“You handcuffed?” Scovill said. “No.”
“You pressing charges?” “Should I?”
“Not if you plan to stay in Cross for any length of time,” Scovill said.
“In that case, take me home, James.” Pilate fell back into the ripped upholstery of the sheriff’s truck and glanced at his watch. “Shit! That guy knocked me right into next year.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Pilate’s jaw was purple on New Year’s Day. His doorbell rang just after eight a.m., as he gingerly touched a mug of coffee to his lips.
He gathered his bathrobe around him and answered the door.
“You all right?” Trevathan asked as Pilate opened the door and beckoned him inside.
“Uh, yeah,” he said. “Dr. Trevathan, I want to assure you that I did nothing to provoke—”
“I know that. Craig Olafson is a fat-assed punk, a bully,” Trevathan said, accepting a mug of coffee from Pilate.
“Why me though?” Pilate said, settling into his armchair.
“Why not you?” Trevathan snorted. “Makes no difference to his crowd. He’s the mayor’s kid, a lazy fat fuck who does whatever he damn well pleases in this town because of who his daddy is.”
“I just keep making powerful friends here, don’t I?” Pilate said. “Look, the good news is that President Lindstrom is out of town for a couple of days,” Trevathan said. “The bad news is that he will hear about this. Strike two.” “Strike two?”
“The smoking thing.”
“You’re kidding me! That was a strike?” Pilate set his coffee cup down.
“Mr. Pilate, Jack Lindstrom fired a groundskeeper for throwing a candy wrapper out of his truck off campus, downtown,” Trevathan said. “The dumb-ass did it in front of Lindstrom just to antagonize him. Lindstrom’s a real prissy bastard anyway. Of course, that’s not the reason he gave when he fired the guy, but the guy is gone just the same.”
“Great,” Pilate said, his head in his hands. “Just great.”
“Just lay low,” Trevathan said, standing. “Glad you’re okay, but my advice is to just go in, do your job well, and stay out of trouble. Hopefully that jaw will look better before the boss gets back, so it won’t have him asking too many questions.”
Pilate snorted at Trevathan’s hangdog repeat of that phrase. “Well, what about you? Don’t you care what he thinks of you?”
“I have tenure. That means I don’t give two shits what Jack thinks of me.” He chuckled mirthlessly. “I’m only interim dean, so I’m technically not management.”
“What happened to the last dean?” Trevathan smiled.
“Great.” Pilate showed the old professor to the door.
“Thanks, Doc.”
“Yup.” Trevathan trudged through new snow to his old pickup.
Pilate dozed that afternoon; he dreamt about the old murders and his new enemies. The school’s carillon, from its perch in the tower over the library, played a tune he couldn’t quite make out.
His jaw ached. He dug some Tylenol out of one of the cardboard moving boxes and took three, then finished his coffee and showered.
The water was the color of rust and not very warm. He hopped out, dried his hair with a towel, shaved under his chin and neck, and dressed himself.
Once he was much more presentable than the day he’d first arrived, he looked over the syllabi for his classes. Yawning, he put them aside.
Pilate unpacked some boxes of books and placed them in the built-in shelves on one wall of his new digs. One book, a gift from his grandfather, caught his eye: Modern Criminal Investigation.
His grandfather, a crime-novel-loving, would-be potboiler writer, had the book in his effects when he died. No one else much cared to have anything of his grandfather’s, since none of it was worth much monetary value, but young Johnny Pilate had kept that book, and he cherished every underlined passage, every pencil-marked note his grandfather had left in the margin. There was something comforting in knowing that one day, his grandfather had tread across those very same words on those very same pages; he had been there, and John could revisit anytime he wanted.
Flipping through the index, Pilate searched fruitlessly for information on crime scenes, murder-suicides in particular. When he realized there was not much there, he gently placed the book on the shelf, treating the legacy with care.
After a boring night icing his jaw and availing himself of the pirated porn on television, Pilate awoke to the last day before semester office hours were to begin. He walked over to his office early.
The sunlight glared off the crunchy snow. He fished in his pocket for scratched sunglasses and slipped them over his bruised face.
The main door of the building was unlocked. He noticed some galoshes in the small entryway and some melting snow tracks leading to the dean’s office up the hall. Pilate went the opposite direction, taking the stairs to the suite of closets, one of which was his office.
At his office door was a fat manila envelope. He had just picked it up and started to open it when he noticed that Kate Nathaniel’s door was open. Pilate slipped the envelope under his arm and walked over to Kate’s door. He poked his head in and was treated to a nice view: Kate on all fours, under her desk, plugging in her computer. Sting’s “Fields of Gold“ played on the radio as a fitting backdrop for the occasion. “Hi,” Pilate said, his eyes helplessly drawn to her Levi’s-clad ass.
As predictably as a character in a television sitcom, Kate bumped her head in surprise. “Shit!“ she said. She crawled out from under her desk, her hand clamped to the crown of her head, glaring at Pilate in annoyance.
“Sorry,” he said, stifling a laugh.
“No problem,” she said, her face softening as she rose to her feet. “Well, well. If it isn’t Rocky Balboa.”
Pilate rolled his eyes upward, turning his bruised jaw away from her. “Geez. Word travels fast around here.”
“It has been said that you can’t fart in Cross without someone smelling it across town,” Kate said.
“That’s a new one,” Pilate fibbed, leaning against the doorjamb. “I just got on the wrong side of a Mack truck.”
“That’s a new one,” Kate also fibbed, sitting in the wheeled chair beside her desk, flicking on the computer monitor.
“Heh. Yeah.”
“So,” she said, fishing in her desk drawer for a rubber band, “you ready to stop your brawling and start teaching?” Her eyes smiled, and she had her hair back in a way that reminded Pilate of a cheerleader he had kissed in high school.
“Hell yes.” Pilate shifted his weight from one foot to another. “I’m ready for an invigorating semester here at Cross.”
“Sounds delightful. Thirteenth grade? High school with ashtrays?” Kate touched the tip of her nose with her finger and pointed at Pilate. “Lindstrom has pretensions of making the place some sort of ‘Harvard of the Midwest,’ but most people are pretty dubious.”
“How long you been here?”
Kate’s eyes glanced at a framed photo on her desk, the subject of which he could not see. “Six years.”
“And I suspect you’ve had enough,” he said. “You suspect correctly.”
“So why stay?”
“Criminal record. Bank robbery.” She smiled. “I didn’t want to get too far from home,” she said.
“Oh, so you’re a native?”
“No, but my husband is,” she said.
“Oh, I see,” Pilate said, feeling foolish. He had not noticed a ring previously, and he clumsily and quite obviously looked to see that there was no ring now.
“Gone,” she said, coolly but not unkindly, as if she had said it enough times with the required feeling. “Passed away.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.
“Thanks. Anyway, I don’t want to take Kara too far from her grandpa. He lives in the next town over,” she said. “He owns the mortuary or funeral home or whatever you want to call it.”
“I see,” Pilate said.
There was a pause; Donald Fagen’s “I.G.Y.” filled the void. “Well, I better get to work on my grade book,” Kate said, her ponytail bobbing as she turned her head to the computer screen and back to Pilate.
“Me too,” he said, turning away from her door and pointing to his office. “Nice talking with you.”
“You too, bruiser. Keep your left up.”
Settling into his office, Pilate turned on his computer and set the manila envelope aside while he brewed some coffee in the office anteroom. He heard Kate singing along to the radio a little.
When he sat back down at his desk to wait for the coffee to brew, he opened the envelope marked “John Pilate” and emptied it on his desk. Neat photocopies of crime scene photos, witness affidavits, and news clippings from the murder-suicide spilled out. A Post-it note on the police report from 1963 said simply:
I could tell you were interested. Enjoy!
Krall
Pilate didn’t get around to opening his grade book that morning.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The first week of school was the usual array of new students, all asking, “Will this be on the test?” seemingly every other moment in his lectures. Thick-waisted farm girls with too much makeup and very little academic interest pranced before the watchful eyes of young men with sex, cheap beer, and not much else occupying their minds. Pilate decided Kate’s appraisal of the studentry was very close to on target.
That wasn’t to say there weren’t some bright spots beyond the girls with tight sweat pants featuring sex kitten phrases on their asses. There were a few students in every class who clearly viewed college as an opportunity to escape the rustic hell where they’d grown up, and Pilate aimed to help them as best he could.
The morning’s speech class was entertaining. He had assigned a five-minute speech, “about something you feel strongly about.” Pilate guiltily took some sick pleasure in counting how many times students said “uh, like, and you know“ in their speeches about smoking, Jesus Christ as their personal savior, their housecats, and even their cars. That depressing output aside, Pilate’s elitist bias against the mostly rural students was challenged by a few standouts.
One such student was a popular senior basketball player named Riley Pierson, who exploded the stereotype of the big man on relatively small campus. Riley was a good-looking, intelligent, pleasant kid. His folks owned a grain elevator in Goss City. Pilate had no illusions that Riley wasn’t a hell-raiser, but he seemed to balance it pretty well.
Riley’s first speech in class was a bold talk about why it was important for Cross College to become more sensitive to the handful of foreign and minority students enrolled there. He related an incident that had occurred in his first semester, when two black basketball team members recruited from Kansas City had quit the team and left Cross. Excellent players, each topping six-five, the players were called “The Twin Towers.” The Towers quit Cross, Riley said, because someone slid Little Black Sambo children’s books under their dorm room doors with cryptic threats scrawled in the margins. “We could’ve gone to regionals that year if people here hadn’t run Terrell and Anthony off,” Riley said. “Cross College needs to know that racism hurts us all. We’re all on the same team. Think about it.”
Though Pilate could argue that the net effects of the racist acts were more far reaching than losing a basketball tournament, he had to give Riley credit for talking about such a volatile topic. From the nods of fellow students and a couple of dreamy stares from girls, Pilate felt Riley’s talk had resonated.
After class, Pilate ran into Krall in the cafeteria and thanked him for the “reading material.”
Krall invited Pilate to join him. As they dug into their lunches—the school had a remarkably good salad bar and grill— Krall surveyed the room. “Well, I figured you’d need something to occupy your mind during these cold winter nights when you aren’t grading papers,” he said.
“Yeah, thanks,” Pilate said, spearing a sliced hardboiled egg on his salad. “The amateur porn hour is only so entertaining.”
Krall leered over his tray. “Well…” He gestured with his fork at a table of hard-bodied, arguably pretty students. “There’s always the extracurricular. You like volleyball?”
Pilate laughed. “No thanks. Even if it wasn’t a no-no, I don’t need the aggravation.”
“Aggravation? What’s aggravating about fucking a nineteen- year-old coed?” he said, smiling.
“Roughly everything leading up to and everything after it,” Pilate said.
Krall laughed a little too loudly and cleared his throat. “True. There’re always chat rooms, you know. That’s fun. You have your home Internet set up yet?”
“Nope. Can’t afford it yet,” Pilate said.
“Didn’t those idiots tell you that you get a free hookup to the college’s backbone?” He snorted when Pilate shook his head. “Assholes. Look, go over to IT Services in the library and get a wireless card for your laptop. They’ll give you a password, and you’ll be surfing in no time.”
“Thanks. That’s great,” Pilate said. “It’ll be helpful.”
Both chewed their food for a moment, Pilate discreetly surveyed the potential aggravations milling about the cafeteria.
“There’re other interests around here for a young man like you—interests of the non-student variety,” he said.
Pilate made a dismissive gesture.
Krall leaned forward again over his tray. “Your officemate, Kate, could probably use a good warming up on these cold winter nights,” he leered.
Pilate tried to chuckle nonchalantly.
Krall continued to look at Pilate in his odd, wide-eyed manner, then leaned back in his chair, making a retreating gesture with his hands.
President Lindstrom walked into the cafeteria. He wore a fancy barn coat with a maroon scarf tied like an ascot around his neck; his scalp was shiny through thinning hair. He nodded at a few people he walked past and went ahead of several students and staff to the front of the food line.
“Prissy” was Trevathan’s word.
“So what’s her story?” Pilate said.
“Who, Kate?” Krall cackled, clapping his hands. “I knew it!” Pilate watched Krall enjoy his victory and ate more salad.
Krall wiped his mouth. “Well, our Katie is the town’s most eligible widow. As you have already discerned, she is easy on the eyes and very sharp, but that woman can be a little standoffish. I think she needs a good, hard—”
Pilate’s eyes darted to Krall’s, stopping him from finishing the sentence, though there was no stopping the thought.
Krall cleared his throat. “She came here about five or six years ago when she married Grif Nathaniel’s son Rick, straight out of college. Grif runs the mortuary next town over. Some people call him ‘Grief’—nice nickname for a mortician.”
“How droll. What happened to her husband, to this Rick?”
Krall grinned a little, but for his own peace of mind, Pilate decided it had to be more of a grimace. “He got clobbered by a grain truck a couple years ago. He was out driving a hearse with a stiff in it, and that grain truck barreled out into the road off one of those dirt field roads. By the way, be careful after harvest, man. Those guys have killed more than a few students in those kinds of accidents.”
Pilate set his burger on the plate as Krall continued.
“Sheriff Scovill—I know you’ve met him… Oh, how’s your jaw, by the way?”
Pilate glared.
Krall cleared his throat.
“Anyway, Scovill found Rick pinned in the hearse, ground up under the wheels of that truck. The stiff in the back had flown from the back into the front seat area with Rick. The body wasn’t in a bag, and the sheet came off during the collision. Our heroic, esteemed sheriff saw it and thought the stiff was riding shotgun with Rick.”
“Damn,” Pilate said.
The clatter of trays in the dish return began to grow louder as students returned to classes and dorms.
&nb
sp; “Yeah. Scovill said Rick was alive when he got there, that Rick was trying to tell him something.” Krall’s gaze clouded over, as if he were recalling something he’d actually lived through or been there to witness. “Something about the Missouri.”
“The river?” Pilate said.
“No idea. Scovill couldn’t make it out. Said Rick choked out a few odd things about the river and then some ‘tell Kate and Kara I love them’ kinda stuff. Poor fella bled out on the spot, with that stiff corpse sitting right next to him. Scovill tried to revive him. Hell, Scovill tried to revive the corpse until he figured out there was no point.”
“Shit,” Pilate said. He observed President Lindstrom carrying a tray of food into the administrative dining room. Behind Lindstrom was, from what he could tell, an attractive man of about twenty-five, carrying Lindstrom’s barn coat and opening the door for him. “That must have been so rough.”
“Yes. It’s how Rick’s granddaddy, Martin Nathaniel, died too—except his ass went over the suspension bridge into the icy Missouri. That wasn’t too long after the Bernard murders, as I recall.”
“Whoa! That cool bridge? What are the odds of both father and son dying in car crashes.”
Krall shrugged. “It is weird, huh? Anyway, our Katie has never really gotten over losing Rick, I suspect,” Krall said. “Then again, who can blame her?”
“So she stays,” Pilate said, sipping his Coke.
“Yeah. I guess Grief takes care of her and Kara,” Krall said, polishing off his drink. “Of course, she got a lot of insurance money and holds Rick’s shares of the family business for Kara, though she pretty well stays out of that. She’s an adjunct instructor with just a couple sections to teach. I know she doesn’t make a whole lot doing that. I think if she could get a good teaching job somewhere else, she’d probably take it. I mean, this place is just a reminder—and whenever she takes Kara to see her grandpa, it’s over at the same damn mortuary where they made Rick presentable for his funeral.”
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