The Probability of Murder

by Ada Madison

  I opened the door.

  “Hey,” I said, still undecided on my persona of the moment, except to give him a weak smile.

  “Sophie Saint Germain Knowles,” he said, brushing past me, not waiting for an invitation to sit at the table in the breakfast nook.

  How could Virgil have remembered my full name, used by my mother when she was about to chew me out? I doubted it was because he, like my math teacher father, was enamored of my namesake, Sophie Saint Germain, an influential, self-taught French mathematician whose work spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not only did I doubt it, I knew it wasn’t true.

  “You’re channeling my parents?”

  A smile broke out on his face, then quickly faded. “I talked to”—he drew quote marks in the air—“‘Noah.’”

  “Coffee?” I asked, heading for the stove. The venue was mine this time.

  “Sure. While you’re thinking of a response.”

  Virgil was frustrated, and rightly so.

  I moved Ariana’s cookies from the counter to a spot on the table in front of Virgil, filled my French press with an aromatic blend, then took a seat across from him. The autumn reds, yellows, and oranges on the placemats, which had seemed so festive lately, now seemed frivolous and unnecessary. I rolled them up and pushed them to the side, leaving bare wood as décor.

  “I was going to tell you,” I said.

  Virgil breathed a heavy sigh and, before I knew it, tears welled up and spilled down my cheeks. Whether they were for Charlotte or for the loss of my parents or the confused state I was in, I had no idea.

  The last thing I wanted was for Virgil to think I was trying to manipulate him with the crying damsel routine. I quickly left the table, went into my hallway bathroom, and pulled myself together with a few tissues and a very deep breath.

  I was back in less than three minutes, just in time to prepare the coffee.

  “You’ve been holding out on me, Sophie. Why would you do that?” Virgil asked, with no reference to my little setback. “Where’s the old logical, levelheaded Dr. Sophie Knowles, math professor? The one who has a favorite prime number of the month or something like that. Where’d she go?”

  “That’s a good question, Virgil.” I almost said, “I’m not myself,” but I’d made enough snarky comments to others who made that claim that I stopped in time. “I just know I want to help somehow.”

  Virgil waited until he’d swallowed a large bite of cookie. “That’s not your job. That’s why you pay your taxes, so people like me can get paid to do police work.”

  “Calling people Charlotte knew and telling them about what happened didn’t seem like police work. It was a harmless way to do something for my friend.”

  “Until you talked to Jeff.”

  I nodded, humbled. “When Jeff told me what Charlotte had done, my first reaction was anger that she’d deceived me. But then I guess I felt I needed to protect her good name. I know it was stupid.”

  “What it was, was dangerous, Sophie. I can’t tell you everything, except please step back and try to…” Virgil threw up his hands, for want of a verb.

  I poured our coffee and decided to help him out. “Get on with my life.” Another phrase I’d sneered at more than once.

  Virgil put his palms up and nodded. “Thank you. You took the words right out of my mouth.”

  I sat down. “Did you figure out what the other notes are about?” I asked.

  Virgil gave me an exasperated look. He twirled his index finger in the space between us. “What did we just decide here?”

  “Even the old, sensible Sophie was a curious citizen, Virgil.”

  “Okay, then how about this, citizen Knowles? I’m not at liberty to say.” Now who was calling up clichés? “But I want to make it clear that there are some dangerous, underlying…”

  I came to his rescue again. “Criminal elements?” A term from my little-known hobby of watching crime dramas. “Is this about drugs or something?” I didn’t think so, but I wanted to open my mind to allow Virgil to fill it.

  Virgil shook his head, not a “no” shake, but a “What am I going to do with you?” shake. “Just trust me, please. You don’t want to get in the middle of this. Mourn your friend as you knew her. And let us do our job.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. Your friend wasn’t shot.”

  “Where did you get the idea that Ms. Crocker was shot?”

  “That’s what was going around on the cell phones at the library. She wasn’t shot?”

  Virgil shook his head. “We haven’t released all the details yet. It’s interesting to see what the rumor mill churns up when it has no input.”

  All this time—which seemed like weeks and weeks but was only about a day—I hadn’t thought to verify the gunshot rumor. I was annoyed, mostly with myself.

  “Can you at least tell me how she died, Virgil?”

  “She fell from the ladder that’s attached to the bookshelves. The one that slides back and forth along the shelves.”

  I drew a quick breath. “So it could have been an accident?” Thus, making us all feel safer, I thought.

  Virgil looked at me and, to his credit, did not remind me how long he’d been a homicide detective, starting in Boston many years ago. He didn’t play a numbers game and tell me how many crime scenes he’d witnessed, how many cases he’d solved.

  “The area showed signs of struggle,” he said. “And so did her body.”

  I groaned. “How awful.”

  “We think the guy came in while she was alone and wanted something from her. When she wouldn’t give it to him, he tried to force it out of her. She resisted and tried to get away by climbing that movable ladder. It ends at the loft that runs above the bookshelves. She was probably trying to get there.”

  I knew it well. “But there are stairs for that purpose. The ladder is just to reach the high shelves in the bookcases.”

  “She maybe couldn’t get to the stairs and hoped to climb over the railing from the ladder. All the killer had to do was shake the ladder off its track, and…” Virgil shrugged the rest of the sentence.

  It had almost been easier to imagine a clean shot to my friend’s chest. Terrible, but over in a flash. Now I was left with a long scenario of fighting, wounds, bruises, blood, drawn-out fear, and a painful fall. Unless I could curb my imagination. Virgil had said struggle, I reminded myself, not bloodletting.

  Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Whirrrr.

  My cell phone ring intruded. Gratefully accepted, to put an end to the scene in my brain. The phone rang and vibrated on my counter, spinning around its center of mass, which I always found a little creepy.

  “Bruce,” I said to Virgil.

  “You’d better take it. You never know when he’ll get a connection again. He doesn’t exactly travel in cell tower country. Tell him hello.”

  I picked up the phone and clicked on. The motion stopped, as if I’d killed a parasite that lived in my phone.

  “Hey,” Bruce said. “You okay?” He sounded far away and high up, but that was probably my imagination at work.

  “I’m the one at home with gas, electricity, and central heating, so, yeah, I’m okay.”

  “I mean, you know…”

  “I’m fine. Virgil’s here and says hi.”

  “Virge? Anything wrong?”

  “No. Just some routine last questions about…yesterday.”

  “Good. I’m glad you have some company. I don’t like the way you sound and I’m kicking myself for leaving.”

  “I sent you,” I said.

  I also wanted to correct Bruce’s impression of the police visit, inform him that his cop friend had brought more trouble than comfort, but I didn’t like the idea of sending Bruce up a mountain thinking he should have canceled the trip.

  “It’s a quick trip,” he said. “We should be up and back without a hitch.”

  “How’s Kevin doing?”

  “Ready to get started. We’ll hike down in the dark to give him the f
ull experience.”

  “So you’ll be at sea level to sleep.”

  “In the comfort of a luxury campsite.”

  “An oxymoron.”

  Bruce laughed. “The guys are waving at me to hurry up. There’s one excruciatingly slow group up there ahead of us. Amateurs. But most everyone else is off the mountain now, so it’s a good time.”

  “What do they know that you don’t?”

  “I miss you.”

  Virgil’s hulking presence cramped my style, limiting my use of endearments. I resorted to, “Me, too. Are the weather conditions good?”

  “So-so. You know it’s always a gamble.”

  A gamble. A bolt of intelligence struck as I flashed back to my first interview with Virgil. He’d been the one to bring up gambling. He’d asked if Charlotte had any vices, like gambling. When I mentioned the lottery, almost as a joke, he’d run with it, talking about the system at length, introducing the idea of scams, going on and on about scammers and victims of scams.

  If I were a betting sort, I’d have bet that Virgil had known all along that Charlotte had been a victim of a lottery scam. I thought of the bag of money, the layers of US dollars in Charlotte’s duffel bag. Was that the mark of a victim? Or was Charlotte herself a scammer with a load of cash?

  “I’m signing off, okay?” Bruce asked.

  I hoped he hadn’t said anything important in the last second or two.

  We exchanged quiet Love yous and I returned to Virgil with new curiosity. I took my place across from him and leaned over my folded hands.

  “You’ve known all along that Charlotte was involved in a lottery scam, haven’t you? Since when? Since she was hired two years ago?”

  Virgil took a sip of coffee. The mug seemed small in his giant hand. “That’s police business, Sophie.”

  Which was nicer than “That’s none of your business, Sophie,” and certainly not a denial.

  “She was my friend, and I thought I knew her, Virgil. You knew something was up before she was murdered and you didn’t tell me? We hung around together, and you didn’t warn me that she was about to be murdered.”

  I knew I was being extreme, but I wanted to provoke Virgil to action.

  It seemed to work. Virgil stood abruptly. If I didn’t know him so well, how much more gentle he was than men half his size, I’d have been worried. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded stack of letter-size pages.

  “I’m out of here,” he said, and handed me the sheets.

  I took the sheaf of papers and unfolded it. The Henley Police Department logo screamed out at me.

  “What—”

  “Thanks for the coffee,” he said, and was out the door.

  An hour later I was in my den, still reading through the papers Virgil had given me. What was the real police term for these documents? I knew it as a rap sheet, singular, but this was a multipage record. Maybe originally it was one long piece of paper. I’d also heard yellow sheet. Or just sheet. “Pull his sheet,” one cop would say to another on television.

  The name of the state from which the pages had been sent, maybe faxed, had been drowned out by the thick, black Henley PD header. The contents of the file were clear, however.

  My friend, Charlotte Crocker, was a convicted felon. She was a scam artist.

  Except she wasn’t even Charlotte Crocker.

  On the first page was a mug shot. A different, younger Charlotte Crocker stared straight ahead at the camera and at me, over the name Carla Cooper. She wore a knitted burgundy poncho and long earrings that ended in rainbow-hued peace signs. Her light brown hair looked thin and straggly, her eyes bloodshot. The date and the outfit were out of whack with each other, as if this were a Halloween costume twenty years after the hippies took to suburbs and switched to business casual.

  The string of digits that made up her ID number, on a black card that she held up, reminded me of a lottery number from one of the mega-games I’d just learned about. I wondered if she’d ever thought of placing a bet on the number.

  I thought of the irony—my so-called friend had led me to believe she was so upset about that one speeding ticket she’d gotten, and all the while she had a record of violations that would have kept a small town cop in Vermont busy for months.

  Everything was wrong about the police photographer’s image of the woman I’d considered a friend. From the arcane hippie look to her snarly expression to the fact that she had a mug shot at all.

  I remembered a day we spent together with Ariana just before school started in the fall. A typical girlfriend day for the three of us, with shopping and lunch and nonstop talk of books, movies, men, the problems of the world, and the hint of gray that was sprouting now that we’d left the big four-oh behind.

  I tried to recall something unusual about Charlotte that should have given me a clue that the real Charlotte was a felon. I remembered a passing remark she’d made that day, somewhat wistfully.

  “I wish I’d known you both twenty years ago,” she’d said, and hugged us.

  Apparently she considered us a good influence on her, but two decades too late.

  She’d made a similar comment more recently that might have tipped me off about an impending tsunami, but I couldn’t dredge it up.

  If I stretched it, I could think of a phone call or two that she took in my presence that left her momentarily upset. But all that was hindsight. At the time, she seemed as even-tempered and trustworthy as they came.

  I focused on the sheet. I could hardly count the list of aliases, all with birth dates within a few years of either side of Charlotte’s real (but who knew?) birth date of 1966. Carolyn Crouse was born in 1963 in Seattle, Christine Coulter in 1970 in Miami, Catherine Chesterfield in 1968 in Cleveland, and so on through several more aliases and dates and places of birth.

  I’d read that many people who change their identities keep their initials. I supposed that was handy—any monogrammed luggage or bathroom towels wouldn’t have to be replaced each time a new persona was adopted. Or in case the person forgot and started to sign something, at least the first initial would always be correct. It occurred to me that probably none of these names, including Charlotte Crocker, was her real name.

  Another wave of anger came over me as I realized how incredibly naïve I’d been. I heard a low growl and was shocked to realize it had come from me.

  How could she, whatever-her-name-was, have faked her pleasant sophistication, her generosity and helpfulness to Henley College’s students? Whoever she was, Charlotte must have had some training in library science to be as good as she was at her job. Clearly, it hadn’t been enough to satisfy her.

  But she wasn’t necessarily trained at all, I realized in a moment. I remembered reports I’d hardly believed at the time, about a guy who flew commercial airplanes on a fake license, and another man without a day of medical training who was head of a surgical unit at a hospital. A story came to me that seemed silly at the time, of a man who posed as a government official and sold the Eiffel Tower.

  None of these scams seemed silly today.

  I was sure there were other examples. Henley’s hiring and firing procedures were no more fail-proof than those of the Federal Aviation Administration or the American Medical Association.

  Had Henley’s students—or I—been in danger all the while? Was Charlotte about to work her scams on us? Was her killer after us, too?

  I got up quickly and made a tour of my house, checking all the windows and doors. Fresh autumn air would have to be sacrificed until further notice.

  I plopped back onto the couch that had served as my bed last night and took up the police documents again.

  There were two more pages in the set, each listing charges and convictions of one or another of the CCs. I read the details of the statutes violated, the class of the crimes, bond information, sentencing, where time was served. The words swam in front of me. Fraud. Theft. Malicious destruction of property. Misdemeanor. Felony. Assault. Willard County. Shaw Coun
ty. Plummet County. I counted the stamps: TIME SERVED. PAROLED. DID NOT APPEAR.

  A glossary of criminal justice terms. All related to my friend.

  I folded the package and stuffed it into a cabinet under my counter with my never-used pie plates.

  Even with the new information at my disposal, I had more questions than answers: Why had Virgil given it to me? Was he trying to scare me off? How long had he been investigating CC? Or, I thought snarkily, C-squared, to depersonalize her even further. Was CC on the run, a real fugitive, or was she legitimately out of prison with a legitimate bag of money and fleeing a bad guy who was after her?

  I needed a spreadsheet to map the possibilities.

  It was scary enough to think that CC’s murderer was out there and may have been targeting someone else right then. Maybe our treasurer, Martin Melrose, also a member of CC’s lottery group, was at risk.

  And that wasn’t all. I reeled at the extent of her criminal enterprises, cataloged on the rap sheet, which went far beyond the lottery.

  All unsuspecting students were at risk. I was at risk.

  Until I knew exactly why Charlotte was killed and by whom, no one who knew her was completely safe. I didn’t want to know what Virgil, or anyone else, would think of my reasoning.

  I wandered around my little cottage, straightening scarves and doilies, picking up a stray glass or mug here and there, sharpening my pencils. Normal things. I sat down to check for messages on my office phone, something I didn’t ordinarily do on weekends, but this was no ordinary Saturday.

  I had messages from freshman Daryl Farmer; Dean of Women Paula Rogers; Charlotte’s assistant, Hannah Stephens; my favorite Möbius stripper, Chelsea Derbin; and several of my student majors, all wanting to help in different ways, as if I were the go-to person for all things related to the murder on campus.

  Daryl offered that he was a pretty good hacker and might be able to get into Charlotte’s files for clues to her murder. Paula’s contribution was a dinner invitation to a fine restaurant “where you can be pampered.” And grilled for information, I added to myself. Hannah missed her boss and wanted to talk to me and grieve together. Chelsea thought I needed “a gift basket with chocolate and nice-smelling soap” that she put together and could deliver whenever it was convenient for me.