“Curious you did not mention that the other day.”
Desmond didn’t appear the least bit shaken.
“Henri just died the night before,” Burnett said. “Maybe I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“Nor are you thinking clearly now. I know he did not show me what he’d written. He was too upset about the dream. He said he was going to scrap what he had done and start over with another subject. I said if he felt that strongly about it, that was fine. So you’re obviously confused or bluffing.”
He sounded so confident Burnett didn’t know what to say next.
“Besides, what does it matter now?” Desmond asked. He looked left, down the street.
Burnett suspected he was searching for a cop. Desmond faced him again.
“It matters because my best friend is dead,” Burnett said, nothing left to lose. “He’s dead because a girl, a girl whose body was planted in the trunk of my car, claimed to be from the future. She insisted his paper would cause a catastrophe. And that just happened to be exactly what his nightmare kept telling him.”
Desmond shook his head with obvious disappointment. “I don’t think you have to worry about going to jail. You tell that story and you will get off with an insanity plea.”
“Here’s where it gets even crazier,” Burnett said. “Last night on the news I heard that Henri’s computer is missing. The same one he used to write all his papers.”
“Is that right?” Desmond said, a trace of concern in his voice for the first time.
“So assuming the girl’s not really from the future, I asked myself who might be the most interested in Henri’s computer. Who might have put her up to it so they could get their hands on it? Who would be able to understand the significance of what he’d written?”
“Are you accusing me of being involved in this?”
“I’m accusing you of being behind it.”
A touch of crimson blossomed in Desmond’s cheeks. His features hardened. “If you try to frame me for what you’ve done,” Desmond said as calmly as if he were answering a question in class, “I will kill you. You hear me? I will kill you. And they will never find your body.”
Burnett couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. This was not the teacher he knew, the man who’d inspired him to choose his career path.
Desmond dug out his cell phone and tapped in three digits. “Yes, I’m outside the Starbucks on Route 1. I’ve spotted the man you’re looking for. Yes, his name is Burnett. No, I won’t try to apprehend him myself.” He clicked off the phone.
“Tell me why,” Burnett said.
“Because you’re a murderer. And a fugitive.”
“You know I didn’t kill that girl. You know I’m not capable.” He backed away.
“Twenty-four hours ago I would have believed that.”
“Please tell me why,” Burnett said without stopping.
“I’m assuming you wanted to steal your friend’s paper and turn it in as your own. So you would not fail the class.”
He froze. “I wasn’t failing the class.”
“That’s not what my records say. They indicate you had a low D average.”
With the police no doubt close, Burnett raced off between two dumpsters.
* * *
Mr. Frank wandered through the university’s main parking lot. With his left hand he shielded his eyes from the mid-morning sun. He knelt and examined a tiny, reddish-brown splotch on the pavement. Dried blood, no question.
This had to be where the girl’s body had been removed from Burnett’s car. Fifteen years spent between the county and local police had conditioned him to look for clues, and that training had proven indispensable long after he’d left the force.
He stood and marched across the parking lot. After he arrived at the entrance to the school, he slid a slip of paper from his pocket. A list of half-a-dozen students and faculty he wished to speak with had been scribbled on the page.
The first name was his top priority. As a close friend of Henri Laroche, and ex-boyfriend of Emma Blankenship, Joel Sandstrom would be the ideal person to interview. Mr. Sandstrom’s sociology class would end shortly.
Mr. Frank waited by the entrance. When the young man exited the building, he approached him.
“Mr. Sandstrom?” he asked politely, already knowing the answer.
“Who are you?” Sandstrom asked. “Another cop?”
The second question spiked his coffee-induced indigestion. “No. But I’m looking for some information on Michael Burnett.”
“Burnett?” Sandstrom said and followed it up with a derisive snort. “The guy’s lost it.”
“You think he killed that girl?”
“I bet he killed Henri, too.”
“Why?”
“I know he’s got a thing for her.”
“Who? Miss Blankenship?”
“I seen the way he looks at her.”
“You think they had something going on?”
“Wouldn’t surprise me. Henri probably found out about it, then lost the fight.”
“You tell the cops that?” Mr. Frank asked.
“Hell, yeah. Then the morning after Henri ‘jumped,’” he said, making quotation marks with his index and middle fingers, “he comes up to me with all these questions, like he’s a cop and I’m a suspect.”
“Then you wouldn’t mind seeing him caught?”
“The truth needs to come out. Henri was a good guy. A little eccentric maybe, but that’s not a crime.”
“Any idea where Burnett might be? Some people are convinced he’s still in the area, trying to prove his innocence.”
“No idea. But don’t waste your time following me. Something tells me he won’t be coming to me for help.”
“Who might he go to?”
“Besides Henri, I don’t know any of his close friends.”
“I’m not talking about close friends. The police’ll be watching them. How about someone he might seek out who the police wouldn’t think to watch.”
“Like who?”
“An instructor maybe. Or the parents of someone he knows.”
Sandstrom shook his head. “Sorry. Don’t know.”
While the young man had fueled his doubts about Burnett’s innocence, he hadn’t proven helpful. One more question, then he would move on.
“Anyone you know of who’s out of town right now? Anybody in one of your classes or one of Burnett’s?”
Sandstrom rolled his head and threw up his arms. “I can’t think of …” In an instant his expression turned thoughtful. “Wait. There might be someone.” He tapped his black and white Nike high tops on the cement. After several seconds the tapping accelerated. “There was a girl in one of my classes last semester. Cara, Clara, something like that. I remember some of the other girls talking to her, asking her if she was excited about studying in Europe somewhere this semester.”
Mr. Frank jotted down the two names on the paper he’d dug from his pocket. “Know anything about her? Last name? Where she lives?”
Sandstrom shook his head with disinterest.
“Any of her friends?”
“No.”
“Okay, thanks.”
CHAPTER 21
Vincent Abruzzo displayed the .38 caliber handgun for Detectives Mayweather and Farrow. The three men strode past Burnett’s Camry, which lay on the floor of the cavernous building in a hundred pieces.
Mayweather shook his head in disbelief. A fragment of bagel, the last remnant of his breakfast, crumbled between his thumb and forefinger. “Where’d you find it?”
“A dumpster behind the university,” Abruzzo said.
Farrow jacked up an eyebrow. “Same caliber as the murder weapon?”
Abruzzo nodded and peeled a grayish-white fiber from the barrel of the firearm.
“Prints?” Farrow asked.
“Wiped clean.” Abruzzo dangled the fiber in front of the two detectives. “We found several of these fibers on the barrel.”
“What are
they?” Farrow asked.
“Duct tape. We found the same fibers inside the front, driver’s side wheel-well of Mr. Burnett’s Camry.”
Farrow faced his partner. “Anymore doubts?”
Mayweather shook his head, but not in response to Farrow’s question. If Audrey had come into Henri’s apartment with a story that drove him to jump, why kill her rather than turn her in? “Pretty dumb to shoot her, then leave the murder weapon where we could find it.”
“Who said criminals are smart?” Farrow said.
Abruzzo and Farrow shared a chuckle.
Mayweather couldn’t imagine how his partner had enjoyed such a distinguished career with that attitude.
“Probably in a hurry,” Farrow said. “Got careless.” He extended his hand toward the fiber but retracted it at the last instant. “I still say she had something on Laroche. I don’t know what it was, but she had something. That’s why she was at his apartment that night. That’s why he jumped, and that’s why Burnett killed her.”
“Why the crazy story?” Mayweather asked. “And why kill her rather than turn her over to us?”
“Ask him when we find him.”
Farrow was reaching, he knew that, but for him the pieces still didn’t add up.
“First, I want to talk to Miss Blankenship again,” Farrow said. “Somewhere we can apply a bit more pressure.”
* * *
Michael Burnett peered around the corner of the eight-story brick apartment building. A dozen vehicles idled in line at the police checkpoint fifty yards down the road. Desmond’s 911 call had complicated an already perilous daylight return to Clara’s condo.
Four security cameras, two mounted near the front of the building and two on the side, rotated at a slow, measured pace. The closest camera swung in his direction. He offered the lens his backside. As the damn thing looked away, he shook his head. Orwell was only off by a few decades.
It had been reckless to venture out in the daytime. He vowed not to make the same mistake again. The information he’d garnered was not worth the risk of capture.
He jogged to the far side of the building. With no one in sight, he crossed a patch of grass and hopped a three-foot wooden fence. A moment later he disappeared between two houses.
* * *
Mr. Frank strolled along the sidewalk with Tom, the manager of Clara’s condo complex, beside him. A cloud drifted in front of the late-morning sun, and Mr. Frank slipped off his sunglasses.
“You get a good look at him?” Mr. Frank asked.
“It was dark.”
Even at his leisurely pace, Tom struggled to keep up.
“And you just handed him the key?”
“He seemed genuine,” Tom said.
Mr. Frank had little doubt Burnett had appeared genuine. He’d come across the same way in his office.
“He knew all about Clara,” Tom said. “What class she was taking. What city she was studying in. And Clara mentioned she planned to rent the place out while she was gone.” His voice adopted a nervous vibrato, “So I was expecting someone, most likely a student, to show up.” Then he added, almost as an afterthought, “Granted, I was expecting someone a little earlier in the semester.”
“Don’t worry.” Yet the last comment stirred Mr. Frank’s curiosity. With less than a month left in the semester, this Fred Blaine arrives and moves in. As of last night Burnett had been on the run for twenty-four hours. That nearly pegged the needle on his coincidence meter.
In his conversation with others from the university he’d been given two additional names of students currently studying abroad. It appeared likely he’d stumbled across the right place on his first stop.
The two men arrived at the door to Clara’s condo.
“Should I call the cops?” Tom asked.
“Chances are he’s a hundred miles away by now.”
Tom heaved a sigh.
“But I have to follow up every lead,” Mr. Frank said. “You understand?”
“Of course.” Tom plucked an off-white handkerchief from his shirt pocket and dabbed his forehead. “Of course.”
Mr. Frank shuffled to his right and peered in through the window. He saw no one in the living room. He leaned forward and tilted his head to the left. This new position afforded him a partial view of the kitchen. From what he could see, the condo looked immaculate, with no indication anyone was living there.
“You wouldn’t happen to have a key?” Mr. Frank asked.
“I only manage the complex. It’s not like an apartment building.”
“But Clara gave you a key?”
“Only because, as I said, she planned to rent the place while she was out of the country.”
Mr. Frank grunted.
“Anything else you need from me?” Tom asked. “I need to get back to my paying job.”
“I’m gonna hang around a little while. In case this Fred Blaine comes back.”
“You do think it’s him.”
“More to prove it’s not.”
Tom offered a tight smile before he lumbered off.
When the man disappeared, Mr. Frank squatted and studied the door locks closely. The one on the handle he could pick in his sleep. The deadbolt above posed a greater challenge. Despite the wealth of clues that awaited, if Fred Blaine and Michael Burnett proved to be the same person, he chose not to enter. His PI license had already been suspended once.
He decided to drive by the other locations. Both were less than a mile away. If they offered little or no promise, he’d return.
CHAPTER 22
At exactly four forty-five in the afternoon, Burnett flopped into a chair before the desktop computer in Clara Potts’s living room. Three-and-a-half hours earlier, he’d safely returned to the condo he now considered home.
The remainder of his journey had been time-consuming, but uneventful. Two hours after arriving, he’d reclined on Clara’s sofa and fruitlessly attempted to get a little sleep. As he’d tried to relax, the shadow of a person passed by the window. He’d convinced himself that this individual had paused and peered into the room.
He’d spent the rest of the afternoon trying to shake off the feeling, attributing it to his shiny new sense of paranoia. But the sensation clung to him.
That uneasy feeling persisted as he typed the name Professor Connor Desmond into the Google search box. A tenth of a second later, thirty-five thousand results appeared. He clicked the first one. A page opened with a concise biography that listed all of Desmond’s published papers.
He’d previously read the articles, which had been published in the open-access journal, Physics Considered. In his opinion, and from how others had described it, Desmond’s research was average—nothing groundbreaking, but nothing to be ashamed of.
What interested Burnett were the peer reviews of Desmond’s work. Among his list of complaints, Henri Laroche had argued that their professor had consistently submitted below average work and that the editor of the journal had instructed a carefully chosen group of referees to only find ways to improve the manuscript. No negative feedback was permitted.
The time had come to use the password Henri had stolen. It took several minutes to pry it from long-term memory.
Once inside the account, he navigated around and located peer reviews for several papers Desmond had submitted. Each paper had been subjected to a single blind review; the reviewer knew who’d written the paper, but the author was unaware who had critiqued his work.
True to what Henri had said, the reviews featured page after page of recommendations on how to improve the manuscripts. Not a single harsh word had been written, and communications from the senior editor always indicated an article would be published once the suggested changes had been made.
Digging deeper, Burnett discovered that a referee had been dismissed after he’d written a scathing review of one of Desmond’s submissions. The reviewer had dubbed the paper, which attempted to depict the state of the universe immediately following the Big Bang, “laughable a
nd a disgrace to scientific reasoning.”
Guess someone didn’t read the memo.
A subsequent e-mail, again from the senior editor, apologized for the review and assured him it would never happen again. It appeared Desmond had a high-ranking supporter over at Physics Considered. Either that or he’d bribed the editor into furthering his career.
It surprised Burnett when he caught himself feeling sorry for his instructor. Even with all the support and advice, the man’s entire body of work could be summed up in one word: ordinary. He wouldn’t be remembered for any contribution to the world of physics. He would be less than a footnote in the field.
Perhaps he had unearthed Desmond’s motivation. He knew the professor had aspirations of greatness. Since he could not achieve it on his own, maybe he could have convinced Audrey to play the part of a time-traveler from the future. As to why Desmond would have done this, rather than just eliminate Henri and dispose of his body, as the professor had threatened to do with him, he was uncertain. If his goal had indeed been to make Henri suffer first, he had accomplished it.
Little doubt remained that Desmond had Henri’s computer, yet any hope of convincing the police would require far more evidence than he had.
* * *
Emma burst through the door to Mr. Frank’s office. He sat at his desk, a phone squashed to his ear, listened a moment, and muttered a hurried goodbye.
“You have news for me?” Emma said, unwilling to check the enthusiasm in her voice. “How’d you find out so fast?”
“I have my methods.” He clasped his hands and thumped them on his desk. He rolled his chair forward and back twice, refusing to meet her gaze.
Why’s he stalling? She understood why he’d chosen not to reveal anything over the phone. The police could easily intercept a call to a cell phone. But she’d rushed here at breakneck speed after he’d called and claimed he had information on Burnett’s whereabouts.
“You going to tell me or keep me in suspense a little longer?” Emma said. She’d managed to elude the tail that had been all but glued to her rear bumper and burst through his door in under ten minutes.
“You sure you want to do this?” Mr. Frank asked.
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