by Mike Markel
Ryan pointed to the neatly made bed. “She was attacked last night, not this morning.”
“Yeah, I see.”
“No sign of a guy living here.”
“Was she screwing the woman down the hall?”
Ryan looked at me, as if the question was out of line or unanswerable or something. “I really wouldn’t know.”
I pointed to the end table. “I mean, any double-sided dildos or shit like that?”
He paused. “Haven’t gotten there yet.”
I walked over and opened up one of the end-table drawers. Then I walked around the bed and checked the other end table. Nothing of interest. “So,” I said, “we can’t identify the mystery woman?”
He gestured toward the desk in the corner of the large room. “Maybe on the laptop.”
I nodded. “We’ll bring it in.” I looked at my watch: 7:38. “Let’s start the canvass, then meet up with Harold back here. He might be able to tell us something from a quick look at the body.”
Ryan nodded, still looking a little preoccupied, as if the worst thing that had happened to Virginia Rinaldi was she didn’t have a man.
“On the canvass,” I said, “we’ll ask about last night, maybe nine pm till around midnight?”
“Sounds right.” He gave me a small smile.
We left Virginia Rinaldi’s bedroom. “I’ll do west, both sides of the street, three or four houses. You do east.”
We walked downstairs, stepping over the body. As I headed out the front door, I turned to Truman. “We’re gonna do a quick canvass. If Harold Breen shows up, tell him we’ll be back in a couple minutes. Ask him to wait.” I closed up my coat against the morning chill and fished through my big leather shoulder bag to retrieve my detective’s shield on the metal chain. I hung it around my neck.
At the house next door, I knocked. Silence. Waited and knocked again. I walked back out toward the street to see if any lights came on upstairs. Nothing.
At the next house, a retired guy in a bathrobe opened the door. A few feet behind him was his wife, her face scrunched up in a concerned expression. A strange woman at the door, wearing a detective’s shield, will do that—especially before eight in the morning.
After introducing myself to the guy—and reassuring his wife that nothing bad had happened to their son or the grandkids—I asked about the woman two doors down.
“We didn’t know her name—Virginia Rinaldi, you say?” He turned to his wife. She shook her head to confirm they didn’t know her name. I’d known some old folks like that, married a hundred years. You ask him if he’s seen this movie, he’d turn to her, like she’d know better than he would.
I described Virginia Rinaldi. Forty-five or so, a professor at the university? A younger woman living there, too? Maybe a daughter? They both shook their heads.
Then the wife said, “Wait a second, Arthur, you remember Ruth was telling us about the professor who invited her students over to her house? Remember you were annoyed about all the cars parked on the street?”
It all came back to him. He launched a rant about the parking problems they’ve been having on their street, and how inconsiderate it was for that woman to bring all those cars into the neighborhood, and how it got real noisy with those kids talking and laughing on the sidewalk before they started their cars around ten o’clock when he and his wife were trying to get some sleep.
I let him go on for a minute, then broke in when his train of thought derailed. Bottom line: they didn’t know anything about Virginia Rinaldi, didn’t know who the young woman was who lived there, hadn’t seen or heard anything. So, it had taken me four minutes to learn that the people drinking from all those wine glasses at Virginia Rinaldi’s house might have been her students. Or not.
Fifteen minutes later, I had talked with three other neighbors and met up with Ryan back on Virginia Rinaldi’s porch. Truman was standing next to the front door, watching passersby and glancing at the cars going past.
“What’d you get?” I said to Ryan.
He shook his head. “Virginia Rinaldi lived in that house for about three or four years but didn’t have anything to do with the neighborhood. She didn’t go to the annual block party or any of the local events. Didn’t spend any time outside gardening or taking care of the place. The lights were lit on both floors late into the night.”
“What about the woman living there?”
“Two of the neighbors knew there was a woman the last month or two, but that’s all.”
“And last night?”
“One neighbor remembered there was a party or something. Lots of young people. It broke up around nine or nine-thirty.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“Shit.” I glanced down the block, but I didn’t see Harold Breen’s rusty old minivan.
“Harold called me,” Ryan said. “Said he’s on his way.”
I nodded. The buzz I had felt about a new case was starting to wear off. I was ninety percent sure it was homicide, with the mess on the kitchen floor and the anonymous phone call early this morning. And the unlocked front door wasn’t right.
“Let’s hang around here, wait for Harold.” I didn’t want to drive to headquarters and then have to come back here if he had a question or something for us to look at in the house. “I’m gonna grab a cup of coffee, okay?” I gestured toward a place a few doors down, on the other side of the street. “You want something? Water?”
“No, I’m good.” He turned to talk to Truman.
I was almost inside Jitterz when I saw Harold pulling up in his minivan at about two miles per hour. I knew he would need five minutes to park the thing, extract his enormous body from it, and lumber his way up the steps and into the vic’s house. I ran into the coffee place and grabbed a cup. By the time I made it back, he was just disappearing into the house.
He’s pretty easy to identify, even from a distance. He’s somewhere between three-fifty and four-hundred pounds, with a shiny scalp, no matter the temperature. Due to all the blubber, he rarely wears a coat. Today he was sporting a short-sleeve plaid shirt, shiny-ass brown polyester pants, and his black shoes with the Velcro straps and the soles worn down on the outsides.
When I got in the house, Harold was breathing heavily and holding onto one of the balusters on the staircase. He gave off a scent of baby powder. “Good morning, beautiful,” he said to me, with a smile that wrinkled up his whole face. Tiny dots of perspiration covered his face. Ryan was standing there, looking concerned, as if he thought Harold’s heart was going to explode any minute. I wasn’t sure what Ryan thought he was going to do about it.
“Sorry to drag you in early, Harold.” I pointed to the woman on the stairs. “We’re right on the edge about Virginia Rinaldi here.” I wanted him to be able to look at the body and explain how it could’ve been something other than homicide.
“She took a nasty tumble, I see.” He looked at the body for a few seconds. “I’d like to get a little closer.” He shook his head in frustration, then walked around the staircase so that he was next to the fourth step. But with the wide staircase and her being up close to the wall, he couldn’t reach far enough through the balusters and touch her arm. He glanced over at Ryan. “You see her right wrist, where it’s swollen?”
“Yep.”
“Climb up there, would you? Get right up close to the wrist. Tell me what you see.” Harold reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a penlight, which he handed to Ryan. “Take this.”
Ryan climbed up the stairs, turned on the penlight, and leaned in close to her arm. He looked at it, then lifted it carefully with his gloved hand and studied the underside of the wrist. He put it down gently and worked his way down the steps backwards. He handed Harold his penlight. “Little red and purple dots. About fifty of them.”
Harold nodded.
“What is it?” I said.
“They’re called petechiae. She’s got petechial hemorrhage.”
“From the fall?”
Harold shook his head. “More likely, it’s what we used to call an Indian burn. Someone grabbed her wrist, twisted it pretty hard, broke the little blood vessels. But there’s all kinds of tendons and ligaments in there. When I open it up, I’m going to see some damage.”
“That’s the swelling?” I said.
“Yeah.” He nodded. “I vote for homicide.”
“Ryan, call Robin, would ya?” I turned back to Harold. “Thanks, handsome.” I walked out the front door. “Truman, put up the tape.”
Chapter 3
The sun was breaking free of the foothills as I drove my Honda toward headquarters from the victim’s house in the North End. I shielded my eyes with one hand and fished around with my other one for the sunglasses that had burrowed to the bottom of my big leather bag. The red-orange ribbon of sky along the horizon was beautiful. Someday, some year, I would make the time to look at it.
I carded my way through the rear entrance to the building and headed to Dispatch to try to track down whoever called in about Virginia Rinaldi’s house this morning.
“Yes, Detective?” A small woman, an admin named Patel, gave me the best smile she could muster at a few minutes past eight in the morning.
“Around 6:30 you got a call from a woman telling you to check out a house on 411 Harkins. Truman responded. Was it you took that call?”
Patel hit a few keys on her computer, then squinted at the screen and nodded. “Yes.”
“Tell me about the call.”
“Young woman, I’d say. Under thirty. She gave me the address and asked us to check it out.”
“She say why?”
“I asked. She repeated, ‘Please check it out.’ I asked again, you know, if everything was all right, if there was a problem. She hung up. So I put out the call. Truman responded.”
“All right,” I said. “I’m gonna ask the chief for authorization to try to run down that call. You mind getting that number to him?”
She was good with that. I thanked her and headed to the detectives’ bullpen to meet up with Ryan and brief Chief Murtaugh.
I checked my watch: 8:05. The night-shift guys had already cleared out by the time I got into the detectives’ bullpen. The place was starting to come alive. The techs and the civilian staff were all settling in at their desks. Computers and printers beeped. The smell of coffee drifted in from the break room.
Ryan was just hanging his coat on the rack in the corner of the bullpen, a rectangular room maybe thirty feet across. I tossed mine on the back of my chair and we walked down the hall, past the incident rooms and some administrative offices toward the short hall that led to the chief’s office. His secretary, Margaret, wasn’t at her desk. I stuck my head around the corner to see if his office door was open. It was.
Robert Murtaugh was seated at his desk, frowning at his screen. He was a good-looking man in his late fifties, a full head of hair going salty, tough-guy features. As always, he wore a white shirt, tie, and jacket, even at his desk.
“Morning, Chief.”
He looked up. “Good morning, Karen.” He tilted his head a little to see past me. “And Ryan.” He glanced at his watch. He’s usually at his desk by six-thirty. That’s after forty-five minutes of lifting weights in the gym downstairs. “Catch a case already?”
I nodded. He gestured for me and Ryan to come in and sit. Ryan and I took the two soft chairs up against the wall. The chief came out from behind his desk and sat on the small sofa.
“A professor, named Virginia Rinaldi.”
He picked up a yellow pad from the little table aside the couch and started to write down the little I could tell him: about the party or the class there last night, about the college-age guy in the photos and the young woman with the slutty outfits. About Harold telling us why he thought it was homicide. About how the canvass turned up nothing. I ended with the request to track down the number of the woman who called in early this morning.
“I’ll notify Billingham.” The chief sighed. “Tell him we’re on top of it.” Charles Billingham was the president of Central Montana State University. “When Harold officially calls it accident or homicide, you get back to me, all right?”
“You bet,” I said.
“Need anything else now?”
I looked at Ryan, who shook his head. We stood up. “We’re good, Chief.”
We made our way back to our desks in the bullpen. Ryan logged onto the system to see what we could learn about Virginia Rinaldi. I went to get a cup of coffee. I could tell it was going to be a good day: Someone had tossed yesterday’s coffee. Today’s was already dripping into the pot.
I passed the hot mug back and forth between my hands as I walked back to my desk. “She in there?”
Ryan was staring at his screen. “She drives fast. Three citations in the last four years.” He was silent as he studied the screen a little bit more. “And six misdemeanors: four disorderly conducts and two failures to disperse.”
“Really? What pushes her buttons?”
“I’d say social justice. She was charged with ‘using obscene, threatening, or abusive language’ from the visitor’s gallery at the state house during a debate on LGBT rights, and she joined a demonstration that blocked the entrance to the parking lot during a session on migrant workers’ rights. She disrupted a hearing about leaseholder’s rights to stop certain kinds of oil drilling on their property. She also didn’t like the law against making secret videos about animal abuse on cattle ranches and dairy farms.”
“And the failures to disperse?”
“Apparently she’d handcuff herself to cars, fences, cops, whatever.”
“Pretty tame stuff.”
“Not the kind of thing that’ll get you killed,” Ryan said. “Even in Montana.”
“Can you get her CV?”
Ryan gave me a playful snort of derision and hit a few keys. “Virginia Rinaldi was the Evelyn Cornay Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Central Montana State University, the first named professor in the College of Social Sciences. Came here four years ago. Her PhD was from Cal-Berkeley, fifteen years ago. Wow. Six books. Feminism, social justice, immigrant rights. The Internet and the alienation of Gen Y students. And about fifty articles.”
“So what’d she doing out here on the frozen plains?”
“I’d say the Distinguished Professorship has something to do with it. Salary, research assistants, not that much teaching.” Ryan’s father is a professor. He knows how to read professors’ CVs.
“So she can afford all those hundred-dollar disorderlies,” I said.
“At least a thousand of them a year.”
“You’re shittin’ me. A hundred K a year?”
“More likely in the neighborhood of one-fifty,” Ryan said.
“Nice neighborhood.” I checked my watch: 8:16. “How about this for a plan? Robin’s going out to the vic’s house. She’ll be there a couple of hours, at least. Maybe she can figure out where Virginia’s son lives—and who the woman is. Meantime, we’ll head over to campus, see what we can learn about Virginia Rinaldi.”
“Let me set up the appointments on campus.”
“I’ll be right back.” I headed back to the break room to grab some calories. By the time I returned, Ryan was ready.
“We’re going to meet with the provost, Audrey Miller, in ten minutes. Next up is Daryl Sorenson, the chair of the sociology department.”
As I drove us over to campus under crisp, cloudless skies, Ryan phoned Robin and asked her to bring in Virginia Rinaldi’s laptop and explained what we wanted to know about her son and the woman. I parked the Charger in a metered spot behind the Administration Building, which housed the provost’s office.
We approached the big glass doors with the names of the president and the provost. “We worked with Audrey Miller before?”
“Yep. On the Austin Sulenka case last year. The grad student?”
It came back to me. “She gave us the envelope with the phony reference letters, rig
ht?”
“That’s right.”
“What was the professor’s name again?”
“Suzannah Montgomery.”
Turns out Suzannah Montgomery was screwing the grad student but didn’t kill him. Audrey Miller used the investigation to fire Suzannah Montgomery. It was a complicated and nasty case.
The provost’s assistant escorted us back to Audrey Miller’s office. The provost, a stocky sixty-something woman with a dark complexion and liver spots ringing her eyes, stood there, her hands on her hips, as if she didn’t want to invite us in, didn’t want this to be how she started her day. Her expression grim, she nodded, turned, and walked into her big office. It was filled by a massive walnut desk, a round table that could seat six, and a small couch and two armchairs. “Detectives,” she said.
She didn’t tell us her name or ask us ours, but I introduced us anyway. “President Billingham told you about Professor Rinaldi?” I said. If she wanted to cut through the civilities, that was fine with me. She pointed to the couch. We sat. She took an armchair.
“A few moments before you called me.”
I expected her to talk about what a terrible loss it was. She didn’t. She looked at me.
“Did you know her personally?”
“I’d been part of the hiring process, worked with her on some committees.”
“But you weren’t social friends.”
“Not at all.”
I thought about whether to follow up on that but decided to hold off. “Can you tell us about her role here on campus?”
“Her role was to be a high-profile international scholar in the social sciences and to stir the pot here on campus.”
“Stir the pot?”
“With all the emphasis on STEM lately—”
“STEM?” It’s rude to use jargon I have no way of knowing. I don’t mind interrupting people when they do it.
