The Skeleton Paints a Picture--A Family Skeleton Mystery (#4)

by Leigh Perry

  “I’ve got that class list you asked for,” Marissa said, handing me an actual piece of paper.

  “You could have e-mailed it.”

  “I only had your FAD e-mail address, and I wasn’t sure how safe it is.”

  “Good point.” Given the overabundance of suspects, our art thief could theoretically have access to my account.

  “And I’ve got this,” Indigo said, giving me another paper. “You remember how I put out feelers online for other people whose work had been stolen? Those are people who’ve been in contact.”

  “Great.” Then I looked at the list. “Indigo, there must be over fifty names here.”

  “I know,” they said apologetically. “They may not all be legit.”

  “Still, it’s good to have,” I said, trying to be sound more enthusiastic than I was. So many victims, so many suspects. This was starting to sound impossible.

  “I put together a file of their stories so we can check them out, but that was too much to print. Do you have a secure e-mail address I can send to?”

  “Sure.” I gave them my home address. “Are all of these FAD students?”

  “Only a couple, but I have friends at other schools, and they spread the word.”

  “Were these all stolen by our guy?”

  “Who knows? There are a lot of these jackwagons out there. I didn’t mention the name Scarlet Letter because I wasn’t sure we should give out that much information.”

  “The earliest thefts Kelly found were by Scarlet Letter,” Marissa said, “but that’s not saying he didn’t change his signature later. Even professional artists change signatures sometimes. This guy could have a dozen.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said. “How do you artists decide how to sign work anyway?”

  Marissa shrugged. “It depends. Some people just go with a name, but even then they spend some time deciding how to write it. Print, cursive, the kind of letters.”

  Indigo added, “It’s like your brand or your logo, only more personal. I’ve had the same one for years.”

  “Me, too.” Marissa looked embarrassed. “When I first started, I probably spent more time perfecting my signature than I did, you know, actually drawing anything.”

  “Yeah, we all do that,” Indigo said. “Like jocks who practice their victory dances more than their touchdowns.”

  “And academics who spend more times on arcane titles than the actual paper they’re writing. I guess nobody is immune. Anyway, thanks for all this. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  The two of them looked at one another, and Marissa asked, “So what’s next?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “Don’t you have something else you want us to do?”

  “Not right now.”

  Indigo gave me a sharp look. “Are you trying to shut us out?”

  “No and yes. No, I really don’t have anything for you, but yes, I am trying to shut you out. Here’s the thing, guys. When you volunteered to help Kelly, you were hunting for an art thief. But now I believe—we all believe—that we’re looking for a murderer. And I’ve been having second thoughts about dragging you two into something that might be dangerous.” The discussion about that had been one of the few useful conversations Sid and I had had the day before.

  “I’m not afraid of this guy,” Indigo said indignantly.

  “Good for you. I am. I mean, I’m not giving up, but I am watching my back. This guy murdered Kelly even though as far as we know, Kelly didn’t even know who he was. And that was just to keep him from getting caught as a thief. How far would he go to keep from getting arrested as a murderer?”

  “I never thought of it that way,” Indigo said and looked over at Marissa.

  Marissa noticed, too. “Don’t either of you get macho on me.”

  “I am in no way getting macho,” I said. “But I am a professor, and protecting students is in my job description, more or less. Plus I’ve got a daughter not much younger than you guys, and if I found out one of her teachers was drawing her into danger, I would be more than a little upset.” I could see that they both wanted to argue, but I didn’t give them a chance. “Don’t think I’m going at this alone. I’ve got someone who has my back.”

  “The person who hacked Bad Bobbie’s computer?” Indigo asked.

  I nodded. “Nobody here knows him, so he can do stuff none of us can do without becoming a target. And now that I think of it, there is something I want from you guys. More than one thing, in fact. First, keep your eyes open. If you hear anything else about art theft here at FAD, let me know right away. Indigo, if you could keep coming to the Writing Lab, that would be great because we’ll have a non-suspicious way to stay in touch. Second, if anything happens to me, I’m counting on you guys to go to the cops. I’m going to e-mail all my files about this mess to you both, just in case. And third and most important: be careful. Don’t talk about art theft anymore, don’t put out any more feelers, and don’t go off alone. The only people on campus that I’m a hundred percent sure are innocent are the three of us in this room, and Bad Bobbie.” Though given Bad Bobbie’s private project, maybe innocent wasn’t the right word for her. But since I hadn’t told Indigo and Marissa what Sid had found on her hard drive, I couldn’t explain that to them.

  I thanked them again and tried to look confident and eager to finish the investigation, but honestly, I was even more discouraged than ever. We already had just about every person on campus as a suspect, so I didn’t see how knowing about more victims was going to narrow the field any further.

  On the other hand, I knew Sid was as frustrated as I was and didn’t have a job or a congenial lunch companion to distract him, and maybe he’d appreciate having something to dive into. So as soon as I got the files from Indigo, I forwarded them to him, along with an explanatory note. By the time I got home, Sid was hipbone-deep in new data and only barely acknowledged my arrival. I warmed up leftover pizza, washed up afterward, did a load of laundry, called Madison to see how she was doing, watched some TV, and filed my nails, all to the sound of clattering at the keyboard. I stayed up later than usual, waiting to see what he’d find out, but was just about ready to call it a night when the racket stopped and he marched into the living room to slap a stack of paper onto the coffee table.

  “No wonder our art thief is so hard to find,” he announced. “He’s been at this for years.”

  “Seriously?”

  “At least five years, according to my calculations. Let me explain how I came to that conclusion.”

  “Or you could just skip to the end.”

  “Literature students could skip to the part where Romeo and Juliet die, too, but what fun would that be?”

  “Many of my students would jump at that idea.”

  “We are made of sterner stuff,” he said. “So as I was trying to say, I went through Indigo’s list of art theft victims.”

  “They hadn’t all been ripped off by our guy, had they?”

  “No. Unfortunately, there are many sharks lurking in the Internet sea. Of the fifty-three names, I’m reasonably sure that eighteen of them hadn’t been plagiarized at all. Either their ideas weren’t all that original in the first place, or they were seeing copying when it was nothing more than a passing resemblance. Plus one guy copied a classmate’s work and then claimed he’d been copied. Fortunately, others on social media have since called him out.”

  “Good.” I paused. “Did you assist in that effort?”

  He only grinned. “That leaves thirty-five who I think are actual victims. Of those, five had designs that were blatantly stolen by Scarlet Letter, four claimed ownership of Scarlet Letter designs that were very similar to theirs, and a couple who claim they had an idea that Scarlet Letter used.”

  “I’ve always heard that ideas are the easy part—it’s the execution that’s important.”

  “Agreed, and if the person being accused of stealing ideas was anybody else, I’d be more skeptical, but in this case, I’m incl
ined to assume the worst.”

  “Are all of these on City Riggers’ site?”

  “Not all. As far as I can tell, he started out selling his work on the kind of sites where designers upload their work and then people order custom-printed T-shirts.”

  “Like Green Globe, the site that banned Marissa?”

  “Right. Those guys have hundreds, no, thousands of designs. I only looked through a handful, and that was enough to give me eye socket strain.”

  “Eye socket strain isn’t a thing.”

  He ignored me. “So it’s no wonder that people sneak in stolen designs without them noticing. Lately, though, there have been so many complaints that the sites are trying to address that. Unfortunately, sometimes they ban the actual artist instead of the thief.”

  “Like with Marissa.”

  “Exactly. Sometime in the past year, Scarlet Letter started selling designs to City Riggers, which I’m guessing earns him more money because it’s a high-profile site. And as we’ve learned, they’re known for not vetting the designs they sell or responding well to accusations of plagiarism.”

  “It’s no wonder starving artists starve if companies steal from them! So how many more of Scarlet Letter’s victims have you confirmed?”

  “Eleven. Two of those eleven had pictures in Kelly’s files, though she hadn’t been in contact with them as far as I know.”

  “How many are FAD students?”

  “None. They’re not even all from art schools, though each of the schools involved has an art department: Suffolk University, New England College, Rochester. And FAD.”

  “They’re all in New England.”

  “Right.”

  “Of course, if the art thief was stealing online, it wouldn’t matter where they came from.”

  “Most of the artists claim to have been vigilant about posting anything online. But it only takes one slip in posting something or e-mailing it to somebody, who then posts it or e-mails it to somebody else. And so on. But I’m willing to believe that some of them really were that careful. And unlike Marissa, most of them never displayed their work at an art fair.”

  “Meaning that the thief had personal access to all of them.”

  “That many students, that many schools, over just a few years. Sid, you know what that means.”

  “I think I do.”

  “Our thief—and presumably the killer as well—is an adjunct.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  That shouldn’t have been a shock. After all, we’d already considered everybody at FAD to be a suspect, and a goodly percentage of FAD’s faculty members were adjuncts. I still felt sick at the thought. Considering how my fellow English department adjuncts had been treating me, I shouldn’t have felt any particular loyalty, but I knew how hard it was to try to make a living as an adjunct. Coccyx, even if the pay had been fabulous, the life itself was rough—working multiple jobs, having to rip up roots at short notice, getting so little respect from tenured colleagues.

  That last thought triggered another.

  “Sid, today I asked Indigo and Marissa how they chose their signatures. So why do you suppose the plagiarist picked Scarlet Letter?”

  “From the Nathaniel Hawthorne novel, I assume,” Sid said.

  “You’ve read The Scarlet Letter, right?”

  “I reside in a house with three English professors—of course I’ve read it. I didn’t like it, which I know is blasphemy, but the man always comes off as a prig to me. Making that poor woman mark all her dresses with an A for adulteress. Or was it for adultery?”

  “It was adulteress, but it could have been for either. A for apple, A for alligator…”

  “A for alibi!” Sid joined in. “A for aardvark. A for academic.”

  “A for adjunct. Do you remember when I worked for Quintain University?”

  “That was the one in New Hampshire, right? You hated that job.”

  “So much.” I’d only stayed a semester, but that was more than enough. Adjuncts weren’t taken as seriously as term or tenured professors at a lot of colleges, but Quintain took that divide to the extreme. “My ID badge there didn’t say Faculty; it said Adjunct Faculty, so nobody would mistake me for a real professor.”

  “Seriously?”

  “And the parking pass? It was the same color and design as a faculty pass, but they stamped a big A on it to make sure I didn’t park in the faculty lot. I had to park in the student lots.”

  “That’s insane, but while I’m happy to commiserate with you, I’m not sure why you’re bringing this up.”

  “The A was in bright red ink.”

  “A scarlet letter.”

  I nodded. “So yeah, I think our Scarlet Letter is an adjunct.”

  “Of course, we’ve still got a lot of suspects, but it does limit the field some. There aren’t as many adjuncts at FAD as there are students.”

  “Not by a long shot.”

  “So you think the thief worked at Quintain, too? Or do other schools do sacrum like that?”

  “That’s the only place I’ve seen it, but there’s enough stigma at some schools that the allusion could have appealed to somebody even if they’d never been stamped with a literal scarlet letter.”

  “It’s kind of a clue to how the person feels, too. I mean, Hester Prynne felt guilty about the adultery but also thought it was justified because she loved the guy and the resulting baby. So she’s angry about the punishment. Also a little desperate. Right?”

  “That’s a fair interpretation,” I said. “Write it up, with appropriate quotes from the book, and I’ll give it a solid B.”

  “Please. It’s totally A-level work! But anyway, maybe the thief feels a combination of guilty, justified, angry, and desperate.”

  “Then not just greed?”

  “Anybody who was just greedy wouldn’t be an adjunct.”

  “All too true,” I admitted. Perhaps a little greed would have steered me in a more profitable direction. “Literary criticism aside, now what? I mean, you searched the offices of some of our adjunct suspects already.”

  Sid drummed his finger bones against his skull. “If you left me at FAD over a weekend, I might be able to get to—”

  “You got to what, seven offices that one night? Multiply that by three for a weekend, which is being generous. Do you know how many adjunct faculty members we have? How many weekends would it take?”

  He actually grabbed his laptop. “Okay, let me access the directory and add them up.”

  “Sid, no.” When he started to object, I quickly added, “I swear I’m not trying to forbid you from doing anything. I’m just pointing out that it’s not going to work. The semester would be over before you got to them all, and who knows if you would actually find proof in the thief’s office. Someone who’s been at this for five years is probably good at hiding his tracks. We need something to get the numbers down to something we can realistically handle.”

  More drumming of finger bones against skull. “Okay, how about this? We know Scarlet Letter stole at five different schools. What if I figure out which adjuncts taught at all of those schools?”

  “How?”

  “LinkedIn. People list all their employers there.”

  “Not everybody is on LinkedIn.”

  “Then online faculty lists—cached faculty lists for previous years. Social media, university papers and press releases, directories of professional organizations. The information is all out there, Georgia.”

  “I guess, but there are so many adjuncts at FAD, Sid. It’s going to be incredibly tedious.”

  “I live for tedium! You turn in for the night and leave me to it.”

  I would have felt guilty about abandoning him, but he looked cheerful at the prospect. I think it wasn’t just the fact that it was something to do—it was the fact that it was something nobody else could do. Nobody but Sid would be able to put in the hours a job like that would take. So I kissed the top of his skull and went to bed.

  He was still at it t
he next morning, so I left him to go to work. When I returned after an uneventful day of teaching, critiquing, and looking at every adjunct I encountered with suspicious eyes, he was still at it. Only when I was washing up after dinner did he come into the kitchen.

  “I’m done,” he said in a flat, unemotional tone that was totally unlike him. His bones were disturbingly loose.

  “Do you sound like that because you’re tired?” He didn’t get tired, or at least he’d never admitted to being tired before, but if anything would wear him out, it would be nearly twenty-four solid hours of research.

  “No, I sound like this because I’m done. In every sense of the word. We have gone from too many suspects to none. Not a single, solitary adjunct taught at every school.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “I wish I were. Check out my spreadsheet.” Sid loves spreadsheets almost as much as he loves dossiers. “Along the side are the adjuncts, other than yourself. Along the top are the schools from which we have confirmed art theft.”

  “Seems reasonable.”

  “I’ve got another spreadsheet with the schools where each adjunct has taught for the past seven years.”

  “Seven?”

  “Just giving myself a margin for error. Then all I had to do was to check off the names. Easy, right?”

  “I know a trick question when I hear it.”

  “Well, it would have been easy if anybody had taught at all five schools.”

  I ran down the list, more to humor him than anything else. “I see one person was at two of the schools.”

  “Several were at two. Some were at three, and two were even at four. But no one was at five. I didn’t even get around to coordinating times to make sure they were at the right schools when the thefts took place. There was no need.”

  I looked down the list again as I tried to think of something comforting to say and got as far as the D’s when I noticed something. “Hey, why isn’t Owen Deen on here?”

  “He’s an English prof.”

  “So?”

  “Scarlet Letter is an artist.”

  “Are you sure? Even I could take a design, scan it into a computer, and change the signature.”