On the other hand, Quinn had tried to blackmail me, charmingly or not. Maybe there was a dark side to his personality that he’d kept hidden under all his charm, a side I hadn’t picked up on before. I considered myself a good judge of people, but only fools assumed they were never wrong. And I liked to think that I wasn’t a fool.
Realizing that Nate was watching me, I brought up another question. “So what do we know about Dr. Holm?”
“I’ve spent the morning on the phone with her colleagues, relatives, and neighbors.” He stopped to take a sip of his coffee.
I was happy to hear that he wasn’t taking her innocence for granted. “Did she pack a bag?”
He looked up from the cup. “What?”
“Oscar saw Quinn go into the TTE building with a backpack, right? What about Dr. Holm?”
He sat quietly sipping his coffee for a moment, as if weighing something. It dawned on me what that something was. He was questioning not only Dr. Holm’s colleagues and relatives but also Quinn’s colleagues and relatives, of which I was one. He was considering which category to place me into—person of interest, witness, or (I hoped) ally.
He leaned back in the chair, as if satisfied, and said, “Oscar remembers seeing Dr. Holm around the TTE building—apparently she’s taken a couple of Dr. Mooney’s STEWie orientation courses—but he wasn’t sure if she came by the day of Kamal’s defense.” He quoted Oscar, and I could picture the doorman saying the words in his raspy voice: “ ‘A lot of people came to Kamal Ahmad’s defense because of the Neanderthal mating thing, and, this being a school, they all had backpacks.’ She would not have stood out.”
So Oscar was a dead end.
“Dr. Holm lives alone,” Nate continued. “No roommate, and—as far as we could tell—she’s not dating anyone at the moment. Her landlord let me in. Nothing seemed amiss at the apartment, but, to answer your question, we have no way of telling if one of her suitcases was missing, or any clothing beyond what she was wearing. We showed the picture of Quinn you gave us to the landlord and around the building. No one recognized him. Several people on campus remember seeing him in Dr. Holm’s office on Friday, however.”
“I sent him there. After he came to my office that morning.”
This seemed to be news to him. “You did? Why?”
“Helen suggested that an expert might be able to explain to him why his plan was so unrealistic.”
“It doesn’t seem to have worked out that way.”
“No.”
“Suppose Quinn got into the TTE lab on a pretext, maybe asked Dr. Holm to give him a tour. I’ve been told she didn’t have the door code to the lab?”
“She wasn’t on the authorized list. In the workshops that she attended, the students would have gotten hands-on experience in the lab, but they certainly would not have been given the door code.”
“I’ll ask around to see if anybody gave the code to either of them. In any case, they got in somehow, and Quinn would have needed Dr. Holm to program the Woodstock coordinates. Willingly or unwillingly, she did, and then she got into the basket with him. What did he say to you exactly? On the phone when he called during Sabina’s party?”
I tried to do my best to remember Quinn’s words. “When he popped into my office out of the blue, he said that he had evidence of Sabina’s secret and would reveal it to the world—plaster it all over the Internet, I believe were his exact words—unless I got him into the TTE lab. He, uh, also hinted that he’d hold off on signing the divorce papers if I didn’t arrange the STEWie run for him, although he seems to have changed his mind about that. He didn’t seem too bothered by my refusal and gave me until after the weekend to think about it. I sent him to talk to Dr. Holm.”
“Then what?”
“Then I went to talk to Dr. Holm.”
He glanced at me quickly. He hadn’t been aware of that either. I hoped that all my disclosures wouldn’t shift me out of the ally category.
“Mostly she and I talked about the stone and what it said,” I explained. “She showed me a poster of the runestone in the Coffey Library. When Quinn called later that day, during Sabina’s party, he said he had signed the divorce papers and put them in the mail. Also…”
“Go on.”
“He implied that he had a date that night. He was meeting someone at Ingrid’s over on Lakeshore.”
“And you think that might have been Dr. Holm. We can check. I’ll send Officer Van Underberg.”
“I just got back from Ingrid’s.”
He frowned, and I felt myself slip further out of the ally category. “What did Ingrid say?”
“That it was Dr. Holm.”
The whole thing had been somewhat embarrassing. When I showed up before the restaurant opened to ask questions about Quinn’s date, kindly, motherly Ingrid had assumed I was jealous. After all, Quinn and I were still married, so it was only natural that I’d want to know about his love life. Swinging her ample hips from side to side, she had led me to a table away from the kitchen, then fetched us both slices of lingonberry pie. She didn’t know Dr. Holm by name, but she recognized the photo I pulled up on the English Department website. According to Ingrid, the pair had stayed for two hours and had gone through as many bottles of wine. The leggings and Viking-themed shirt that Dr. Holm had worn to the library earlier in the day had been replaced with a black dress, low cut in the back. And dangly earrings, Ingrid had added, as if that made Dr. Holm even more of a home-wrecker. In order to keep up the fiction of being a jilted woman, I felt like I should pretend to be put off by the lingonberry pie. I ate my slice anyway.
As I told him about my sit down with Ingrid, Nate jotted a few sentences down on the pad in front of him. I wondered if he would send Officer Van Underberg to talk to Ingrid to double check what I had told him. He was a police officer, and it was his job not to take anything at face value, though I hoped he knew me better then that. There was the matter of his unfortunate experience with the pyromaniac, which had undoubtedly made him distrustful of people—especially people he had a personal interest in? Or was that side of it wholly my imagination? I pushed my coffee cup away and sat up straighter in the chair, suddenly feeling like I was at a job interview and not chatting with a friend in his office.
Officer Van Underberg stuck his head in the door. “Chief, I think you ought to see this.”
Nate left the room and I slumped back down, taking the opportunity to pull out my cell phone to check my email and do a quick Internet search on Sabina’s name, which I did every so often to see if any rumors about her past had started to seep out online. Sabina didn’t have what we might call a last name, so she had appended Abigail’s to hers—Sabina Secunda (after her father) Tanner.
There were no hits, and I heaved a sigh of relief.
As I was putting the cell phone away, Nate came in and slid into his seat across from me. “Did Quinn say anything about what he’s been doing in Phoenix?”
“Only that he had a couple of rundown properties he was flipping so he could sell them for a profit.”
“I’ve had Officer Van Underberg do a bit of research. Quinn obtained mortgage financing with no money down and bought three fixer-uppers. The work on all of them seems to have stalled because he stopped paying the contractors. Julia, he is deep in debt…which means he’s even more desperate than we thought.”
There wasn’t much to say to that.
“You didn’t find anything in his hotel room, did you?” I asked.
“Like what?”
“The signed divorce papers. I thought he might have left them there.” If I wasn’t feeling embarrassed and awkward before, I was now, but I had to know. I needed those papers. I was desperate for my connection to Quinn to be officially severed—especially now.
Nate wrote something down on his notepad and said, without looking up, “I’ll check. You might want to talk to your lawy
er. If you two are still married, you might be liable for Quinn’s debts.”
“Lovely.”
“One more thing. His car. He flew into MSP—adding to the debt on his credit card—and rented a vehicle at the airport. The rental isn’t in the parking lot at Lena’s Lodge.”
“Is it somewhere on campus?”
He shook his head. “No. We check all vehicles left overnight for campus parking stickers.”
“Well, that’s odd. I have no idea where it could be. I’d have expected it to be either in the campus visitor lot or at Quinn’s hotel. What did you find in his room at Lena’s Lodge?”
He paused long enough for me to wonder if he was thinking of going back to calling me Ms. Olsen since this was official business and I had connections to his prime suspect, then answered, “A suitcase, half-empty. Receipts for a large backpack, a flashlight, two sleeping bags, a water filter, freeze-dried meals, and other camping gear. And—a receipt for a hunting handgun.” He said it evenly, without changing his expression.
“Oh. And Dr. Holm?”
“No similar purchases on her credit card statement. No one at the Emporium remembers seeing her. Quinn bought enough supplies for two. Julia, why are you so reluctant to see him in an unfavorable light?”
Was I? It just didn’t seem characteristic of Quinn, who seemed much too lazy to concoct such an elaborate plan. I wasn’t sure how to communicate that to Nate, though, so I tried another tack.
“About Dr. Holm—the text message of hers asking for help—”
“What about it?”
“It was all in capital letters. It’s hard to believe that someone who was panicked would stop to hit the caps lock button, if her phone even has one. I know it’s a very small thing—”
“It is.”
“You know this is her third postdoc, right? I looked up her university employment record. Before coming here, she was at Berkeley for two years, and before that, she spent eighteen months at Groningen University in Netherlands. Maybe she got tired of postdoc limbo, of waiting for a STEWie spot and an offer of a professorship. Quinn’s appearance may have been just the catalyst that she was waiting for.”
“And the overturned table, the text message asking for help?”
“To throw us off her track and focus our suspicions on Quinn.”
“So you think he is the one in danger.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way, not until Nate said it.
“Honestly, I have no idea what’s going on,” I admitted. “I just think we shouldn’t take things at face value.”
“I never do.”
“Uh—good. In the meantime, Dean Braga’s trying to think of the best way to spin this.”
“It’s a big problem. Two people, a civilian and a postdoc, missing somewhere in the past on her watch. I wouldn’t want to be in her shoes. Let’s hope the problem solves itself and Quinn and Dr. Holm return of their own accord before Friday.” Nate checked his watch and got to his feet. “Ready? My grandmother said that we should come at one.”
I gave the rest of the cookies to Officer Van Underberg on the way out.
15
A one-hour drive in Nate’s Jeep, Wanda in the back seat, brought us to a craftsman-style house with a wide front porch. It was painted a warm blue, and it sat sandwiched between two houses bordering on MacMansionism on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River just south of St. Paul. We parked on the street out front. Wanda raced up the steps as if she was a frequent visitor to the house and gave a short bark. The door opened before Nate and I had a chance to reach the front stoop.
I had expected Nate’s grandmother, Mary Kirkland, to be a lot like him, that is to say, tall, lean, and a bit reserved in speech. She was none of those things. She was short and stocky in a denim dress, and, as I was about to find out, quite free with her opinions.
She rubbed Wanda’s ears, gave Nate a bear hug, which he returned somewhat awkwardly, and then turned to me. “And this is…?”
“This is Julia. Remember, Kunshi, I explained on the phone—”
“Nothing wrong with my memory. You two are here to ask me about the runestone. C’mon in.”
Wanda ran in ahead of us and we followed Mary down a hallway lined with photos of a life lived to the fullest. A husband who had passed away—Nate’s grandfather, Duncan, who appeared to be the source of Nate’s strong jaw and cheekbones. I counted seven children, three girls and four boys, some with their own progeny. There was a cute picture of what had to be Nate with a plastic spatula in one hand and a toddler-size chef’s hat on his head, helping Mary attend to a pair of roasting turkeys at a family picnic. I wondered if the picnic where Mary and Duncan had first met had started an annual tradition in the family—there were many picnic photos. In the middle of them, there was one showing Mary Kirkland handling a library book during her career as a cataloger at the Minnesota Historical Society, her long black hair streaming down her back.
Suddenly my own accomplishments, few as they were, took on an even more meager hue. I had one failed marriage (almost) behind me; a bungalow that I had inherited from my parents when they moved to Florida; and I was probably on the hook for loans defaulted on by Quinn. On the plus side, I did like my job, which, I’d come to realize, was a rare thing—it brought me joy to see young faces come to St. Sunniva University eager and idealistic about doing science and then leave four-to-six years later with a PhD in their pocket, a little wiser and more seasoned. Still, I couldn’t help wishing for something more; the STEWie bug had bitten me. I had caught the desire to feel the dust of other places and times under my fingernails and toes.
My eyes stopped at another photo on the wall. “Hey,” I said.
“Julia?”
“That’s my Mom! How funny. I don’t know who’s with her, though.” My mother Missy, looking unbelievably young, was smiling at the camera next to another woman of about the same age; both were carrying an armful of textbooks and had large hairdos.
Nate came back into the hallway and Mary turned on the lamp on a corner table so that we could all see better.
“That’s my daughter-in-law Gigi. Nate’s mother,” Mary explained of the woman in the photo next to my mother.
“It’s a small world,” I said. “They must have been friends at school. I didn’t know your mother attended St. Sunniva.”
“It was one of the reasons I applied for the campus security job at the school.”
“They were at the school in the seventies, just after it turned co-ed. It must have been an interesting time. I’ll have to ask my mother about it when she and Dad get back.” I thought it would be rude to say that my mother had never mentioned her friend Gigi from college. I would have remembered the name. But parents, I had come to understand in my job, rarely seemed to tell their kids much about their own college and graduate school experiences, other than how hard they studied for all their classes and how few parties they attended, busy as they were studying.
“You should ask Gigi about it,” Mary said to Nate as we followed her into the kitchen.
“I will. Julia, you said your parents now live in Florida?”
“They’re in charge of a retirement community in Fort Myers. They’re all gone, though.”
“I’m sorry?” Nate said.
“My parents, with their retirees. They went on a Caribbean cruise. It’s one of those cruises,” I added.
“Which?” Nate said with a nervous glance at his grandmother, like I was about to reveal that my parents were swingers or something. I suspected that not much would shock Mary Kirkland. Her hair, the black now streaked with gray, was tied back into a neat bun that framed a face weathered by life and crisscrossed with deep lines, more of them carved by laughter than sorrow.
“The cruise? It’s one where no tech gadgets are allowed,” I explained. “A complete, blissful disconnect from the hectic pace of mod
ern life. I’m quoting the brochure there. No cell phones, no laptops, no emails, no text messages. Ship-to-shore communication only for emergencies, should one of the cruise guests come down with severe seasickness or worse. Apparently all the retirees happily signed on to the idea of no electronics. My parents said they might mail me a postcard when they went ashore to sightsee. I haven’t received one yet.”
I had never been on a cruise, electronic gadgets or not, but I figured that I’d get bored after twenty minutes of lying in a leisure chair on the ship deck, even with the onboard pool and shuffleboard and whatever else cruisers did to keep themselves entertained. The sightseeing, on the other hand, I would have enjoyed quite a bit.
“Sounds lovely,” Mary said from the fridge, where Wanda was waiting, her tongue hanging out in an unseemly manner.
“I’ve heard the cuisine on these cruises is good,” Nate said in the voice of one who would be uncomfortable in anything larger than a canoe, unless he was in charge of it.
Mary had taken eggs and a container with some kind of chunky white cheese out of the fridge. She scooped half of the cheese out, let Wanda have the rest, and headed for the stove. “Speaking of food, how about I make you kids something to eat?”
Mary sat us down at the large kitchen island that doubled as an informal eating area. Behind her, a grand cooking range held the spot of honor. Copper pots and pans hung suspended above the range, well-thumbed cookbooks lined a nearby shelf, and a rack with spices hung to one side of it. She was clearly a much more seasoned cook than I was.
Mary expertly cracked four eggs, added a dollop of creamy milk, and whipped up the combination while the pan heated up. I tried to reconcile her forthright manner with what Nate had told me about her life. She had been born in the Lower Sioux Community, on the banks of the Minnesota River, and then sent away to Pipestone Indian school at age six, where she had acquired her Americanized first name. (Her parents named her Yellow Bird.) Some of her friends had gone back to their Dakota names later in life, but Mary hadn’t. As I was starting to realize, she was a woman who did not do what was expected of her. I liked her very much.
The Runestone Incident (The Incident Series, #2) Page 14
