The Square Root of Murder

by Ada Madison

  “That’s my girl,” Bruce said.

  I was glad to hear it, but my head hurt. “Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Have you gone in to see Virgil yet?”

  “Something else else.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Probably because Bruce was ready for a nap, I was able to finagle my way out of making the call to the Henley PD immediately and into getting him to talk about his own dealings with them yesterday.

  We’d moved to the den and I sat on the couch with his head on my lap. I used my most soothing voice while I rubbed his head.

  “Did you think of anything else from your meeting with Virgil?” I asked. Manipulating girlfriend.

  “I told you everything, about the poison and all. I know the police have questioned everyone from the president to the groundskeepers. Even delivery people and trash collectors who were around that week. The chief is pretty shook up. This kind of thing doesn’t happen every day.”

  “It’s the same on the campus. I wouldn’t want to be working in counseling or admissions right now,” I said. “Can you imagine how frantic the parents are? Of the incoming freshmen especially. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were already some withdrawals. The sooner we get to the bottom of this, the better. I’m going to try to meet Lucy Bronson, the new girl in chemistry, later . . .”

  No sense continuing. Bruce was fast asleep. I wondered how much of my rambling he’d heard. I slipped off the couch and put a pillow under his head to replace my lap. On a cooler day I might have tucked him in with one of my afghans, but the heat had let up only slightly and my west-facing den was warm from the afternoon sun.

  I checked my cell in case I’d missed a call back from Lucy. Nothing.

  I considered calling the police station to be sure Virgil was there. I hoped it was Archie’s day off. In the end, I decided to take my chances. I didn’t want to go on record as having preferred one cop over another.

  I remembered hearing about a forty-eight-hour rule—that most murder cases are solved within forty-eight hours or not at all. It was already more than seventy-two hours since Keith had been murdered. What hope was there?

  I had to give it a shot and talk to the PD, no matter how delinquent I’d been up to now.

  My timeline was complete and printed out. I stuffed it in my briefcase.

  There was nothing left to do but turn myself in. I left a note for Bruce and took off.

  I was the only guest on the bench in the waiting area of the police building, a common posture for me this week, sitting in wait for a superior of one brand or another to chide me. Hanging around the lobby was much better than sitting in Interview Two, however, where I’d stewed before my meeting with Archie on Saturday.

  I’d attached a small, round MAstar pin to my knit top. I’d picked up the pin and a cap and other logo items at a visit to the facility. My thought was that the whole emergency services thing might resonate with the cops in the building and provide good karma.

  Uniformed officers, young and old, male and female, passed by me, chatting, carrying clipboards and folders, talking on cell phones. A few were behind the high counter making and taking calls. Every now and then one of them smiled at me or asked me if I’d been taken care of.

  I checked out the oversized bulletin board across from me. I smiled at several cartoons and one-liners, my favorite being “If someone with multiple personalities threatens to kill himself, should it be reported as a hostage situation?”

  My attention was caught by the word STATISTICS at the top of a series of bar charts. Lo and behold, tacked to the board was a graphic profile of Henley, Massachusetts, compliments of Bristol County.

  I’d finished extracting the metal loops of the twister puzzle while waiting for Dean Underwood this morning and didn’t have another handy. Lacking anything to read, I walked to the corkboard and took a look at my hometown from a different perspective. Laid out on several sheets of legal-size paper was the Henley data on gender (exactly half male and half female, what were the chances?); race (ninety-two percent Caucasian); and age. I was dismayed that on my upcoming forty-fifth birthday, I’d jump to the next bracket, comprising eighteen percent of Henley’s population. Henley had a median income slightly higher than that of the state. Good to know.

  Crime statistics were on the sheet also. Only seven police incidents labeled property crimes were noted for last year. If I reported all the times the boxes from Keith’s office had been stolen, the total would go up by two or three for this year. I had no clue whether the person who took the cartons from my garage was the same one who carted them to the basement of Franklin Hall. Maybe the thief who robbed the thief (me) was also robbed. I felt a wordplay puzzle coming on.

  As for violent crime, there hadn’t been a murder or manslaughter in the last eight years, which was as far back as the chart went. I was sure the numbers were very different for Boston, forty miles to the north. Leave it to Keith Appleton to give our town a memorable, one of a kind statistic.

  I’d been waiting almost an hour, amusing myself with other trivia on the statistics chart. Motor vehicle theft was down fifty percent from ten years ago; the month with the most number of crimes was July for three years running; the total population was up six point nine percent from last year. I flipped through data about climate and the educational level of the Henley population.

  “Fascinating, huh?”

  The loud voice startled me, though I saw that he hadn’t intended it. I hoped I didn’t look as crestfallen as I felt when I turned to face Archie McConnell.

  He, on the other hand, was smiling. It was the smile of victory.

  “I like numbers,” I said.

  “You would.”

  He ushered me into a large office with room for three desks and several extra chairs. A lot of coming and going and paper shuffling throughout the area, but no one was seated.

  Archie took his place behind a desk with his name on it and indicated the chair I should take. We both knew that I was about to concede defeat. My role as unofficial police consultant had come to an end.

  Archie was nicer to me than last time, leading me to believe I was no longer a viable suspect in his mind. He nodded politely as I announced that I had information from some of my students and from the janitor at the college. I hated to drag Woody into the morass of those who lied to the police, but I felt that once I explained his motivation, he’d be forgiven quickly and not held accountable.

  “It’s about the cake and soda,” I said. “I know why you didn’t find any at the scene.”

  I spread out the timeline, which included what I knew of my students’ visits, without naming them. To my chagrin, Archie had had no call from anyone at Henley since his initial interrogation. I wondered about the legitimacy of marking the three applied statistics students down a grade for their cowardice. I was most disappointed in Rachel, over whom I had no grading power. Not that I would ever do such a thing.

  I oriented the timeline so Archie could read it. I’d marked the events of the day and laid them out in a straight horizontal line. “I’ve been over this a million times,” I said, breaking my rule never to exaggerate with numbers. “This is what I have.”

  Ten A.M., Woody hangs Keith’s award on his office wall.

  Eleven forty-five A.M., Woody sees Keith’s car in the lot.

  Twelve fifteen P.M., Franklin Hall party begins.

  One forty-five P.M., Rachel finds Keith dead, sees no yellow sheets, leaves cake and soda outside door. Two thirty P.M., Three girls arrive, see Keith dead, see cake and soda outside, no yellow sheets.

  Four P.M., Woody arrives, calls police, removes cake and soda from office, sees yellow sheets.

  Four ten P.M., police arrive, see no cake or soda, but do see yellow sheets.

  I indicated the place on the line between two thirty when the cake and soda were still outside the office, and four P.M., when the police found yellow pages, allegedly of Rachel’s thesis.

  “Here’s where t
he killer came back,” I said. “To incriminate Rachel, he went back and planted the cake inside the office and threw pages from Rachel’s thesis around, except Woody messed things up by trashing the cake. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  Archie stroked his chin while his head bobbed comically.

  “The killer came back and messed with his own crime scene,” Archie said. “Busy guy.”

  Archie picked up my timeline and held it close to his face, studying it. “So you’re saying the killer was essentially hanging around the crime scene waiting to plant evidence. I’m assuming you think he also planted the chemicals from the cabinet so it would point to Rachel, who had a key.” I nodded. “Why didn’t he just drop everything at once? Why risk going back?”

  “Well, there was no cake and soda until Rachel took it upstairs. That gave the killer the idea. And then I guess throwing the marked-up yellow pages in was just an afterthought. Overkill. So to speak.”

  “So the killer was at the party and saw Rachel head up to deliver the cake and soda and decided to take advantage of the situation. The overkill. Where’d he get the yellow pages?”

  I felt my face flush. My eyes suddenly itched. All along, I’d suspected the killer was one of the attendees at the Franklin Hall party, but that had been theory. Now the fact seemed to emerge from the timeline and the logic of the movements on Friday afternoon. The killer saw Rachel leave the room with the cake and soda. The killer had access to draft pages of Rachel’s thesis. I saw draft sheets in the trash around Franklin all the time, though something was different about those sheets compared to the way Virgil had described the ones at the crime scene. I wished I could remember his exact words. No matter, the point was that the killer could have picked them out of the trash any day of the week, if he was part of the Franklin family.

  I didn’t like my theory so much anymore.

  Apparently Archie did.

  “Nice work,” he said, “which we could have—”

  “If I or the girls had come to you immediately, you’d have come up with this.”

  “I could charge you all with obstruction,” he said. I drew in my breath. “But I don’t see the point.” I let out my breath. “I’m assuming Rachel Wheeler told you she entered the office and found the victim, then exited and put the food outside the door.”

  I nodded, grudgingly.

  “I notice you haven’t given me the names of the three students who went to the office at two thirty.”

  “I can’t tell you my sources.”

  “What? Are you a reporter now?”

  More like a priest, I thought. “Do I need a lawyer?”

  “Come on, Dr. Knowles. This is not one of your math puzzles. This is a murder investigation.”

  He was right. When he shoved a pad of paper and a pen in front of me, I acquiesced and wrote “Pamela Noonan,” “Elizabeth Harrison,” and “Casey Tremel.”

  “You did give us the janitor without a problem.”

  I hoped Archie didn’t mean that poor Woody was about to be accosted by the Henley PD.

  “It was hard to explain how the cake went missing in the end without involving him. But he was only—”

  Ding. Ding. Ding. Pause. Ding. Ding. Ding.

  A low-level alarm went off on Archie’s watch. He checked the time and got up abruptly. “Excuse me one minute.”

  It was more like fifteen minutes. I saw many no smoking signs in the room, but no warning against using electronic devices, so I took out my phone to check my email. There were messages from my applied statistics students as well as companies trying to sell me shoes and posters, but nothing from Lucy. I was curious to know if she’d admit to dating Keith, and, if so, whether that put her higher or lower on the list of suspects.

  Maybe I should have shared that info with Archie, too. Nah, I wouldn’t want to spoil my reputation as The Great Withholder.

  I chose one of the games my phone offered to keep me amused. I decided on an easy one: moving three boxes of graduated sizes from one pile to another in the smallest number of moves. The restriction was that only one box at a time could be moved, and you could move a box only on top of a larger one. This was a very smart game in that if you tried to move a bigger box onto a smaller box, a nasty beep sounded. After a few seconds the game reminded me of the movements of the boxes that held Keith’s office effects. I quit the game.

  I went online again, clicked around, and found a neat game to foster algebraic reasoning. I bookmarked it for use in a math workshop. When things got back to normal.

  The algebra game put me in a good mood by the time Archie returned with a cup of coffee in a mug that had seen better, cleaner days. Strange to take coffee at the sound of a wristwatch alarm, but to each his own. Maybe he was on medication that required a concomitant dose of caffeine.

  “I’d have gotten you a cup, too, but I don’t recommend it. Can I get you a soda?” Archie asked.

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “So where were we?”

  “I’m very concerned that it’s too late to solve this murder. It’s been more than forty-eight hours.”

  “I know you hear that all the time, but it isn’t a hard and fast rule. For big cities it might be true since those guys are dealing with at least a murder a day. They can’t afford to let fresh ones go, so a case is considered on its way to cold much sooner than here.”

  The idea of a homicide as “fresh” brought back the taste of the spicy pasta salad I’d had for lunch. I rubbed my nose, smelling a ripe body.

  “What’s next?” I asked.

  Archie laughed. “What? Are you part of the squad now?”

  I shrugged. “You have civilian volunteers, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, to make the fund-raising calls and fill in as crossing guards. Interested?”

  I was beginning to like Archie. “I’ll pass.”

  “I thought so.”

  “So, what is next?”

  Archie looked past me, over my shoulder. I turned to see what had attracted his attention. Virgil and Rachel had entered from the back and were headed for a desk and chair set across the room. That couldn’t be good.

  Archie stood and I followed. He led me out of the room in the opposite direction while I strained my neck to get a glimpse of the expressions on Virgil’s and Rachel’s faces. Too far away. I consoled myself with the observation that Rachel was not in handcuffs or prison garb.

  It amazed me how little it took to give me comfort these last few days.

  “We’ll call you if we need anything else from you,” Archie said, all business now, nearly pushing me over the threshold, back into the waiting area.

  I guessed he wanted to join the conversation—I hoped not another interrogation—with Rachel.

  Walking past the bench I’d waited on and past the busy telephone desk, it dawned on me. Archie didn’t have a prescribed, alarm-triggered need for meds or coffee. He’d come out here to tell his cronies to pick up Rachel Wheeler. How dumb was I? I felt betrayed, for no good reason, since deep in my heart I knew Archie was just doing his job. Why else would he want everyone’s names? I was lucky he hadn’t charged me.

  I couldn’t see why Archie couldn’t at least have been honest with me. So what if I hadn’t been completely forthcoming with him right away. Sworn officers of the law should be held to a higher standard. It was low and tacky to fake a timer alarm on your watch.

  I made a note to see if I could pull that same trick with my watch, should an occasion warrant it.

  On the whole, I was back to not liking Archie.

  CHAPTER 19

  I drove toward home, defeated. I felt I should have been smarter, quicker, more persistent in my role in Henley’s first murder investigation in at least a decade, and three floors above my own campus office to boot. Ask me to construct a crossword puzzle or a brainteaser and I was on the job. I managed to meet a rigid schedule of producing original puzzles and mindbenders for several publications. But when it came to something really
important, like helping a friend out of deep trouble, I was a failure, plain and simple.

  I wondered where Rachel could have been that they found her so quickly. On the threshold of coming in to the station herself, I hoped. And the other girls? I’d thought all along they weren’t taking their actions seriously enough, but did I really want them grilled by Archie? I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d been well within my rights to have kept all the names to myself. Something to check, if I thought I’d ever again need to know.

  The image of Rachel, slump-shouldered, walking in front of Virgil came back to me. The fact that I’d brought it on with my oh-so-spectacular timeline made everything worse. I called myself every name I could think of from ratfink to snitch to stoolie to the good old-fashioned tattletale, and variations thereof.

  I wished I were one of those special television characters who could sneak into a building, plant a bug, and listen in on all conversations from an unmarked, well-equipped van. Or better still, that I’d been able to find a clue, a giant clue, that would have led us to the true killer.

  Rachel’s freedom was out of my hands. I hoped her aunt’s lawyer would do better by her than I had.

  Letting go of the idea that I could help left me free for what I should be doing. I had a mountain of work to do at home, what with reading student papers from last week, scheduling my summer students, and creating next month’s puzzles for my editor, but Bruce hadn’t called and I knew he would as soon as he woke up.

  I selected number one in my CD player, Tim McGraw, and hummed along. Just be still . . .

  I needed another comfort destination, other than my home. As luck would have it, Ariana’s shop was only a few blocks away. I made a quick right and headed for A Hill of Beads.

  I found Ariana starting to close up. I thought she was quitting early until I realized it was after five o’clock. The day flew by when you screwed it up.