanced over at David. “You probably just set me on the track that’s going to solve my case.”

  He simply smiled. “If so, you can buy me dinner, then help me find my missing PI.”

  Seven

  Evie met up with Ann near Jenna’s apartment building, arranged to ride with her, and waved David on to his interview.

  “For efficiency, let’s split up and start by following Jenna’s credit-card purchases, get a look at where she liked to shop around the campus area,” Evie suggested. They could show Jenna’s picture around, hopefully jog owners’ and longtime employees’ memories.

  Ann stamped her feet to clear snow off her boots and gamely nodded. With only a little irony, she said, “It’s a beautiful January day for strolling around.” Fortunately, it was a bit warmer than yesterday. Ann handed back Evie’s page of facts and theories. “I like the music-student theory.”

  “David’s suggestion on the drive over here. Music is this person’s passion, I’m guessing, and why he chose Jenna. Or she—I’m not convinced yet we’re looking for a guy. Jenna would have opened her door late at night to a woman without a second thought.”

  “I saw that,” Ann returned, “and the ‘literally moved her body’? You’re good at seeing the scope of something, Evie, but that’s just macabre. Possibly true, but beyond macabre. Although hauling a body away in a sleeper sofa carried out to a moving van does open one’s eyes to what might not have been explored yet.”
>
  Evie shrugged. “College students move all the time. It’s easy enough to use that to your advantage. ‘The girl upstairs disappeared. I don’t care what the penalty fee is, I’m breaking my lease and getting out of here.’ Remove Jenna’s body in a wardrobe box or that sleeper sofa, wipe your place with so much bleach it stinks because you have to at least get your security deposit back. It’s a simple enough story to sell, which covers up a murder scene and gets rid of the evidence. I’ll look at dates people moved out, see if something interesting shows up for residents in her building or buildings along that block.”

  “You think relevant paperwork is still around?”

  “Between lease agreements, truck rentals, post-office address changes, student records, and DMV records, I’m sure I can find what I need. If this was a typical case, cops would have solved it already. The best way to use my time is to look wider than they did.”

  “You are doing that, Evie. A drunk driver hitting her caught me off guard too,” Ann said. “I could see him dumping her body, but the blood on the street would be difficult to wash away.”

  Having already thought about that problem, Evie simply said, “A couple of drunks, hosing off the street where a friend threw up, it could be sold that way. It’s late at night and you wouldn’t see blood as red until the sun is up. The search didn’t begin until Monday, and if Jenna had walked a distance, was a few blocks away when she was hit, the cops don’t see that location right away. There were heavy rains Monday night. It would probably take two people or more in the car who hit her to cover up that kind of involved crime scene, or very good friends of a drunk driver willing to help him cover up such an accident. Still, it can fit the facts.”