by Leigh Perry
“Then I put you through this for nothing? I’m so sorry, Sid.”
“No, she had to be eliminated as a suspect. But you know what the worst part is—the absolute worst part?”
“What?”
“She posts her work online regularly, and her followers number in the thousands.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
While Sid made sure no vestiges of Bad Bobbie’s files had tainted his laptop, I texted Indigo and Marissa.
GEORGIA: Bad news. Bad Bobbie has no T-shirt designs on her hard drive. Unless she has another laptop, she’s not our thief.
INDIGO: Now what?
GEORGIA: Marissa, you said your designs were critiqued in class. Do you have a list of the other students?
MARISSA: Can it wait? About to go to a movie.
GEORGIA: Sure. Enjoy.
Sid put his skull on my shoulder to peer over it. “Their first date?”
“I’m not sure. It could just be chilling, or hanging. Do college kids date? As in, ‘Would you like to go to a movie with me?’”
“You’re asking the wrong guy. I’m more an Internet kind of dater.”
“I suppose. Wait, have you been flirting online?”
“A gentleman never texts and tells.”
Sid wanted to discuss next steps, but I was worried that somebody might hear the two of us talking. So he got back into his bag, and we headed back to the bungalow. Since it was daylight, I told him we should again hold off on conversation during the drive. But honestly, both of those decisions were just delaying tactics. The fact was, I was feeling discouraged.
Sid being Sid, he’d figured it out and as soon as we were home and he was out of the suitcase, he said, “Come on, Georgia, it’s not that bad. I mean, Bad Bobbie’s work is that bad, but finding out that she’s not our murderous thief is a good thing. One less suspect.”
“That’s not a big help, Sid. Even with her eliminated, we’ve still got so many suspects. Do you know how many students, instructors, and admin staff members are at FAD?”
“Too many.”
“Face it, Sid, we are a bust at catching art thieves.”
“Hey, we’ve never tried to find a thief before. And we’ve only been at it a couple of weeks. Kelly was a trained reporter and she hadn’t cracked it in a month.”
“No, she just got herself killed, which is not something I aspire to.”
“Yeah, she did get herself killed, didn’t she?” Sid said speculatively. Then he actually smiled. I know, with the skin and such out of the way, human skulls have no choice but to smile all the time, but experience has taught me the difference between a default expression and a real grin. Sid was delighted with himself.
“Sid, stop that. You’re creeping me out.”
“Sorry. I was just thinking about what you said. You know, you’re right. We suck at catching art thieves.”
“This is a cheerful thought?”
“Shush. So we don’t know how to catch a thief, but there is something we do know how to do. We know how to catch killers.”
“Isn’t that what we’ve been trying to do?”
“Yes and no. You don’t even believe it was murder, do you?”
“I do now.” I hadn’t wanted to accept it at first, but something about the timing of Kelly’s death combined with the overall nastiness at FAD had convinced me.
“Really?” He looked pleased. “That makes it easier.”
“How?”
“Remember, we decided we couldn’t do much without knowing a motive, but once we found it, we got sidetracked: first into thinking Kelly was a thief, and then into realizing that she was, in fact, going after the thief. So we’ve been doing that, too: looking for a thief.”
“Don’t you think the thief is the killer?”
“Absolutely, but we’ve been trying to work out the thefts, not the murder. The problem is that apparently our guy is a pretty good thief. I’ve found designs with the Scarlet Letter signature going back several years, so he’s had time to perfect his technique. I’m guessing, however, that this is his first murder, which means mistakes were probably made. So let’s look at the murder.”
“That’s what Officer Buchanan has been doing.”
“I think she’s given up. There’s been nothing on the web about an official investigation. Have you heard anything more from her?”
“Now that you mention it, no.” She’d paid me no more unexpected visits, and as far as I knew, she hadn’t been on campus since the memorial service. Admittedly, I hadn’t been entirely tuned into the rumor mill, but I think I’d have heard something.
“So forget her. She’s a small-town cop, anyway—I bet we’ve got more experience with murder than she does.”
“So what are do we going to do?”
“We’ll do what we always do: nose around, ask stupid questions, speculate wildly, and argue about everything!”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Given that no opportunities available for nosing or asking presented themselves, we jumped right into speculating and arguing. Honestly, that was the part we were best at anyway.
“Okay,” Sid said, “let’s start with how Kelly was killed.”
“She froze to death.”
“Not according to the Falstone Journal. She died from a combination of injuries and exposure, which is a little different. But that’s not what I meant anyway. I was talking about how the murderer killed her.”
“Officer Buchanan said there was no sign of another car running into Kelly or anything like that. She just ran off the road.”
“Normally, you’d expect to see skid marks if she’d hit a curve too sharply, but there was none of that, either.”
“If the road was slick from snow or ice, it might not have left marks.”
“Possibly. It depends on what time the snow started.”
I thought back. “The snow was just starting when I left campus, which was at five. So the roads should have been clear for Kelly. Indigo said they spoke to her at two thirty that afternoon, and she was going to leave after her next appointment.”
“I wonder who the meeting was with.”
“I could check the Writing Lab portal.”
“Good idea.”
I got onto my laptop. “Nothing here—so it wasn’t a student appointment. Unless somebody could delete an appointment to make it look as if it hadn’t happened. Is that possible?”
“I don’t know. It would require access to the system, which would mean one of you English adjuncts.”
“Or Professor Waldron or Mr. Perkins.” That was an unsettling thought. “No, wait. Kelly only put critique appointments in that database. Maybe it wasn’t a student.”
“Or if it was with a student, it wasn’t for a tutoring session. Did Indigo know who the meeting was with?”
“They said they didn’t. Do you think Kelly learned something important in that meeting?”
“No, I think the meeting was with the killer, and that’s when he struck! What if he knocked her out or shot her full of tranquilizers?”
“Wouldn’t the autopsy have shown signs of head injury?”
“There was probably trauma from the accident that could have masked an earlier blow. Remember the blood we saw?”
“I definitely remember that.” The memory was more vivid than I would have preferred. “Wouldn’t they know the difference between a newer injury and something a few hours old?”
“You may be right,” Sid admitted. “CSI is always talking about antemortem, postmortem, and perimortem injuries. Before death, after death, and at the time of death.”
“Okay, so he didn’t hit her. And probably they’d have found a needle mark if she’d been drugged.”
“Not if the killer injected her under a nail or on the scalp or someplace like that.”
“Why would Kelly stay still for that?”
“Maybe there was an accomplice? One held her and one injected her?”
“Without making noise or leaving bruises?
Let’s make it simpler. Just one killer. What about coffee?”
“You want to take a coffee break now? This is just getting good.”
I thumped him on the head, something it took practice to do without hurting myself. “What if the killer brought her drugged coffee, or some other drink? Though I don’t know how somebody could drug her coffee without her noticing.”
“It happens all the time,” Sid said.
“True.” Date rape drugs were alarmingly common on college campuses.
“The problem is, drugged coffee doesn’t really go with the timeline. Unless we’re picturing Kelly falling asleep at her desk, then waking up hours later just enough to stumble to her car, and then getting that far away before she crashed.”
“You’re right. That doesn’t make sense.”
“Unless… Okay, pretend I’m the killer. After Indigo leaves, I show up for our meeting.”
“How could he be sure nobody would see him going into the Writing Lab?”
“I’m still at the speculating stage—we’ll get to the arguing part later.”
“Sorry. Carry on.”
“So I go to the meeting carrying drugged coffee, which Kelly slurps right down because she’s tired. Then I ramble on about something or another until she passes out.”
“Okay.”
“Then I lock the Lab door and lie low until it gets late enough that nobody is around.”
“Not nearly as many people had keys then,” I reminded him.
“Good point. So I’m not worried about anybody walking in on me. Maybe I even turn out the lights and sit in the dark. When I’m sure the coast is clear, I carry Kelly out to the car.”
“How do you do that safely? If somebody had seen them, the whole plan would have been ruined.”
“I’m not sure. Wait, what about one of those wheeled garbage cans?”
“Then there would have been garbage on her clothes—those things are never clean.”
“Hey, I’m speculating here!”
“And I’m providing a reality check. Forget the garbage can and substitute one of those carts they use to transport heavy framed artwork and sculpture. The killer could have covered her with a tarp and nobody would know the difference.”
“Oh, that’s good.”
“Except that now that I think of it, those carts have to be checked out. I saw a memo about it—apparently students were using them for races.”
“Coccyx,” Sid said.
We both drummed our fingers for a minute, then I came up with something. “What if the meeting didn’t take place at FAD at all? Or if they met on campus and then went somewhere else? Maybe whoever she was meeting gave her a ride in his car, the way Lucas did with me the other night.”
“Oh, that’s better. So either he’s already drugged her or he drugs her in the car.”
“I think she must have been a little woozy when she left campus or she wouldn’t have forgotten her phone.”
“You forget your phone all the time.”
“I do not. It’s like once in a blue moon!”
He’d have rolled his eyes if he had any. “Anyway, no matter where he drugs her, he could just drive her around until she fell asleep. Then he could break her laptop, because he had to know there would be notes about the art theft on there.”
“But now he’s got two cars: hers and his. He can’t leave hers on campus, but he needs his own to get home after he kills her.”
“Okay, I’m not the best one to speculate about car issues. What do you do when you’ve got one car too many?”
I snorted. “I’m lucky if I’ve got one vehicle that’s running.”
“Focus.”
“Sorry. What if they take Kelly’s car instead?”
“Wouldn’t she be driving?”
“‘Hey, Kelly, you look beat. You want me to drive?’”
“That would work,” Sid said.
“He drives around until she passes out, and then he heads for the spot he’s already picked out. He destroys her laptop to get rid of any evidence that might be on it, gets out of the car, and pushes it over the edge.”
“He must have been expecting her to die on impact or maybe to never wake up again.”
“Kelly was stronger than he thought,” I said, wishing I’d known her better.
“But he doesn’t have a way to get home.”
“Is there anyplace useful within walking distance?”
“Google Maps to the rescue!” Sid said and borrowed my laptop to access an aerial view of the area. “Hmm… There’s not much around there.”
“What’s that?” I said, pointing to a blur that seemed to be the only structure nearby. It wasn’t on the same road Kelly’s car had been on, but only a thin strip of woods separated them.
He enlarged the picture, then went to Google Street View. “It looks like a log cabin.”
“You think it might be a vacation place like this one?”
“I’ll check the address.” More typing. “Bingo! It’s a rental and is currently available.”
“Since I don’t think anybody has been vacationing around here this winter, I bet it’s vacant. What if the killer left his car there that morning?”
“How did he get to campus?”
“He could have called Uber or asked a friend to pick him up. ‘Hey, Joe, my car is broken down on the road. Come get me, and I’ll get my car towed or jumped or whatever later.’”
“So his car was there all day waiting, maybe under a tarp or something. After he deals with Kelly, he walks down the road a little way, ready to duck if he sees a car; goes into the woods to get to that cabin’s driveway and his car; and drives home. Wait, wouldn’t the driveway have been snowed in?”
“A lot of rental places have service contracts to keep the driveways plowed. Of course, he was taking a chance that the snow removal folks would find his car, but I bet he could have talked his way around that. The important part is that the spot where he went into the woods was far enough from the accident scene that the cops would have no reason to look there for traces of him passing, and of course, snow and wind would mean that all signs would be covered soon anyway.”
“So he walks to his car and drives home. No muss, no fuss. Georgia, I think that’s it. It’s flawless!”
I enjoyed ten seconds of satisfaction before realizing the problem. “Sid, it’s so flawless that I can’t think of a single ossifying way to prove that that’s what happened.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
That was the end of the speculation phase for the evening, though we kept on with the arguing for a while longer. We were convinced that our solution for how the murder was committed was the right one, but we couldn’t come up with anything we could conceivably take to the police. Even if we went with our tried-and-true anonymous tip method, how would they be able to prove it?
Fingerprints in Kelly’s car? The killer would surely have been wearing gloves—the only one in Falstone who didn’t need to wear gloves every time he or she stepped outside was Sid, and he didn’t have prints.
Traces of a car in the vacant cabin’s driveway or of the killer in the woods leading to it? Sid was all for going out right then and there to look and only gave up when I went to online snow accumulation charts and reminded him of just how much snow had fallen since Kelly died.
If the killer had used Uber or a cab to get to campus that morning, the cops might be able to get a warrant to find out, but it wasn’t something Sid and I could do. The only possible lead we had was that if an on-campus friend had given the killer a ride, and if I could figure out who that was, maybe I could get that person to confirm that somebody had been parked at that vacant cabin. That was predicated on that person being somebody I knew and who would talk to me, so the chances weren’t good.
After a while, we gave up for the night and picked a movie to watch on TV, one which did not include murders.
It was aggravating to have gotten that far only to get stuck again, but as I told Sid, at least we
’d made some progress. Probably. Surely we’d come up with something brilliant after a good night’s sleep for me, and a good night’s reading, web surfing, and YouTube video watching for Sid.
I was overly optimistic. The next morning, our minds were notably free of brilliance.
So we dove into weekend chores that had been put aside for detective work, going on the theory that our unconscious minds would be working as we washed, cleaned, graded, shoveled, shopped, and cooked.
Wrong again.
By Sunday night we were so desperate that we actually did get into the car to drive along the road Kelly’s car had gone off, looking for traces that somebody had gone through the woods. We even went so far as to check out the driveway of the cabin but found it neatly plowed by some incredibly conscientious snow removal company. As a last ditch attempt, we turned up and down all kinds of roads, looking to see if there were some other place the killer could have hidden a car while leaving tire prints, a nice scraping of paint, or other useful physical evidence. That did nothing but waste gas.
Monday morning was almost a relief—I had definite things to do. There were papers to grade, classes to teach, and colleagues to be snubbed by. At least Caroline was speaking to me again, so we had a late lunch, gossiping about those who were snubbing me, and now snubbing her because she was with me. Sometimes I wonder if any of us really ever leave the behavior of junior high school behind.
Late in the afternoon, there was a knock at my office door and I looked up to see Indigo and Marissa. They weren’t holding hands, but they were definitely standing closer than they had been before. I made a mental note to tell Sid. For somebody made completely of bone, he had a soft spot for young love.
“Hi, guys. Come on in.”
They did so, closing the door behind them.