The Probability of Murder Page 3

  “Do you think we’re all suspects?” Martin asked, more nervous than his usual fussy self. “I don’t really have an alibi except I was home all night and on campus all morning. I’m thinking we should get the school attorneys involved.”

  Another question: Who was the scraggy young man I’d never seen before? Too old to be a student, he leaned in to Martin, appearing to be whispering in his ear, coaching him as Martin asked me questions.

  Not that I cared that much, but the young man, shabbily dressed, with a significant birthmark on his neck and part of his cheek, pulled Martin away before I needed to respond. Was he a suspect? Did he have an alibi?

  Did I?

  The whole episode was like a confusing dream where people you know mix with complete strangers, and there’s a whole backstory you haven’t been made privy to.

  “Ready, Sophie?” Virgil asked.

  “Yes,” I said, but I didn’t think I’d ever be ready for the full impact of what I knew was coming.

  Virgil couldn’t have been more solicitous, holding the door for me, pulling out the surprisingly new metal chair, all but patting me on the head.

  “Are you warm enough?” he asked, stepping over to the thermostat by the door. “Look at this. We can adjust the temperature of each room individually.” You’d think he was demonstrating state-of-the-art technology, but I understood that he was proud of his new digs as well as concerned about me.

  “I’m fine” came from a part of me I didn’t recognize.

  I was always ill at ease in the police station, however. Old and run-down or shiny and new; it didn’t matter. I wished I could reach into my purse and grab a puzzle to work. I always carried a plastic or metal manipulable to twist apart and a few word puzzles of my own or someone else’s making. Solving them and creating them gave me equal pleasure and tended to focus my energies away from anything unpleasant. I couldn’t think of when I’d needed to manipulate a puzzle cube more, or when it would have been less appropriate for me to reach into my purse and choose one to place on my lap.

  When a young officer set a bottle of water in front of me, I was ridiculously suspicious in spite of her nice smile. Was she after my fingerprints as a suspect? The thought was beyond hilarious, since Virgil had easy access to even my DNA if he wanted it. All he had to do was lift prints or a hair from my house on one of the many evenings he and Bruce and I shared a pizza and a movie. Martin’s silly questions had done a number on me.

  The officer left, and Virgil and I were alone, across a small metal table from each other, far from the comfortable chairs in my dark-toned, soothing den that I loved. The newly painted pale green walls of the interview room were a distant cousin to anything I’d call pleasant.

  “Coffee?” Virgil asked. “I’m afraid we don’t have any of those great donuts we’re famous for. And, to be truthful, the coffee here’s no better than in the old place.”

  “I’m fine,” I said again, more normal, grateful for the friendly connection he was trying to reestablish. Emboldened by his gestures, I ventured a question. “When did all this happen, Virgil?” I looked at the bottle of water on the table in front of me. It seemed too much effort to remove the cap. “How did she die?” I asked, hearing myself finally admit to the fact of my friend’s death.

  “Do you know a Hannah Stephens?” Virgil asked me, getting down to it and ignoring my reasonable queries. Probably every reporter from Henley to Boston, forty miles away, knew more than I did at this point, but Virgil had gone into cop mode.

  “Hannah Stephens? Yes, I know her.”

  “How well?”

  “Just to say hi to. I don’t have her in class. She’s Charlotte’s student aide, an English major.”

  “So, you never had lunch with her or counseled her, anything like that?”

  “No, nothing like that.”

  I resented that Virgil got to ask me more questions before I had any details about Charlotte’s murder, a simple fact that I’d practically had to drag out of him back on campus.

  I surveyed the venue. A clean (for now), stark room with a table and two chairs. A boxy unit by the thermostat that screamed out: Recording devices here! Maybe even a gun cocked and ready. We were in homicide detective Virgil Mitchell’s house now, and I knew the faster I played it his way, the faster I’d be out of here and able to get some answers on my own.

  “No one seems to have seen Ms. Crocker since last night when she closed up around nine o’clock,” Virgil said. He paused. “Did you?”

  “After nine last night? No, I didn’t. Did anyone see her today? You think she was shot last night?”

  “When was the last time you did see Charlotte Crocker?” Virgil asked, his head turned slightly, his eyes making contact from the sides.

  “Excuse me?”

  All the pepperoni pizzas we’d put away together counted for nothing when I was asked a question like that, in the manner of every television detective on prime time. For the moment, my rational mind took a vacation, and I heard Virgil’s question as an accusation. I gulped—loudly, I thought—and pushed the feeling away.

  “When was the last time you saw Charlotte Crocker?” he repeated, slightly less hostile. If he’d ever really been hostile, except in my mind.

  “On Wednesday, I think. We went downtown for lunch.”

  “You didn’t make a habit of calling or seeing each other every day?”

  “No, not necessarily. We emailed or texted sometimes.”

  “Across the yard?”

  “That’s how we do it now.”

  Virgil raised his eyebrows. Uh-oh. I hadn’t meant to sound condescending. Virgil was only a couple of years older than I was, Bruce’s age, but his mind-set was different, not hanging around kids all day as I did. At least not the best and brightest kids, outfitted with the latest in i-technology, like almost all the Henley students. I taught them math, but they taught me a new app practically every week—last week I downloaded an app that would point you from your location to the nearest restroom, in any city—and new ways of communicating. They were more connected than Virgil would ever want to be.

  He flipped through pages in his notebook. “You went downtown for lunch on Wednesday. Any special reason?”

  “We didn’t need a reason to get off the campus.” I smiled, then settled back into the somber mood I wasn’t ready to give up. “We were both inside buildings all day.”

  “What did you talk about?”

  I shrugged. “What girlfriends talk about.”

  “The new governor?” Virgil prodded.

  “For a minute or two.”

  Virgil laughed. “That’s about right.”

  Charlotte and I had bonded soon after she moved here from California two years ago. We’d met at the gym downtown around the same time we’d first seen each other on campus, and slid into an easy friendship. Certainly not of the closeness I’d shared with Ariana since we were preteens, but Charlotte and I saw eye to eye on politics, books, and campus issues. We parted ways on only one issue—reluctantly, I smiled again—fashion. Charlotte wore classic, fifties preppy. I’d recently adopted the popular student attire: layered pieces, bordering on steampunk, aka the Victoriana-meets-Goth look.

  I could see that Virgil was waiting for more specifics about my last lunch with her.

  “Charlotte was planning to visit an old friend in Florida for Thanksgiving,” I offered.

  “Another two minutes to talk about that?”

  I wasn’t trying to be difficult; it was simply hard to remember what we discussed.

  I decided to relax for a minute and be honest with Virgil. “This is like when I come back from a two-hour coffee date with Ariana, and Bruce can’t figure out what we could have talked about for that long, and I can hardly tell him. Except that we didn’t finish. Women friends always run out of time before we run out of things to say. It was the same with Charlotte and me.”

  “I see.”

  But he didn’t. I doubted he and his buddies sat and chatte
d more than five minutes before doing something—playing cards or racquetball, lifting weights, fishing. It was hopeless to think he’d understand how Charlotte and I interacted.

  I would never allow such sloppy reasoning in my math classes, but these were extenuating circumstances.

  Then I remembered something Charlotte and I had talked about. “There’s a new book club forming at the public library in town. Charlotte and I discussed joining the group and we brainstormed books we’d like to see on the list.” I felt proud I’d thought of something specific.

  “Okay, that’s good,” Virgil said, and made a show of writing it down. “Did you text her today at all or any time since nine o’clock last night?”

  “Uh, I don’t think so. I was busy with classes today, and then the party. August Möbius, November seventeenth,” I said. “We’re a little early, but close enough.” How pitiful. Reveling at a party about a mathematician from two centuries ago while Charlotte was…“When did you say she died?”

  “I didn’t. But I’ll tell you now that Ms. Hannah Stephens, the student aide we talked about, left her boss in the library just before nine o’clock last night. She went back into the employees-only section of the stacks around four PM this afternoon to shelve some books. She found Ms. Crocker’s body on the floor up against the bookshelves.”

  I drew in my breath. I didn’t want to hear any more, and Virgil sensed that. He unscrewed the cap on the water bottle and pushed it closer to me. I accepted it gratefully and swallowed short bursts of cool liquid.

  I hated the thought that Charlotte had been lying helpless on the library floor while I concerned myself with a sophomore’s presentation and my plans for the weekend. I wanted to ask Virgil if it was a quick death, then realized he wouldn’t tell me even if he knew this soon, then realized I didn’t want to know. Tears formed, and I quickly switched to a blank screen in my mind.

  After a grace period, Virgil continued. “Do you remember what you were doing last night, Sophie?” Virgil looked away immediately after he asked for my alibi, thus missing my shocked look. “I have to write it down.”

  I felt my muscles relax as I heard his apologetic tone and briefly felt his hand on my shoulder. “I was home doing the usual, reading, puzzling.”

  “Phone calls?” he asked.

  I nodded. “Bruce, to set up plans for today and the weekend. Ariana, to chat.”

  “You didn’t speak to Ms. Crocker?”

  “No, not last night.”

  “Can you think back and remember the last time you and Ms. Crocker spoke by phone, emailed, or texted?”

  “I can check my cell.”

  “That would be a big help. Not right now, okay? I have a few more questions, then I’ll leave you to go through your phone and write down the times of your last few communications.”

  “Okay.”

  What else could I say? Nothing I could remember or jot down would bring Charlotte back. This interview had done nothing to ease my pain about Charlotte’s death.

  And what about my own safety? If Charlotte was vulnerable just because she was in a campus building after dark, many of us, faculty and students, were at risk. I stayed late often, working in my office long after everyone else had gone. Sometimes it was easier to stay where all my class prep resources were than to try to stuff everything into my briefcase, inevitably leaving something behind. For the most part, home was for relaxation and for my puzzling activities, and, when Ariana prevailed, my beading hobby.

  All my hobbies—everything, in fact—seemed trivial at the moment.

  “Just a few more things, if you don’t mind,” Virgil said. “Was Ms. Crocker seeing anyone that you know of?”

  I started at first. The question was out of sync with my thoughts. “Seeing anyone” was lumped with trivial matters in my mind, but I understood why Virgil was asking. “As in a boyfriend? No, not that she shared with me.”

  “Or girlfriend?”

  “No, not in that way.”

  “You think you would know, either way?”

  I nodded. “I think I would.”

  I didn’t tell Virgil that Charlotte made it a point never to talk about her love life, if she had one, past or present, male or female. She waved away my initial queries about boyfriends or exes, and I begged off ever bringing it up. I had Ariana for that kind of conversation.

  “Did Ms. Crocker have any vices? Anyone she might have owed money to? A gambling debt, maybe?”

  Vices? I laughed inside. Charlotte was about as straitlaced as the stereotypical librarian. She’d fretted over a speeding ticket she’d gotten on a trip to Vermont last summer. She’d attended traffic school for several long, boring sessions just so the violation wouldn’t appear on her record or affect her insurance.

  Had she owed money? Another smile came as I pictured a connected guy sending a goon to collect from Charlotte, finding her in her tweed skirts and silk blouses with ties at the neckline.

  “She did like playing the lottery, if you call that gambling.”

  “I do.”

  I bristled. “She wasn’t in danger of losing her house or her car or anything. She played maybe a couple of dollars a week.” I wet my lips with a small sip of water. “That’s not a crime, is it?” I asked, concerned about Charlotte’s good reputation, in life and in death.

  “Nothing wrong with the lottery,” he said, embarrassing me with his indulgence. “It pays my salary. Brilliant solution to the Commonwealth’s budget problems, huh?”

  “I forgot about that aspect.” I’d read somewhere that Massachusetts apportioned a certain percent of the lottery funds to government salaries.

  “Forty percent goes to fire, schools, and”—Virgil pointed to his chest—“yours truly.”

  Nice to have the details. “A worthy cause,” I said, attempting a grin.

  “Lots of scams, too, though,” Virgil said.

  “I suppose so.”

  “I hope your friend was never the victim of one of those scams. You know, like believing a letter that says”—Virgil made quote marks with his fingers—“‘You’ve won big, just send us some money and we’ll release your megabuck winnings.’”

  “Who would fall for something like that?”

  Virgil rolled his eyes and shook his head. “Way too many people. You’d be surprised. Friend of mine, his brother, college educated and all, lost ten thousand dollars in one of those scams. He still can’t believe a million bucks is not on the way to him via a bank in a third-world country.”

  “I had no idea.”

  “I’ve seen scam letters supposedly written by a soldier in Iraq, just to tug at your heartstrings, and another one that claimed it was from the secretary of the treasury. The victims come in here, but there’s not much we can do once you’ve sent your hard-earned cash off to a stranger.”

  “It’s amazing that people can be so gullible,” I said to sound more interested than I was.

  Virgil seemed wrapped up in the topic. “Another question is, what kind of person pulls a stunt like that? Making a living off duping people?” he asked. He gave me a curious look, as if I knew the answer.

  “A bad person, I guess.”

  Virgil slid a lined note pad toward me. “I’ll leave you to go through your phone logs and I’ll be back in a few, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  When Virgil left the room, I replayed our conversation. A bad idea, since I couldn’t go back and edit my responses. Why hadn’t I been more at ease, more help to the investigator of my friend’s murder? Why had I felt on trial myself? Was it my imagination, or had Virgil been in pure cop mode most of the time?

  There were no answers the second or third time I went over our meeting in the new Henley PD interview room.

  I rotated the pad Virgil left on the table for me and took out my smartphone. I scrolled through my log and started my list of recent calls, emails, and texts to and from Charlotte.

  I wondered when things might really be okay again.

  Bruce mad
e valiant attempts to bring life back to normal as we drove away from the police station in his SUV.

  Unbidden, he stopped at a new chocolate shop in town. He caught the door just as the clerk was about to turn the sign to “Closed” and returned to the car with two mochas and a bag of cookies. I wondered what kind of offer, or threat, he’d made to the scrawny kid in charge of closing up.

  The man knew the way to my heart.

  Writing out the list of the conversations I’d had with Charlotte over the last week had taken its toll on me. Forced to relive every minute of our recent contact, I’d grown morbidly philosophical.

  Would we have texted about the bland food in the Mortarboard Café, the campus coffee shop, if we knew one of us would not live through the weekend? Would we have spent even a moment whining about the faulty self-checkout system at the library? I know we wouldn’t have compared notes on the relative cost of gasoline close to and farther from campus.

  Fortified by caffeine and sugar, two of my favorite food groups, I gave Bruce a summary of my interview with his cop friend.

  “Does Virgil play the lottery?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of. Why do you ask?”

  “He started this curious ethical discussion about the lottery, all the scams there are, how the money from the lottery keeps cops on the beat and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in the black. You’d think the infrastructure would collapse without it.”

  “Maybe he’s right.”

  “It doesn’t matter. It was just curious, considering why I was there.”

  “Maybe he was just trying to make you feel comfortable, talking about something off-the-wall.”

  “It didn’t work.”

  Suddenly worn out again, I sank back into the seat. At the next light, Bruce studied my face with his trademark squinty focus and offered to drive me directly home.

  “We can pick up your car tomorrow,” he said.

  “I’m not as bad as I look,” I said, shaking my head. Too many logistics, and there was a good chance that I’d want to wallow alone and not leave my house for a couple of days. “Just drop me at my car and I can drive myself home.”