by Paul Heald
Even in black-and-white print, on regular computer paper, the prosecutor could see that Diana Cavendish had been beautiful. She had a lovely round face with high cheekbones and a stunning figure.
“Second,” the reporter continued, “that swimsuit is not described in the inventory of her possessions taken after the murder.” He pulled another paper out of his pocket and handed it to her. “I think she may have been shot in it.”
She studied the spreadsheet of items found in the Cavendish apartment. This sort of information was not typically shared with the public, especially not with reporters. She handed it back to him. “How did you get this?”
“I helped make it.” He shrugged and explained. “Some of the police were dragging their feet in the investigation. My friend on the force was not. We entered Diana’s apartment without the permission of the lead detective and looked around.”
The guy clearly had some big ones if he was willing to stick his nose so deep into a potentially corrupt murder investigation. He might be slightly younger than she first thought, about her age probably, early forties or so. Vaguely handsome, too, in a Liam Neeson sort of way, despite the concern creasing his brow. “Do you have anything else?”
“No, just the pictures. I’ve written the website URL on the back of the printout I gave you.” He blushed again. “I’m sorry to admit that I know the postings are new on the site. I called you as soon as I saw them.”
She smiled and was briefly tempted to pry into his web-surfing habits, but making him squirm would be poor sport. “Like I said before, this is very interesting for its own sake, but exactly what would you like us to do? We need some sort of basis to assert federal jurisdiction. I mean, the website shows use of interstate instrumentalities, but you’re just guessing that there’s a connection to the crime.”
“It’s a good guess, though, isn’t it?”
She tilted her head doubtfully in response.
“I was hoping that you could track down the person who uploaded the photos. Whoever took the photos was probably either the perpetrator or one of the last people to see her.” His eyes brightened. “How about interstate distribution of stolen evidence?”
“If the killer took the photos and uploaded them, then they’re not stolen.”
“Interstate obstruction of evidence?”
“I don’t see how posting something for the world to see is obstruction.”
“Well,” Murphy persisted, “he hid vital evidence for years.”
“That’s usually not a crime unless the government first asks you to hand it over and you don’t.” She smiled. “And besides, the crime is hiding it, and that was not necessarily done across state lines.” The reporter was starting to grow on her. Instead of yelling about First Amendment rights and justice, he seemed to understand that at the federal level, the jurisdiction game needed to be played first.
“But if your tech people discovered that the photos were uploaded from another state, then you’d have evidence that the suspect, or at least a prime witness, had fled and crossed state lines.” He leaned forward in his chair, poised to launch his next riposte.
“Fair enough,” she replied, as she turned her attention to her computer and rapidly tapped and clicked her way to a confidential FBI database, “but still awfully thin.” She stared at the screen for a moment and entered some more information. “Didn’t you say that the FBI was alerted three days after the crime?”
“That’s what I was told when I asked the detective how the manhunt for Jacob Granville was going.” He slipped his notebook back into his jacket pocket. “Granville was the boyfriend.”
She entered the names of the suspect photographer and the victim into the database and gave a little hum of curiosity. “There’s no request here for help finding either Jacob Granville or Diana Cavendish,” she said, with a brief frown at the confidential notation she saw next to Granville’s name, “nothing that indicates fugitive status.” She turned toward Murphy. “That’s pretty unusual, given the suspicion of abduction and flight.” She paused. “You’re only … what … fifty miles or so from the South Carolina border?”
“More or less. And less than a hundred from North Carolina and Tennessee.”
“Tell me more about the investigation.” She smiled again, welcoming the distraction from the endless parade of drug cases coming through her office. There were hundreds of interesting federal crimes on the books, yet ninety percent of her time was spent on a single one: Possession of Narcotics with Intent to Distribute. Her career had started with a juicy murder case but she had not had another one since. “We’ve been known to intervene upon evidence of a conspiracy to deny someone her civil rights.”
“I can’t give you any definite evidence of a conspiracy.” He offered her his first smile of the day. “I’d have a Pulitzer on my desk if I could prove anything for sure.” She reached for a yellow pad and took notes while he spoke, backtracking and adding information from the beginning of the interview whenever he paused.
“Diana Cavendish was a dance major at Clarkeston College and had been dating Jacob Granville off and on for almost a year when she went missing. By all accounts they were a mercurial couple but didn’t seem to have an abusive relationship. They were last seen together at a bar on a Friday night. She didn’t show up for work on Monday morning, but no one got suspicious until a neighbor complained of her dog barking incessantly. On Monday evening, the landlord went to investigate and found Diana’s dog had tracked her blood all over the apartment.”
He popped a mint into his mouth and continued. “The investigation was screwed up from the get-go. To start off with, neither of the city’s detectives could be found and way too many regular cops went in and out of the crime scene before it was secured. The dog didn’t make matters any better either. It had spent the weekend ripping the place up and smearing blood everywhere. When the detectives finally got on the case, they put everything on total lockdown.” He paused. “Jacob Granville was not only a part-time colleague of mine, but he was the son of a prominent family. He had grown up in Clarkeston and everyone important in town knew him. The sheriff had taught him how to throw a football, for chrissakes.”
A look of disgust crossed his face. “You or I would have called in the state police immediately to take over, but that didn’t happen. Everything was done in-house and not very transparently. Jacob was never found and no one was ever charged. Suffice it to say that many people in Clarkeston have their doubts about how hard the cops were looking for him.”
“How well did you know him?”
“Not well. He had been with the newspaper a year or so when he disappeared.” The reporter thought for a moment. “He was a good-looking guy and very ambitious. He clearly saw his job in Clarkeston as just a stepping stone to bigger things elsewhere. He was a little hard to read, quite frankly.”
“You said that Granville never turned up.” Melanie stopped writing for a moment and pushed a strand of blond hair behind her ear. “Cavendish was never found either, right?”
“No, ma’am. There were rumors that someone saw his car driving out of town early on Saturday morning, but I could never get the cops to admit it.”
“Did they find the car?”
“No. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation eventually got involved, but it never found anything either. A source of mine there claimed that the local cops were not very cooperative, but he wouldn’t elaborate.”
“Well, the weirdest thing to me is that the FBI didn’t swoop in.” She got up and looked out the window. Nine out of ten people at the US attorney’s office would thank James Murphy for the information and politely send him on his way. The FBI was not going to be very interested in an old domestic-violence case, even if there were some promise of unearthing a little local corruption. On the other hand, she had solved one cold case in Clarkeston already, and it would be nice to have an excuse to get out of Atlanta and see some flowers.
She sat back down at her desk. “Thank you so much for
coming by. We’ll definitely be in touch.” The reporter got up and reached his hand in the breast pocket of his jacket. With an apologetic shrug, he handed her his business card.
“Please don’t hesitate to contact me.” At the door, he turned. “I never met Diana Cavendish, but after so many years of studying her, I’ve come to know her pretty well.” He paused and his eyes flashed. “She was a caring person who helped a whole lot of kids in Clarkeston. She did not deserve to die, and whoever did this does not deserve to get away with it.”
After he left, Melanie looked at the web address scrawled on the back of the photo of the murdered girl. She flipped the paper over and studied the young student’s face. The FBI database said nothing about the abduction or any formal investigation, but a note and phone number next to Granville’s name stated that any inquiries about him should be reported. Maybe a little digging by the computer staff on the source of the pictures wouldn’t be a bad idea. Something was a little whiffy about the case, and sometimes one scratch at the surface was enough to uncover all sorts of interesting social rot.
III.
NOTHINGNESS
A man in a pale windbreaker trudged up the side of Mt. Baldy and took a moment to stare down on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. He kept hoping that the view would improve as he approached the ten-thousand-foot summit, but instead the chlorine-yellow air over the city mushroomed more densely with every step. A climber’s website had claimed that the ocean was visible on a clear day, and he paused at a rocky outcrop and peered to the west. The horizon was so indistinct that he could only guess where the coastline lay. Turning his back on the city, he sat down, pulled out a Nalgene container, and took a long drink of water. The view to the east was clearer, and he could trace where the trail had emerged from the tree line and wound its way through a dozen switchbacks to his feet.
He took another sip and continued his climb. Late spring meant remnants of winter snow, but he had wagered that his well-worn pair of hiking boots would be sufficient, given that the climb was supposedly entirely nontechnical. A pair of gaiters would have been nice, though, to keep the ice crystals from slipping past his ankles. The top of the snow was glazed and crusted, but his boots broke through to rock with every step and he sensed no danger of slipping and sliding down the steep ravine on his right.
By the time he crossed the last patch of snow, his socks were soaked, but the sun was shining and it was fifty degrees, perfect weather to be at altitude, even if the air below was so bad that LA was just a brown smudge in the distance. When he found the brass elevation plate marking the top, he sat down and took out a sandwich and bag of chips that he had bought at the Vons back down in Claremont. He ate slowly, started on his second bottle of water, and pushed the detritus of his picnic deep into his backpack. When he was through, he took out a candy bar and cursed when he saw that he had mistakenly bought one laden with nuts. He broke off a piece, sucked away the chocolate from around a large almond, and spit it onto the rocks at his feet. He continued until the chocolate bar was consumed and the small pile of nuts had attracted two curious blackbirds. Then he zipped up his pack, took one last look over the city he had come to hate, put his head in his hands, and began to cry.
* * *
Stanley Hopkins had lived a Southern California dream for almost two years. He had come to LA as a sociology professor hoping to complete the first serious academic study of women working in the porn industry. Although his scholarly mission had failed and his work was rejected by his home institution in the Midwest, his videotaped interviews had been used as the backbone of a successful documentary. A private liberal arts college in Claremont with less squeamish sensibilities than his former public employer asked him to join its faculty, and soon he became the go-to expert on the sleazy world of adult media for both the talk-show circuit and the LAPD. Between his salary, some film royalties, and appearance and consulting fees, he quickly amassed a surprising amount of savings. He and his wife bought a small home on the plain beneath Mt. Baldy and awaited the arrival of their first child, conceived in the turbulence of his fateful visit to California.
Their daughter was eighteen months old when his wife merged onto I-10 heading west and was pinned between a semitrailer and a large SUV whose impatient driver had tried to squeeze illegally past her on the right. Both the trucker and the other driver suffered minor injuries, but Angela and Carrie were killed instantly when their car disappeared underneath the semi. He had been relaxing on their back deck when the phone rang with news of the accident. He refused to bury them in the state that he blamed for taking them away, and he ignored the wishes of his inlaws that they be buried thousands of miles away in an Atlanta suburb. So they were cremated and still sat in the laundry room, where he set them after the memorial service. He originally planned to scatter them from the peak of Mt. Baldy, but once he got to the summit, the gesture felt wrong. Hiking was his thing, not hers. She had never really appreciated the barren beauty above the tree line.
Inertia kept Stanley in Los Angeles, and his classes at Belle Meade College provided the best weapon against the morbid thoughts and depression that plagued him when he had too much free time to think. The college was only a twenty-minute bike ride from his house, and his students provided some distraction. They seemed to have a more genuine interest in his courses than his former students in Illinois. This might be explained by the fact that Belle Meade wanted him to teach upper-level electives like the Sociology of Media, whereas he had previously been stuck teaching required classes like Introduction to Sociology to hundreds of bored freshmen.
In his media course, he assigned the students an alternating diet of reality television and traditional texts, while lecturing about the interaction of human subjects within groups, the distorting effects of observation, and the creation of norms of judgment and leadership. He had no opinion about the aesthetics of the shows or whether reality television constituted a legitimate art form, but he was convinced that he could teach almost all of undergraduate sociology by observing social interaction in Survivor, America’s Next Top Model, Project Runway, Flavor of Love, Charm School, and Top Chef. He felt especially vindicated on days when the students dove into the textbook and illustrated their understanding of traditional doctrines of group formation by reference to Tim Gunn and Heidi Klum.
His other course, provocatively entitled Social Exploitation of Women was even livelier and often kept him after class, arguing with those willing to defend pornography in one form or another and with their counterparts who thought he was too open minded. True to his early training as a lawyer, he found his teaching method becoming more and more Socratic, with the result being a more rewarding engagement with his students. But at the end of the day, he still had to go home, pass through the laundry room into the kitchen, and cook a meal for one.
The day after his mountain hike, the young professor sat in his office watching a couple of students toss a Frisbee around the small quadrangle that fronted the student union. He had no plans for the summer. When invitations for conferences were issued around the time of the accident, he tossed them away or hit the delete button without even reading them. Belle Meade taught almost no summer-school classes, preferring instead to encourage its students to study abroad, which left Stanley with a three-month vacation looming before him, a terrifying state of affairs that earned little sympathy from anyone he knew with a nine-to-five job.
As he got up from his chair and reached for his coffee mug, the phone rang, and he greeted the LAPD detective on the other end of the line. Stanley had been helping out the vice squad on a complex human-trafficking investigation. The case involved the forced immigration and prostitution of Eastern European women, and the police were trying to find a link to a major player in the American porn industry. His prior research had introduced him to a number of producers and directors. He had been happy to sit in on strategy sessions with the detectives as a pro bono consultant, and they were grateful for his suggestions on who would be worth in
terviewing.
The detective explained that the case was heating up again and wanted to know if he had some free time. Sure, Stanley answered without deliberation. Spending the summer with sleaze and crime just about fit his mood. After he hung up, he grabbed his coffee mug and tried to decide whether he wanted to make the walk across the quad to the campus Starbucks. He stared at the mug for a moment and then slid it back across his desk. There was really nothing that he wanted to pour into it.
IV.
KINGDOMS
“ Father Thor, what were you thinking when you suggested these hymns for Sunday?” A stout woman swathed in gray tweed stood in front of the priest’s desk, quivering with indignation. “They are totally inappropriate!”
The priest had a perfectly good theological explanation for why he had selected several traditional Epiphany hymns for the fourth Sunday after Easter, but he knew better than to argue with Shelly Woodall, longtime choir director and organist of St. James Episcopal Church in Clarkeston, Georgia. She not only looked like Margaret Thatcher, she took the same defiant and combative approach to every issue, from the proper length of the choir robes to the font style of the numbers posted on the hymn board. The last time he had crossed her, the entire alto section of the choir shunned him for a week.
“Could you suggest some alternatives?” He responded weakly, hoping to maneuver her out of his office. She chided him for not asking for advice earlier and then left in a scuffle of worsted wool.
Thorsten V. Carter had been in charge of St. James for only two years. He preferred Thor as a nickname, with its racy pagan connotations, instead of Thorsten, the name of his father’s favorite economist. Many in his stiff and old-fashioned congregation chose to call him Father Carter, when they referred to him by name at all. Although St. James was a prime parish, located in a pretty college town full of wealthy professionals that made stewardship campaigns a breeze, the congregation had a horrible reputation for troubling its priests soon after they arrived. Since priests in the Episcopal Church were technically employees of the diocese and not the parish, the church had been fighting with the bishop for years and had gotten the reputation of being a snake pit. Only a handful of candidates had applied for what in other circumstances would have been a plum job, and the parish committee recommended young Thorsten (certainly not one of the two female candidates!), who at the time was only three years out of seminary. His first job in a small mission parish in rural Illinois had in no way prepared him for the parade of self-righteous congregants who frowned in disapproval as they shook his hand after the Sunday service.