A Fugitive Truth

by Dana Cameron

  “Ladies’ room. Where?” I managed to gasp out.

  “Down the hall, second door on the left,” she answered, stepping back out of my way.

  The door opened as I was reaching for the coarse brown paper towels on the sink. Detective Kobrinski came in and shut the door, leaning back against it quietly while I dried my hands and face. After a moment, she said, “You sick?”

  “No.” I looked into my bag, to avoid looking in yet another mirror, and found a comb I didn’t even know I had. I combed out my hair by feel, even if it didn’t really need it.

  Pam looked quietly triumphant, convinced she had the right guy. I was no longer so sure, in spite of the weird confidence Paul had unknowingly just shared with me.

  “Quite a case, huh? That guy is about as cold as they come.”

  “Sounds like the Paul I knew,” I said, putting my comb away. I turned to her. “But after you left…” I told the detective what I’d seen. “It was downright eerie,” I concluded.

  She took it in and nodded once or twice. “You know, I wouldn’t trust that guy as far as I could spit him,” she said thoughtfully. “Guys like that honestly don’t realize that they’re doing anything wrong, and that gives their words the ring of truth. As far as they believe, they didn’t do anything and can’t understand what all the trouble is about.”

  “This was eerie,” I repeated. I didn’t yet have the words to explain what convinced me that she was on the wrong track.

  “I wonder,” the detective mused. “Everyone knows that those mirrors are two-way. It was probably just a little performance for whoever was back there. You told me what he was like. And I’ll be able to review it on the videotape, too.”

  I shivered. “I don’t know. I know I might have said I remembered that he had been calculating, but I don’t think anyone is that good a liar. Something was going on there, something that we don’t entirely understand yet.”

  Kobrinski waved my doubts aside. “In any case, it will all be cleared up when I speak to the folks in Michigan. Look, Ms. Russo will be done with her statement in a minute, and the two of you can get back to Shrewsbury.” She put her hand on my arm and looked genuinely touched for the first time, not evasive, not sarcastic. “Emma. You’ve done really well with this. It’s been a big help. Thank you.”

  I wasn’t convinced I’d done anything at all, so I just nodded and sat down where she told me to wait. I was aching from my fall, and I wanted to get out of there. I wanted to stop thinking about what I saw, but that wasn’t going to happen. A subdued scuffling in the hallway caught my attention and when I saw it was Paul, I found myself automatically shrinking back, trying to press myself into the wall. He walked by unresisting, led by Officer Campbell, but he started to balk when he recognized me for the second time that day.

  “You!” he called, as if searching to place me. “I remember you! You tell me! Is Faith really dead? I’ll believe you.”

  It was no compliment that Paul should believe me. The implication of course was that I was too stupid or unimaginative to lie.

  I really didn’t want to answer him, but Officer Campbell stopped, obviously wanting to watch Paul’s reaction.

  “Faith’s dead.” Then the absolute burning need in Paul’s eyes drove me to say more than I meant to. “I found her.”

  He looked stunned, the way he did when I first saw him in the interview room, until Campbell said, “C’mon, you,” and yanked his arm brusquely. When he looked back at me, Paul’s eyes were dull and dead again.

  Sasha emerged hesitantly as soon as Paul was gone. “I wasn’t coming out while he was here.” She was still pale, her eyes red and puffy. “Are you okay? You look kind of green. Is your head bothering you?”

  I sighed. “It’s been a rough day, Sasha. How about you?”

  She shrugged and smiled wanly. “I’m okay. It all happened so fast. That’s all.”

  When we reached my parked car, I paused to fish out my keys.

  Sasha blurted out, “I didn’t press charges.”

  That surprised me. “Oh?”

  She fiddled with her hair, trying repeatedly to get one short strand to stay behind her ear. “I mean, I don’t think it was really assault or anything—”

  I was unable to quash an impatient impulse to explain the niceties of the law as I had learned it first hand. “Yes, it was—”

  “—and besides, they’ve got bigger things than me to worry about with him. I just came along to tell the detective sergeant my side of what happened. What I knew.”

  We got into the car. I wanted to know, too. “Did Paul say anything to you? Anything at all?”

  Sasha paused before she said, “It was creepy. When he grabbed me he said, ‘You promised.’ That’s all. Then he got a good look at me and seemed really surprised. Then he saw you and ran.”

  “Yeah, he recognized me, but I don’t think he remembered who I was right away.” After a couple of tries, I got old Bessy to turn over and catch. I pulled out of the parking lot, and headed us back toward Shrewsbury. “What did he mean, ‘you promised’?” I said almost to myself.

  The librarian shrugged. “How should I know? I never saw him before. That’s all he said.”

  “He was after Faith, I bet,” I said. “Must have been. I mean, your collar was up, you and she have a similar build, close to the same hair color…”

  We drove along in silence until I noticed that Sasha was weeping again. “Hey! Hey, what is it, Sasha?” I pulled over onto the side of the road, just shy of the Shrewsbury gates. The sound of the tires was muffled by the fallen pine needles on the gravel.

  Sasha covered her face with her hand and leaned against the window, unable to stop. I cast about for a Kleenex, but the last of my stock of fast-food napkins had been used to wipe off the windows days ago. I settled for patting her arm, and she startled me by grabbing onto my hand and holding on desperately. She pulled out a handkerchief of her own and wiped her face but couldn’t seem to stop crying. It took about five minutes before she calmed down, then let my hand go. I was glad, not only because I hoped she would tell me what had been troubling her, but also because I had been leaning against the shift, and my leg was going to sleep.

  Her first words chilled me. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this.” It was almost like an echo of the beginning of Faith’s story.

  I waited what seemed like an eternity before she took a deep breath and continued. I couldn’t seem to get one myself, half of me dying to hear, half of me wishing that she’d reconsider and clam up.

  “Everything was supposed to be so much better, you know, once I got this job, moved up here. But now it seems like everything just gets more and more confused and stressful, and—” She sighed. “I don’t know. Even on top of everything else that’s going on. The libraries going through a really big shake-up. There will probably be cuts.”

  “What’s been stressful, Sasha?” I knew I had to tread carefully here: I thought that “everything else” probably meant the deaths, but I didn’t know for sure. The part of me that wanted to hear won out, but I don’t think it was entirely a matter of moral fortitude or compassion. Call it professional curiosity, the lure of an impromptu interview that insinuates you into the middle of something. You could also call it a part of my avocational interests.

  She leaned back against the black vinyl headrest and closed her eyes to collect herself. “The books, the manuscripts we can’t find. I’m just so afraid I’ll be blamed for it, since I was the most recent hire. Harry thinks that it was the former head librarian, Mr. Talbot, but even he seems unsure about that lately, and of course, he’s got even more to lose than I do, so I can’t blame him for being cautious about it. I mean, Director Whitlow and Mr. Talbot were—are—great friends, and if there are jobs on the line, no one wants to stick out too much. But I don’t think they were deaccessioned, I don’t think they were misplaced. I think…I think someone’s, right now, stealing them.”

  I sat, amazed. “Who?”

 
“I don’t know,” she answered wearily. “Someone with access, someone who knows how our security system works. Someone who knows how much these things are worth.” Sasha suddenly giggled, then opened her eyes. “Of course, we spend an awful lot of money on brochures telling everyone just how rare and valuable our collections are, then we invite total strangers to come in and see things for themselves.” There was an uncharacteristically bitter note in her voice.

  “Come on,” I protested. I knew she was right to some extent, but she touched a nerve in me. “You do security checks, you keep track of everything that gets examined. Unless you want to keep the materials locked up and never allow them to see the light of day, there’s always going to be some risk. Otherwise, you should just call yourself a storage facility and not a research library.”

  This was the eternal conflict between scholars and the people who had the works they needed to study. What good was it to preserve these things if no one got any use from them? What good would they be if they were lost or destroyed?

  “You’re right, you’re right,” she answered, less sad now and more angry. “I’m just tired, I’m scared—people have been dying around here! That’s not supposed to happen, and it keeps happening! Can we go?” she asked impatiently. “I’ve got to get back. I’ve got work to do.”

  “We’re going.” I started the car up again, and pulled onto the road. A brief skid on the sandy verge was the only betrayal of my annoyance with her moodiness. My head ached. I’d been assaulted, disbelieved, then had that followed by an episode straight out of a bad dream, and no one seemed to care. Sasha didn’t even recognize that I’d actually come to her rescue.

  The icing on the cake came when I drew up to the guardhouse at the entrance, and one of the older guards told me that Mr. Constantino wanted to see me right away.

  “Any idea why?” I asked.

  “I couldn’t tell you,” he said. His nervous tone suggested he could and wasn’t going to.

  “I’ll stop by presently,” I said. “I’ve got a few things to take care of.” What I really needed was a little time alone to pull myself together. I turned to Sasha as we neared the library annex. “I’m going to drop you off here, okay? I’ll be back in a bit.”

  “Great. Fine.” She shut the passenger side door with such force that it shook my poor little car. “See you later.”

  “Not if I see you first,” I mumbled under my breath. “Thanks for the ride, Emma. Thanks for listening, Emma, you’re so sympathetic. You were right there, when I couldn’t even turn to my boyfriend. Oh, no problem, Sash, happy to do it.” I didn’t bother watching her walk away, I didn’t care if she was okay. Well, I did, really; I was just willing to take the dose of guilt later on for being angry with her now. I don’t know why I should have felt guilty, I hadn’t done anything to justify it. But that never seemed to matter.

  Once I got to my room, I wondered what to do. I knew I should get back to the library to wait on the letters or work on transcribing more of the encoded parts of Madam Chandler’s diary, but I didn’t want to. Not yet. I continued to change into a pair of clean jeans and one of Brian’s flannel shirts, for no better reason than I wanted to shed my skin, put the scene at the police station behind me, and maybe in doing so, take a little comfort in the order of the universe.

  Calling Brian, I was chagrined to find that he was not in his office, and I took it out on his voice mail. “Hi, it’s me. Paul Burnes, Faith’s ex, was just arrested. So you can relax. Stop worrying about me. I’m fine. Everything’s fine. Call me tonight. I love you. Bye.”

  A glance at the clock in the hall told me that even if I didn’t want to get any more work done, I was going to have to move it if I was going to rescue my computer and notes from the library before the reading room closed for the evening. Everything was still in a panic, even though there was a chance now that the mystery was solved, I thought.

  But it wasn’t all solved, I remembered with a frown as I drove down to the library annex. I still needed to find out whether Jack’s death was an accident. And now Sasha admitted that books were going missing as well.

  As I locked up Bessy, I suddenly realized there was an undue amount of noise and bustle that I couldn’t attribute to the ongoing repair work—the Martini brothers usually knocked off around three. I got close enough to see a couple of police cruisers, radios squawking, and the sirens now off, but lights were still whirling, parked in front of the library.

  Then I watched as Pam Kobrinski was leading Michael Glasscock out the front doors.

  Drawing closer, I realized that she wasn’t leading him, but that he was talking and she was taking notes. I had just reached them when the real center of excitement emerged beside us. Two very burly officers, who might have been clones of Officer Campbell, were having a hard time holding onto their prisoner, who was screaming at the top of his lungs and thrashing violently against them.

  “—bullshit! Fucking bullshit! It’s a fucking setup! I didn’t—”

  I didn’t immediately recognize Gary Conner in his civilian clothes, but he stopped dead in his tracks when he saw me. That lasted only a split second before he hurled himself toward me, and if the two policemen hadn’t kept their grip, he would have made it. The fact that he was handcuffed didn’t seem to make any difference at all, and he nearly dragged them along with him.

  “This is your goddamned fault!”

  I stepped back involuntarily against the force of his accusation.

  The cops dragged him along toward one of the cruisers, and Gary managed to get his feet up against the side of the car, preventing them from stuffing him into the back seat. They struggled a while longer, and he twisted around just long enough to spit venomously at me.

  “You watch yourself, cunt!” he screamed. “I’ll be back for you!”

  Stunned, I stared at the spit as it soaked into the pine needles by my feet, trying to make sense of all this. I was glad for the number of cops that was there, and wished for a few dozen more.

  The door to the cruiser was finally slammed shut. Gary, now incarcerated in the back, had swung around on the seat and began kicking a rear window with both feet. After a few warnings, the two cops got in the front of the car and started the engine.

  I could still hear the dull thumps as Gary hurled himself at the windows and doors. It must hurt, I thought. It must hurt him to do that. Good. And still, he persisted. What the hell had happened? What did he think was my fault?

  Pam Kobrinski was saying something, but I didn’t comprehend a word of it, as I watched the police car start slowly back toward town.

  Chapter 15

  “YOU KNOW,” PAM KOBRINSKI WAS SAYING, “I think we just Mirandized our last loose end.”

  “Hang on a second,” I said. “What the hell just happened?”

  “Gary Conner quit,” she answered with satisfaction. “And when he went to clean out his locker, Dr. Glasscock here noticed something Gary shouldn’t have had.”

  Michael was drooping against the doorway, eyes closed, big black overcoat almost hanging off his shoulders in a hugely Byronic display of world weariness. “I was walking past the security office. He had a stack of books in his locker. Books from the library.”

  “So you put him in a headlock and called the cops, there, Batman?” I asked, skeptical. The image of Michael hanging by his ankles for his preprandial nap seemed to make more sense than the thought of him tangling with Gary physically.

  “I could have, if I wanted to,” he said with an adolescent shrug, eyes still closed. “Instead, prudence being the better part et cetera, et cetera., I slunk away and squealed on him to les flics. I’m no fool.”

  “So, wait, I’m confused.” I turned to Pam. “Gary didn’t kill…?”

  Pam shook her head violently. “No, no. There are two separate situations here—”

  “Situations.” Michael covered his face with one hand, shook his head, and blew a wet raspberry by way of editorial comment. “I love your use of the language. I
must check my dictionary to find out when situation became a synonym for murder.”

  Kobrinski smiled patiently at the unkempt man; she could afford to be indulgent now. “Let’s start at the beginning. I believe Paul Burnes was responsible for drowning his ex-wife. A crime of passion. Then Dr. Miner, because Burnes was afraid Miner had seen him. According to our medical examiner, Dr. Bambury, Jack Miner died of alcohol poisoning all right, but it was probably a substantial amount of iso-proponol—like rubbing alcohol—in his booze. There were lesions, eruptions, all over his trachea. I suspect that Paul Burnes saw Miner spying on him as he carried his ex-wife’s body to the stream that morning and decided that no one else should know about it.”

  “Where was Faith killed?” I asked. “I know she didn’t die in the stream where she was found.”

  “We found traces of cement mortar in her lungs,” came the grim reply. “She was probably killed over by—”

  “The library,” I interrupted automatically. Kobrinski stared at me, agape, and Michael really seemed to wake up and take notice for the first time. “There’s been a big tub of water out there for the repairs, the whole time I’ve been here.”

  “Right,” Pam said slowly. “I think that she agreed to meet Paul by the fence behind the library—it’s hidden by all these trees and it’s close to the road, as you well know from our little race the other day. But I’ll bet Paul Burnes was waiting for her on the wrong side of the fence and drowned her there.”

  I thought about what Dr. Theresa Moretti had told me about the sort of strength and the emotional coldness that it took to hold someone under water until they stopped breathing forever. After Paul’s performance behind the two-way mirror, I was convinced he could have done it. He could have seduced the Sphinx, he could have outwitted Loki. And Jack would have taken a drink from Guyana Jim Jones; Paul certainly would have had no problem talking him into a little outdoor party for two and poisoning the bottle.

  The Detective Sergeant continued. “But both of these deaths are different situ…er…circumstances from the theft of the books, which I understand has been going on for some time. I think we can safely say that Gary Conner was responsible for that.”