He pointed to a plaque on the wall. “National Merit Scholars.”
“That’s an impressive number, for how long? The school is twelve years old?”
“That’s just this last year. Previous winners are in other halls.” He watched as her mouth fell open. The school had approximately twenty times the national average of scholarship recipients through the nation’s most famous program.
“I’m glad the building is still open,” she commented, probably to keep the conversation going.
“They run classes in the evening, allowing curious minds to come and learn from other local experts.” He waved a hand toward one of the rooms. “It’s like the same way someone would take an MIT online course, but in person, with the ability to sit at a desk, raise your hand, and ask a question of a teacher at the front of the room.” The teacher could, of course, answer with the smart board, as every single room had one.
He noted that the Biology wing had live animals in most of the classrooms and fish tanks embedded in one of the walls. His high school classroom had been lucky not to have mold. Though he'd attended six different high schools, none had enough books, nor chairs, nor teachers, and certainly no one had worried about tablets for the individual students or National Merit Scholarships.
They hit Room 342 and found the door, though closed, led to a well-lit classroom. Turning the knob, Donovan looked up and down the hallway, and noted Eleri surreptitiously doing the same. No one was up here. The class Johanna was filling in for should have been well done by now. So perhaps, not being the regular teacher, she'd not closed up the room, or had mistakenly left the lights on, something like that. Still, they ducked inside to check.
A teacher's office was attached to the far side of the room, the door only partly closed. He and Eleri barely glanced around the empty classroom before they dashed for the office.
Turning the knob, Donovan peered through the small window and pushed at the door. His glance into the room had not revealed anything other than shelves of books on two sides and a small window to the outside on the third. The door only swung about a foot and a half open before it bumped into something, not going any further.
His heart sank then, the bad feeling settling into his bones. It had only gotten worse when he stuck his head in and looked down. The thing stopping the door was a foot.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck," he'd whispered, and Eleri had known then.
As the two of them had grown to trust each other over the past almost two years, she let him look and did not rush him for space in the doorway. Instead, she stepped back, allowing him to pull the door slightly closed, then slide through the opening and step to the other side. Once he was in, Eleri poked her head in, but they both understood the importance of not bothering the body first.
Johanna Schmitt hadn’t moved in the slightest, and though he already knew the answer, Donovan knelt down and tested for a pulse. "Shit, El. She's getting cold."
He launched into investigation mode, not sure how long they would have before someone found them with the body. He watched as his partner started calculating time since death, even as they both pulled out their phones and began snapping pictures.
Eleri started, her voice soft. "If the class ended at seven and it’s eight-thirty now, then she can't have been dead for more than an hour probably. We need to find out if she taught this class or not. Maybe the body was in here the whole time class was going on."
"I don't think so," Donovan said, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out the pair of blue latex gloves that he constantly kept on him. At least his cover as a physician made that seem somewhat normal. Though he'd never carried gloves along as an ME, as an FBI agent, he now also had a foldable CPR barrier, allowing him to give any mouth-to-mouth without full contact. But this time, unfortunately, he only needed the gloves. "She left the house at four. She would have had to have come here, and been killed, and then a class would have come in and not noticed, even though the door was only partly closed. Had any of the students come early, they would have known. It’s possible, but not probable."
Once they had a satisfactory number of pictures, he asked Eleri and they agreed: it was time to move the foot, open the door fully, and let Eleri in. Closing the door behind her, they squatted down together, using phone flashlights to illuminate what they’d noticed before. What they'd seen in the pictures of the first body was now confirmed here.
Eleri looked at him. "Rope marks, wrists and ankles."
He pointed to the marks. "But she fought."
17
Donovan woke up late the next morning, and so had Eleri, he noticed. No one had gone outside, trying to make friends with LeDonRic next door, or his girlfriend Maggie, or to see if he had a gaggle of high school students following him along in full medieval armor. This had not been the morning for that.
This morning had been a struggle between his own feelings about losing someone directly on his watch—and also about still covering up the facts about what they really were and why they were here. He had yet to resolve it in his own mind, and for a moment, he wished he was back in the ME’s office in South Carolina. The dead bodies there were not his fault and he rarely had to interact with the people their deaths impacted. He solved his puzzles and went home.
Now, he was rarely home. But in more ways, he always was home, he thought, as he watched his partner come down the stairs. He had Eleri, Wade, Lucy, and even GJ. Eleri schlepped down the steps looking as though her night had been as sleepless as his. They had been up until the wee hours.
Though they'd taken their own pictures and checked the body with their gloves on, they realized quickly that they were each playing the role of “random citizen.” The thing that Random Citizen would do was to call the Curie Police Department. Donovan had already touched Johanna Schmitt to check her pulse in her neck, though it had yielded nothing beyond her already dropping temperature. They had also moved the body, ever so slightly, but since they'd had to do it to open the door in the first place, the PD would likely let that slide.
When the police arrived, they had made a justified argument for why they had done it, and no one seemed to be suspecting them or bringing up any charges. In fact, if they hadn’t done those things, the PD would likely question them later, though Donovan thought he might just claim his Curie-level brilliance meant that he knew better than to touch or move a dead body.
They'd been questioned separately, and he had been forced to speak as Dr. Donovan Naman, primary care physician and erstwhile CDC adjunct. He’d had to account for every moment of his time yesterday, just to help them rule him out as the killer. Not used to being the suspect on the receiving end of the interrogation, Donovan struggled to make it work. His acting was subpar, but he hoped the police read that as him struggling with having found a dead body rather than as struggling to maintain an FBI cover story. But holding up his cover demanded that he do the full interrogation as though he were an average citizen, and the FBI demanded that he hold his cover until he was explicitly given permission to break it.
The upside was that he and Eleri had not even been in Curie when Marat Rychenkov had been murdered—and that much of the PD had no idea that Marat Rychenkov had been murdered in the first place.
Eleri looked at him now as she plopped into the chair opposite him. "Everything is going out the window," she said by way of greeting.
He could only agree. "I had a bowl of cereal. You want one?" He shook the box at her, as though that would be in any way enticing despite the dismal situation of the day.
She shook her head. "No. You and I both need to go to the Up N Atom and eat pastries and drink strong coffee and be sad and shaken."
He nodded. It was a good plan. They'd called Westerfield at four a.m., explaining everything they'd found and how they'd been interrogated. When they asked about continuing their cover Westerfield had insisted they maintain it.
"The problem now," Donovan told Eleri, "is everybody's going to know that Johanna was murdered. Two
people don't just die the same way—in that way—coincidentally. The general population of Curie will know that Johanna was murdered, and they’ll put it together and know that Marat was, too.”
“I suspect the information about the ligature marks is going to get out,” Eleri sighed. “Our jobs just got infinitely harder."
They both knew the police had managed to keep the majority of details clamped down regarding Marat’s death—not because they thought they were releasing details of a murder, but because they felt one of their citizens likely had a kinky sex life, and they didn't feel the details were important to the public. But now, given the CPD officer staff of around fifty, something was likely to get out. “Do you think they’ll be able to hold back the information about the ropes better because they’re smarter?” Donovan asked Eleri.
“These people are smart,” she replied, still not looking at him, “but I don’t think that makes them any less human. Does it make them any less likely to feel that driving urge to share a secret with just one person? It might make them think twice about the content of what they share and hopefully about the consequences, but I don’t think it will significantly slow the spread of information.” Even her tone sounded depressed about that.
Donovan and Eleri tried briefly to figure out how long it would take for the ligature marks to make their way into public knowledge, though first the gossip would likely be that Johanna Marat had died barely two weeks after her husband. These people were far too smart for that not to look hell-and-high-water suspicious to everyone. This death was definitely going to be a murder investigation from the start.
Rubbing one hand down her face, Eleri leaned ungracefully back into the hard wood chair as Donovan got up to take his bowl to the sink and think about the two of them getting ready and heading out. "The upside," he said, "is that we actually are sad and scared and frustrated now. Our acting abilities don't have to be up to any level of showmanship today."
"No, but our filters will have to be top notch. We're really going to have to watch what we say. Also," she added, "everyone's going to be after us because we know details about the body, and they're going to want to know, too. So what do we tell and what do we not tell?"
They spent a few minutes deciding what kind of citizens they were going to be today—the good kind who said nothing or the ones who shared a single, juicy tidbit. All the while, the thought played at the back of Donovan’s mind that he could not determine how Johanna Schmitt had died. Once again, there was no evidence of any foul play, other than the obvious. He’d even tried the less-than-obvious. He’d leaned over the body and sniffed it before the police arrived. Though it wasn't the same as having a Y incision on the thorax and the organs actually held in his hands, he got a good whiff. But he didn't smell anything that made him curious.
Eleri sighed heavily. “I vote to be slightly bad citizens. We share one detail. Make people hope to get more information out of us. Hopefully, one of those people will be the killer, trying to figure out what we figured out.”
Donovan nodded, thinking about what kind of detail to share. Once they'd called the police, the investigation had been out of their hands, and though they'd both looked around and seen and taken in details, they hadn't been able to have a discussion yet. They'd been on the phone with Westerfield late last night. Then, almost as soon as they had hung up with him and thought about discussing the case, Bennett had called.
Donovan's phone had rung simultaneously to Eleri's, which almost always meant Westerfield, but given that they'd just hung up with the man and that the number was Bennett's, they both raised an eyebrow. That had been five a.m.
The founder had demanded a more thorough investigation from them. “How could this have happened on your watch?” he wanted to know. But there had been no answer for that. Not yet.
In the end, Marshall Bennett managed to tone his ire down a bit, and even apologized for yelling. He understood that he was just angry, and it really wasn't their fault, something Donovan wasn't sure he'd wrapped his own head around just yet.
That was when Bennett told them, "I'm giving you access to all the police reports. As soon as they're done, they come to me. As soon as I have them, Kate will forward them to you. Expect full cooperation in this."
“Of course,” Donovan had replied, though he wondered what else Marshall Bennett might have thought he would get from the two FBI agents he had explicitly brought in for this case. Had he thought they might have seen the body and run screaming? Donovan told himself the old man was flustered and maybe even scared. His seemingly peaceful town was under attack by a killer. His dream was threatened.
As Donovan thought back, it meshed with what Eleri had said. Smart didn’t mean not human. And as smart as Marshall Bennett was, he'd not been prepared for this.
Somehow, the town founder seemed to believe that intelligent people were better people. Donovan was realizing that that was not the case. Smart people were, in most ways, just like everyone else.
Johanna Schmitt had believed her husband's murder was a contained case. Though she had slept with a weapon under her pillow, she'd not truly been worried about her own life. She was more worried that she would disturb the intruder looking for Marat's things and that was what would put her in danger. Not any threat directly to herself, or at least not anything she couldn’t protect herself from.
Of course, she’d been wrong.
They'd assessed the case, and yet Donovan and Eleri and Wade had all somehow missed the threat to Johanna Schmitt, and it had cost her life. They'd been too slow to see the real threat was to the woman still living in the house.
Now he let it all out, all his frustration and self-anger. He and Eleri were finally able to have some of the conversation they'd been unable to have the night before. Once he’d spent a minute being a pain in the butt, he got down to the work of assessing their information.
"What was she tied to?" he asked first. "She had ligature marks on her wrist. She was tied down. No one just puts ropes around someone’s wrists for no reason."
“Well, don’t put that past anyone here. Now that you mention it, that would be a great way to throw the police off track.”
He muttered to himself that he’d been joking, but she had a point. Eleri continued, "Though her arms hadn’t been splayed out, it appeared they'd been moved back by her sides after she died. Though the evidence on that isn’t solid yet. It’s something we want to look at harder when we see the body. I think she was tied to the bases of the bookshelves. They were relatively heavy. Maybe a leg of the desk."
"Is that just because you saw them and that's what you would have used?"
"Partially," his partner replied, her head now laid back across the rungs of the chair and aimed up to the ceiling, her hair needing to be washed, and her face needing a new expression. "But also, if you noticed the bookshelf on the right where I was standing, many of the books were tilted. They looked like they'd been jostled. Thus, maybe she disturbed them if she fought back and she was anchored to the bookshelf."
"It's a good thing it didn't fall over on them," he said.
"I know, but also I get the feeling that she wasn't able to fight too hard."
Donovan thought about that, and then he understood why Eleri said that. "She had ligature marks, but not really burns, no scrapes."
"Right. If I was tied down and I knew the person was trying to murder me, I would have pulled on those ropes hard enough to draw blood. The data says most people would. And Johanna Schmitt was already angry enough about her husband's murder to have fought hard."
"So," Donovan added to the train of thought between them, "did all her bruising come from getting her into the ligatures, not after?"
“I think so,” Eleri replied.
But that only made the case stranger and stranger.
18
Eleri was heartbroken. They had recognized the danger to Johanna Schmitt, but probably thirty minutes to an hour too late. On the drive to the Up N Atom, Marshall Bennett
had called their phones again, demanding that they come into his office. Donovan turned the car around as Eleri mentally postponed the pastry and the coffee, both of which she really needed, for later in the morning.
She'd wondered what Bennett was going to say, and was not surprised when he opened the office door to them, his face already red. His tension appeared like visible blood pressure, as though he had possibly already paced the carpet bare in several spots. She hadn't known what to say. Neither had Donovan, but he'd at least attempted it.
"Morning, sir." Eleri noticed her partner dropped the good. It wasn't.
Bennett closed the door behind them as politely as he seemed to be able to, given whatever was zinging through his system—anger, frustration, fear, maybe all of it. She was having difficulty sorting it out and wondered if Donovan could smell a distinction on the older man.
She didn't get to wonder for long, though, because Bennett moved behind his desk—probably a position he felt powerful and comfortable in—and suddenly smacked both his hands down, hard. She would have been startled if she hadn't been well enough trained to see it coming.
"I have a fucking serial killer in my town," he issued the statement like a demand.
Though Donovan started to answer, Eleri gave a small motion to him. This was actually her area, and she wanted to talk Bennett down. "No, sir, you don't."
"I have two murders with weird signatures," he said, throwing out a word he likely had heard on TV. As a businessman, he probably wasn't well-versed in his DSM psychological manual and diagnoses. “Isn’t that what they call it? Because we have it!”
"Actually, sir, if you call this person a ‘serial killer,’ even just to your own staff, you're going to create far more problems than you solve."
Bennett left his hands planted on his desk and looked up at her, his eyes narrowing. "Is he—or is he not—killing serially?"
The Camelot Gambit Page 11
