“Like the killer knew what he was doing,” she concluded.
Ted nodded.
“I need you to forgive me.”
But before Ted could respond, the door to her room swung open, and there stood none other than the detective in charge of the case, Detective Segarra, and two other cops.
Georgia made a statement to the police the next day, followed by Ted’s statement. They weren’t allowed to meet again. As for Ted, he stuck to what he had told Justin in their room: on the afternoon before the crime took place, he had been playing poker on the sixth floor of his dorm and then had gone to his room to study. They asked him all sorts of questions, not only about that day but about previous days, jumping from one point in time to another in a clear attempt to confuse him. Ted never contradicted himself.
Journalists working the story somehow got hold of Georgia’s statement, and her version of the facts became the official story. Dozens of reporters, some of them planted in front of the murder scene from just outside the restricted area, narrated the tryst between student and professor and how she had turned back seconds after leaving him and watched him die. Many people (including Ted) believed that Detective Segarra had carefully orchestrated the leak. Though the young woman couldn’t identify the killer, she insisted it couldn’t have been her boyfriend, Ted, who she said she would have been able to identify despite the lack of light. Speculation ran amok. All sorts of theories were advanced. Some people doubted Georgia’s whole story, accusing her of committing the murder herself. Others speculated about a possible conspiracy between Georgia and her boyfriend. Still others suggested that Tyler’s wife was the vengeful killer.
Ted’s situation worsened when Georgia’s lawyers suggested that she elaborate on her statement. She was already implicated, she had a motive for killing the professor, she had left the scene of the crime, and she hadn’t immediately called the police. In her favor, of course, was the fact that everything known about the murder came from her own statement. But was that good enough? At least two of her girlfriends knew about her secret affair, and anybody else might have seen her with Tyler as well, so the fact that she was the first to reveal it publicly could have been just a smoke screen. Indeed, more and more suspicion fell on Georgia as the days went by. Her lawyers recommended that she correct her statement as to what she had seen that night. The truth was that there was so little light that she couldn’t rule anyone out, not even Ted. The lawyers claimed that McKay had intimidated Georgia when (as witnessed by Segarra himself) he had visited her in her room the following day. She couldn’t believe that her boyfriend was capable of doing such a thing, and had therefore ruled him out in the first place, but the fact was that she couldn’t say anything about who had or hadn’t killed Tyler. She couldn’t even swear that it had been a man.
71
Present day
Laura, Ted, and Lee stood before a long perimeter wall whose original color was indiscernible. A yard or so of gray concrete blocks had been added on top to bring the wall to the imposing height of ten feet. Paint was peeling off the bottom third of the wall in large patches, revealing the original bricks. The rest was faded or covered in graffiti. The wall was topped by a double row of barbed wire. At the center of the wall stood a gate, padlocked with a heavy chain.
“It’s the abandoned typewriter factory,” Laura said. It wasn’t a question.
“That’s right.” Ted walked up to the wall and placed both of his hands on it, as if he expected to receive some sort of vibration. In a way, he did. “My company acquired it ten years ago.”
“In one of our sessions, you told me that Wendell had bought it,” Laura said, wondering how he would react.
It seemed to take Ted a while to figure out who she was talking about.
“I acquired it, through my company,” he repeated, walking along the wall now without lifting his hand from its surface. “The keys are right there.”
He was pointing at one of the bricks, practically at ground level, hidden behind weeds and an odd, prickly bush.
Lee went immediately to the spot where he was pointing, telling Ted to stand back. With some difficulty, the guard squatted and stretched his arm through the weeds until he touched the wall. One of the bricks moved a little when he pushed it. He had to use both hands to grip it and pull it out. A key ring rested in the cavity.
“We have to go inside,” Ted said. “But only Laura and me.”
“No way,” Lee said.
“Ted,” Laura interceded, “you know we can’t do it like that. Is there something you need to tell me? Lee can give us a little privacy, but he can’t leave us completely alone. You understand that, don’t you?”
Ted rubbed his temples. He wasn’t convinced. Lee and Laura waited.
“It’s simple, McKay,” Lee said. “Either we all three go in together, or we all three turn around and go back. No other alternative.”
“All right.”
Lee went to open the gate.
“It’s the biggest key on the ring.”
Laura stood by Ted.
“You’re doing great. I’ll ask Lee to let us talk in private a little. Do you know what we’ll find in here? Something you’ve remembered?”
Ted didn’t speak. There was a strange look in his eyes.
“No, I don’t know.”
But he did.
Passing through the gate, they entered a large parking lot that looked as abandoned as the perimeter wall. Weeds and bushes had grown unchecked. The crumbling concrete sidewalks were the only areas where they could walk. On the right was a two-story building, its windows and most of its doors shuttered with sheets of plywood. The exception was a single door on one corner. The three of them headed for it.
On their walk through the woods they had scarcely noticed that the winds from the south had covered the sky in a layer of clouds—not threatening, but thick enough to block the sun.
Lee used one of the keys to unfasten another padlock, and a smaller key to unlock the door, which closed behind them with a soft click. They had walked into a tiny room, completely empty and falling apart; after all, this wasn’t the main entrance. Ted guided them through a side door to a hallway that led to an area with offices. Lee had turned on his flashlight to make up for the dim light filtering through cracks in the plywood sheets nailed over the windows. The offices weren’t completely empty: there were a few desks, filing cabinets, and so forth. Halfway down the hall, Ted stopped and contemplated a side door, as if he couldn’t recall it—or perhaps to the contrary: as if it held some special significance. At last he walked on, until he came to a double door at the end of this office area. They entered an enormous space that had once held workshops and assembly lines. Some of the machinery was still standing. The ceiling here reached up to the full height of the building. It was outfitted with skylights that, though grimy with years of dirt, allowed some light through.
Lee put away his flashlight. What he needed to have at hand was his Taser, or even the Beretta. He didn’t like this place. Too little light, too many places to hide.
That was when Laura’s cell phone rang, and all three of them jumped.
“Marcus?”
The reception sucked.
“…lo…gency…ospital.”
Laura instinctively stepped away. She asked Lee for the key ring and he gave it to her without objection.
“Marcus, I can’t make out anything you’re saying. An emergency at Lavender?”
“…listen…way…”
It was pointless. Laura ran through the labyrinth that had brought them there, but in reverse. She had to try three of the small keys before she managed to get outside. She tested the phone again.
“Can you hear me now?”
“Yes. And you can hear me?”
“Now I can. I’m outside the building.”
“What building?”
Marcus sounded alarmed.
“The footpath behind Ted’s house led to an old factory. It’s the one that—�
��
“Laura, listen closely. Is McKay with Lee?”
“Yes.”
“Is he shackled hand and foot? Is he being closely guarded?”
“Yes. Why?”
“Are you sure he can’t hear you?”
“Yes, I’m sure! Marcus, you’re getting me worried. What happened?”
“I need you to listen to me very closely. I’m with Bob Duvall right now. Bob checked up on the things I asked him to look into. There really was a murder at MSU in nineteen ninety-four, when Ted was a freshman. A professor named Thomas Tyler had his throat slit. A pretty high-profile case. The police investigated several students, including Ted McKay and Justin Lynch, but they came up empty. The case went cold and was left unsolved. I have the file in my hands. And guess what?”
Laura couldn’t guess anything. Processing this new information was as much as she could manage. A professor murdered? Marcus’s urgency could mean only one thing…
“Tell me the rest—please.”
Her legs went wobbly and almost gave way. She knelt on the ground and listened.
72
1994
Five days after the murder of Thomas Tyler, the campus was still shaken. Classes were running normally again, yet the crime against the professor seemed to be the only possible topic of conversation. Television production trucks were no longer stationed at MSU around the clock, and helicopters no longer buzzed above the campus every few hours, but the media hadn’t forgotten the case. Not at all. The love triangle was the new focus of attention. Reports carried photos of Tyler and his family, of Georgia McKenzie, and two or three of Ted (including his high school yearbook photo). Georgia had returned home on her doctor’s advice, but the police issued a press release stating that she was not under investigation for Tyler’s murder. Hardly anyone believed it.
It was seven in the morning when three short blasts of a siren sounded in the Box. Then a voice crackled over the dorm’s old intercom system, a rarely used relic from the days of civil defense drills. Doors opened throughout every corridor. Sleepy-eyed students, most still in pajamas, looked at one another and tried to take in what the voice was saying. The speaker was the dean of students. He was asking everybody to gather downstairs in the first-floor assembly hall. An important announcement would be made there in fifteen minutes.
The situation was beyond unusual. Who had ever heard of an unscheduled all-dorm assembly? And what kind of announcement justified waking students up at seven in the morning?
Ted was the first out of bed in room 503. His roommate was the heaviest sleeper Ted had ever known, and it was a couple of minutes before Justin’s brain began functioning minimally. When it dawned on him that the announcement might be about the murder, he went on the alert.
“Don’t rush things, Justin. Please. Take your time, get dressed, and then we’ll go downstairs.”
The other fifth-floor residents were stumbling down the corridor, half asleep.
When they reached the first floor, any doubts as to whether the announcement concerned the murder were dispelled. A group of ten police officers ran upstairs while some students were still on their way down. The assembly hall was packed. Next to the door stood the dean and Detective Segarra, who everyone recognized from his brief televised press conferences about the case. With them were more police officers and two assistants to the dean.
“What is all this shit?” Justin muttered.
“Some routine procedure, no doubt,” Ted said, sounding unconcerned.
“Good morning,” the dean began. “I will be brief. As you can imagine, we require your cooperation in the police investigation that is being conducted at this time. Detective Segarra and his officers will be searching this building. What we ask of you is to remain here while the search is ongoing.”
Murmurs and protests spread through the hall. Segarra took the floor.
“If any of you require any indispensable items over the course of the next two to three hours, raise your hand and an officer will accompany you to your room to retrieve them.” He paused. “By ‘indispensable,’ I mean medicine.”
“Can they do this?” someone asked.
The dean responded.
“University lawyers are present and will ensure that the search is conducted according to the letter of the law.”
Nobody else raised any further objections. Segarra and a few of his officers went upstairs, leaving two behind on the first floor to watch the doors.
What was going on?
Of all the dorms on campus, the Box was the only one in which a search like this had been carried out so far. Perhaps it was a coincidence, but logic indicated that the dorm hadn’t been chosen at random. As soon as one building was searched, of course, every student on campus would be on the alert, so if anybody was concealing objects relevant to the investigation in his or her room, he or she would have plenty of time to get rid of the evidence before a second dorm was searched. Obviously, then, the other dorms weren’t going to get searched; whatever the police were interested in, it must be here in the Box.
Justin, Ted, and a couple of other students huddled in a group. Among them were Marman and Irving Prosser, as well as a kid named Joe Stilwell, who had gone pale as a sheet and seemed to have forgotten how to blink. Ted was glad Stilwell was with them; he made Justin’s terror that much less obvious.
“Do you guys think they’re searching for the lighter?” Marman suggested.
Ted had forgotten about the lighter, an urban myth that had grown from the fact that a few students had once seen the professor holding an expensive-looking gold cigarette lighter.
“There isn’t any lighter,” Irving observed.
“So what are they looking for?”
Ted wasn’t really interested in what they were looking for, only in why. Searching an entire six-story university dorm wasn’t a measure to be taken lightly, not even in a high-profile murder case. Though the dean had sounded cooperative when he made the announcement a few minutes ago, he and the university lawyers must have raised massive objections. A judge would first have to grant a warrant. But a warrant to search an entire dorm? It was too big an operation for it not to be based on a concrete piece of information. What could it be?
A little more than an hour later, Segarra and his team were headed back down to the assembly hall. Ted counted them. Fifteen altogether, plus Segarra. The first conclusion he drew was that they were all regular cops or detectives, not forensic police, which meant that the judge’s warrant must have authorized only a limited search for some particular object, not a general fishing expedition for fingerprints or DNA evidence. This said something about the likely progress of the investigation, he reasoned. The second and more important conclusion was that it would be impossible for a mere fifteen officers to search every room in the dorm with any degree of thoroughness in such a short time.
Ted ran upstairs as soon as students were allowed back on their floors. He took a few seconds to peek into some rooms along the way; he saw signs that many of them had been combed through. But that was impossible given the time allotted, of course. He immediately knew what had happened: two or three members of the team had been tasked with ransacking all the rooms a little, some more than others, while the bulk of the team undertook a detailed inspection of the room they were really interested in. There was no other possibility. Fifteen officers could not possibly have searched the entire Box in just an hour and done a decent job of it. And otherwise, why bother?
When he got back to room 503 his suspicions were confirmed. Everything was in disarray: the mattresses dumped on the floor, clothing scattered everywhere. They hadn’t made the slightest effort to hide their tracks. Of course, even this mess could have been made by one person. Ted hunted for more subtle clues, and it took only a glance at the bookshelf to determine that the genuine painstaking search had been carried out there. Ted’s photographic memory told him that the books were in the correct order but had been replaced farther back on the shelf than h
e had left them. Someone had taken the time to look through them one by one.
“What’s got your attention?” Justin asked.
“Nothing,” Ted said, still looking at the books. “Pretty soon we’ll be hearing from Segarra.”
“What are you talking about?”
“This,” he said, completely serious. “You have to control yourself, Justin. Remember what I told you. That detective is going to want to talk to you. Maybe with me again, too, though he knows he won’t get anything new out of me.”
Ted knew that Segarra hadn’t discovered anything. The detective would now be regretting this false move.
73
1994
It was Marman who brought the news to the Box. In recent days he’d done nothing but roam the campus in search of information. He really seemed to be enjoying his new role as the unofficial campus news anchor. Not only did he hasten to spread rumors, even the most unlikely ones; he also kept on top of the latest developments, so any student who wanted to find out what was going on would unfailingly turn to him.
“Have I got news for you guys!” Marman announced in the fifth-floor corridor. “And this is no rumor.”
Irving Prosser and Justin were all ears.
“Let’s go into a room to talk,” Ted urged them. He was the fourth member of the tiny group.
Marman was unsure. More people could hear him out in the corridor.
“Come on, Marman,” Ted insisted. “It’s better to tell people the news individually, don’t you think?”
“Oh, sure.”
They went into 504, the room next door to Ted and Justin’s, and sat on the beds, two on each.
“This is incredible. I’ve got three different sources that confirm it,” Marman said, playing his new role of investigative journalist. “Fiona Smith, my girlfriend’s study partner, got it from her father, who heard it last night from his own father, a police officer who’s working the case. I also got it from Meredith Malone, the sister of the dean’s secretary, who heard the dean talking over the phone with Segarra. And finally—”
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