The Red Queen Dies

by Frankie Y. Bailey

  When she finished reading the message, McCabe reminded herself that they would have the car they were looking for only if their teaching assistant had driven past the library or had parked in the lot in back of the library and then gone up the hill and onto Washington Ave en route to the summer science camp on Madison. But at least they had video from which they could try to pull license numbers and hope for a match with a female driver who would have been in her late teens or early twenties.

  Unless she had been driving someone else’s car or had taken the bus or gotten a ride with her boyfriend.

  But they had at least a shot at finding what they were looking for.

  The television station had already sent over the video. McCabe debated getting dressed again and going back to the station.

  But she was exhausted, and she knew Baxter must be, too.

  She sent him a tag, letting him know his idea had paid off. Then she went out into the kitchen and made herself a turkey sandwich and a cup of cocoa.

  The house was quiet because Pop was out. He’d gone down to the City for a reunion with an old buddy from his days as a foreign correspondent. “An overnighter,” he had said in the note she had found on the bulletin board. “So don’t wait up.”

  Truth be told, she was glad to have the house to herself. Pop wasn’t hard to live with, rarely played the heavy father. She did what she wanted and he did what he wanted, and they were company for each other. But now and then, it was nice to have the place to herself and enjoy the solitude.

  Pop probably felt the same way when she spent the occasional night out, so she felt no guilt about thinking it.

  McCabe settled down on the sofa in the living room in her cotton nightgown and robe. Stocking feet on the coffee table, she brought up the movie menu.

  According to Research, the movie that the teaching assistant had picked up had probably been Them! It had been, and still was, in the Albany Public Library catalog.

  She owed Baxter lunch. He had bet it was a sci-fi movie, not a documentary.

  According to the description from Research, the movie was about giant ants, mutants produced by nuclear radiation.

  McCabe scanned through “classic sci-fi.”

  There it was.

  She read the notes and settled in to see how the New Mexico State Police and the FBI would handle the infestation.

  “Okay, that’s why the teacher chose this movie,” McCabe said out loud when the father-daughter team of entomologists arrived to provide their expertise. “A female scientist. Dr. Kincaid’s 1950s counterpart.”

  Of course, the downside of a movie about giant ants was that it might give sensitive children nightmares. But presumably girls of between twelve and fourteen had been way too sophisticated to be frightened by a black-and-white movie made in 1954.

  Still, the giant ants were pretty good. According to the notes, the special effects had been nominated for an Oscar.

  McCabe took another bite of her turkey sandwich and settled back for some mindless entertainment that had nothing to do with the case, other than one girl’s taunt to another: “Want those big old ants in your pants?”

  Had Bethany Clark, middle-school bully, improved with age? What they knew was that she had worked as a waitress and, during her off-hours, she had liked to party with what her sister had described as her “wild friends.”

  But there was nothing to indicate Bethany’s friends had been any wilder than other young people their age.

  At age twenty-two, Bethany Clark had been a beautiful young woman. But had she been kinder than she was when she was thirteen, skinny, and awkward?

  When the movie was over, McCabe decided, she’d read through the entries on Bethany’s social network node again. At first glance, there hadn’t been much there. But maybe, with the additional information they had, some throwaway remark would stand out this time around.

  McCabe wiggled her toes and took a sip of her cocoa. Not the appropriate drink for a warm evening in October, but the house was on cooldown. And with luck, even if other people were doing the same thing, the Northeast would make it through the night and right through December without a repeat of the three-day blackout they’d had in the spring.

  22

  Monday, October 28, 2019

  “Mike, look at this,” McCabe said when Baxter walked into the bull pen the next morning.

  “What? The video from the TV station?”

  “No, I was waiting on you to get started with that. But I found a really interesting entry on Bethany’s Web node.”

  “I thought you said you and O’Connell had gone through all those already.”

  “We did. But I thought I’d look again now that we know about the science camp.” McCabe highlighted the entry on the wall. “Read this.”

  Baxter read out loud: “THE DIET GODS WILL PUNISH SINNERS. Really wanted hot fudge sundae today. Swore I’d do another thirty crunches at gym. Broke down and stopped at place out on Wolf Road. Cute guy working counter. Decided to sit at table outside even if it was hot. Then realized had forgotten to get water. Went back inside. Came back and ANTS crawling ALL OVER my sundae. TOTALLY GROSSED OUT. Little brats at next table laughing like hilarious. Diet gods laughing, too.’”

  Baxter finished reading. “When did she write this?”

  “August eighth, 2019,” McCabe said. “A few weeks before she was killed. I wonder how the ants got on her sundae.”

  “The kids were giggling. Maybe they did it. Or maybe the ants were on the table and rushed for the sundae as soon as she walked away.”

  “Maybe,” McCabe said. “Or maybe someone else scooped up the ants from the ground and sprinkled them on Bethany’s sundae. Maybe nobody was paying attention but the kids, and they thought it was a good joke. And anyway, you hop in your car and you’re out of there.”

  “But what’s the point?” Baxter said, sitting down in his desk chair. “If she thinks the ants got on the sundae on their own, then what’s the point?”

  “If it’s a message and she didn’t get it the first time, maybe you send it again.”

  “Okay. Does she mention ants again?”

  “No. I did a search, and ants only come up in this one entry.”

  “Does she mention anything else that seems odd now that we know about the science camp?”

  “Nothing that jumps out at me so far. But it’s going to take me another couple of hours to finish rereading.”

  Baxter took a sip of the iced coffee he had brought in. “You really think the ant thing means something?”

  McCabe shrugged. “I have ants on the brain. I watched that movie last night. Them!”

  “Great movie, right? I saw it years ago, when I was a kid.”

  “And you probably recalled that movie had a female scientist.”

  Baxter grinned. “That’s why I was betting they’d watched a movie instead of a dull old documentary about ants. So let’s see if we’ve got anything on the TV station video.”

  “We’re going to need help from the lab to see what we have.”

  “Task force meeting this morning. After we take a first look, maybe we can get some help from the State Police.”

  * * *

  By that afternoon, they were at the State Police lab with Whitman, the investigator assigned to the task force. He had helped them to expedite the forensic examination of the video from the television station.

  Cahill, the lab tech, was manipulating the images on the screen. The license plates of the cars on Washington Avenue between 8:30 and 9:30 that morning nine years ago were being scanned into the database.

  Within seconds, the driver’s license photos of the registered drivers who fit the criteria appeared on the screen.

  “Six possibles,” Baxter said.

  Two of the possibles were black, the other four white.

  “No one’s mentioned the teaching assistant’s race,” McCabe said. “I should have thought to ask Jean Lockhart. Mrs. Giovanni and Bethany Clark’s sister didn’t meet her,
but if the teaching assistant wasn’t white, someone would probably have mentioned that to them.”

  “How do you figure that?” Baxter said.

  “Because nine years ago, white was the default setting for race. If a person wasn’t white, a white person would be inclined to mention his or her race, especially in a situation like this one. If this doesn’t work, we should check with the people we’ve interviewed just to make sure they weren’t all being politically correct by not mentioning that the bungling teaching assistant was black.”

  “Politically correct because you’re black?” Whitman said.

  “That sometimes happens,” McCabe said, not getting into the biracial discussion. “Anyway, let’s look at the four white possibles first.”

  It took less than half an hour to locate all six of the young female drivers in the database. Within the next hour, they had reached four of the six. All denied having worked as a teaching assistant in a science camp back in 2010. The husband of the fifth, reached at Albany Med, said that his wife was in labor. Between contractions, she informed them she didn’t know what they were talking about and didn’t care. The sixth possible was in London, where she had been living and working for the past three years. McCabe left a tag asking the woman to contact her or Baxter. But when they reached her mother, she said her daughter had never been a teaching assistant.

  “One of them could be lying,” Baxter said.

  Whitman said, “None of them sounded like it. But we can dig some more.”

  “Maybe we’ve struck out,” McCabe said.

  “Or maybe not,” Cahill, the lab tech, said. “I know you guys are interested in cars, but I’ve been playing around with the video, and I might have something. The camera angle’s bad, but I’ve managed to enhance the image. This is an image in the side mirror of the TV mobile van.”

  They gathered around her, peering at the blurred image of a woman walking away from the main entrance of the library. Her hair was caught up in a ponytail under a baseball cap, which threw her face into shadow. She was slender, wearing a short denim skirt, T-shirt, and sandals. She had something in her hand that she was putting into the tote bag she was carrying.

  Cahill zoomed in.

  Baxter said, “Damn, woman, you’re good.”

  Cahill pushed back her lank brown hair and smiled. “See what’s in her hand. That looks like a VCR container to me.”

  “Me, too,” McCabe said.”And that’s what we’re looking for. The library had retained some of the old movies in that format. For which we should be grateful. A DVD would have been harder to spot.”

  “Hey, what’s that writing on the bag she’s carrying?” Whitman asked.

  “Let’s have a look,” Cahill said.

  She manipulated the image until the Gothic white lettering on the black cloth tote bag was visible.

  “The Next Man,” McCabe said. “Wasn’t there a play with that title?”

  “Don’t ask me,” Whitman said. “I don’t do theater.”

  “Easy enough to find out,” Cahill said. She pulled up her search engine. “Here we go. The Next Man opened on Broadway in November 2009.”

  “Okay,” Whitman said. “We’ve got a dead Broadway actress. And now we have a teaching assistant walking around with a tote bag from a play.”

  “If she is our TA,” McCabe said.

  “I’d bet good money on it,” Baxter said. “Next question: Was Vivian Jessup in that play?”

  “Yes, she was,” said Cahill. “Here she is in the cast list.”

  “I think we just hit pay dirt,” Whitman said.

  Baxter grinned at McCabe. “Do I get to choose the restaurant?”

  “Yes,” McCabe said. “Now, would you like to have a go at telling us what this is all about?”

  “You got me there, partner.”

  “Whatever it’s about,” Whitman said, “it looks like you might be right that our serial killer hasn’t been choosing his victims at random.”

  McCabe glanced at the screen. “Or, maybe, her victims.” McCabe smiled at Cahill. “That really was incredible work. Would you give us a copy of the image and the info that you found on the play?”

  “Coming right up.”

  “What next?” Whitman asked as they were walking down the hall. “We still need to identify the teaching assistant.”

  “If you were the director of a summer science camp, how would you go about finding a TA?” McCabe said.

  “Check with the local colleges,” Whitman said.

  Baxter said, “College science programs.”

  “We have at least eight or nine colleges in the immediate area. All of them have science programs.” Whitman said. “The director of the science camp might have come from one of those programs, too.”

  “Definitely,” McCabe said. “And I think that it would also be a good idea to follow up with Meredith Noel, the theater professor at UAlbany. She might have some thoughts about Vivian Jessup and The Next Man.”

  “Okay,” Whitman said. “While you two are doing that, I’ll work on the college science programs angle.”

  * * *

  This time, they met with Meredith Noel in her office in the Department of Theatre Productions. She looked a little uncertain about finding herself talking to police detectives again.

  McCabe said, “We’re sorry to bother you again, Professor Noel. But we’re hoping you can help us. We looking for information about a play that Ms. Jessup appeared in.”

  “Oh, I see,” Noel said. “Which play?”

  “The Next Man.”

  Noel shrugged. “A mediocre play, But Vivian was wonderful in it.”

  “According to what we’ve been able to find, the backer of the play was a business mogul named Richard Osmond.”

  Noel hesitated, then said, “When we talked before, I didn’t want to gossip, but now that this has come up…”

  “Now that what has come up, Professor Noel?” McCabe said.

  “When I mentioned the Dalí edition of Alice in Wonderland that Vivian had when she first moved to New York … the one that was stolen in the burglary…”

  “What about it?” Baxter said.

  “I think that Richard Osmond may have been the friend who gave it to her. We had dinner together last week … that would have been on Tuesday. My husband was out of town, so we kicked off our shoes and let our hair down.” She smiled slightly. “Although I was more than a little astonished when I stopped to think about it, that I was sharing a girlfriends’ night with Vivian Jessup.”

  “And while you were having this girlfriends’ night, she said something about the Dalí edition?” Baxter said.

  “She was telling me about her career, and she mentioned a ‘wonderful but very married man named Richard’ who had helped her when she first arrived in the City and who had been there for her over the years.”

  “And you think Richard Osmond might have been the friend she was referring to?” McCabe said.

  “Vivian said this man had died a few years ago and she still missed him.” Noel looked from McCabe to Baxter. “Osmond died a few years ago of a heart attack.”

  “Do you know what happened to his wife?” Baxter asked.

  Noel said, “I looked it up. She remarried less than a year later. Her new husband is an old family friend.”

  “According to the bio we saw,” McCabe said, “Osmond and his wife had no children.”

  “I think that’s right,” Noel said. She ran her fingers through her spiky hair. “You do know that he was Ted Thornton’s mentor? The reason Ted Thornton came up here to Albany.”

  Baxter said. “We did see Thornton listed as one of Osmond’s business associates. But Detective McCabe and I don’t keep up enough with the wheeling and dealing of the financial world to be up on the details.”

  “Neither do I,” Noel said. “I was just curious enough to look Osmond up. And that was when I saw his connection to Ted Thornton.”

  “And you were already aware of Thornton’s friendshi
p with Vivian Jessup,” McCabe said.

  “Yes,” Noel said. “But I don’t think … I think any romantic relationship she had with Osmond was over long before she met Ted Thornton. And I’m not even sure that she and Ted Thornton were ever involved in that way. So I didn’t want to gossip.”

  “We understand,” McCabe said. “There is something else we’d like to ask about. Would you be able to tell us if one of your theater students had worked as a TA in a summer science camp back in 2010?”

  “Good grief, that’s almost ten years ago. I’ve only been here seven years. And it’s not the kind of information that would be recorded anywhere unless a student put it on his or her vita or in a funding application. You might be able to get Ian’s secretary to try to look it up. But why would you think one of our students would be working at a science camp?”

  “We have a theater connection that we’re trying to follow up,” McCabe said. “We have a young woman on a video from 2010 who we think was the TA at the summer camp that our first two victims attended as kids. In the video, she’s carrying a tote bag with the title of the play we asked about.”

  “You mean The Next Man?”

  “That’s the play,” Baxter said.

  “But anyone who attended the play … or didn’t … might have picked up a tote bag. It was probably available as a promotion. And with a title like that, it’s the kind of accessory a young woman might enjoy carrying around.”

  “To get her flirt on?” Baxter said.

  “You could put it that way,” Noel said.

  “All good points,” McCabe said. “But we were hoping we’d get lucky and someone here would know the young woman we’re looking for.”

  “Sorry I can’t help. But if you really think she might have been one of our students, you might ask Ian to have his secretary look through the files.”

  McCabe slid out of her comfortable armchair. “Thanks. We’ll do that on our way out.”

  When they stopped in his office to ask, Ian Carmichael shook his head. “Before my time, too. But Maude might know.”