by John Lutz
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 teaching 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.”
&
nbsp; “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.”
“Macy was a Waycliffe student,” Jody pointed out.
Professor Pratt laid a hand on her wrist and gave a little squeeze. “If I were you, I wouldn’t talk to the chancellor, or to the police, about Macy Collins. Remember what I said about compartmentalizing. Well, this isn’t the time for you to be distracted. Concentrate on your studies and let the detectives go ahead and detect. You shouldn’t get enmeshed in a murder case, Jody. For a number of reasons, not the least of which is that nothing about this case involves you. As far as you’re concerned, what happened to Macy Collins exists in another dimension, and one you shouldn’t visit.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Jody conceded, smiling as if the professor had persuaded her.
How wrong you are.
“So what kind of place is Waycliffe College?” Fedderman asked Quinn and Pearl, after they’d returned to the office.
Pearl had made a fresh pot of coffee and was pouring some into her initialed mug. “Kinda place where half the girls are nicknamed Muffy, and the boys Bunny.”
“Like state prison,” Fedderman said.
“I won’t even ask what that means,” Mishkin said. He and Sal Vitali had divided the notes from the interviews with Macy Collins’s neighbors and were poring over them to find items of interest or contradictions.
“It looks like minor league Ivy League,” Quinn said, leaning back in his desk chair. “Small and secluded.”
“Very picturesque,” Pearl said.
Sal growled something unintelligible.
“And it looks like money,” Pearl said.
“That, too,” Quinn said.
“But I think secret suits it better than secluded.” Pearl sipped her coffee and made a face. “Maybe that’s an odd word to describe it, but that’s the impression it gives. Like there’s some dark and musty secret hanging over the place.”
Quinn swiveled slightly in his chair and said nothing. He’d had the same feeling as Pearl’s, that something just beyond sight or sound was lurking in the ivy. Or maybe that was because it had been a long time since either of them had been on a college campus. The quiet, shaded grounds and buildings of Waycliffe were a detached world of their own. One conducive to pondering and discussing rather than conducting police interviews.
After all, the Collins murder had occurred in the real world, beyond the rows of oak and maple trees that marked the boundaries of the academic enclave. In the world of Waycliffe, everything had to make sense. In Quinn’s world there was chaos.
“Are we going back there?” Harold asked.
“Right now we don’t have a reason,” Quinn said. “There doesn’t seem to be anything connected to the college that figures into Collins’s death. And there wasn’t anything useful in her dorm room.”
“No computer there, either,” Pearl said. “And the crime scene unit didn’t remove one from her apartment.”
“No computer, few friends,” Sal growled. “Makes things difficult.”
“On the other hand,” Harold said, “Macy hardly knew anyone in New York, so if a serial killer didn’t do her, there aren’t too many suspects.” Harold, looking on the bright side.
“You don’t have to know someone in New York to get murdered,” Sal said.
Helen Iman, the NYPD profiler, came in, making the office suddenly smaller with her six-foot-plus height. She was wearing khakis and a white pullover shirt with a collar and looked like a women’s basketball coach. Quinn wasn’t sure if she’d ever actually played basketball.
She was sweating, as if she’d been running up and down the court.
“Hot out there,” she said, pulling a plastic water bottle from a khaki pocket and taking a hearty swig. “I was by earlier and you weren’t here,” she said to Quinn, backhanding away water that was dribbling down her long chin.
“He and Pearl have been to college,” Fedderman said.
Quinn described the visit at Waycliffe to Helen.
She seemed to become more interested as the account unfolded.
“You think the college president-”
“Calls himself the chancellor,” Quinn interrupted.
“Okay. Whatever. You feel he was being evasive?”
“Yes,” Pearl answered.
Quinn nodded, not as sure. He didn’t want to go off in a wrong direction here. “It was only a feeling,” he said. “We have no reason to believe he was lying about anything.”
“The college itself looks too good to believe,” Pearl said. “So picturesque, and isolated from the town. Snooty as hell, too. They play lacrosse and only lacrosse.”
“I lettered in lacrosse,” Helen said.
“I bet you played field hockey, too.”
Quinn shot Pearl a warning look. If a spark was struck, the two women sometimes deliberately tried to get on each others’ nerves. Go easy, Pearl.
“Good game, lacrosse, if you’re up to it,” Helen said, apparently primed for an argument this morning.
“We’re not concerned about their athletic program,” Quinn said, heading off trouble. “Anyway, it isn’t the kind of place you’d think would have a bowl contender.”
“Football,” Pearl said. “Beats the hell out of lacrosse.”
“Maybe we oughta go back up there,” Fedderman said, coming to Quinn’s rescue before Helen could reply.
“I don’t think so,” Quinn said. “Schueller might just have been nervous, like a lot of people when they come face-to-face with the law. Especially if it concerns a murder investigation. That sort of thing would be foreign to the Waycliffe campus.”
“We would hope,” Helen said. “What about Macy Collins’s friends there?”
“She didn’t seem to have any close friends. She was in something called the Vanguard program, for gifted students. Sounded to me like everybody in the program had to work too hard to have time for friends.”
“Not like the jocks,” Pearl said. Jab, jab…
“They must have a basketball team,” Helen said, as if every institution with more than five people did.
“No,” Quinn said. “Only lacrosse. I didn’t see any obvious jocks. The women we saw looked like college types. Trendy, studious. The men were Ivy League types, or nerds. Everybody looked like they spent too much time on Facebook and Twitter.”
“Of course,” Pearl said, “we didn’t see many students. Summer classes were in session. But Quinn’s right; the few students we did see looked like nerds or future bond salesmen. The geeky kids who did all their homework in high school.”
“Sounds like you need a perfect SAT score to get near the place,”
Fedderman said.
“Or perfect bank account,” Pearl said.
“They should have a basketball team,” Helen said.
“Only lacrosse,” Quinn said, before Pearl could.
“Macy Collins have a roommate in her dorm?”
“No,” Quinn said. “Vanguard students room alone.”
“And die alone,” Harold said. He’d been silent on the other side of the office, listening.
Quinn sat wondering if this conversation was getting them anywhere. It seemed to emphasize the paucity of hard facts in the investigation. A serial killer (if he was one) like Daniel Danielle who butchered his victims (if there was more than one) didn’t seem to have much to do with an exclusive and secluded college, even though the dead woman had been a student there. Quinn was beginning to think they’d taken a wrong turn.
“I were you,” Helen said, “I’d drive back up there.”
“Why?” Quinn asked.
“No basketball team.”
17
S omething was wrong with Ann Spellman’s laptop computer. Her wallpaper that formed the background of her desktop on her screen when she turned on the computer had somehow changed from blue sky to a news photo of victims lying under blankets on the side of a highway after a horrible head-on collision between a car and truck.
Her computer had been hacked. Great! Another disruption in her life.
Everything else seemed the same when she went online, so not exactly wrong… but different.
This was the third day of her unemployment. Her personal possessions had been delivered from her desk at work at Clinton Industrial Designs, and she was sure she’d be persona non grata if she ever so much as entered the building.
One good thing was that the worries of her job had melted away. Being among the unemployed was unsettling, even scary. Yet it was undeniably liberating.
She had to smile. Being thrown out of a high window probably creates the same sensation, and where does that get you?
One thing, though. Life was simpler now. All she had to do was find another job. And stop thinking about Lou Gainer.