Corde said, "I wonder if you could go through this book and tell me if you recognize the man you saw in the road that night."
"Well, like I was telling you I can't recall many details about him. That old Buick moves at a pretty good clip--"
"I've got an Olds corners like nobody's business," Kresge said. "G.M. can put a car together."
"There you go," said Trout.
"If you could maybe narrow it down to a few men might resemble the fellow you saw it'd make our job a whole lot easier." Corde handed him a copy of the Auden University yearbook. Trout began to flip through it quickly.
"Take your time," Corde said.
Corde's heart thudded each time Trout tore off a small piece of paper and marked a page. When he was finished he flipped open to the marked pages and pointed out three men. He said. "I don't think I'd feel right testifying but it could be any one of these fellows."
Corde took the book and glanced at the names of the men Trout had marked. He looked up at Kresge, who nodded slowly. Corde thanked Trout and with Kresge in tow left the store, not bothering to jot down the names on his index cards.
Kresge--just back from his first official evidence photographing expedition--had taken the better pictures.
At the crime scene below the dam in April, Jim Slocum had forgotten to override the automatic focus of his 35mm camera and in the dark he'd sometimes pointed the infrared rangefinder at a bush or hump of rocks. Many of the pictures were out of focus. Several of them were badly overexposed. Kresge had taken his time with the Polaroid.
Sitting in the den that was really Corde's fourth bedroom, surrounded by the debris of two double orders of the Marquette Grill's steam-fried chicken, drinking coffee (Corde) and two-bag Lipton (Kresge) the men leaned close to the photos.
Six eight-by-tens of the footprints by the dam were tacked up on a corkboard next to an ad for a lawn service that guaranteed to make your lawn thick as cat's fur and we mean purrfect. In the center of the board were Kresge's small Polaroid squares.
"I think it's these two," Kresge said, tapping one of Slocum's pictures and one of his own.
"Why?" Corde asked. "The tread's similar but look at the size. The crime scene shoe's fatter."
Kresge said, "Well, that ground is wetter. By the dam, I mean. I was reading a book on crime scene forensics, ... You know what that word means?"
Corde had forgotten. He thought for a minute, wondering how he could bluff past it and couldn't think of a way. He said, "What?"
"It means pertaining to criminal or legal proceedings. I used to think it meant medicine, you know. But it doesn't."
"Hmmm," Corde said, at least giving himself credit for not looking too impressed.
"Anyway, I was reading this book and it said that prints in mud change shape depending on how close they are to the water source and whether the print would get drier or muddier with time. That dam's got a runoff nearby and it's uphill of where she was found--"
"How'd you know that?"
"I went there and looked."
"So the print spread. Okay, but how come in the crime scene photo the feet don't point out like in the one you took?"
"I think they do," Kresge said. "We just don't have him standing in one place. Look, the heavier indentation's on the right of his right foot and in this one it's on the left of his left. Means the man walks like a penguin."
"Yessir," Corde said. "It sure does."
"So, I think they're one and the same."
"I do too, Wynton." Corde pondered this information. "I think we're real close to probable cause. But damn I'd love a motive. What else've we got?" He flipped through his cards then lifted out two and read them slowly. He said, "You remember that scrap of computer paper I showed you, the one I found behind Jennie's dorm? Mostly burned up."
"I couldn't find out anything about it before I got laid off."
"Well, in the morning I'd like to check on where it came from."
Kresge winced. "Bill, the school's hardly going to let me do that. I got fired. Remember?"
"Wynton, it's not a question of letting you. We'll get a search warrant. You've got to start thinking like a cop."
Kresge nodded, flustered. "I haven't been on the job too long, you know."
"That's not an excuse."
At ten the next morning the men walked up the steps of the dark-brick house and rang the bell.
Wynton Kresge noticed the way Corde stood away from the front of the door as if somebody might shoot through the oak. He doubted anybody was going to do that but he mimicked the detective.
A blond woman in her forties opened the door. Narrow shoulders in a white blouse widening to a dark plaid pleated skirt. She listed to her right under the weight of a large briefcase. She set it down.
Corde looked expectantly at Kresge, who cleared his throat and said, "Morning, ma'am, would your husband be home?"
She examined them uneasily. "What would this be about?"
Corde said, "Is he home, please?"
Kresge decided he wouldn't have said that. He'd have answered her question.
She let them in. "In his study in the back of the house."
The men walked past her. She smiled, curious. The motion spread the red lipstick slightly past the boundaries of her lips. "There." She pointed to the room then left them. Corde's hand went to the butt of his pistol. Kresge's did too. They knocked on the door and walked in before there was an answer.
The man swiveled slowly in a shabby office chair, bleeding upholstery stuffing. Kresge wondered if he'd found the chair on the street in his poor graduate student days and kept it for sentiment. Kresge's nostrils flared against the old-carpet smell, basement water in wool. He had a strong urge to walk directly to the nearest window and fling it wide open. The papers and books filling every available space added to the stifling closeness as did the jumble of old-time photos stacked against the wall. Everything was covered with thin films of dust.
Randy Sayles put a pencil tic next to his place in the massive volume he was reading, slipped a paperclip between the pages and closed the book.
A jay landed on a bush outside the window and picked at a small blond mulberry.
Bill Corde said, "Professor Sayles, we're here to arrest you for the murder of Jennifer Gebben."
Sayles leaned back in the ancient chair. Sorrow was in his face but it seemed a manageable sorrow like that in the eyes of a distant relative at a funeral.
He listened to Corde recite the Miranda rights. Corde unceremoniously took his handcuffs out of the leather case on his belt. Sayles said a single word softly. Corde believed it was "No." The professor's tongue caressed his lips. One circuit. Two. He lifted his hands and rested them on his knees; they looked dirty because of the fine dark hairs coating his skin. Corde noticed that his feet pointed outward. He said, "Will you hold your wrists out, please?"
"Why do you think it's me?" He asked this with unfeigned curiosity. He did not offer his wrists.
"A witness came forward and identified your picture in the yearbook. He saw you by the dam that night. Your hands?"
Sayles nodded and said, "The man in the car. He almost ran me over."
Kresge said, "And your bootprint matches one found at the scene of the killing." He looked at Corde to see if it was all right to volunteer this kind of information.
"My bootprint?" Sayles looked involuntarily at a muddy corner of the study where presumably a pair of boots had recently lain. "You took prints of mine from the yard?"
"Yessir," Kresge said. "Shot pictures, actually."
Sayles fidgeted with his hands, his face laced with the regret of a marathoner pulling up cramped a half mile shy of the finish. "Will you come with me?" Sayles stood up.
"For what?" Corde asked.
"I didn't kill her." Sayles seemed stricken with apathy.
"You'll have your day in court, sir."
"I can prove it right now."
Corde looked at the eyes and what he saw was a load of disappointm
ent--much more than desperation. He motioned with his head toward the door. "Five minutes. But you wear the cuffs." He put them on.
As they left the house Kresge whispered, "So, okay, let me get this straight. If they say they didn't do it we give them a chance to show us some new evidence? I just want to know the rules."
"Wynton," Corde said patiently, "there are no rules."
The two men followed Sayles outside. They walked to the back of the house--ten feet from the place where Kresge had taken photos of Sayles's footprints. Corde recognized the ruddy box elder root from the Polaroids. Corde glanced toward the front of the house. He believed he smelled cigarette smoke. Corde saw Sayles's wife standing in the kitchen thirty feet away.
Sayles walked to a patch of dug-up earth like two wide tread marks about twenty feet long. Small green shoots were rising from precisely placed intervals along the strips.
"Dig here." He touched a foot to the ground.
Kresge picked up a rusty spade. Corde now felt contempt in the air. Sayles's eyes were contracted like nipple skin in chill water. The deputy began to dig. A few feet down he uncovered a plastic bag. Kresge dropped the spade on the ground. He pulled the bag out, dusted it off carefully and handed it to Corde. Inside was a length of clothesline.
"That's the murder weapon," Sayles said.
Corde said to him, "Do you want to make a statement?"
Sayles said, "This is the proof."
"Yessir," Corde said. "Do you wish to waive your right to have an attorney present during questioning?"
"He killed Jennie with it. I saw him. It'll have his fingerprints on it."
"You're saying you didn't kill her?" Kresge asked.
"No, I didn't kill her," Sayles said. He sighed. "Jennie and I had an affair last year."
"Yessir, we figured as much," Corde said.
In the open window, the blond woman rested her chin in her hand and listened to his words without visible emotion. The cigarette dangled over the sill and from it rose a leisurely tentacle of smoke.
"I was quite taken by her." He said to Corde, "You saw her. How could anybody help but be captivated by her?"
Corde remembered the moon, remembered the smell of mint on the dead girl's mouth, remembered the spice of her perfume. He remembered the dull eyes. He remembered two diamonds and he remembered mud. He had no idea how captivating Jennie Gebben was.
Sayles said, "She went to work for me in the financial aid office."
"We just came from there. The scrap of paper we found burned behind her dorm matches computer files in your records. You broke into her dorm and stole her letters and papers. You burned them."
Sayles laughed shortly, the disarmed sound of someone learning that his secrets are not secret at all. He nodded. "You know the financial condition of the school?"
What was it about educators that made them think their school was exactly the first thing on everyone's mind?
Sayles continued, "We've been in danger of closing since the mid-eighties. Dean Larraby and I came up with an idea two years ago. As dean of financial aid I started giving out loan money to students who were bad risks. Millions of dollars."
Corde nodded. "You gave them the money and they paid it to the school then they dropped out and defaulted. You kept the money. Who got, uhm, taken in that deal?"
"It was mostly state and federal money," Sayles said. "It's a very common practice at small colleges." A professor, Sayles was giving them information, not apologizing. "Times are extremely bad for educational institutions. Auden is being audited in a week or so by the Department of Education. They'll find the loan defaults. I've tried desperately to get some interim financing to put into the loan accounts to cover the deficit but--"
"And Jennie found out about the scam and you killed her," Kresge said.
"No sir, I did not." Corde thought something like a Southern military officer's drawl crept into the man's offended voice. "She knew what was going on. But she didn't care. And I didn't care if she knew. I just arranged for the job for her so we could see each other privately. She took some work home, administrative things. After she died I went to her dorm and burnt those files and her letters. In case she'd mentioned me in them."
"That's why you urged Steve Ribbon to pull me off the case? So this secret of yours didn't get uncovered?"
"I promised him and Sheriff Ellison they'd have university support in the elections come November."
Kresge's face blossomed into a large frown at this first glimpse of law enforcement politics. He'd been on the job less than twenty-four hours.
"But I didn't kill her. I swear it." His voice lowered. "Our relationship never went past sex. We were lovers. Once or twice I thought about marrying her. But she told me right up front she was in it for the sex and nothing else. I was happy to accommodate. It didn't last long. Jennie was bisexual, you know. She finally patched up her relationship with Emily, her roommate, and she and I drifted apart."
"Emily's death was a suicide, wasn't it?"
"Yes, I'm sure it was. She called me the night she died. I went to meet her. She was terribly depressed about Jennie, incoherent. She ran off. I have no doubt she killed herself."
"Well, Professor, who do you think is the killer?"
"About four months after Jennie and I broke up she said she'd started seeing someone else. We were still close and she told me a few things about her lover. It sounded like a very destructive relationship. Finally she broke it off but the lover was furious. On the day she was killed, after class, Jennie told me she'd agreed to meet for one last time, to say it was over, to leave her alone. I tried to talk her out of it. But that was one thing you just couldn't do with Jennie. You couldn't protect her. She wouldn't stand for it, she wouldn't depend on anybody. I worried about her all evening. Finally, I drove out to the pond, where she'd told me they were going to meet. I found Jennie. With a rope around her neck. That rope. She was dead."
"She hadn't been raped?" Corde asked.
"No, that must've happened later. The boy that got shot."
"Why," Kresge asked, "did you take the rope?"
"I was going to destroy it. But then I thought for my own sake I should save it--to prove that his fingerprints were on the murder weapon. I wrapped it up in a scrap of plastic and buried it here."
Kresge was exasperated. "Destroy the rope? You were trying to cover up the murder? Why?"
"Don't you realize what would happen if word were to get out that a professor murdered one of his students? It would destroy Auden. Enrollment would plummet. It would be the end of the school. Oh, it was hard for me.... Oh, poor Jennie. But I had to think of the school first."
"A professor?" Corde asked. "Who is it?"
"I assume you talked to him when you were interviewing people," Sayles said. "His name is Leon Gilchrist."
Jim Slocum, Lance Miller and a county deputy met them at the university, in an alleyway behind Jesse Hall.
Corde said, "He claims it's Gilchrist, one of Jennie's professors."
Miller said, "He was in San Francisco at the time of the killing, I thought."
Corde said to Kresge, "I checked the flights. Gilchrist flew out on the weekend before the killing. His secretary said he just got back a few days ago."
Sayles said, "I swear it, Officer. He was back the Tuesday she was killed."
Kresge said, "Maybe if he was planning to kill her he used a different name on the flight."
Corde nodded then handed Sayles over to Slocum. "Take him to a cell. Book him for murder one, manslaughter and felony obstruction."
Corde and Kresge left Sayles's protests behind and walked through the elaborate towering arch, like the doorway in a medieval hall. The sounds of their footsteps resounded off the high concrete walls.
They suddenly heard running water.
"What's that?" Kresge whispered.
As they got closer to the lecture hall they could tell the sound was of applause, which rose in volume and was soon joined by whistles. The noise f
illed the old stern Gothic corridors. An image came to Corde's mind: gladiatorial battles from an ancient movie.
Doors opened and the halls filled with students in shorts, jeans, sweats, T-shirts. Corde walked into the lecture hall. It did indeed resemble the Colosseum. Steep rows of seats rising from a small semicircular platform, empty except for a chipped lectern. The ceiling of the auditorium was high, hueless, murky with years of grime. The walls were dark oak. The gooseneck lamp on the lectern still burned and in the dimness of the hall cast a pale shadow on the stage.
Corde stopped a crew-cut student. "Excuse me, this Professor Gilchrist's class?"
"Yessir."
"Do you know where he is?"
The boy looked around, saw someone and grinned. He continued his scan of the auditorium. "Nope. Guess he's gone."
"Was he away from town for a while?"
"Yeah. He was in San Francisco until a few days ago I heard. He came back to give his last lecture."
"What was the applause about?"
"If you ever heard him you'd know. He's totally, you know, intense."
Corde and Kresge continued down the corridor until they found Gilchrist's office. The professor was not here and the departmental secretary was gone. Kresge motioned toward her Rolodex, which was turned to the G's. Gilchrist's home address card was gone. The desk drawers were open and although Corde found files on other professors there was none for Gilchrist.
On the way out of the hall they passed the auditorium again.
The lectern light was dark.
The apartment wasn't university property. It was three miles outside of town in a complex of two-story brick buildings, with the doorways on the second floor opening onto a narrow balcony that ran the length of the building. Gilchrist lived in apartment 2D. The complex was surrounded by thick foliage and mature trees. Corde noticed it was only one mile from his own house through the forest. Another brick of evidence for the district attorney--it would have cost Gilchrist merely a pleasant twenty minute walk to get to Corde's house and leave the threatening pictures of Sarah.
Corde drove the cruiser past the entrance to the apartment complex then parked in a clump of hemlock out of sight of the building. Corde unlocked the shotgun and motioned to Kresge to take it. "You hunt, you told me?"
"Yup." Kresge took the riot gun and Corde got a moment's pleasure watching the man's thick hands load and lock the gun as if he'd been doing it since he was five. They climbed out and started along the path.
The Lesson of Her Death Page 35
