Gone Ballistic (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  I inclined my head. “Willow told me.”

  “The gun that fired the fatal bullet was the same make and model as the one you gave us,” McClane said. “It was a .380 semiautomatic made by Smith & Wesson, an M&P Bodyguard. But it wasn’t the same gun.”

  Aubrey said, “We want Willow Woodruff’s gun.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  “I don’t want to parse words with you. Are you saying you’ve never had it, never seen it, that you don’t know where it is?”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  Aubrey shook his head. “As I understand it, the two guns are identical. How would you know which one you were looking at?”

  “This M&P Bodyguard has turned up twice and only twice. Fortunately, I wrote down the serial number the first time. When the gun turned up again, I checked its serial number against the first one. I can swear I have never been in possession of any gun except Christopher’s.”

  Aubrey stood. “If you’re lying, it’s obstruction of justice.”

  “If I’m not, it isn’t.”

  He was looming over my desk, in so far as a man who’s less than five-and-a-half-feet tall can loom.

  I said, “How do you know Willow’s gun was the murder weapon? Will you tell me that?”

  “Because the Christopher gun isn’t.”

  “How do you know either gun was the murder weapon?”

  “We don’t know of a third gun of that make and model,” McClane said from his seat. “Do you?”

  “Surely you’re not about to introduce one,” Aubrey said.

  “No. As I’ve said, I just seen the one. It occurs to me, though, that Smith & Wesson probably made more than two guns of that model.”

  “Is that really the way you want to play this?” Aubrey said. “I can promise you it won’t go well.”

  I stood myself so that I was looking down again. “If you can prove I was ever in possession of Willow Woodruff’s handgun, then you go for it.”

  “I made the trip across town to your office today because I wanted to give you a break. You need to take it.”

  “I don’t have the gun you’re asking for,” I said, speaking slowly, so as to emphasize each word. “I don’t know where it is.”

  “It’s not back in that desk drawer of yours?” McClane asked, gesturing with a hooked finger.

  My eyes cut toward the drawer. With a sudden sick dread, I knew that was just where Willow’s M&P Bodyguard was.

  “Well?” Aubrey said, noticing my hesitation.

  I took a breath and sat to reach for the drawer. Both men leaned over my desk. My hand touched the drawer, and I stopped. If I opened the drawer and the gun was there, my credibility was shot forever. Possibly, my legal career was over. I considered: I could order them out of my office, but if I did that, my credibility was shot whether the gun was there or not. I looked up at them. We all seemed to be holding our breaths.

  I pulled open the drawer.

  My purse was there, but otherwise the drawer was empty. I exhaled, and McClane fell back into his seat. Aubrey remained standing.

  “You’re not just putting your law license at risk,” he said. “I will be filing a complaint with the Disciplinary Board, but it won’t begin there, and it won’t end there. You have taken possession of a murder weapon in an ongoing investigation, and you have failed despite repeated requests to turn it over to police. Now, you’ve tried to confuse the facts by substituting guns. This makes you an accessory-after-the-fact in a murder case, and I will be charging you as such.”

  “There’re a lot of things you’re going to have to prove to make that stick.”

  “Don’t think I can’t do it.”

  “As of right now, you can’t even prove that Willow’s gun is the murder weapon.”

  “I can see I’ve wasted my time coming over here.

  “I can see that you did,” I said.

  I remained standing as they walked stiff-backed from my office. When they disappeared through the archway, I slumped back in my chair. I’d feel better if all this trouble was the result of something I was doing, but it was not. Someone with access to both my office and my home was moving guns around like a con man in a shell game. One instant the gun was under one shell; the next it was under another.

  A sick dread settled in my abdomen as I thought about it. The people in the best position to pull off a shell game like this were my friends. Paul and Brooke and Dr. McDermott each had a key to my house, though neither had a key to my office. Carly had a master key that opened my office, but didn’t have a key to my house. Brooke’s office was close enough to mine for her to monitor my comings and goings, and I didn’t lock my door, didn’t even close it, when I was on the floor. Rodney’s office was close, but it didn’t have a line of sight to the archway. He couldn’t see me coming and going, and to get to my office he’d have to pass Brooke’s. When she was here, her door was usually open, but of course she wasn’t always here. . .

  I tapped a finger on the desk. I trusted all of them completely. Suppose, though, one of them had a connection with Chris Woodruff? Would I still trust them completely? Such a connection, undisclosed, would open up some sinister possibilities. I pulled over my laptop and looked up Willow on Facebook again. No need to befriend her to scroll through her list of friends. It was all open to the world. The same was true of Chris Woodruff and Peyton Shilling. It took a bit over an hour to look through all of their friends and photographs. Peyton had the fewest friends, only 87 of them, but the most selfies. None of her self-photos were pornographic, but a number of them were sexually suggestive. Peyton clearly thought a lot of Peyton.

  The good news, if it was good news, was that I didn’t see any names I recognized, and as I got close to the end of the search, I began to feel a relaxing of the knot in my gut. Finally, I pushed the laptop away and took a few deep breaths. I could never tell Paul or Brooke or any of them that I’d gone looking for them.

  I stood up and shook out my arms, then raised my knees a few times to stretch out my buttocks. I was done investigating my friends. Of course, I hadn’t actually been investigating them, just the principles in the case. No. I knew what I’d been doing, who I’d been looking for.

  I sat. What I could do, without being an overly suspicious paranoiac—if that’s not redundant—was continue to investigate Chris Woodruff, the dead man himself. Find out everybody he had associated with in any capacity, no matter how remote. One thing was sure. I didn’t have any more time to indulge in Spider Solitaire.

  I used my computer to look up J. Sargeant Reynolds, the junior college where Chris Woodruff had taught. It had three campuses, one downtown and two out in the general direction of my home. East Parham Road looked like the main campus. At any rate, it was where the business school was located, and Christopher Woodruff was listed as an assistant professor of business. The dean of the business school, pictured on an inside page, was a big, dark-haired woman named Dr. K.O. Walker. Karen? Kaci? Kelsey? I wondered if she really went by K.O. I picked up the phone to call Dr. Knock-Out Walker, hesitated, and put it back down.

  It took me thirty minutes to get to my car and drive out there. There were trees everywhere, a few pines, but most with the bright green growth of spring. The school’s parking lot was vast, but I was able to park close enough to the buildings that I exchanged my sneakers for the pumps in my shoe bag to walk to the closest one.

  The dean of the business school wasn’t in that building, but she was in the next. Her secretary, visible through the sidelight by the door, was a strawberry blonde who looked about twenty. I opened the door and went in.

  “May I help you?” She smiled up at me, her head tilted back.

  “I don’t know. My name is Robin Starling. I was hoping to talk to the dean.”

  “Dr. Walker? I’ll see if she’s in.”

  My eyebrows went up. Through an open doorway I could see a big woman in a plaid jacket working at a big oak desk, but the girl picked up the phone and punched
a button. The phone in the inner office gave a soft trill, and the woman at the desk reached out to press something.

  “Yes?”

  I could hear her through the doorway. She had a deep, foghorn sort of voice, not unpleasant.

  “Dr. Walker, there’s a. . .” The girl looked up at me.

  “Robin Starling.”

  “. . .a Robin Starling here to see you.”

  “Bring her in.”

  The girl stood. “If you’ll come this way.”

  As I followed her the half-dozen steps to the open door, the woman whose picture I’d seen on the college’s website rose from her desk and came forward with a hand extended. We shook.

  “Hi,” I said. “I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me.”

  “Not at all,” she said in her trombone voice. “It’s what I’m here for.”

  “I’m investigating the death of Christopher Woodruff, and I’m hoping for some background.”

  “Are you with the police?” She gestured me to one of her client chairs and walked around her desk.

  “I’ve been hired by Mr. Woodruff’s widow. I’m a lawyer.”

  She frowned. “Representing her on the murder charge?”

  “As of right now there is no murder charge. I’m helping her with insurance and other matters.”

  “People are saying she did it.”

  “In a situation like this, people are going to say a lot of things.”

  “Ghastly business.” Her trapezius muscles bulged around her thick neck as she gave her head a shake. “So what kind of background do you want?”

  “I understand Mr. Woodruff’s job title was assistant professor of business. What did he teach specifically?”

  “A lot of things. He had an MBA, but was eligible to teach in five different subject areas.”

  “What does it take to be eligible to teach in a subject area?”

  “A master’s degree and eighteen graduate hours in the teaching field. He had the M.B.A. Instead of pursuing his doctorate as any sensible person would do, he racked up eighteen graduate hours in economics, finance, accounting, management, and marketing. Probably not the best thing for career advancement, but it made him very useful to us. He could teach pretty much everything we offer.”

  “What was he teaching this semester? I guess it’s still going on.”

  “Introduction to business, personal finance, micro- and macroeconomics. . .” She reached for a sheaf of papers stapled at the corner, flipped a few pages, and added, “Also principles of marketing and two sections of accounting, seven courses in all. He was a workhorse.”

  “Who’s covering his classes now?”

  “I’ve taken over the economics courses. The others I’ve parceled out as best I can.”

  “Was he a good instructor?”

  “Very popular, very good with the kids. I shouldn’t call them kids. A school like ours has a good number of nontraditional students, too, some of them older than I am.”

  “Peyton Shilling?”

  She frowned. “The name’s familiar. I think she’s in one of the economics classes I have now. Macroeconomics.”

  “When does it meet?”

  “Why?”

  I tilted my head and aimed for the mildest of shrugs. “Really I’d like his whole schedule if I could get it. It would help me reconstruct the last week of his life.”

  “Why the interest in Peyton Shilling?”

  “It’s just a name that’s come up. I thought maybe she was a student of his.” I wasn’t being entirely forthright—okay, I was lying—but I was afraid that too much candor would shut Dr. Walker up as effectively as a fishbone lodged in her throat.

  “I wouldn’t want anyone contacting students and getting them upset.”

  “Of course not. But take the morning Chris Woodruff was killed. Did he have an eight o’clock? Did he get in late the night before from teaching class? I need some kind of timeline just to get a sense of context.”

  She nodded, and her thick, wavy hair remained immobile, as if it were molded plastic. “I understand.”

  I smiled in what I hoped was a winning way, though I may have just looked sick.

  In the end, I got what I came for: A schedule of classes complete with room numbers. Woodruff’s next class had been Personal Finance at 4:00, which gave me about an hour to kill if I wanted to look in on it. I wandered through the buildings until I stumbled on the Berrywood Café on the main floor of Burnette Hall. In the middle of the afternoon, only two of the tables were occupied. I wasn’t particularly hungry, but I got a cup of coffee and a cookie and went to sit at a table adjacent to one of the tables with students, three females. You’d think that the recent murder of one of their professors would be causing comment, but no such luck. The boyfriend of one of the girls had evidently drunk ouzo the night before until he’d thrown up.

  “He was crawling as fast as he could, trying to get to the bathroom, but he didn’t quite make it, and he left a trail of vomit over about six feet of carpet.”

  “Gross,” observed another girl.

  “Yeah. It took a while to clean up. I kissed him and put him to bed before I went to work on it.”

  “You kissed him?” A squeal of incredulity.

  “I didn’t want him to feel bad, did I? I mean, he had enough to deal with.”

  “I’d have at least made him brush his teeth.”

  I took another sip of my coffee, but decided I didn’t want my cookie. I didn’t want to hear any more about vomit either. I put the cookie, still wrapped in plastic, in my purse before moving to a table closer to the other group of students, this one with two guys and two girls leaning over a laptop computer. One of the girls at the first table noticed me moving away from them, and they leaned into the center of the table, whispering and giggling. I was only thirty-one, but I felt like I could have been a contemporary of their grandmothers.

  The students at my new table were looking at an Excel spreadsheet, while one of them explained how he had gone about calculating the value of a twenty-year bond after interest rates had risen two percent. It wasn’t my field, but it sounded like a personal finance topic, which might mean they would soon be going to the class formerly taught by Chris Woodruff.

  Feeling a hunger pang—a faint one, but you can’t be too careful—I got out my cookie and unwrapped it. It turned out that the students at my newly adopted table were more interested in the time value of money than in salacious gossip, which was a serious failing, at least from my perspective. I nibbled at my cookie, but after fifteen or twenty minutes of hearing about ordinary annuities and annuities due, I wrapped up what was left of it and put it back in my purse.

  What was I hoping to accomplish anyway? The four-o’clock class was about to start, but it wasn’t Peyton Shilling’s class anyway. If I wanted to learn anything useful, I was going to have to ask questions, and before I did that I was going to have to work out an approach that would encourage students to talk to me rather than close ranks against the outsider.

  I stopped halfway to the door. A girl was sitting by herself at a table in the corner. She was holding a tablet computer as if she were reading it, but was looking over the top of it at me.

  After a moment’s hesitation, I went to her table. “You waiting for class to start?”

  “Yes.”

  “May I?” I indicated a chair.

  She shrugged, and I sat. “Personal finance?” I suggested.

  “Yes.”

  “Who’s teaching that, now that. . .you know.”

  “Now that our instructor has been brutally murdered?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Now that that.”

  “Someone named Greg Hardon.” She gave a little too much accent to the last syllable.

  “You’ve got to be careful how you pronounce that one,” I said.

  “I was being very careful.”

  “Does he hit on girls in the class or something?”

  She smiled, shook her head. “Actually, he’s a
broken down old man, probably seventy or so. It was the middle of the semester, and they were scrounging around for anyone they could get.”

  When she didn’t explain further, I said, “Why the careful pronunciation?”

  “I don’t know. Dirty minded, I guess. Actually, the name would have fit Mr. Woodruff better. The gods have no sense of humor.”

  “Greek or Norse?”

  “What? Oh, I get it. The gods. You’re funny.”

  “I try. Are you saying Mr. Woodruff hit on women?”

  “Maybe. What’s your interest?”

  I sighed. Sometimes I hated to admit to anyone I was an attorney, but I said, “I’m a lawyer representing the widow. Chances are, she’s going to be charged with killing her husband.”

  “I’d say she had good reason.”

  “That’s not what I want to hear.”

  “Gives her motive?”

  I nodded. “On the other hand, I would be interested in the details.”

  “Prurient interest?”

  “Sure. I wouldn’t want you to miss class, of course.”

  “We’ve got time.”

  “Meaning you don’t know much?”

  “Meaning I don’t know anything. Just gossip.”

  “Gossip’s good.”

  “I guess. Have you ever seen Chris Woodruff?”

  “Not in the flesh. I’ve seen a picture.”

  “He’s good looking, isn’t he?”

  “Sure, if you like that strong-jawed, wavy-haired, clean-featured type.” I shrugged. “Okay, he’s good looking.”

  “That’s one reason he always had so many people in his classes, so many women anyway. Of course, he was a good teacher, too, one of the best around here. And he was very available outside of class. He kept his office hours, and if you went by to see him, he was always happy to talk to you.”

  I nodded.

  “Except when his door was closed. You’d wait, and eventually the door would open and a student would come out—always female, occasionally a little rumpled looking. That’s what they say. I never saw it myself.”

  “So it wasn’t like he fastened on one student,” I said.

  “I think he usually had a favorite, but you’re right. Mr. Woodruff belonged to all women.”