Wakefield College 01 - Where It May Lead

by Janice Kay Johnson

  The one exception was the guy in Moses Lake, who had given a recitation of what and who he saw that was as methodical as if he’d practiced it like a speech to his local chamber of commerce. Of course, it happened that he was a CPA, so maybe methodical was part of his blood makeup.

  The WSU professor had been distinctly annoyed to be cornered by a cop. If he was into social media, he’d probably been tweeting by the time Troy reached the stairwell twenty feet from his office. If he was too old-fashioned for social media, he’d likely picked up the phone and placed a call to Wakefield College president Lars Berglund.

  That was something Troy expected to happen sooner or later, but he’d been hoping for later. Just as he’d been hoping it was a while before anyone he talked to felt compelled to phone every former classmate to tell them the investigation had been reopened and some cop would be around to ask questions. He’d really prefer to catch them by surprise, to watch their faces as they ground the rusty gears of memory into motion. He especially didn’t want potential witnesses chatting to each other, embellishing their own memory with patches and sparkles from someone else’s.

  But that’s the way it goes, he thought in resignation, nodding his thanks to the waiter who brought him a sizzling steak and an enormous baked potato. And, damn, was he starving.

  If Madison had been here, she’d have ordered one of the more interesting vegetarian items on the menu, and he might have done the same. But what the hell.

  Damn it, Dad, why didn’t you follow your conscience?

  Had it ever occurred to his father, once Troy came home to Frenchman Lake, that he might be the one who would have no choice but to investigate—drum roll, please—the grand prize winner of the Most Shocking Revelation to Come Out of the Time Capsule award?

  He grimaced as he cut a piece of the tender meat. No, Dad had still been relaxed, because the thing wasn’t supposed to be opened for another fifteen years.

  Troy had to come to terms with the fact that, if Dad had been there to accept the envelope with his name on it, he most likely would have taken it home and shredded or burned it. If guilt or twinges on his conscience had any impact on him in the intervening years, nothing would have stopped him from walking into the downtown police station and saying, “There’s something I need to tell you.”

  Why, Dad? Goddamn it, why?

  Knowing he’d never get an answer felt a lot like the acid, gnawing beginning of an ulcer in his belly.

  * * *

  WHEN HER PHONE rang midevening, Madison pounced, thinking Troy had called. Seeing her father’s number on the screen took her aback.

  “Dad?” she said cautiously.

  “Madison.” He started most calls that way, with her name gravely spoken. “How are you?”

  Um...not any different than I was three days ago?

  “I’m good,” she said. “Busy.” She started chatting about a couple of new alumni networking groups, one all women, one gay/lesbian, and of the eagerness to participate that had really pleased her. Her father listened in silence, which inexplicably drove her to keep talking. All the while, she knew she was really trying to keep him from telling her why he’d phoned her. Finally, however, she ran out of things to say. “Sorry,” she said, abashed. “I don’t suppose you are that interested.”

  “I’m always interested in your accomplishments.”

  Just not in her failures or doubts or the impulses he considered silly. This resentment was new to her, even as she knew she wasn’t being entirely fair. In his own way, he’d been an attentive parent, certainly not neglectful. What she was really having trouble with was the knowledge that he’d cared more about whether she measured up to his expectations than he did about her. Did he even know who she was aside from those accomplishments?

  Probably not, but some of that was her own fault, she admitted privately. Feeling abandoned by her mother, she had been so insecure, she was as focused as he was on achieving successes that would please him. That would earn her one of his rare genuine smiles. She’d never had the nerve to lift her chin and say, “Dad, I had a great day without getting an A or being told I was being moved to an accelerated class. In fact, I got a B on a quiz in algebra, but who cares? I don’t like math, anyway. What really matters is, this guy who is so cute stopped at my locker and talked to me, and I like him, Dad, I really do.” Or, “Oh, and it felt so good to dive into the pool today, like I was weightless and free! That’s why it was a good day.” Nope, she’d never said anything like that to her father.

  “So what’s up, Dad?” she made herself say now.

  “I can’t call you without a reason?”

  You never do. But that was another of the things she didn’t say to him.

  Feeling stubborn, instead she said nothing.

  He cleared his throat, a rare indication of discomfiture.

  “I admit, I keep thinking about you overhearing someone claim he saw me at the gym the night King was killed.” He paused. “Or was it a she? You didn’t say.”

  Oh, boy. Madison thought frantically before deciding to go with some semblance of truth. “It was a man.”

  “What the hell would get into someone to say that now? He sure didn’t thirty-five years ago when the police were asking questions.”

  “Maybe...could it have been a friend of yours who didn’t want to get you in trouble?” Breathless, she waited.

  The silence was just a little too long. “Some friend,” her father muttered at last.

  “Well...he might have been trying to be.”

  “I could have cleared it up then.”

  “You could talk to the police now.”

  “For God’s sake, none of this has anything to do with me,” he snapped.

  “It does if somebody saw you there.” Her voice shook slightly at her audacity. Usually she would have backed down by now.

  I’m acting like I’m afraid of him.

  Of course she wasn’t, she told herself hastily, and knew that what she feared wasn’t her father, it was the possibility of losing him. No matter how judgmental he was, he had always been her security.

  “I could sue whatever idiot claims he saw me there,” he grumbled.

  Madison kept her mouth shut.

  “Mitch King made plenty of enemies,” her father said in a hard voice. He either hadn’t noticed her lack of comment, or he’d fallen into the trap of needing to fill a silence. “The police won’t have any problem finding people who hated his guts.”

  Oh, dear God, she thought in horror. Would she have to tell Troy what her father told her? She closed her eyes.

  “Dad, I don’t understand. He was a college student. A kid! I mean, being unpopular is one thing, but what could he have done to make people actually hate him? That’s a really strong word.” Madison realized she was all but begging. Tell me you weren’t one of the people who hated Mitchell King’s guts, rather than merely disliking him.

  “Other students’ screwups were his wine and song.” There was a startling knife-edge of bitterness in her father’s voice Madison had never heard before.

  “Dad?”

  “Enough about him,” he said brusquely. “Hell, I hadn’t so much as thought his name in twenty-five, thirty years. I’m sorry to have to remember him now. Don’t let yourself get sucked into this, Madison. He’s not part of your job.”

  She made a noncommittal sound that seemed to satisfy her father, because after a few general remarks he ended the call. It was strange, though, because inside a part of her was protesting that last statement. Whatever else could be said about him, Mitchell King had been a Wakefield college student, and barely a semester from being an alumnus. Didn’t that make him, in a way, legitimately her responsibility?

  Thinking about the conversation with her father, Madison stared down at the now blank screen on her phone. Suddenly she felt as if the air was being squeezed from her lungs, and, afraid her phone would ring, she turned it off in a rush. She couldn’t talk to Troy now. She needed time to decide whether
she would even tell him she’d talked to Dad, and if so what she would say. She wasn’t a very good liar.

  Anguish filled her. What could Mitchell King have done to her father? Madison desperately wanted to believe it was something relatively normal and innocent. They’d fought over a girl, maybe. Or Mitch had bad-mouthed Dad around campus. Dad had told Madison on more than one occasion that he considered his reputation to be all-important.

  But...hate?

  She couldn’t escape the terrifying realization that her father had been telling her he understood why somebody would want to murder Mitch King. No, not only murder—the savagery of the attack hadn’t been any secret. Whoever had hit him over and over again until his face was unrecognizable had wanted to wipe him out of existence.

  Had hated him.

  Not you, Dad. Please, please, don’t let it have been you.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MAYBE A CHANGE of tactic was in order.

  Brooding and oblivious to the noise and activity around him at the station, Troy sat with his chair tilted back precariously and his feet propped on his desk.

  Starting with the original witnesses was a waste of his time, if the ones he’d already spoken to were representative. Unless he hit on one of them who was flat-out lying, they’d already said their piece.

  No, what he needed were witnesses who hadn’t been identified at the time.

  Back to the original murder book. He took his feet off the desk and put them back on the floor, in the same motion reaching for the binder that held the sum total of what investigators had learned thirty-five years ago. Opening it, he tried to remember whether those investigators put out a general appeal on campus for witnesses, or focused on King’s classmates as Troy’s first impulse had been.

  It took him a while to figure out that a general appeal had been issued—but not until students had come back after Christmas break for second semester. In other words, weeks later. Big mistake, he thought clinically. Two or three weeks was long enough for memories to blur or, maybe worse yet, get corrupted after too much chitchat with friends who’d heard this, or knew for a fact that so-and-so had been there that night. He could imagine panic spreading along with rumors that police were looking at anyone who admitted being at McKenna Center that night as a suspect.

  In fact, when he contemplated the list of students interviewed, he discovered the vast majority were seniors. Was that because seniors took finals most seriously and were therefore more likely to be awake in the middle of the night—or because investigators had looked with immediate suspicion on classmates?

  Troy was torn. He could learn more about Mitchell King by talking to people who’d known him best. On the other hand, his best chance of locating a witness nobody had talked to back then was to start with the freshmen on up.

  Maybe some of each, he mused, flipping through the list he’d gotten from Madison. A number of the alumni on the list lived in eastern Washington. He’d set up appointments.

  He filled his afternoon with local appointments, and, left with an hour or so before he had to set out, he started calling graduates he was unlikely to ever get a chance to interview in person.

  He left a lot of messages, but also spoke to three people. All remembered the excitement around the murder, but hadn’t even known who Mitchell King was until they read about him in the local newspaper and heard the talk. He thanked them politely, shut down his computer and left for the first appointment.

  During the short drive, he called Madison at work and suggested dinner. She sounded guarded, which made him suspect she wasn’t alone, but agreed. He’d pick her up at seven.

  His first two appointments proved to be as disappointing as the morning’s phone calls. Because they lived in Frenchman Lake, both women recalled details of the murder better than the more far-flung alumni did. The Frenchman Lake Herald occasionally ran a retrospective on the most lurid crime ever seen in the small town. But neither had ever so much as met King, and at the time of the murder they’d apparently been tucked in their narrow beds in their dorm rooms sleeping the peaceful sleep of the student too well prepared to need to pull an all-nighter.

  The third appointment was different. He hit on something—okay, not a nugget of gold, but a flake. A glimmer of hope.

  Ben Gossett, a partner in a real estate brokerage, had betrayed himself with a few twitches as he listened to Troy explaining why he was asking questions about a crime committed so long ago.

  “Yeah, I had a class with the guy, although I can’t say I really knew him.” He eyed Troy. “I heard things, though.”

  “If you’d be frank with me, it would be very helpful.”

  Gossett hesitated, running a hand over his thinning pate. “I only heard rumors,” he said cautiously. “It may all be BS.”

  “That’s okay, too.” Troy smiled. “I’ll be talking to a lot of people. Right now, I’m trying to build a picture of the guy. The original investigators got hints that Mr. King wasn’t well liked, but they didn’t learn anything that would suggest a motive for his murder. I’m hoping I can.”

  “Yeah, okay.” The multi-line phone on his desk rang, but Gossett ignored it. “What I heard is that he was blackmailing some people. ‘You pay me off, I keep my mouth shut.’ That kind of shit.”

  Troy hid his elation. “Can you give me any names?”

  Gossett shook his head. “If it would help, I can tell you who told me.”

  “That would help.”

  Gossett told him; Troy jotted down the name.

  After further questions, the guy admitted that he’d heard there was at least one student who had been at the gym that night and hadn’t wanted to talk to police.

  “He was a stoner. He didn’t like police.”

  “What about now?” Troy asked.

  “Don’t know.” Gossett shrugged. “He wasn’t a friend of mine. I don’t know what happened to him after he left Wakefield.”

  He seemed to have less compunction about giving Troy this second name. Troy thanked him cordially and they shook hands. Leaving a card, Troy walked out past a couple of desks staffed by agents who were all on the phone. He gathered from the photos and property descriptions covering one wall in the reception area that Gossett & Armstrong specialized in farms and acreage. With the growing wine grape business, arable land in the county was probably a hot commodity.

  The minute he was behind the wheel of his Tahoe, Troy grabbed the file that lay on the passenger seat and searched for the two names. It took him a minute, but the stoner was there with address and phone number. He had been a sophomore that year. The second, the kid who might know who had been blackmailed, was there, too, but with no contact info. He’d been a junior, like Ben Gossett.

  Unfortunately, the stoner lived in Maryland. Troy didn’t recognize the name of the town. After thinking it over, he placed the call. It would be almost 8:00 p.m. on the east coast, which increased the odds of catching the guy at home.

  A woman answered. When he asked for Curtis Tucker, she said, “Just a moment, please,” and he heard her yell, “Curt! It’s for you.”

  Troy waited a good minute before a man came on. “Yeah?”

  “This is Detective John Troyer. I’m calling from Frenchman Lake, Washington. We’ve reopened the Mitchell King homicide and I’m contacting alumni all across the country in hopes of finding witnesses who didn’t come forward then. I’m interested in talking to anyone who knew King well, too.”

  The silence had that bottomless feel that only happened during phone calls.

  “So you just got to my name?” Tucker finally asked.

  “Actually, I was steered to call you by someone who’d heard secondhand that you might have been at the gym that night but chose not to talk to police at the time.”

  “Who...?” He broke off. “Never mind. It doesn’t matter. Yeah, I was there. If I’d seen someone kill the guy, I’d have come forward, but I didn’t.”

  “I’m interested in what and who you did see,” Troy explained
patiently. “If you give me a new name who gives me a new name, eventually I may be able to learn something useful.”

  “Okay, I get that. The thing is, I’d been smoking weed that night.” He half laughed. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you that.”

  “It’s of interest to me only if it affected your ability to remember what you saw.”

  “Yeah, well, I was relaxed, mostly. I spent some time in one of the small weight rooms lifting. After that I meant to take a sauna, but when I opened the door there were these two dudes in there, see. One of them was sitting, wearing only a towel. He was sweating like he’d been in there awhile. The other guy hadn’t stripped down, which was weird. I mean, he even had street shoes and socks on. I could tell I was interrupting something intense. The dude in the towel glared at me and said, ‘Do you mind?’ so I backed out. I showered and left.”

  Troy questioned him further, and he remembered there was a second towel in a heap on the bench next to him, like maybe he’d been lying down and had his head on it.

  “Did you know either of the two guys in the sauna?” Troy asked.

  “Not then. I mean, they were familiar because, hey, Wakefield isn’t that big. You know?”

  “Later?”

  “The dude wearing the towel was Mitchell King. His picture was everywhere the next few days. Freaked me out, I can tell you.”

  Troy knew that, in fact, King had been nude when he was murdered. A blood-soaked white towel had fallen to the floor below his body, found on one of the slatted-wood benches in the sauna. One towel, not two. The killer had to have taken the second one, likely to have bundled some of his own clothes. He couldn’t have inflicted that much damage without getting blood on himself. He’d avoided stepping in it, though; luminol had turned up no blood traces outside the sauna.

  He worked hard to make his voice nonjudgmental. “And the other guy?”