by Richard King
“Dean More,” Gaston said patiently, “you left Doctor Young’s office before we discovered that there was an e-mail from your wife in Professor Hilliard’s mailbox. You knew that your wife was going to leave you for Harold Hilliard. No?”
“No!” More exclaimed. “She left him for me. She married me. Not the other way around, remember?”
“Yes. That is what I thought. And that’s why I made a fatal error in judgement. An error that, as you know, cost your wife her life. I believed that she killed Hilliard because he was trying to blackmail her to return to him. I believed that when I read her message to him that we found on his computer. I even went to her office yesterday evening and virtually accused the poor woman of murder. She told me, us, a very interesting story which I wasn’t sure I believed but, as it turns out, was the truth. I had the whole thing backwards. She married you, in despair and anger, because Hilliard didn’t want to marry her, at least, not then. She also figured that if she married you, you wouldn’t or couldn’t turn her in for plagiarism. But then things changed. Hilliard wanted her back. They resumed their affair. You found out about it, killed him, and then tried to destory the evidence you knew was likely to be on his computer. Then you guessed that there might be evidence on her computer that incriminated you, so you beat us to her office yesterday and stole it. But you knew we had found Hilliard’s laptop and it was only a matter of time before it yielded evidence that might point to you as his killer.
“This morning you realized that even with Harold gone, she was still going to leave you and that there was a pretty good chance that you would be arrested for the murder of Harold Hilliard. So you followed her to her office and killed her, out of fear and jealousy, thinking that if you did it there that you would not be found out, that her murder and the murder of Harold Hilliard would both be attributed to the same unknown person, and you would get away with it. You were losing her and that was bad enough; you didn’t want to lose your freedom in the bargain.”
“You’re dangerously deranged,” More shouted. “After you stop harassing me I’m going to get a lawyer and sue you and the police force for millions. You won’t get a job as a crossing guard after I’m through with
you.” More knew he was trapped. He couldn’t argue his way out of a murder conviction. The best he could do was bargain for something less than the rest of his life in prison. But foolishly, he still seemed to believe that he could protest his innocence.
“Dean More,” Gaston began again, “let me tell you what I know and what I’ve surmised. Your wife was preparing to leave you. She told us that she had not yet asked you for a divorce, and I believe her. She thought you knew nothing. But you suspected, or knew, that she and Hilliard were getting back together again. Perhaps you accused her of it over lunch at the faculty club last week, and she denied it. But you knew that sooner or later Hilliard would win. You couldn’t keep her by bringing up those old plagiarism charges, at least, not without embarrassing yourself, and she knew that. You had benefited from her stellar academic advancement as much as she had. Her plagiarism had become yours as well, and she knew your threat to expose her was an empty one.
“You didn’t want to lose her. You thought that if you killed Hilliard she would stay with you. It’s the stalker’s mentality. Your ego couldn’t accept that she just plain didn’t want to be with you. You almost got away with it. If the cop investigating this case had been less familiar with the vagaries of the English language than me,” Gaston said without even a trace of modesty, “you might actually have gotten away with double murder. It was Jane’s e-mail to Hilliard that at first made me think she was the murderer and then showed me that she was trying to get out of your clutches. Your language can be ambiguous. When your wife wrote to Hilliard stating in effect that she would not give up her happiness, I thought that she was telling him to leave her alone and let her continue her life with you. But she was murdered and I had to re-examine the evidence and it was then that I realized I had misinterpreted the phrases from her e-mail. She was telling Hilliard that she was no longer willing to sacrifice herself to you. If you tried to ruin her reputation she and Hilliard would fight you and likely win. In other words she was prepared to call your bluff.”
I was impressed at Gaston’s ability to summarize a complicated series of events. When I joined Gaston in the investigation I had hoped that I would have a chance to confront the murderer and make a passionate accusatory speech. Obviously this was not to be the case. Gaston had the case solved and I didn’t think I had anything to add to his solution. But I was curious about one thing: Did Jane discover that her husband was a murderer? Was this the real reason he killed her?
Following up on Gaston’s précis of the case I asked, “Did your wife know that you killed the man she loved? Is that why you killed her?”
The question came out of my mouth a little more aggressively than my brain intended but the man had killed two people and I wasn’t at all concerned about hurting his feelings.
Fred More looked at me. I was certain that he would not answer my question and I don’t think he intended to answer it. But he did. “She had no idea.” He spoke with the slow monotone of a man who can’t fully control what he is saying, almost as if he was listening to himself saying something that he did not know was a fully formed idea. “But I couldn’t take the chance that she would never figure it out. It became clear to me that she had no intention of changing her plans to leave just because Harold was dead. I guess I killed him for nothing. Even with him out of the way I was gong to lose my life. But I had no intention of losing my freedom as well. I realized that if Jane did not stay with me I would have to kill her to protect myself.”
“So you marched into her office and killed her?” I prompted.
“I went over to her office to talk to her,” he continued as if he had not heard my question. “I wanted her to agree to move to another city, to start over again. She refused. She told me that she didn’t love me and that if she could not spend her life with the man she loved she would certainly not spend it with a man she did not love. I couldn’t take it. I was not someone she could use and discard. I am a person to be reckoned with. While we were talking her phone rang. She turned to answer it and I grabbed her scarf and got behind her. The minute she hung up I strangled her. It was that simple. She must have known that I had killed her lover but by the time she figured it out it was too late.”
Fred More stopped talking as abruptly as he started. He looked at us but said nothing. Gaston stood up and backed away from where More was sitting. For a moment I half thought More was going to get up and try to run away. And he did try to stand up but he couldn’t. He pushed himself up with his hands on the armrests of the chair, but all the fight had gone out of him. He fell back into the chair. For a tense moment he stared pure hatred at Gaston and then he covered his face with his hands and began to cry.
This man was cold-blooded enough to kill two people, yet when his own life was in jeopardy he couldn’t deal with it. He broke down.
Gaston pulled his cellphone out of his blazer pocket and punched in some numbers. After a moment he said, into the phone, “Please come inside now and make an arrest.” He looked up and said to me, “My officers will be here in a moment. I have to make a few more calls.
Keep an eye on him. If he tries anything just push him back into his chair,” and he turned away and punched in another number. I didn’t know quite what to do. A career in bookselling had not prepared me for murderer watching but I figured that if he tried anything I would do as Gaston suggested. Anyway, More didn’t try anything. He didn’t even try very hard to stop whimpering.
Gaston must have called Steve’s pager, because his phone rang the insant he snapped it shut, and from his side of the conversation I gathered that Steve and Dr. Young were anxious for news. He filled them in briefly and then asked Steve to bring Dr. Young over to More’s house with her laptop and some extra cabling to create a network, as she had done with Hilliard’s comp
uter. His request surprised me at first but as I thought about it I realized that he knew More was the murderer based on a rational interpretation of the available evidence, but there wasn’t much of that and a sharp defence attorney might have been able to get some of it excluded from a trial. Gaston wanted hard evidence to head off any attempts to create a convincing alternative theory for the rest of it. He needed documentary proof that Jane was on the point of leaving her husband and re-establishing her relationship with Hilliard in order to be able to present an unimpeachable motive for More to have committed a double murder. And he believed that evidence was concealed in Jane’s computer.
Dr. Young and Steve Mandopolous arrived about ten minutes after the uniformed officers. A CSU technician showed up tight after them. Gaston turned Fred More over to the patrol cops and got the technician to take fingerprints from the computer. The techie made a move to remove the computer from the house but Gaston insisted that she, the same Constable Bouchard who had been at Jane Miller-More’s office, do her fingerprinting on the spot. It didn’t take her long. Gaston then asked her and her crew to investigate the rest of the house and to leave us alone in the living room.
Barbara Young and Steve Mandopolous had trouble restraining themselves while Constable Bouchard went about her business and the second she left Dr. Young virtually pounced on Gaston and me and demanded, “Tell me everything. How did you catch the bastard?”
“You tell them,” Gaston said to me. “I want to make a few notes.”
I brought them up to date. I hope I didn’t embellish the story but I sure didn’t leave anything out. I acted all the parts: sitting and sobbing for Fred and standing and accusing for Gaston. It was an bravura performance if I do say so myself.
The room was quiet after I finished the recounting of events and it was during that quiet moment that I realized the meaning of the book order form Gaston found in Hilliard’s hand. I had theorized that it might point to Jane. It was obvious I was wrong but it was only after I reviewed our solution to the crime that I understood the clue Hilliard had left for us. Jane Miller had talked to us, when we first interviewed her in her office, about Henry VIII, and his wives, and his Lord Chancellor.
It was the name of the Lord Chancellor that was the clue: Sir Thomas More. Hilliard had pointed a direct, accusing finger at the murderer, but we were too thick to see it. I felt very sad and guilty about Jane Miller. If we had been smart enough to understand what Hilliard was trying to tell us we might have been able to save her life.
Gaston put away his notebook and went over to observe as Dr. Young examined the computer. “Please be very careful. We’ll need solid evidence to get a conviction.”
“Don’t worry. I designed the software. I’m sure I can figure out a way to crack it.”
“Don’t programmers usually leave a back door into their software?” Steve asked.
“Yeah, we do. But they’re complicated and I only use them as a last resort. I’d rather use my brains to get into this thing than take a cheap shortcut.”
She had wired the two computers together and got them booted. “Before I start this process, anyone want to take a shot at guessing her password?” she asked, looking directly at me. “What about you, Sam? You guessed the last one. Want to try for two out of two?”
I didn’t really want to try. I didn’t want to back away from a challenge but I couldn’t do much without some information; after all, I hadn’t guessed Hilliard’s password. I’d figured it out from reading Hamlet. I didn’t have anything to go on for Jane. “Do you know if she had a nickname? Or did she make a joke or pun on her name?” I asked. “Something based on More, more or less, much more, something like that?”
“Not More,” Barbara said. “That was her husband’s name, not hers. She did sometimes joke about The Miller’s Tale being the start of her family’s history.”
“So try ‘Chaucer,’” I heard myself say.
“Why not?” said Barbara. “The author of The Miller’s Tale — it’s got seven letters so there’s room for that all important symbol that makes these codes so hard to crack. Let’s try Chaucer1.” She typed that in with Jane’s login and got the error message.
“Damn it,” she muttered.
“Keep trying,” I suggested, looking over her shoulder. “Try Chaucer and the other possible symbols. It’s worth a try before we give up on Chaucer.”
She tried Chaucer combined with all the numbers on the keyboard and then went through the symbols on the top part of the number keys. We were beginning to think that we were back to square one when bingo! the asterisk worked.
“Way to go,” she told me. “You could have a real career breaking into people’s computers and stealing all their secrets. I better send out a memo telling folks not to be so obvious when they come up with passwords they think no one will ever guess.” Normally I get a real rush when I solve a puzzle, but not this time. Jane’s death made it impossible for me to take any pleasure in cracking her password. It was funny, but I hadn’t felt that way about Hilliard’s death. At that time I was just excited about getting close to a murder investigation. But now, well, I guess I’d had enough murder for a lifetime.
“Good work, Sam,” Gaston said coming closer so that he could see the screen. “What have we found?”
“Well,” Dr. Young explained, navigating thorough Jane Miller-More’s e-mail box. “We found that she never deleted any messages. We’ve got a lot of communication with Hal along with a lot of professional, historian stuff.”
“I’ll want a printout of all her communications,” Gaston said. “But for the moment let’s read them.”
The four of us — Steve, me, Gaston and Barbara — pulled chairs up to the table and read Jane’s private e-mail. I don’t know about the others, but I felt guilty at first, as if I was somehow violating her privacy. I felt better when I reminded myself that I was helping to find evidence to convict a murderer and that she and Hilliard were dead and could not be harmed by our prying.
We even found the original, complete version of the e-mail she sent to Hilliard. It said:
“I’ve thought very carefully about our conversations of the last few weeks. Very carefully. And I’ve come to a decision. It may not be the smartest decision but it’s the one I feel most comfortable with and I’m prepared to face the consequences of having made it.
“I don’t feel I can live a lie for the rest of my life. Whatever the short-term cost I’m determined to be happy and I don’t intend to spend the rest of my life with someone with whom I’m not happy. Accepting the way things were just to avoid risk was horribly unfair to F and I won’t go on with it. I wasn’t sure I had the guts to say that but now that I see that I do I’m more sure than ever that I’ve made the right decision.
“The next step is to act on it. It won’t be easy but I’ll do it and I’ll have to depend on your patience and understanding.
“I’m sorry, believe me, love,
“Sincerely,
Jane.
If we had seen the whole message maybe we would have gotten to her office faster and saved her life. Who knows?
The rest of her e-mail pretty much confirmed what we had already deduced. That she and Hilliard had realized they were still in love. That this time he was ready to make a commitment to her, and she believed him. She was sorry to have to hurt Fred. She was fond of him and it wasn’t his fault that she fell in love with Hal again. These were notes she wrote before he had revealed the full extent of his willingness to harm her just to keep her for himself.
At some point she must have confessed her plagiarism to Hilliard. It seemed that he had assured her he didn’t care, and would let past sins remain buried in the past. It was clear from her e-mail that she and Hilliard discussed how they would deal with the possibility of More’s accusation that she was a plagiarist. Their solution was simple: they decided to take the risk, betting on Fred’s not saying anything, because if he was believed he would look spiteful and petty, and, worse, if he was
disbelieved he would look like a vindictive cuckold who spread ugly false rumours for revenge after his wife left him. Knowing his vanity about his reputation they thought he would make no public accusations.
Many years of experience working with the university crowd told me their strategy probably would have worked.
Jane’s last e-mail to Harold, the one we found on his computer, made it clear that she was not planning to stay in the conjugal home for much longer. We all felt a sadness for her and Hilliard, emotionally exhausted, and anger bordering on fury at Fred More.
When we finished reading Jane’s mail Gaston was the first to speak. “With these letters we’ll have no trouble getting a conviction, I’m sure.”
“It would be nicer still if he took a plea and spared the memory of his wife and Professor Hilliard the embarrassment of a trial,” Steve opined.
We silently agreed with him.
“Would you like me to give you all this on a diskette so that you can print it out down at police headquarters?” Barbara asked Gaston.
“Yes, if you could. That would be best,” Gaston agreed. “You may have to testify that the copy you give me is an accurate and true copy of the files on the computer. I’ll keep the computer itself sealed and under lock and key so that there will be no question of the authenticity of the messages.”
While Barbara fished in her computer case for some blank diskettes Gaston found the CSU people and told them that they could work in the living room and he gave them special instructions as to how he wanted the computer cared for.
“We can leave now,” he told us.
We were standing on the front step feeling at loose ends. We didn’t know what to say to one another. We had just come through an incredibly intense experience and we didn’t know how to bring it to an end.
“I want to thank you all very much for all that you have done to help me,” Gaston addressed us. “I could not have brought this case to a successful conclusion so quickly if not for all your help. We couldn’t save a life, and that’s too bad, but at least we got justice for the victims. Thank you.” He solemnly shook each of our hands. “Would any of you like a car to take you home?”