Cause to Save

by Blake Pierce

  Did that information reveal something to him? Did it give him some reason for breaking out other than simple freedom?

  And after he broke out, what would he do? What kind of a man would he truly be? Would he get as far away as he could and live life as a free (yet highly wanted) man?

  Or would he start killing again? It’s been said that once someone commits murder and gets over the initial shock, the second one is easier. And then the third one is almost like a natural act.

  But Howard doesn’t seem like the type to commit to that base animal instinct.

  All of the original murders were clean and simple.

  The latest victim was killed in a grotesque fashion…as if the killer was trying to make a point.

  Does Howard have a point to prove?

  And through it all, she saw him in her mind’s eye—sitting across a table from her in the prison with the beginnings of a smile always on his face. Confident. Almost proud.

  I have to find him, she thought. Or at least determine if he is indeed the killer. And the best place to start is going to be speaking to those who knew him on the same level I do. I’m going to have to talk to people he worked with—other instructors at Harvard.

  It felt like a flimsy plan but at least it was something. Sure, Connelly didn’t want her on the case, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

  She looked to her phone and saw that it had somehow come to be 12:10 a.m. With a heavy sigh, she gathered the files up into one pile and set them on Ramirez’s bedside table. When she undressed for bed, she did so slowly, recalling what things had been like the last time she’d been standing in this bedroom, taking her clothes off.

  When she slid into bed, she chose to leave the light on. She did not believe in paranormal activity, but she felt…something. For a brief moment, she thought she could sense Ramirez in the room with her, checking in on her while he floated somewhere between life and death.

  And while Avery knew that wasn’t possible, she still didn’t feel like facing the dark.

  So the light stayed on and she managed to fall asleep fairly quickly.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Without any precinct resources, Avery had to rely on the same basic tools as everyone else on the planet. So over a cup of coffee and a few stale bagels she had found in Ramirez’s pantry, she pulled up Google and went to work. Because of the case files she’d brought over with her, she already knew the names of three professors who had worked closely with Howard during his time at Harvard. One of them had passed away last year, leaving only two potential sources. She typed their names into Google, clicked her way to the Departments and Staff pages, and saved their numbers into her phone.

  As she worked, Rose ambled into the kitchen. She made exaggerated sniffing noises as she headed for the coffeemaker.

  “Coffee. Good.”

  “How’d you sleep?” Avery asked.

  “Like crap. And dude…it’s seven o’ clock and you aren’t technically working. So what are you doing awake?”

  Avery shrugged. “Not technically working, I guess.”

  “Won’t you get in trouble with your boss?”

  “Not if he doesn’t find out. Speaking of which…I’m heading out for a bit today. Can I drop you off anywhere?”

  “My apartment,” Rose said. “If I’m going to be holed up with you for another few days in someone else’s place, I’d like a few changes of clothes and a toothbrush.”

  Avery considered this for a moment. She knew that Sawyer and Dennison were still sitting outside, likely to be replaced by another duo soon. They were likely working in twelve-hour shifts. They’d follow her wherever they went, making sure they remained safe. That could throw a monkey wrench into things. But she already had a plan working out in the back of her head.

  “Hey, Rose, where is your car parked?”

  “A block over from your apartment.”

  She’d figured as much. Sawyer and Dennison would automatically ping O’Malley or Connelly if she headed back to her apartment. But maybe if she mixed things up and headed elsewhere, it would be easier.

  “Okay,” Avery said. “We’ll head back to your apartment. I have a call to make really quickly and then I’ll see if Sawyer and Dennison can give us a lift to your place.”

  “Okay,” Rose said, obviously skeptical of the plan—as if she knew there was something a little devious about it.

  Before she called Sawyer and Dennison, asking for a ride as if she were obeying orders and staying safe, she called a cab company and requested that the driver pick her up at the rear of Rose’s apartment building in half an hour.

  ***

  It had been far too easy. And it wasn’t that Sawyer and Dennison weren’t good cops. They simply had no inclination that Avery would want to be disobedient. The way she had it figured, she’d killed two birds with one stone. By slipping out the back of Rose’s apartment building unseen, she had a few hours of freedom to do what she wanted without fear of what Connelly would think, while Rose was still under police surveillance. It was a win-win. The fact that she had called to request that they drive them to Rose’s apartment had been the icing on the cake.

  The cab dropped her off at the Harvard campus shortly after nine o’ clock. In the back of the cab, she had called the two professors, Henry Osborne and Diana Carver. Osborne had not answered, but she had managed to speak with Carver, who had set aside some time at ten o’clock to speak with her. With some more hunting around on the Harvard website, she had managed to get Osborne’s office location and available times. She figured she’d try hunting him down in the hour or so before she was to meet with Carver.

  As she made her way across the campus, occasionally checking the campus map on her phone, she took a few moments to appreciate the architecture. Because most people in the Boston area were so accustomed to the college being in their midst, they often forgot about the history of the place. Avery could see it in most of the buildings, as well in as the overall historic atmosphere of the place—the flawless lawns, the old brick, wood, and landmarks,

  She focused on these things as she came to the Philosophical Studies building. Henry Osborne was an instructor in the philosophy school, specializing in Applied Ethics and Philosophy of Language. When she entered the building, a few students were bustling here and there, apparently a little late for their nine o’clock class.

  According to Osborne’s schedule, he did not have a class until 9:45 and should be available in his office until then. She found his office at the far end of the second hall she came to. The door was cracked and when she peeked in, she saw an older man sitting at a desk, hunched over a stack of papers.

  She knocked lightly on the door and took a step inside. “Professor Osborne?”

  He looked up with an uncertain smile. When he realized that the woman standing in his doorway was probably not a student, he straightened up and said: “Yes? Can I help you?”

  “I tried calling earlier, but there was no answer,” Avery explained.

  “Yes, I believe I was with a student when my phone rang earlier. Again…what can I do to help you?”

  Avery reached into her coat pocket and pulled out her badge. “I’m Detective Avery Black with the Boston police. I was hoping you could lend me a few minutes to talk about your encounters with Howard Randall when he was a professor here.”

  Osborne gave an exaggerated and breathy sigh, pushing himself away from his desk in frustration. “Absolutely not,” he said. “I have nothing more to say about that man. I said all I needed to say when he was at trial.”

  Avery tried to recall Osborne’s face, wondering if he had ever taken the stand during Howard’s first trial…when she had gotten him off. She couldn’t remember, though something about his face did seem familiar.

  “I understand that,” she said. “But as you know, he has escaped from prison. And we at the A1 believe that there may be current events that have occurred that mean he might be thinking of becoming active again.”

/>   “That’s unfortunate,” Osborne said. “But I’m not going to offer any more of my time to those horrors.”

  “But Professor Osborne—”

  “I’m not sure there’s any other way I can say it,” Osborne snapped. “You will not get a single second of my time to speak about him!”

  Avery nearly countered with: Maybe you’ll be more willing to talk when more college-aged girls start getting killed. But she stayed quiet, taking the high road. If he didn’t want to talk, that was his right.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly as she slipped out of his doorway and back into the hall.

  She had nearly forgotten just how much of a toll the Howard Randall case had taken on the people around him—co-workers, his thinned out family, and even some of the jurors in the courtroom when he had gleefully admitted to the murders. She supposed the current state of the city’s paranoia was further proof of his effect. Clearly, it had imprinted a lasting effect on Henry Osborne.

  She took her time crossing campus to reach Diana Carver’s office, as she still had thirty-five minutes to spare. She found a coffee shop, grabbed a strong brew, waited outside of Carver’s building—the English Department—and called Rose.

  “Hey, Mom. You done yet?”

  “No. One more quick meeting. I wanted to see if there had been any movement outside with the surveillance.”

  “Yeah, the guys that had been there were relieved about forty minutes ago. There’s some new guys down there now.”

  “Same car?” Avery asked.

  “No. A different car. This one is a Honda. Not sure what style, though.”

  “Okay. Just…stay put. And if for some reason they need to come up and speak with you, you call me before you answer the door. Okay?”

  “Got it. Mom…you aren’t out getting yourself into trouble, are you?”

  “Of course not,” she said.

  Though she was thinking: Not yet.

  ***

  She found Diana Carver’s office with no problems. Avery entered with a bit of reassurance; she had already spoken to Carver on the phone while in the back of the cab and Carver knew why she was coming. She was apparently not totally against speaking about Howard Randall, though she had not seemed particularly excited about it.

  Diana Carver was a pleasant-looking woman—the kind who was probably just slightly on the north side of fifty years old but looked closer to a fresh forty. Her shoulder-length black hair looked healthy in the sunlight that came in through her office window, framing her face in a way that made her look both cute and serious at the same time. As Avery took a seat on the other side of her desk, Carver pushed her glasses up onto the bridge of her nose and smiled at her.

  “So,” Carver said. “This man just won’t leave our lives, will he?”

  “Excuse me?” Avery said.

  “I recalled your name when we spoke on the phone, but wasn’t sure why,” Carver said. “So I Googled you. You were attorney that first time…when he walked. And then you became a detective that caught a lot of bad press for meeting with him during active cases. So it’s clear that Howard never quite left your life. As for me…well, I think about him from time to time. He pops up in my head like the memory of some very bad nightmare.”

  “So I take it you knew him well?” Avery asked.

  “Fairly well, yes. At one time I was flirting with the idea of dating him. He never asked me outright, mind you. It was always just something in the air between us.”

  “Were you ever intimate with him?”

  “God, no. The most intimate we ever got was in conversation. Usually over a bottle of scotch in his office.”

  “And what did you tend to talk about other than work-related things?”

  Carver shrugged and for the first time since mentioning Howard, her expression seemed to go a little sour. “A bit of everything,” she said. “One of the reasons I was so shocked that he had done those horrible things was because of how brilliant he was. We’d talk back and forth about literature and classical music. It was like something out of a snooty book club or something. I’d lambast Shakespeare and he’d give me hundreds of reasons why he was so popular. He’d tell me why first-person narrative was becoming nothing more than a gimmick for young readers to enjoy while I’d argue its merits. Those were my favorite conversations, but we also discussed current events, social issues, things like that.”

  “In the course of those conversations, did anything ever strike you as odd? Or maybe even a little extreme?”

  “If anything, Howard was quite passionate about not liking things. For example, he was very vocal about his distaste for Hemingway. He hated Hemingway. He’d get heated over just the mention of the man’s name. He’d get angry in those conversations—angrier than you’d expect over a conversation about writers—but not in any sort of threatening way. But when everything came to light, that response in him sort of made sense, I guess.”

  “Okay, so let’s go the other route,” Avery said. “As someone who spent some time with him, what would you say were things that really drove him? What made him tick?”

  “Being challenged,” Carver said right away. “Any sort of challenge, whether it was a friendly argument, competition, or even word search puzzles. That was another thing he’d get angry about—if the crossword puzzle in the day’s paper was too easy, he’d get upset. It was sort of silly.”

  “So these strange bursts of anger over being challenged or things he really disliked…were those the only quirks you ever noticed about him?”

  “Well…I mean, I don’t know if you’d call it a quirk or not but it is one of the reasons I didn’t really push to date him. He seemed very uneasy whenever someone would shake his hand. I thought nothing of it at first but then I started to add things up. During one of our deeper conversations, I somehow ended up mentioning that I hadn’t had sex in several months. I’m pretty sure I was just sort of letting him know I was available. His comment was something along the lines of ‘I haven’t had it in longer than that. I never really cared for it.’ Or something along those lines.”

  “So there was no physical contact between the two of you?” Avery asked.

  “Oh, I tried to hug him one time…just a way to say goodnight after having a bit too much red wine. When I leaned into him, he went absolutely rigid. For a moment, he looked mortified.”

  “So your conclusion about him was that he just didn’t like physical touch?”

  “I suppose. I thought it was just a germaphobe thing when it was just the handshaking. But then learning about his thoughts on sex and his total aversion of something as simple as a friendly hug…”

  “There could be some other quirk,” Avery finished for her. “Something deeper.”

  She pondered this for a moment, thinking back over her meetings at the prison with him. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she was pretty sure she’d noticed something similar about him. Whenever she would lean closer across the table when he would whisper something to her, he always either tensed up or seemed to lean back as quickly as possible.

  I thought it was just a way to protect his personal space at the time, she thought. But it also lines up with what Diana Carver is saying—something about an aversion to physical touch. Maybe that played some small part in his bizarre need to dismember his victims…

  She then saw the college girl in the alley in her mind’s eye—a girl she didn’t even know the name of yet because she wasn’t on the case. She’d been stripped down to her underwear, revealing a somewhat thin but well-packaged body.

  She then thought of the photographs she’d seen just last night, taken out of her little box of Howard Randall memories.

  Yeah, this doesn’t line up at all, she thought. But I should really be sure before I stand firmly behind such a claim.

  “Professor Carver, thank you,” Avery said. “You’ve been an enormous help. And if there is anything you think of in the coming days, please call me directly.”

  She slid a business card
across the desk to her. Carver picked the card up with a frown. “When I heard he’d escaped,” she said, “I couldn’t help but think how proud he must be of himself. That must have been the ultimate challenge—breaking out of prison. And now he has another one: to escape somewhere without being caught.”

  “Well, we certainly hope to catch him before he gets too far,” Avery said.

  “I hope you do,” Carver said. “I had never felt like more of a fool in my life. To have considered letting that man into my life—if he’d have had me—and then to find out the kind of monster he really was. It was wretched.”

  Not knowing what to say to such a thing, Avery again gave her thanks and then excused herself. She instantly called another cab, having sent the previous one away so as to not rack up even more of a fare. After all, these trips were coming out of her own pocket, not the precinct’s funds.

  With a cab lined up to meet her within ten minutes, Avery sat down on a bench at the agreed upon place and waited. She was pretty sure she knew where she needed to go next if she wanted to solidify her theory that Howard Randall had not killed this latest woman—and that he had probably not been responsible for the dead cat through her window.

  Yes, she knew where her next stop would be, but it would be risky. Connelly or, God forbid, the mayor might find out what she was up to.

  But it was a chance she had to take. And a chance she felt good about taking as the cab pulled up to the curb. She got into the back seat and gave the cabbie the address to the coroner’s office.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  One of the many bizarre friendships Avery had made over the course of her career as a detective with the A1 division was with a man named Charlie Tatum. Charlie worked as one of the coroners for the city of Boston, supervised under the city’s chief medical examiner. She knew a few other guys in the office, but she’d always had something of a banter-based friendship with Charlie. If she could manage to get alone with him, even if for only five minutes, she was pretty sure she’d get what she needed.