by Blake Pierce
“No,” she said, feeling off-balance. “This is just a chat for now. But we will take you to the field office in order to record our conversation.”
“Fine, fine,” he said, nodding a little too aggressively. The alcohol had cut his limits, stopped telling him when to stop. “Lead on.”
Over his shoulder as he walked toward the door, Zoe met Shelley’s eyes. This was odd—too odd. When did a murder suspect ever just willingly, even happily, go along to the station for questioning? It was as if the man was not just resigned to his fate, but glad of it.
They walked in convoy to the car: Shelley leading, then Wardenford, then Zoe. She kept her eyes on him at all times, thinking that if he really was their guy, he was surely going to bolt. She was tense, one hand itching to rest on the holster of her gun just in case.
Nothing happened on the walk out to the parking lot. Only when he was sitting in the back of their car, with the child locks on, did Zoe allow herself a moment to relax. He wasn’t going anywhere, except where they took him.
So, if he was a killer, why did he seem so pleased about that?
***
Zoe sat opposite James Wardenford, with Shelley in the seat next to her. The bare room—just a table and four chairs, one currently unoccupied—was dominated by one glass wall. Just like on TV, it was blacked out, impenetrable from this side. On the other side, a tech was watching closely, making sure that everything was picked up by their recording equipment.
“I knew you were coming for me,” Wardenford said, scratching the back of one of his ears. He looked all the world like a man who had not a single care. They might have been chatting to him in a local grocery store about the weather, for how concerned he seemed. “It was only a matter of time, really.”
“And why is that, James?” Shelley asked. She was doing her Good Cop bit. Playing the friend. It was what she was good at. Zoe, for the meantime, was content to stay quiet and observe until she had something to say.
She looked James over, reassessing as she had done so many times already. His height of five feet nine made him the correct size to have attacked the college student, Cole Davidson, at a slightly lower angle. His arms were bunched with muscles enough, though not so much to make him stand out. Still, she figured he would have had the strength for the first blow—which stunned the victims enough that they were unable to fight against the others.
It was his manner that irritated her. She knew the signs of panic or fear, the desire to not be found out. The sharp angles of the shoulders and elbows, the constant movement, the defiant lean. She had memorized all of them from textbooks before she had ever gone out into the field, and had enough experience to know now they were real.
But James Wardenford was calm and relaxed, even smiling. That did not sit well with her at all.
“The victims,” Wardenford said simply. “You were always going to trace them back to me eventually.”
Shelley shifted in her seat, leaning back. It seemed she was having a hard time figuring out what to make of him, too. She was switching back and forth between her usual tactics. “Is this a confession?”
James Wardenford laughed, free and easy. “Good lord, no. It just looks like me from the outside. I get that; I do. But considering I didn’t do it, I’m not worried at all. Once we’ve cleared this all up, I’ll be back at home before the day is out. It’s not like I have anything better to do today.”
Shelley sighed, rubbed the bridge of her nose for a moment. Zoe kept quiet. She watched him carefully, wishing she was better at reading the subtle nuances of expression and movement that gave people away.
“Let’s start from the beginning, then, shall we? How does it look like you from the outside?” Shelley prompted.
“It all started with Cole Davidson, of course.” Wardenford tipped his chin a few inches up, his voice increasing in volume. He was putting on a speech, as if he was addressing a lecture hall. That only unsettled Zoe further. Truthful people didn’t look up that far. “Professor Henderson—Ralph—and I had, well, a bit of a falling out. You see, Cole had a bit of talent in English, or so it seemed. Ralph was absolutely determined that he ought to be kept on, to finish his studies, but he was here on a scholarship. There, I ought to say, since I don’t work at the college anymore.”
“What does the scholarship have to do with your falling out?”
“I’m getting to that.” Wardenford’s left eyebrow shot up an inch or two before dropping down. Was he actually reproaching Shelley for interrupting him? “The scholarship was dependent on Cole keeping up a certain level across all of his grades, and he was also taking my physics class. Taking being a loose word. More often than not, he slept through my lectures. Surprise surprise, he was failing.”
“And Professor Henderson asked you to intervene,” Shelley said. She was leaning back still, but something in her manner had changed. Zoe guessed that she had found the right tack at last. A sympathetic ear. A believer.
“More than once. We got a bit out of hand, truth be told. Ralph was in my face, telling me I couldn’t possibly be doing my job correctly given the alcohol he could smell on my breath, so what did it matter if I marked the boy higher? I resented the affront to my integrity; fists were thrown. The upshot was that I was found to be drunk while teaching, and I was fired.”
“How did you react to that? It must have been a blow,” Shelley asked, shaking her head in solidarity.
“I went back to my old friend the bottle ever more than before. Moved out of my big house into a small apartment and made do. I haven’t seen Ralph since then.”
“You didn’t hold a grudge against him for getting you fired?”
Wardenford studied his hands closely, taking a moment to answer. “It wasn’t Ralph who got me fired. It was me. I shouldn’t have been drinking at work.”
There was silence for a long moment, stretching out between the three of them. Wardenford glanced up, playing into one of the oldest tricks in the book by opening his mouth to fill that silence with anything he could blurt out. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “Cole, nor Ralph. I had no grudge against them. I didn’t even realize Cole had managed to turn things around. I thought he’d have been packed off home with his tail between his legs by now.”
He wasn’t going to admit to anything—that much was clear. Zoe took the moment to make her own move, finishing the formalities. “Where were you on the night Henderson was killed?”
“At home, alone—the same as the night Cole met his end. I drank until I passed out. That was probably around nine in the evening.”
Zoe tilted her head slightly, a gesture of disbelief she was not quite fast enough to quash.
“I started early,” Wardenford said, spreading his hands and shrugging. “I tend to. I don’t have much else to fill my day, besides refreshing my inbox and wondering whether anyone is ever going to reply to any of my job applications.”
“So, you have no way to prove that you were not there in the parking garage when Ralph Henderson was killed?” Zoe pressed.
Wardenford laughed again, a sound that was so out of character with their surroundings that it seemed to jar the very air. “I’m an educated man. I know as well as you do that the absence of evidence is not evidence. You have no reason to think I was anywhere near the scene, and the burden of proving that falls to you. I don’t have to prove that I wasn’t there if you can’t prove that I was.”
That rankled. More than that—it was the kind of thing you expected a career criminal to say. Someone who knew his rights because he had been in the position to have them enforced so very often. Not an innocent professor who had only recently crossed a line for the first time in his life.
“We’ll take a break from this interview,” Shelley said, checking her watch and starting to stand. She rattled quickly through the formalities required for the tape, before Zoe followed her out of the room and into the hidden divide behind the blacked-out glass.
Once out of sight, the two women watched their suspe
ct, both sagging a little as they let down the pretense of not being tired and overworked.
“What do you think?” Shelley asked.
Zoe chewed on her lip for a moment before answering. “I do not trust him.”
“I don’t trust him either, but I do believe him.”
Zoe turned, looking up to meet Shelley’s eyes in surprise.
Shelley sighed. “He’s a pompous ass who has seen one too many episodes of CSI, yes. But I think he’s telling the truth. His body language, his manner—he’s turning this whole thing into a joke because he feels it’s below him. He sees himself as being part of a different world from ours. For him to commit a crime like that and be arrested for it would be, well, funny to him.”
“Funny?” Zoe repeated, shooting a distasteful look at their suspect. “I do not think that murder is a joke.”
“Poor word choice, perhaps. It’s just so far from being on his radar that he could ever seriously be suspected of something like this. I really don’t think he did it, Z.”
Zoe hesitated, struggling to know what to believe. She didn’t buy the act that Wardenford had put on—and it had been an act. That ten-degree head tilt, the orator at work. She wanted it to be him, wanted to have a solution that would put all this to bed. She wouldn’t have to wrestle with those equations anymore.
But Shelley knew people, and therein lay the rub.
Who could Zoe trust—her own disbelief in his words of innocence and the lack of an alibi, or Shelley’s instinct?
And what if she trusted Shelley and let him go—and he killed again?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
He watched and moved slowly, careful not to be seen. He had left his refuge and hunkered down amongst the people at the bus stop, hiding in plain sight.
The doctor still owed him blood snakes, and he was going to get it, all right. He was going to get it, and how.
There was not much more time to wait. The doctor would be coming off shift. That was the best time to strike, oh yes. Follow him home in his refuge and strike when he was alone, get the snakes, the brains, make him pay.
The doctor came out of the building and he could barely contain his happy dance, his happy smile. He walked swiftly now, hood up against the rain, blessed rain. To his refuge and opened the door and got inside and started the engine.
He crept then, slowly on the—pathway, keeping a distance. He let the doctor go home all safe and secure, thinking he was free. Thinking he would not see his own blood snakes before the day was out. Yes, let him think that.
Let him think that, the sniveling fool, the bitter, hated enemy! How he could not wait to punish him, make him pay! How he longed for blood snakes and crushed bits of—headbox everywhere, for the doctor’s last breath!
He pulled up a few doors down from the doctor’s home, parking quick and ready to strike before the doctor got safe, when his—talk—walkie—buzzer rang. The display told the name of a friend.
Curses. But he had to take it.
“Hello?”
“Hey, did you hear about Wardenford?”
Alert, alarm bells, instant. The name of his mentor. Panic through his veins like an ice bolt; he knew, just knew something was wrong. “No?”
“He’s been arrested. They’re saying the FBI took him. For those murders, you know—Cole and that professor.”
He could not speak. N—he could not believe it.
The friend prattled on, not realizing what he had done. “He’s been on a freefall ever since Henderson got him fired. Honestly, I’m not surprised. He was always a bit of a loose cannon, wasn’t he? All those outbursts?”
“It wasn’t him.” It came blurted out, an accident. He was desperate. How could the world think such a thing? How could the beloved professor be in the frame? No, no, no, no, no, no, no!
“You reckon? FBI wouldn’t have nabbed him if they didn’t think there was a good chance.”
“It wasn’t him.”
He ended the call; couldn’t stand to listen anymore. Couldn’t stand the—snakes, ear snakes, untrue, all of them. All of them. The professor! No this, this was all wrong, all wrong.
What could he do? Let the professor be blamed? No, not that, anything but that; the professor was his favorite. He could not let the ear snakes bring down the mentor who brought him everything before this.
At least one thing was safe: he never told Wardenford about the things in his head. The accident. The cra—the cre—the crash. He never told him about the snakes in his own brain. The ones that wouldn’t come out, no matter how hard he smashed. The reason why everyone else had to lose theirs.
The doctor had gone inside, out of reach. He sat and thought, in his refuge, rain drumming on the—mirror. Too late now. Doctor had to live.
Doctor living, maybe useful.
Maybe something he could do for the professor. A gift. To release him.
Clarity came for a moment, as it sometimes did. A flash of his old brilliance. A plan formed. He saw the steps that he needed to take and how he would execute them. First of all, finding a piece of evidence that should be kept protected, in a plastic bag, a thing that could be used later. Then he could continue with his original idea, make sure that the doctor paid for everything.
God, was this all a mistake? The things he had done, the way he had left them. This wasn’t him. He didn’t act like this. He wasn’t a violent man. He was a scholar—none of this should ever have happened!
If it wasn’t for the crash—the accident. Was it even really an accident? Everything had been destroyed at that moment, but he saw now that this was not the way to react. What had come over him? This violence, where did it come from?
But now—now Professor Wardenford was on the hook. He owed it to the professor, the person who had really believed in him, to make sure that everyone knew he was innocent. That was the right thing to do. Irrefutable proof, worse than a confession. And afterward, he could go to the police and—no—he felt it slipping. Always too soon, always destroying him again. The clarity came and then it—
He wouldn’t give in. Even without the—focus, he could continue. He knew what he had to do now. It wasn’t over.
Doctor dead, blood snakes released. Soon. But first the planning. First the gift to his professor. The only one who saw—future in him. The only one who thought he could be something. He would escape. But only with his help.
Doctor, doctor. Twice you slipped away.
Third time, he thought, was the—hook.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Zoe stood looking through the glass, studying Wardenford as closely as she could.
For the whole time he had been in custody, his demeanor had not changed. Though she found it hard to understand why, he was still casual and cheery, as if he believed that this was all a comic misunderstanding and easily cleared up. The only thing that had changed over the hours they held him was the beginning of a shake in his right hand, a telltale sign of an alcoholic in need of their next drink.
Maybe that was a weakness that she could use, at least.
“I am going back in,” Zoe announced. She had grabbed up the files holding the crime scene photographs—specifically, the equations.
“Do you want me with you?” Shelley asked. She, too, had been watching for any kind of sign, while they chased surveillance footage from areas around his apartment over the phone. So far, nothing had shown him leaving his apartment. It didn’t mean that he hadn’t slipped by in an area not covered, but it did mean they had nothing to threaten him with.
“No.” Zoe made for the door, buoyed along by a new determination. “You watch him. Closely.”
“Call him professor,” Shelley called after her. “You’ll stroke his ego. False sense of security.”
They couldn’t keep him at the field office for long. A long time for him, surely, but in terms of their investigation, not long enough. If he didn’t crack soon, they would have to let him leave. So, she would have to make him crack.
Zoe entered the in
terrogation room and resumed her seat opposite Wardenford, who greeted her with a cheery smile.
“Time to let me out yet, Agent?”
“Not yet.” Zoe paused, opening the folder at such an angle that only she could see the contents. “How are you with math, Professor?”
Wardenford seemed to swell with ego as she gave him his former title. Shelley had been right. “It’s one of my specialties,” he said. “Of course, math goes hand in hand with physics. It’s been my life’s work.”
Zoe nodded. “I understand,” she said. “Then perhaps you can help us out with something? We have some equations that we are trying to figure out.”
She first reached for the printouts she had created: the equations alone, copied out on the computer, rather than the crime scene photographs. No blood, no sign that they had anything to do with the killings. She laid them down one by one in front of him, watching his face as he leaned forward to study them.
There was no flicker of recognition in his eyes, at least not that Zoe could see. She glanced up toward the black glass wall, as if she could see through and divine what Shelley was thinking. Of course, there was nothing to see there.
Back to Wardenford; he was lifting the printouts in his hands now, comparing them side by side, rubbing his mouth and resting with his fingers over it as he leaned on his elbow. He spent longer looking at the first than the second. He frowned deeply, then deeper, the furrows on his brows lengthening and sinking.
Minutes stretched on. Zoe kept count of them: four, six, ten. He was still staring at the equations, shifting in his seat sometimes, even mouthing things to himself as he worked through them. Zoe let the silence continue, not wanting to interrupt. What he said and did now was important.
“They’re unsolvable,” he declared at last, throwing the two pieces of paper down onto the desk. “This is some kind of trick, isn’t it?”
