by John Farrow
“Believed what?” Hartopp asks.
“That he didn’t know anything. What I did notice in him was fear. He was afraid and at first I thought he was afraid of me. I changed my mind on that. Tried a different approach. Father figure. The kindly cop. The gentle pal. Maybe I’m not good at those roles but worth a try. They didn’t work out, either. He gave me nothing. But the boy’s afraid.”
“I don’t suppose,” Cinq-Mars says, and rather wearily he draws both his hands down over his face, then lets them drop into his lap. “I don’t suppose that you acquired a search warrant to visit his home. His apartment or his dorm or whatever.”
“I did actually.”
Cinq-Mars catches himself being more impressed than he should be. “And?”
“Nothing. No speck. I don’t get kids today. Neat as a pin. What’s up with that? In my day, we tossed our stuff on the floor. We didn’t keep our underwear all folded in a drawer, or hang up our pants like we were in the military.”
“Don’t…” Émile starts, then pauses to make sure that Hammond processes his next remark “… take this the wrong way.”
“Fine,” the trooper says. “I won’t. Don’t you be so goddamned condescending, how about?”
He lets that pass. “Would it be all right if I visit his place? Is the warrant still active?”
“I won’t take that the wrong way. Move in, for all I care. The warrant’s active. I have to go with you, though. When he wakes up you’ll want to interrogate him again, I suppose. You don’t trust what I did.”
“No, I believe you got out of him what he knows.”
Hammond stares at him a moment, then, because he’s not sure, he finally asks, “Is that sarcasm?”
“Not meant to be. Look, he was thrown out of the car by guys who wanted to stop Chief Till’s men from chasing them. Throwing him out alive caused the patrolmen to stop and take care of him first. Which was the right call, by the way. Probably saved his life with all his internal bleeding. If they found out, in the bit of time they had with him, that he knew what they didn’t want him to know, would they’ve risked taking a chance that he’d survive the fall? They could’ve shot him first.”
Nobody’s quite sure they’re following him.
“What I’m saying is, I have a hunch that the bad guys found out what Trooper Hammond found out, that he doesn’t know what it is they were afraid he knew. They let him go.”
Others nod. They know it’s a stretch, and the comment seems to demonstrate how thin the fabric of their investigation has become. Feeling that way himself, Cinq-Mars looks around the room, and asks, “What else we got?”
Not much, all told. Going forward, Special Agent Hartopp agrees to run down the necklace as best he can, find out if anyone has reported radioactive charoite. Cinq-Mars reveals that he’s in possession of the guest list for tomorrow afternoon’s cocktail party.
“Who’d you get that from?”
“President Palmerich.”
“Of course. Yeah. Who’ve you not talked to, I wonder.”
“We’re past that,” Cinq-Mars reminds him, and surprisingly, Hammond seems to agree. “A colleague ran down the names for me, to see if any bells went off. So far, nothing. Rich people and their racehorses and yachts, that’s all we know. Special Agent, I wonder if you can’t have your people do a rundown. See if any names pop out for you.”
“Sure thing.”
“I was thinking,” Vermont State Trooper Archie Leopold says, and people look to the quiet one in the room, “well, what’s our next step?”
Each in their own way, they’ve been asking themselves that.
Basic procedure will be observed. Small-town New Hampshire is not lousy with security cameras; the ones that exist will be examined again, to see if they might catch sight of the vehicle involved in the abduction of Vernon Colchester. Friends and neighbors of the victims will continue to be canvassed, often for a second and a third time. One person who knew everyone was Professor Edith Shedden, and her background will be checked, her movements covertly traced. Hammond will talk to her. FBI forensics specialists will be brought in from out of town, with the emphasis on Malory Earle, as her murder was the messiest, and messy usually garners the most abundant clues. Chief Till, after a modicum of resistance, agrees to look again at the previous issues with rape on campus, to determine if there is any possible link. And Émile states that he has the boy’s digs to examine, in Hammond’s company, and that he’ll be attending the donors’ cocktail party tomorrow.
“What’s the point to that?” Till asks. “I mean, the killer left an invitation with the girl, but seriously, do you think he’s deliberating dropping clues, asking us to chase him down? Doesn’t that only happen on TV?”
“Partly I’m going,” Émile informs him, “because it’s almost all we’ve got. Another aspect has to do with what Special Agent Hartopp was saying. Why did Toomey hang around, and do nothing, and seemingly wait for his killer to ring the bell? Then why answer that bell? What could have gotten into his head to behave that way? Maybe, I’m thinking, just maybe he was guided into waiting. Led to be there. Maybe something indicated to him that he should wait.”
“Despite,” Hartopp asks, “the warning about being breached, the edict to run?”
“That I don’t know. Just as he decided to hang out at home after seeing the body of his butchered girlfriend—assuming I’m correct and he didn’t do it himself—in the same way it’s possible—not likely perhaps, but possible—that we’re being led to the cocktail party. That’s where I’ll be. Maybe no one will know I’m there or for what purpose. They’ll expect you, at least one of you, to be there. There’s no other reason I can think of for Toomey to stay home except that he was guided to do so. We’re being guided to the party. We have to go.”
A consensus permeates the room: No one seems particularly upbeat about the tactic. If they took a straw poll, they’d probably find that the consensus expected the party to be a necessary waste of time. Émile chooses to buoy their spirits a little, and reveals more about his thinking.
“Look, I spent considerable time in the clock tower, trying to get a feel for this guy, for a sense of the terrible events there. I got scared while I was up there, because I felt something sinister, and the news that Addie was abused even after death confirms that for me. I also caught a glimpse of our killer’s weakness.”
“Seriously?” Archie Leopold’s query isn’t negative. Perhaps it’s attributable to his youthfulness that he expresses a thrall that everyone is feeling, if only a little. “You’re in an empty room and you detect a killer’s weakness? That’s pretty cool.”
“Not cool. A bit of a misery, truth be known. Consider: raping and killing Addie Langford wasn’t enough for our guy. Raping her again after death demonstrates his contempt for her and for civilized society. That wasn’t enough for him, either. He had to put her, and by extension, his crime, on display. That’s how I guessed that whatever he’d done had to be especially wicked. Because having committed his acts, he then needed to turn his crimes into an exhibition. Everything about that crime, as opposed to the other two murders, was planned in detail and executed, pardon that word, with precision. No weaknesses there. The display, the need to turn the murder into a performance piece? That’s a crack in his psyche. What does a performance require? Or a gallery vernissage?” He waits for a response. The men are waiting for him to answer his own question and one or two of them wonder what the French word means. “An audience. That’s his weakness. He seeks an audience. Is it enough for him to imagine our reactions, our take on the situation? Maybe. More likely not. This may be wishful thinking on my part. I’m guessing that he might want to encounter his audience, which is who we are to him. He may want to witness our reaction, to hear our applause. He may even want to talk about it and hear our comments. How does he do that? This killing was infinitely well planned, planning may have included an invitation to discuss his genius. History is full of criminals who permit themselves to be caught merely to gl
oat over what they’ve done. If I’m right, this man is intent on keeping his identity secret, he’s not looking to get caught. Having us attend a cocktail party, though, may be his way to covertly receive our applause, to pick up nuggets of our admiration for his expertise, and for his artistic flourish. At least, what he would call his artistry. He’ll even want to hear public admission of our impotence in the face of his genius. We need cops at the party, and they need to feed his ego, admit our incompetence, our admiration for his expertise. They might even drop a comment about the beauty of the presentation of the corpse—we can be incredulous that the same person could commit the crime then arrange the body artistically—and after that we need to be alert to whoever’s soaking it all in, getting a charge. Our killer may be there, people, because he needs to walk among us, to gloat, if you will, before he can be satisfied with what he’s done.”
The men are more excited now. Cinq-Mars is not done with pumping them up.
“How’s our perpetrator feeling right now? The way he dealt with the body, he’s not feeling guilty. He’s euphoric. I guarantee you. He planned it, he carried it off perfectly. He’s over the moon. Of course he wants to celebrate by chatting with the flummoxed investigating officers at a cocktail party. What could be more delightful? He needs to celebrate. Some of you will play the roles of baffled police officers, and I’ll be there trying to pass myself off as a superwealthy philanthropist. We’ll see what we can root out. Okay. What else do we have?”
Horriza wants to know what campus cameras revealed. That’s one job that Hammond was willing to share with Till, and both their departments have been scouring through the footage. Nothing yet. The pending stormy weather on the eve of the murders and on the morning after didn’t help. A majority of people were wearing rain hats and hoodies, making identification difficult.
No cameras were up in the stacks or on the floor where the clock tower is entered.
“Who had keys to the tower?” Hartopp wants to know.
He expects to find out how many people and how long is the list and how have they been checked out. Cinq-Mars gives him just the one name that’s telling. “Malory Earle. Once in a while she used to go through the tower to brush away cobwebs.”
“What’s her time of death? Before or after Addie Langford?”
Neither Horriza nor Leopold know.
“See, that’s the sort of thing we need to know and share,” Hammond points out to them, thereby giving his formal stamp of approval to the entire proceeding. In another ten minutes, Cinq-Mars expects, he’ll take credit for calling the meeting.
“What has surprised me since I’ve been in town,” pronounces Special Agent Hartopp, “is the apparent lack of public information. Why isn’t this twenty-four/seven on the local news?”
In tandem, Till and Hammond sigh, and shoot a glance at each other.
“What?” Cinq-Mars asks.
“That’s tricky stuff,” Hammond says.
“It’s the culture here,” Till adds.
“What is?”
“The colleges are the power in this town, and in the state. President Palmerich wants all this kept as quiet as possible. He especially doesn’t want to look bad in comparison to the bigger university in town. His authority takes precedence. Maybe you can arm-twist a governor again?”
“How well did that strategy of keeping things quiet work with respect to the rapes on campus?” Cinq-Mars puts to them.
“Not so hot,” Till admits. “Still. The colleges are not merely the power in these towns, they are these towns.”
Cinq-Mars takes his turn to sigh. One place in the world is pretty much the same as any other. Throughout his career, local politics have always been at play. He comes up with an idea, though. “How about this? Chief Horriza and Trooper Leopold go back to Vermont, and in White River Junction they hold a press conference about their murder. About Malory Earle. Only, they make allusions back to the murders in New Hampshire. Now you have people talking, tips might come in. We need the public’s help here and shutting them out is definitely a negative. Doing it that way, Hammond and Till are off the hook with the Dowbiggin School. It’s the grubby White River Junction people who are messing it up, and you guys can push aside any criticism by blaming Vermont. By then, it won’t matter, the news will be out, people will be talking on both sides of the state line. Talk should help.”
Everyone is onside with that, which assists their group to congeal. They’re making headway.
“With respect to the three different killings,” Hartopp muses. “The White River one makes a point of being brutal. Blood everywhere. It’s a mess. Toomey’s murder was efficient. A shot through the throat. Slightly messy, but it’s over and done with. Ballistics are in—a different gun. Then the first murder you came across strikes me as being a glorification of death. The neatest, it’s psychotic. I think we have to be willing to separate the three from one another, even if we may want to link them.”
“Link them?” Leopold repeats. “Different killers, from the same group?”
“Or one action trips another, is a consequence, or a logical sequence, that sort of thing. One action might support another. Keep an open mind because we understand little about this. A universe of possibility is out there. Personally, I believe we have three killers, but at the same time I can’t segregate one crime from the next, especially given the necklace connection. That binds them, and we’ve generated links between the three victims.”
“I wish we had one solid link we could talk to.”
“We do,” Cinq-Mars contradicts Hammond. “Vernon Colchester. Too bad he’s unconscious for the time being.”
The implication hangs in the air that he wasn’t unconscious when Hammond interrogated him.
“I got nothing out of him,” the trooper points out.
“You didn’t know what we know now,” Cinq-Mars says. “No fault of your own.”
“Good to have this meeting,” Hammond concurs. “Émile, you and me are going to his place, but I can’t go yet. I’ve got a press conference scheduled. One where I’m not supposed to say much.”
“Once you’ve frustrated those reporters, take one or two of them aside, suggest that they attend a press conference across the river. Give them a wink. That way, Chief Horriza and Trooper Leopold might have a good audience for what they say. TV. Radio. Big press. Until now, that murder has been overshadowed.”
Another plan they can agree on.
Once they decide to curtail the meeting, they break up rather quickly, with only Special Agent Hartopp, who’ll be staying on at the house, remaining behind with Cinq-Mars. He agrees, now that the others are gone, to a wee dram of good scotch.
“What else are you up to, Émile?” Hartopp puts to his friend. “It’s not only what you said.”
“I hate to do this,” Émile answers, and sips. He examines the color of the liquid in his glass.
“Do what?”
“Put the kids at risk.”
“Then don’t.”
He shakes his head, tries to agree with him. In the end he concludes, “I have to involve my niece and her friends. A cop is expected at the party. Even an undercover cop or two. I can play the rich man role. I might not get away with it, and anyway, I can’t be everywhere. The undergrads, working as servers while being our ears, no one will expect that. Not in that room. Attractive young women may elicit attention we’d like to see play out. Sorry, Michael, but this party is all I’ve got for now. That, and the visit to the boy’s house in the morning.”
“What do you expect to get out of that? Hammond may be right, you know, your legendary powers of observation notwithstanding.”
Cinq-Mars blows air as though scoffing at his legendary powers. “Feeble is the better adjective for those so-called powers. These days, anyway. What do I expect?” He seems to be addressing the scotch in his glass. “Anything. Something. We’re looking for a guy with a scrape on his elbow and a sense of euphoria. I better find something. Face it. We don’t have mu
ch else.”
TWENTY-ONE
Another fine day. In the morning, Émile Cinq-Mars is in possession of the Escalade again, with Sandra, a day before her mother’s funeral, willing to be chauffeured by her niece if she needs a ride. Émile drives straight to the dorm where Vernon Colchester normally resides, where he’ll meet up with Trooper Hammond. The campus security guard, Roberta, has been invited to join them. Émile explained to Hammond that a noticeable police presence will attract the wrong sort of attention: They need someone other than a cop to guard the door and their privacy. To his surprise, when he arrives, he discovers that Hammond has invited Chief Till to pay a visit, as well.
“New leaf,” Cinq-Mars presumes.
“He’s embraced team play for a day,” Till whispers. “Go figure.”
“Before we’re done, he’ll say he invented it. Good morning, by the way.”
“Back at you. How’s it going, Émile?”
“I slept. You?”
“I always sleep. My mind is constantly at rest, my body’s never far behind.”
“Too modest.”
“We all have our ways. You think things through. I think about maybe thinking about thinking. Works for me, now and then.”
The banter brightens Émile’s outlook. As Till seems to have that effect on him, he supposes that the man’s technique does appear to be working. He introduces him to Roberta and those two revisit occasions in the past when they may have met. They recognize each other anyway. Then Hammond swings around the corner, and due to a shortage of parking spaces pulls in down the block. So much the better, as his squad car half a block away won’t draw attention to the building they enter.
Vernon’s room is on the top floor, the fourth, of his dorm. They ascend the stairs without running into many students. Most residents have packed up and left for the summer. A few have returned for convocation. Roberta was able to quickly secure the keys—the room’s been entered by police previously, the administration knows that the boy has been hospitalized—and after opening up she stands outside while the men enter, and closes the door behind them.