Dear Irene,

by Jan Burke

  Geoff, the security guard for the building, must have let John know that Frank was on his way to the newsroom, because he stepped out of his office just as Frank entered the room.

  “So, when’s the wedding?” he boomed.

  “It’s up to Irene,” Frank answered, making his way to my desk. John met him there with an extended hand.

  “I haven’t had a chance to offer my congratulations, Frank.”

  Frank thanked him and shook his hand. At the same time, he studied me.

  “I’m okay,” I said, answering the unspoken question.

  He didn’t seem convinced, but asked his other questions aloud. The first was, “Did the call come through the switchboard, or directly to you?”

  I felt like an idiot for not checking that myself, and started to call the switchboard operator when John said, “Never mind, Kelly. I already called Doris. She hasn’t transferred any calls to you today. Must have come through direct.”

  “Then it’s most likely someone you’ve met, perhaps given your business card to, right?” Frank asked.

  “Maybe,” John said, before I could answer. “But it’s not that hard to learn someone’s direct dial number. There are a number of ways to do it. You could ask the switchboard operator for the number; she’ll usually give it out for anyone who’s not in upper management. If you wanted to be a little more sneaky about it, you could call another department, say, ‘Oops, I was trying to reach Irene Kelly. The operator must have transferred me to you by mistake. Could you tell me Irene’s extension?’ ”

  “Even if it’s someone with a card—I’ve given out a lot of them,” I said. “I had a new direct dial number when I came back to the paper, so I had to let people know how to reach me. I had to re-establish contact with a lot of old sources, and I had to meet some new ones. And on almost every story, I end up giving a card to someone.”

  “Well, it’s something to think about,” Frank said. “Maybe you’ll recall someone who mentioned this history professor to you, or who seemed interested in you in some unusual way—or who just seemed odd.”

  “ ‘Odd’ will not narrow the list much.”

  “Probably not. You said you found the envelope?”

  I nodded, and handed it to him.

  “Lydia!” John shouted, startling me. “Find something to keep Miss Kelly busy for a while.”

  “Wait a minute—” I protested.

  “You can live without him for five more minutes, can’t you, Kelly? You haven’t gone that soft on me, have you?”

  I could sense something was up and that John was in a conspiratorial mood. But I couldn’t figure out a way to object before they walked off into John’s office, Frank turning at the last moment to give me a shrug of feigned helplessness.

  I practiced breaking pencils with one hand while Lydia tried to find something for me to do.

  4

  IF HE DIDN’T KILL HER in her office, he made a damned good start there.”

  Pete Baird, Frank’s partner, had accepted our invitation to join us for dinner that night. While Frank acted as chef, Pete was filling me in on the progress they had made in the Blaylock case. “There was blood splattered everywhere—over her desk, the windows, her books, the floor, her papers. The guy went nuts. Really sprayed the place. I doubt she walked out of there, anyway. We’ll know more when the lab and coroner’s reports come in.”

  You get two homicide detectives together, you have to be prepared not to let much of anything ruin your appetite.

  “She was killed there,” Frank said, coating some orange roughy fillets with a mixture of herbs and a small amount of olive oil. “All the blows were to her skull. He was hitting her hard.”

  “He?” I asked.

  “Figure of speech,” Pete said. “But didn’t you say the voice on the phone was a man’s voice?”

  “It was synthesized. No telling. But I admit the letter made me think the writer is a man. Thanatos is a male character in mythology, for starters. Clio is female, a woman was killed. Cassandra was a woman. But maybe the killer is a woman who wants us to think she’s a man, to throw us off her trail.”

  “If the killer’s a woman,” Frank said, “she’s a very strong woman.”

  “Why strong? You told me that you thought the professor was sitting at her desk, bent over some papers . . .”

  “Right. Her desk faces some windows. It was late at night. If she had been looking up, she might have seen his reflection in the windows. Might not have made a difference if she had seen him, but in any case, there was no sign of a struggle on her part. I think he got her with the first blow.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “One good blow to the head and she wouldn’t have put up much of a struggle. So the killer wouldn’t need to be strong.”

  “If the body had been left there, I’d agree,” Pete said. “But after making all that mess, the killer was very neat. Must have bagged her—or at least wrapped her head up, because there wasn’t so much as a drop of blood out in the hallway. My guess is that he was wearing something over his own clothing—coveralls, maybe—because he couldn’t have been in that room or picked her up and carried her out without getting anything on himself. The professor wasn’t a very big woman, but even if she only weighed about a hundred pounds, that’s a lot to lug around. He carried her downstairs, took her to a vehicle, drove to the zoo, and then dumped her over a fence and in with the birds. Leaves her wallet and all her identification on her, so that we know exactly who we’ve got.”

  “He’s damned sure of himself,” Frank said, putting the fish under the broiler. “No question about that.”

  “Yeah, and not just because he left her ID,” Pete said. “You ever been around peacocks? They’re noisy suckers. He had to know that someone was going to hear all that racket.”

  “Zookeepers might be used to it,” I said.

  “The birds were raising Cain. They’re beautiful, but not pleasant, if you know what I mean. In fact, they—” Pete halted when he caught Frank shaking his head. “Sorry. We shouldn’t be talking about this before dinner.”

  If it was something that bad, I wasn’t going to challenge him.

  “You said the chair of the history department let you into Dr. Blaylock’s office,” I said. “Was it locked?”

  Pete nodded. “Yeah. But the killer probably just locked the door after he left. Hiding the mess for a while.”

  “He didn’t need a key to lock it?”

  “No, the history offices are in one of the older buildings. Some of the buildings on campus, especially the ones where they keep a lot of equipment—art studios, science buildings, the gym—those buildings have electronic locks that open with key cards. They lock automatically when the door shuts. But the college couldn’t afford to put them everywhere, so lots of the classrooms and faculty offices are standard-type locks. Use a key to get in, but once you’re in, you have to push a button lock on the other side to lock yourself in.”

  “And you don’t think she locked herself in?”

  “No, probably not. She taught a class on Wednesday nights, and had a habit of working late in her office after the class. She usually had the door open or unlocked, from what the other faculty and her students say.”

  “So we’ve got one of two possibilities,” I said. “Either she invited the killer in or he entered without her knowing he was there.”

  “You ask me, she didn’t know he was there. Probably never knew what hit her—BAM!—and she’s out. He keeps going at her, but not ’cause she’s fighting him.”

  Throughout dinner, I picked up other details.

  No one at the college or the zoo reported seeing anything suspicious before the body was found, but it would not have been difficult to move around unnoticed at either place during the hours in question, sometime between midnight and four in the morning.

  The professor was fifty-four years old. Her colleagues described her as a vivacious woman who wore her years well. She lived alone. She seemed quite devoted to her stu
dents; she often held meetings of her graduate seminars in her home, and willingly gave of her time to students who needed extra help. She taught a seminar in twentieth-century U.S. history on Wednesday nights, and was doing some research on the Truman administration. It was not uncommon for her to work late in her office on her research and writing. When she was killed, she had been working on an article she hoped to submit to the Journal of American History.

  After Pete left, Frank and I sat together in the living room. I asked him about his meeting with John. At first he claimed that they were just talking about cooperation between the newspaper and the police on the Blaylock case.

  “No sale,” I said. “You wouldn’t need to exclude me from that conversation.”

  “Okay, so maybe we talked about you. What of it?”

  “What of it? I’ll tell you what of it. Shall I go into Captain Bredloe’s office and have a nice long talk with him about you?”

  “Be my guest.”

  “You wouldn’t like it.”

  He was quiet for a moment then said, “No, I guess not. Look, John’s just concerned about you.”

  “Concerned how?”

  “Well, in a fatherly kind of way, I guess.”

  “Fatherly? You mean as in Father Knows Best? As in ‘Well, son, we menfolk need to protect our little gals’?”

  “I don’t mean that at all . . .”

  “I got scared today,” I went on, ignoring his protest. “Anybody would have been scared, I think. But because of this damned splint and cast, my being scared looks different to him. John doesn’t think I’m ready to come back to work.”

  There was a long pause before he said, “Well, yes. That came up in the conversation.”

  I stood up. “You know what I want?”

  “Irene . . .”

  “Faith. Faith in my ability to function. Less help. Less control by well-meaning but—”

  “No one is trying to control you—”

  “Bullshit. Oh, it’s all in the name of taking care of me, mind you. Friends. People who just want to make sure I’m all right. I’m all right!”

  He was silent.

  “He had no business talking to you about my ability to do my job!”

  “You’re right.”

  “Absolutely none.”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “You’re not even a relative.”

  A pause. “No.”

  “You’re just . . . you’re just . . .” I was losing steam. I sat down next to him. “Why am I yelling at you? It’s not your fault.”

  “No, it’s not.” He said it without looking at me.

  “Sorry.”

  He didn’t say anything. It was then I realized it wasn’t anger that was keeping him quiet.

  “You’re better than a relative,” I tried. “Much better.”

  Still nothing. For a few seconds, I felt like I might start crying or something.

  Don’t do it, I told myself.

  He finally looked over at me. When he did, his expression changed. “Irene? Hey . . .”

  My turn not to answer.

  “It’s okay,” he said, putting an arm around me and pulling me closer. “Go ahead and cry.”

  “No way,” I said stubbornly.

  He started laughing. “You are one of a kind.”

  “Thanks, I guess.”

  “John said that to me today. ‘Kelly’s one of a kind.’ ”

  I had to smile at his imitation of John’s gruff voice.

  “That’s what I meant by ‘fatherly,’ ” he went on. “I think with your dad and O’Connor gone, John felt like it was his duty to check me out. He was trying to figure out if I was going to be a suitable husband. He mentioned the divorce rate for cops more than once.”

  “Of all the damned nerve!”

  “Take it easy. It didn’t really bother me. He’s right. From the outside, it probably looks dicey. Look at it from his perspective. A cop and a reporter. Who would think it could work?”

  “The people on the inside. The only people who count.”

  He smiled. “I move that the people who count call it a night.”

  Motion carried unanimously.

  * * *

  LIFE LEVELED OUT again during those first weeks in December. There were no more letters from Thanatos. True to John’s prediction, the story about the murder and Thanatos’ contact with me had sold a lot of papers. In spite of earlier prohibitions, I had been allowed to cowrite the first few stories on the case with Mark Baker.

  I did a lot of reading on the subject of Greek mythology. Jack loaned me books by Edith Hamilton and Robert Graves, along with translations of Ovid, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Homer. He was kind enough to spend several evenings talking with me about what I read. I also spent hours searching the newspaper’s computer files from every different angle I could think of, looking for something that would have connected my writing to someone who wanted to kill a history professor and leave her body at the zoo. I started reading stories by other reporters, thinking I might find the connection to the paper, if not to me personally. I reviewed anything in the Express files about the college, as well as stories about any of its professors. Nothing, except Frank growing tired of me saying things like, “This is a Sisyphean task.”

  He had his own problems. As the investigation of the Blaylock murder went on, it focused primarily on the professor herself. It became clear that Edna Blaylock had enjoyed the extra-curricular company of several of her male graduate students. Six of them eventually admitted to sexual liaisons with her. The professor had been a little more devoted to her students than others had imagined.

  But the six lover boys were all able to account for their whereabouts on that Wednesday night, which was during the last week before finals, and Thanatos remained undiscovered.

  * * *

  I GOT A few phone calls from men pretending to be Thanatos, but they were not the synthesized voice. At the request of the police, we had left that detail out of news reports. Two other factors helped to identify them as crank calls. They contained more references to sex acts than to Greek mythology. And they all came through the switchboard.

  But three times, just as I returned from lunch, someone called me through the direct dial then hung up without speaking. Those three silent calls bothered me more than the obscene ones.

  They occurred on what I started to refer to as my “paranoid days.” These paranoid days had a pattern of their own. Lydia and I would leave the building to walk to lunch; as I hobbled down the street, I would become convinced that someone was watching us. I started looking over my shoulder. During a downtown lunch hour, there are plenty of people walking around, so inevitably I would see some man walking behind us. Never the same man. Never anyone who showed more than passing interest in us.

  You look odd, I told myself. People are going to watch someone who is limping along in a cast and wearing a splint. Stop acting crazy.

  Sometimes I could talk myself out of it.

  * * *

  FRANK PUT IN long hours on the Blaylock case, as did everyone else assigned to it. He made sure someone—usually Jack or Pete—was with me if he couldn’t be. I had mixed feelings about the protection, but didn’t protest.

  As the days went on and Thanatos’ trail grew colder, I gradually felt more relaxed. I put any anxious energy I felt into my physical therapy. I was bound and determined to put the days of injury behind me as quickly as the healing process would allow. I could tell that my shoulder was greatly improved, but my right hand seemed hopelessly weak. I was told again and again not be discouraged. By people with two good hands.

  But as it turned out, the cast and the splint came off early, a little more than a week before Christmas. I felt like someone had freed me from chains. I still had to spend a lot of time squeezing a rubber ball with my right hand, but that exercise was a small price to pay.

  Frank and I celebrated that Friday night by going out to an evening at Banyon’s, a local watering hole s
hared by the police and the press. There were lots of familiar faces on hand. The band was on a break, so it was relatively quiet, which meant you could still hear yourself think over the rumbling mixture of boisterous conversations and a distant jukebox speaker.

  “Well, look who’s here!” a voice called out over the din. I looked across the room to see a sandy-haired man with boyish good looks grinning at us. Kevin Malloy, an old friend, waved us toward him. Not long after I was injured, he had stopped by the house to cheer me up, and now he seemed happy to see me out and about. Kevin was the Malloy in Malloy & Marlowe, a public relations firm, and had been my employer for a time. He had also shared a friendship with my late mentor, O’Connor. I hadn’t been to Banyon’s since the night before O’Connor was killed, but I pushed that thought from my mind as we made our way toward Kevin.

  “Well, lass,” Kevin said, hoisting a pint of Guinness, “we haven’t seen you in here for an age. And look at you! No sling, no cast . . . Liam!” he called to the bartender. “A round for the house. We’ll celebrate our lost lamb’s return to the fold.”

  That brought a cheer, but for a free drink, most of them would have cheered anything short of the words “last call.” One of the reporters bent close to Kevin and whispered something to him. Kevin turned to us in surprise. “What’s this? Engaged?”

  “It’s true,” I said.

  “And how many times did you have to beg him on bended knee before he said ‘yes’?”

  I laughed and answered, “Believe it or not, he asked me.”

  “Well, now, listen up!” he called in his carrying voice, then stepped up on a chair, so that he towered above the crowded bar. As the buyer of the aforesaid round, he had their grateful attention. The bar was so quiet, you could actually hear what was playing on the jukebox. Kevin glanced at Liam, who promptly unplugged it.

  “There’s a nasty kind of rumor going around,” Kevin began, then paused, turning to Frank.

  “Tell us!” A cooperative crowd. They’d heard him before. Frank looked a little uneasy.

  Kevin looked back to the crowd. “It’s said that the men in the Las Piernas Police Department have lost their courage!”