Katie’s composure had not faltered in the least, and Sally thought she seemed interested in the conversation, as if they were at a dinner party discussing campus politics and not her possible motive for murder.
“The dean’s office would certainly confirm that I was one of several candidates interviewing for the tenure-track position when Barrow got the job. You should also consider the fact that if Barrow had not been granted tenure, that position would most likely be available again. The tradition is that a teacher moves on from the campus that denies him or her tenure.”
“What did you think Barrow’s chances of getting tenure were?”
Katie smiled. “The information I had was that the committee was far more against tenure than for it.”
“And your source?” Sally already knew who Katie’s source was likely to be, having seen Katie leave Delilah’s house early in the morning on more than one occasion. She was always surprised what she discovered as she drove around town on patrol, most of it irrelevant, but much of it interesting.
Katie looked uncomfortable for the first time. “My source? Chief, a college campus itself is a source. You can cross the quad between classes and be three rumors richer than when you started out.”
“So you’re saying that you don’t have access to a reliable source of information on what goes on in the tenure committee?”
“I don’t see the relevance. I’m uncomfortable giving out names of people who might have told me things. It doesn’t feel right.”
Sally shifted her position on the sofa, as if signaling a shift in topic. She noticed Katie visibly relax again.
“I’m just wondering if your source isn’t Delilah Humphries. I know she’s chair of the tenure committee and I believe the two of you are close.”
“Close?”
“As in I’ve seen you leaving her house in the early morning close.”
Now Katie got up from the sofa and walked to the other side of the room. “Have you been watching me for some reason, Chief?”
The trouble with this kind of information, Sally thought, was that people thought she was some kind of loser for having it. She must be stalking because she was either a right wing law-enforcement nut patrolling the streets 24/7, a lovesick lesbian parked in front of her adored’s house, or simply a loner with nothing better to do with her time. The last description fit a little too closely for comfort.
“I just happened to be driving by on patrol. I assumed you were sleeping with Delilah. I apologize if I assumed incorrectly.”
Katie gazed out her front window for a moment before turning back to Sally. “No, you’re correct. We didn’t want anyone to know during the tenure battle since it would appear to be a conflict of interest if Delilah was pushing for a no vote on the committee. She told me that it appeared the committee was going to vote against Barrow but that Landscome was threatening to veto that.”
“Thank you. Just one other question for now. Will you tell me where you were last night?”
Katie smiled. “You did just make this easier for me, as it turns out. I was with Delilah at her house all evening, and I slept there last night.”
“And neither of you left the house for any reason?”
“No.”
“And Delilah Humphries will say the same?”
“Well, I hope so. I fell asleep around ten, so unless she saw me sleepwalking she’ll say that I was there.” Katie picked up her keys and her bag. “If that’s all, Chief, I have to run my car to the shop for servicing and then meet a student on campus.”
Sally handed over one of her cards and left, not even a rumor richer than when she set out. As she drove back to the station along Main Street she noticed that there was more foot traffic out than she was used to seeing, the weather still being fine and the pedestrians clearly enjoying the beginning of their weekend. Delilah Humphries was coming out of the pharmacy, a small plastic bag in her hand. Sally pulled over and lowered the passenger window, calling out her name. Delilah turned her head and moved over to the car.
“Did you want to speak to me, Ms. Chief of Police?” Delilah lowered her face to the open window. “I didn’t know you even knew who I was.”
“Well, I know you are the chair of the Tenure and Promotions Committee and I wondered if you could speak to me for a few minutes about John Barrow.”
Delilah looked a bit put out, as if that wouldn’t be the number one thing on the mind of the chief the morning after a murder in town. As if she’d be the number one thing on Sally’s mind. “I suppose I have a few minutes. Where would you like to talk?”
“I have some things I have to do now. Why don’t I come by your house later this afternoon? Will you be at home?” Sally asked.
“Yes. I suppose you know where that is,” Delilah said.
“I’ll find it,” Sally said, pulling away without another word.
As soon as she got back to the station she called the state lab, trying to mobilize their weekend staff to view her case with at least some urgency. CSI team members were working their way through bags of the detritus found around John Barrow’s body, but all they were coming up with was dirt that was the same as the dirt around the front door, fibers that were the same as the fibers in the clothes the victim wore, and no extraneous match, pin, earring, pocket lint, or other form of matter that might qualify in any sense as a clue. They did not expect that the remainder of the untested material would be any more revealing.
She called the ballistics lab next to find out if there was any useful information found on the bullet or the casing. Sally had delivered the bullet and casing to the lab in Center City immediately after the medical examiner extracted the bullet from John Barrow’s heart. The autopsy was without surprise. No other wounds were found on the body, and the only other finding worth note was the appearance of the wound itself. The compact stippling around it confirmed that the shot was fired from two or three feet away.
Sally missed the sort of connections she had in the city, missed knowing who to call to help speed up the processing of information. With so little crime actually happening in Mount Avery, certainly little of the sort that needed to involve the state labs, she hadn’t had occasion to get to know the experts and technicians that turned evidence into useful information. She picked up the phone to call and make her best case with whoever they assigned in the ballistics lab. She was transferred to a lab supervisor named David Zimmerman.
“Chief Sullivan? I was just going to call you. We put a rush on the material we received from you this morning and I think I have some information for you.”
“We need every bit of it that we can get here.”
“I guess you can say you got lucky on this one. Normally, a bullet and casing don’t tell us enough to identify the make of gun that shot them. I can tell you to look for a gun that shoots three-eighties, for instance, but not which of the many, many guns shoot that bullet.”
“Yeah, I know that. What’s different about this?”
“There are certain ejector type markings on this casing that can only be made by a Walther PPK.”
“You’re kidding.”
“No, ma’am. I’ve only seen this once before, and that was in Chicago.”
Sally sat up further. “That gives us a lot more focus, and we can use that. I’m a little surprised at the gun, though.”
“Yeah, the James Bond gun. Haven’t seen one of those ever used around here, but they’re not that uncommon nationwide,” Dave said.
“I had one myself as a backup gun a long time ago. They’re nice and small, easy to conceal. How certain are you?”
“Pretty damn. Of course, you get me a gun and I can tie it all up for you with this bullet. Until then it’s just something for you to watch out for.”
“Well, that’s more than I had before. Can you fax that report over to me?”
Sally hung up and called Bob Geddings into her office.
“Bob, have you heard anything more on the cell phone?”
Gedding
s looked down at a fist full of notes in his hand and sat to start shuffling through them. “I did get confirmation that the phone was bought by a Jennifer Manos in San Francisco on Wednesday, two days before the shooting. But that doesn’t help us place her at the time of the murder.”
“Nope, it doesn’t.” She thought about her refusal to let any of the state police help in her investigation and wondered if it was her pride or her desire to not be bogged down by their bureaucracy that really was behind that. Certainly she could use a few experienced hands. “Bob, you work on getting some background info on John Barrow. He was at the London School of Economics shortly before coming to Grafton last fall—start tracking back from there. And send your trainee in to me, Jake. I’m going to get him started on something else.”
Sally assigned Jake to tracking down any sales of Walther PPKs in the surrounding multistate area. Then she checked the time and realized that Beth would be on her way over. She went to the break room to brew more coffee.
*
Beth was shown into Sally’s office by Henry, the desk sergeant, and she saw immediately that Sally was running on fumes. Her eyes were red and there were dark circles under them, her hair was a little wild and her smile absent when she looked up to welcome Beth. She motioned her to the empty chair in front of her desk. There was only room for one. Her office was exactly as Beth had expected—small, beige, without personal touch, fairly well organized without appearing obsessively neat, and efficient.
“How are you holding up?” Beth asked her. “You look exhausted.”
“Do I? I probably look like shit, but I feel okay. Just trying to get to as much of this stuff as I can while we’re in the first hours of the investigation.”
“Yes, they always say that on TV, that the first forty-eight hours are the most important time for catching whoever committed a crime.” Beth took her jacket off and put it behind her back. She was exhausted as well and leaned back, stretching her legs in front of her.
“They got that one detail right, then.”
“Hmm.” They looked at each other.
“Thanks for getting me that information so quickly last night. I did talk to the victim’s mother, and I have to say, my impression was more that she was thankful for my kindness in calling her than really upset by the news.”
“The British are terribly polite, as we know,” Beth said. “But that was my impression too. I just talked to her an hour ago. Maybe she didn’t like him either.”
“It seems there was a lot of that going on. I want to review with you the story you told me Thursday night about the fight over John Barrow’s tenure.”
“Thursday night was a far more enjoyable time. I practically feel nostalgic about it. It seems incredible now that the tenure fight I described then, as ugly as it was, could lead to this.”
“We’re looking into it, of course. I’m not certain that it’s the reason Barrow was murdered. He seemed to be a very unpopular man.”
“If I remember correctly,” Beth said, “you were a homicide detective in Chicago.”
“That’s right.”
Beth waited for Sally to give her a little more background but there was only silence.
“That should help you considerably in your investigation.”
Sally smiled briefly. “Let’s hope so. As it stands now we don’t have much physical evidence to go on.” She opened a file and read from some handwritten notes. Beth tried to surreptitiously read Sally’s notes upside down, but Sally closed the file. She was all business now.
“Let me see if I understand the two basic positions on this question. The faculty in general, and the Tenure and Promotions Committee in particular, were against tenure because they thought Barrow unqualified, and they were outraged because they felt this is a faculty and committee decision that the president had no business threatening to veto. How did they know the president threatened to veto their vote?”
“Because I told Delilah Humphries, something akin to publishing the news on the campus network. I hoped that by letting them know about the veto, the tenure committee would deliver a unanimous vote and the faculty would be prepared to back them up, if necessary.”
“Wouldn’t this put you in a bad position with the president?” Sally looked at her with some concern.
“It will, if he finds out, but at this point I don’t see how it puts me in any worse trouble with him. He knows I’m opposed to Barrow. Or was. I don’t know, it’s all such a mess. I wish that the college could go back to the way it was.”
“What way was that?”
“Definitely pre-Landscome. Since he’s been here there’s been a constant battle to defend how we do things. Defending academic integrity and excellence, for instance, is not about ego, as Landscome alleges. It’s about maintaining the system that provides the best education for the students.”
“Excuse me for saying so, but that does sound a little, I don’t know, conservative? Stodgy? As if new ways of doing things is bad.”
“I guess I can only describe it this way. Imagine a large family with opinionated but loving children and trusting but protective parents. The family operates well because they understand their shared mission—to support and love each other as they pursue individual excellence. All of a sudden one of the parents—the most important one for setting and maintaining that tone—well, something terrible happens and that parent is replaced by a stepparent. The evil, greedy, short-sighted stepparent that every kid fears and loathes. Now the common mission of the family members changes quite rapidly to one of survival, maintenance, anger, and resentment. It’s no longer a place where its members thrive. It’s a sorrowful place.”
Sally was silent for a another moment. “Has anyone ever said to you that it’s just a job? That your work isn’t your life? Friends used to say that to me all the time in Chicago.”
Beth felt her nose wrinkle. “You sound like my mother.”
“I take it that’s not a good thing?”
“I’m talking specifically about the irony of her urging me to separate my work life from my private life, something that she never once even attempted to do. She’s a big ‘do as I say, not as I do’ person.”
Sally had opened the file again and had her finger on the notes as she listened to Beth talk. “We should probably get back to the interview.”
“Of course.”
“The other thing I don’t quite understand is why President Landscome cared so much about Barrow. You said at one point that he brought Barrow in from another college. Do you know anything more about that?”
“President Landscome arrived on campus late last summer, and it must have been his first week on the job when he told me a new English professor would be joining the faculty.”
“Is that the usual way faculty members are hired?” Sally asked.
“Not at all. Quite the opposite, in fact. It so happened that we did have a tenure-track position open because I left the faculty when I became dean. The feeling was that Katie Murphy would be moved out of adjunct status and into the tenure-track position, but the department conducted the usual search anyway. That’s protocol. Before that decision had been made, the new president made a very heavy-handed plea that Barrow be given the position.”
“I don’t really understand all the ins and outs of this. Can’t he just hire who he wants?”
“That’s just not the way it traditionally works regarding the hiring of academics. But certainly the president has a lot of power and can lobby for his man. In this case he convinced enough people in the English department to hire Barrow. There are rumors that he gave them something in exchange for the votes.”
“And what was your position on the question of hiring John Barrow?”
“I made it very clear that I thought Katie Murphy should be given the position. She was well liked by faculty and students, highly qualified, and already in place here. She deserved the spot. I don’t think taking that stand got me off on the right foot with the president, but I just didn
’t see that John Barrow was much of an addition to the college.”
“Did you receive any background information on Barrow?”
Beth placed an envelope on Sally’s desk.
“I’ve brought his file in for you, but there’s not much there. His CV is quite short. I did confirm his last adjunct position at the London School of Economics. The letters of recommendation have still not been provided to me, though President Landscome keeps assuring me he has them. Not much else there, I’m afraid.”
“Would it be accurate to say that Katie Murphy potentially benefited from John Barrow’s death?”
“Yes, she would be well positioned to get that spot in the English department and in line for tenure. But I can tell you that there is no way that she killed John Barrow.”
“You say that based on what?” Sally asked.
“Just knowing her. There’s just no possibility of it.”
Sally made a note on the pad in front of her. “I’m going to need the names of all of the faculty and others who had a say in both the hiring of John Barrow and the vote on his tenure.”
Beth hesitated. “All right, I’ll make those available to you.” She rose and put her jacket back on. “What about Jennifer Manos? Have you looked into her situation at all?”
“Why? Do you think she was capable of murdering Barrow?”
“My guess is that she had a motive,” Beth said. “I imagine Jennifer told Barrow that she’s pregnant and he dropped her like a box of rocks.”
“I imagine that’s so, and that’s why she left. Whether she murdered him is now also a question of opportunity. She supposedly was in San Francisco the evening of the murder, when she called you, and if that’s the case, she’s clear. But I did track down the phone number she gave you on her voicemail. The phone was one of the pre-paid minute jobs, and we can’t trace back her location. We’re working on tracing where she bought it, and we’ve left messages for her, of course.”
Sally got up and led Beth out of the office. “Anything I tell you is not to be released to the press, and all updates about the investigation need to come from my office only. I want to keep you informed, but I can’t have what I tell you getting out to the press and from there to the killer.”
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