by John Lutz
“Don’t kid yourself,” Tangler said.
Elaine uncrossed her legs and looked over at Schueller. “Any ideas?”
Schueller began absently toying with a sharp-pointed yellow pencil on his desk. “The solution to our problem is simple,” he said. “This suspected faculty member was here with us, in this office, on the evening of Macy Collins’s death.”
“Maybe this person already has an alibi,” Elaine said.
Schueller shook his head. “If he does, if he, say ... was in another city with a married woman, the police wouldn’t suspect him of being in New York murdering Macy Collins.” Or if his flight plan suggested he was in another city ... “The point is, we don’t want that sort of information to get beyond us.”
“And the married woman,” Tangler said.
“Of course.”
“You’re suggesting that we lie to the police,” Elaine said.
“Only if necessary. It would be a harmless lie that might as just as easily be true, and it might save this college from extinction.”
“As well as our jobs and considerable financial interests,” Tangler said. He squinted at the chancellor. “I understand the cops were here today. Did they ask you about this person?”
“Not yet. And maybe they never will. But I want to be ready, and I need to know we can continue to count on each other.”
“You’re not only proposing that we lie to the police, but that we do so in a murder investigation,” Elaine said, as if to make clear to each of them what was happening.
“Exactly.”
“That will make us accomplices.”
“In for a penny ...” Tangler said, smiling beneath his mustache.
“We’re already accomplices,” the chancellor said. “But as far as the police are concerned, not in murder.”
Tangler rubbed his chin, tugged at his mustache. “All right, Chancellor. You can rely on me.”
“And me, I suppose,” Elaine Pratt said, after a slight hesitation.
“We can’t simply suppose,” Schueller said.
“Of course. Count on me.” No hesitation that time.
Schueller smiled, nodded, and stood up.
“Are we going to cut ourselves and join hands to mingle our blood?” Elaine asked.
“Our needs are already mingled,” Tangler said. “As is our duty to each other.”
“Noble talk,” the chancellor said.
“Noble purpose,” Tangler said.
“Let’s not kid ourselves,” Elaine Pratt said. “Especially about the death of Macy Collins.”
Nobody drew blood, but they did shake hands.
14
“I love your body,” Lou Gainer said to Ann Spellman. “You made that clear just a few minutes ago,” Ann said. She was still breathing hard, and her twenty-four-year-old nude body glistened with perspiration. She watched her diet and worked out faithfully almost every day, but even though she knew Gainer was several years older than she was, it was all she could do to keep up with him physically. He appeared deceptively slender in clothes. The grace of his movements and cut of his suits made his lean, hard physique a surprise.
She was aware of Gainer watching her closely as she rose from where she’d been seated on the edge of the mattress. After veering to the window to turn down the thermostat on the air conditioner, she padded barefoot into the bathroom.
In the mirror she caught sight of her compact, busty body, dark eyes, and thick black hair. It had been amazing how Lou had used her body, how much pleasure he’d given her, and derived from her. She felt a brief uneasiness about how skilled a lover Gainer was, how experienced he must be. His knowledge and lovemaking skills weren’t intuitive. They had to have been learned. Nothing about that concerned Ann, other than that someone had to have taught him.
Jealous. That’s all I am.
She pushed her worries to the back of her mind, pinched the flesh of her waist to make sure she wasn’t putting on any excess weight, and turned on the shower. Testing the water carefully with her hand to make sure it wasn’t too hot, she thought about trying to preserve what was left of her hairdo. Then figured screw it. She’d dry her hair with a towel and then comb it damp.
The steady spray of water was lukewarm and soothing, making her sorry she couldn’t spend more time under it. But it didn’t really matter. Warm water in this building didn’t last long before it began to run cold.
Ann had no serious misgivings about her affair with Lou. He was her boss at Clinton Industrial Designs, where she worked as one of half a dozen graphic artists. The other employees all knew by now that Ann and Lou were a couple. One of them, an attractive and immensely talented artist named Gigi, had even asked in a roundabout way if Ann might be thinking about a wedding.
Ann hadn’t been, until Gigi put the idea in her head. Twenty-four already. I’m not so young anymore, and the clock is ticking.
Standing beneath warm needles of water in the tiled shower, Ann had to smile. Sleeping with the boss was one thing, but marrying him was something else altogether. There was a sense of adventure in their affair, spiced by secrecy even if it was an open secret. She wouldn’t want to undermine that with talk of marriage. She needed to be careful here.
She was still smiling as the shower curtain was suddenly swished and jangled aside.
Lou stepped into the shower with her. He kissed her wet forehead and fondled her soapy breasts. Began sliding his hands down her back and over her buttocks.
“You’re trembling,” he said.
“You startled me. Haven’t you ever seen Psycho?”
“I had another kind of movie in mind. Ever think what a hit we’d be in a porno film?”
She laughed. “Is that a proposition?”
“Just an idle thought.”
Deciding more soap was called for, he picked up the tiny oblong sliver from the soap dish and shook his head. “Times are hard,” he said, showing the thin oval of soap to Ann.
“So’s something else.”
He reached around her and rotated the chromed knob to make the downpour from the showerhead warmer, simultaneously kissing the side of her neck. The thin wafer of soap slipped from his other hand and didn’t make a sound as it was taken by the gauze of water rippling on the shower stall floor. Lou used his bare foot to slide it over where it was out of the glide of water toward the drain.
“Speaking of hard,” he whispered in her ear, “there’s something I need to tell you.”
She felt the warm tip of his tongue in her ear and squirmed, grinning, to wrench her head away. “So go ahead and tell.”
His hesitation, something in the sudden stillness of his body, warned her, but she didn’t grasp the meaning of her sudden premonition.
“I’m going to have to fire you,” he said.
She toweled dry in a fury and stood before him in her white terry cloth robe, her wet hair a dark tangle like her thoughts. Her brown eyes danced with anger. Lou finished putting on his pants, then his shoes.
“What else do you have to say?” she asked.
He looked up at her from where he sat on the bed. “That I hate like hell to have been the one to tell you. But I had to. It’s part of my job.”
“Is it something I did—or didn’t—do?”
“For God’s sake no, Annie! It’s the economy. I wasn’t kidding when I told you times were hard. You know we’ve lost some big accounts. The company simply can’t justify paying so many employees.”
“I’m not the only graphic design artist there.”
“And I’m not the one who decided to let you go. It was a board decision.”
“Aren’t you on the board?”
“You know I am.”
“Boards are just a way to dilute responsibility,” Ann said.
“C’mon, Annie ...”
“Did you fight for me?”
“Hell yes, I fought.”
She didn’t believe him. The lie was in his eyes like an ominous object floating just beneath the surface of
dark waters. He wasn’t leveling with her. He’d decided to end her employment, probably as a way to end their affair.
And there the bastard sits. On my bed.
“So you thought you’d drop by one more time and have one last piece of poor, dumb Ann before telling her she’s being cut loose. Or did you expect to keep coming over here and dropping your drawers while I was drawing unemployment?”
“That’s not in the cards, Annie. It can’t be.”
“Better damn well believe it.”
“The board knows you’re good, and you’ll probably soon be working for the competition. How’d it look if you and I were still having this secret affair that everyone knows about?”
She had a hard time catching her breath. “Lou ... I can hardly get my mind around this.”
He hung his head. “Me, either. We just got caught up in circumstances.” He raked his fingers through his damp hair and looked at her petite, tight body. But it was an oddly impersonal appraisal, as if he were assessing a piece of statuary rather than a real person. Ann realized he was fixing her in his memory. “You’re still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever slept with.”
She was still struggling with her comprehension.
“I’ll have your stuff sent here to you,” he said, “along with your final check. You know how they are. They don’t want you in the office once you’ve been severed.”
“They? You are they.”
He stood up and looked at her sadly. “Did I ever say I wasn’t?”
She rubbed her towel with vicious abandon over her mussed wet hair, squinting at him through flying droplets. “You are really a sack of shit, Lou.”
He nodded in silent agreement, put on his shirt, and left.
15
Central Florida, 2002
Sophia wanted everyone to see what she had done. That was why the sky was a cloudless blue, and the only breeze was soft and cool. The air was so clean and clear it seemed possible to see details half a mile away, like looking through a pair of powerful binoculars.
It didn’t require binoculars to see what Sergeant Ed Hall of the Florida State Police was looking at.
The sergeant stood staring down at a dead girl. She looked so frail beneath the wreckage of the barn. And there was something about her injuries, even beneath all that blood. There seemed to be dark rings around the flesh of her wrists, and the flesh was wrinkled. The same marks were around at least one of her ankles, too.
A length of rough-hewn beam lay across her midsection, and it appeared that it had come down and smashed her rib cage. Not much doubt as to what had killed her.
But what had she been doing in the barn almost nude? It was possible that the fierce winds of the hurricane or a trailing tornado had stripped the clothes from her.
Except for another oddity, at least to Hall’s way of thinking. She was wearing black thong underwear. A strange thing, for a kid her age. Unless she’d been older than she appeared now, dead.
The thing about the underwear that struck Hall as odd was that he’d just come from the eastern part of the state, following the wide swath of Hurricane Sophia, and he remembered the Ambersons being found dead in the wreckage of their house. One of the cops there had been saying it was hard to tell, what with the condition of the bodies, but it looked like Nathan Amberson might have been shot.
His wife, Flora, had been found nearby, her body also mutilated by fierce winds and debris. She’d been mostly buried in wreckage, and nude, like this poor as-yet-unidentified girl.
Hall had known the Ambersons slightly. Flora, though getting along in years, had been an attractive woman, and was rumored to have been sexually adventurous in her youth. Hall knew that some of the rumors were true. Husband Nathan, in fact, had once been talked out of shooting an unwanted suitor with a shotgun.
Hall stared down at the dead girl under the barn and rubbed his bristly jaw. A black thong on Flora Amberson, maybe.
On this girl, never.
But that wasn’t the only thing about the girl that didn’t set well with Hall. It was something about her eyes. Something that made it hard to look into them.
They reminded him of other dead eyes.
16
New York, the present
Professor Elaine Pratt stood tall and slim in designer jeans and a crisp white blouse, the practical kind of outfit she usually wore to teach summer courses. She had on her cameo necklace on its gold chain, and a gold bangle bracelet. Her dishwater-blond hair was shoulder length, her eyes brown and intense beneath a wisp of bangs.
There were only a dozen students in her business psychology class, seven female, five male, but they were among the brightest attending Waycliffe College. All of them were in the Vanguard program for advanced students. When they graduated, they would be more than ready for the world beyond the ivy.
The room was bright from a long bank of jalousie windows, and furnished with rows of small gray metal desks and a wooden table up front. There was a large flat-panel screen behind Professor Pratt, and an open laptop computer nearby so when necessary she could PowerPoint salient information. She believed imagery was crucial to learning.
A wasp droned persistently against the closed windows, bouncing off the glass, going nowhere.
“I can see that some of you are upset,” the professor said to her class. “There are signs that you’ve been crying. It’s a sad thing when someone as young and promising as Macy Collins dies. It’s even more tragic because her life was taken from her violently.”
There was no sound from the class other than a few sniffles. Three of the students showed no emotion at all, other than impatience. They obviously wanted to get the mourning over with so they could begin class.
“This is, despite its sad dimensions, positive,” the professor said, “an opportunity to express and understand that whatever the circumstances, we must press on. There is a time for grieving and emoting. This is not it. That is not a coldhearted assessment of the situation, but a pragmatic one. In the wider world there will come times when you’ll be faced with similar situations. What will be right won’t seem right. Vestiges of childhood concepts of morality, of rights and wrongs, can haunt and cloud your logic. It must not. You can’t let it. Your opposite number somewhere will be yielding to no such delusions. He or she will have long ago locked them away so that they’re no longer a part of the decision-making process. The earlier you learn to compartmentalize, the better for all concerned.”
“Except Macy Collins,” Juditha Jason said. Juditha, known on campus as “Jody,” didn’t say it in a tone of disagreement. She seemed to be speaking thoughtfully, and mainly to herself.
“Macy will not lodge a complaint,” Professor Pratt said. There were a few snickers. “In the military,” she said, “there was an officer who, shortly before a major battle, stood before his fresh recruits, a dead enemy at his feet. He kicked the dead man in the head. Then he opened his canteen and poured water into the corpse’s gaping mouth. He made his troops do the same. He was teaching them there was nothing to be feared from the dead. They had nothing more to do with the living. They would not feel nor benefit from your respect, your empathy, your regret, or any other emotion. They were simply ... the dead.” She met the gazes of each of her students. “He doubtless saved many of his troops’ lives with that demonstration. They learned that there is a time for grieving, and then the dead are simply inanimate objects. Am I making myself understood?”
“If you aren’t pragmatic, you’re going to lose the battle,” a tousle-haired boy in the last row said.
“Precisely,” Professor Pratt said, pleased.
“I agree with what you say,” Jody Jason said, “but we can’t simply put what happened to Macy out of our minds.”
“We can for the next hour,” the professor said.
And for the most part, they did.
Professor Pratt considered that a breakthrough.
After class, Jody lingered and approached the professor, who was gathering her t
eaching materials and poking them into a brown leather bag that was a cross between a large purse and a briefcase.
“I noticed a man and woman talking with Schueller,” Jody said.
“You mean Chancellor Schueller.”
“Of course.” Jody actually thought of the professor as “Elaine,” and the chancellor simply as “Schueller.” But she’d learned to be careful. Hierarchy and respect were important at Waycliffe. “I was wondering if they were talking about Macy Collins.”
“I can’t enlighten you on that,” Professor Pratt said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised.”
“Were they police?”
“Yes. That’s my understanding.”
“Are they going to talk to any of the students?”
“I wouldn’t know.” Professor Pratt closed and latched her purse-briefcase. “Why are you so interested?”
“It’s a puzzle,” Jody said. “A murder case that cries out to be solved.”
“How do you know it isn’t solved? There might be an obvious perpetrator. Possibly a boyfriend none of us knows about.”
“I wouldn’t think so. And the way she was killed. Did you read about Macy’s injuries, the awful things done to her?”
“Actually I haven’t,” Professor Pratt said. “All I’ve seen or heard about the case is from a capsule report on a cable news channel this morning. It was too hysterical to be very informative.”
“The twenty-four-hour news cycle.”
“Yes, it’s changed the world,” Professor Pratt said. “Not necessarily for the better.”
“It’s easier to find people.”
Professor Pratt looked at Jody as if trying to decipher some code. “That’s not always a good thing.”
“I meant with the Internet. The social networks.”
“More like antisocial networks.”
“Sometimes, I guess. Do you happen to know the names of the two detectives who were here earlier today?”
“No. Sorry. Chancellor Schueller might be able to help you there, but I’m not sure you should bother him with business other than Waycliffe’s.”