The Secret of the Stones

by Ernest Dempsey

  “What do I call you?”

  Standing erect, as if considering what harm could come from his prisoner knowing his name, he then responded, “I have had many names, but you may call me Jens Ulrich.”

  12

  Atlanta

  The campus at Kennesaw State University sits about twenty minutes northwest of Downtown Atlanta, just outside of the I-285 perimeter. Some of the more socially concerned citizens of the city look down on those who lived outside of the encompassing highway. Silly, Morris thought, that people would think in such terms. It was the modern day version of living on the wrong side of the tracks, though, in many ways, this particular wrong side of the tracks seemed much more enviable. Even with the encroaching urban sprawl, the area to the northwest of Atlanta had remained a nice place. Just one exit down from the university, a shopping center had grown from what was once just a mall to a town unto itself.

  Even more impressive was the university. Quite young, as colleges go, Kennesaw State had only been established in 1963. However, in just forty years, the campus had grown to become the third largest school in the state, boasting an enrollment of over sixteen thousand students. The newest addition was the remarkable student village that had been constructed over the last three years. A school that only a decade ago had no student housing now possessed one of the nicest dorms in the country. It made him wish he were a freshman in college again. The brick and stucco combinations were topped by neo-Dutch roofing. The promenades and brick walkways that led from one housing hall to another were designed like those of a European town, complete with fountains in the middle of small plazas, Euro-style cafes, and a village convenience store.

  The school was renowned as one of the top baseball programs in the country. KSU had also won NCAA Division II National Titles in women’s soccer and men’s basketball, all remarkable achievements and all in such a short time.

  Trent eyed his surroundings as he walked along the concrete toward the library. He lived fairly close to the university, depending on the time of day. If it was from 7 a.m. until 10 a.m. or 3 in the afternoon until 8 at night, it would take him more than an hour or so to get from one point to the other. Otherwise, it would only take him fifteen minutes.

  He hated the traffic. The city had done all it could to create as many lanes as possible to keep the traffic problem to a minimum, but to no avail. Atlanta had recently been deemed the city with the worst traffic in America.

  He rounded the corner of one of the older buildings on campus and entered the parking lot of the library. Directly in front of the structure, a flag flew at half mast. He’d noticed a few others on campus paying the same tribute. The crime scene had been scrubbed, replaced by flowers and candles in the spot where the killing had taken place. The library was back in business, though at this time of day was not bustling with the rush of students desperate to finish papers and projects. Of course, with the arrival of the Internet, libraries had become less of a valuable commodity. Those who needed to research a topic nowadays simply had to search on Google or Yahoo. Seemingly endless amounts of knowledge pouring down from the ages were available at the click of a button. The antiquated libraries full of musty old books had been replaced by laptops at a Barnes & Noble or any number of coffee shops that offered free Wi-Fi.

  Thinking about things like that made Trent feel like he was getting older. He was only thirty-eight, but a time when the Internet and email didn’t exist or when people didn’t have cell phones seemed like ancient history.

  All of these things ran through his mind and made him smile, just slightly, as he swung open the door to the main entrance. The library itself was not very large. It was one of the first buildings constructed during the initial building phase in the 1960s—when the college had been established. Apparently, expansion had only occurred as necessary. He made his way over to the librarian desk to where a short, red-haired woman was busily stamping books. She looked to be in her midforties. As he stepped up to the counter, her attention went from the books to the tall black man in a trench coat at her desk.

  “Can I help you?” she asked with a smile, setting aside what she was doing.

  He returned a polite smile of his own. “Yes, ma’am,” he pulled his wallet from inside the jacket to show his identification. “My name is Detective Trent Morris. I was wondering if someone here could answer a few questions for me.”

  The redhead looked at him, a quizzical look on her face. “Well, I’m the one you would need to speak with. I am the head librarian here,” she paused, “but I thought the police had already finished up their investigation.”

  “They have.” And since he wasn’t assigned to this case, he needed to cover his tracks a little. “I was just stopping by to do a little follow-up. You know, make sure that everything has gone back to normal as much as possible. It’s kind of a new customer service thing we’re doing at the department. Gives a better image of the police and all that.”

  Apparently, she bought it and smiled. “Well, I appreciate you checking on us. Things are starting to get going again, but it will be a long time before things are back to normal.” Her eyes seemed to focus on a random spot on the carpet ten feet away. “Dr. Borringer was a well-liked man here. Lots of people knew him. It truly is a great loss for the university family and the community.”

  “You didn’t happen to see him the night he died, did you?”

  She looked down at the desk, a tear forming in the corner of her eye. “Yes. I saw him just before I closed up.”

  “I’m sorry to put you through this again. Please forgive…”

  “It’s okay,” she cut him off, “really. Dr. Borringer had a key I had given him. It was a common thing for him to stay here later with whatever project he was working on, so I just let him lock up when he was done. Other than the person that killed him, I think I was the last person to see Frank before he died.”

  Trent gave her a moment to have that thought. Then he pressed on. “Do you happen to know what he was working on that night?”

  She wiped her eyes with a tissue from a nearby box and gave a slight sniffle. “I don’t really know. Dr. Borringer was in here all the time. It’s anybody’s guess what he may have been doing.”

  Somewhere upstairs, a vacuum was running. The clock on the wall read 7:08. On the way to the library, he had called Will to find out if he knew anything about the murder. From what he’d heard, they had no suspects and no leads, only Wyatt.

  Looking down at her nametag, he revived the conversation, “Darcy, is it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. I just wanted to stop by and make sure things were getting along as best as could be expected.” He handed her his business card. “Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you or if you come across anything unusual you think we should know about.”

  The smile returned to her face. “Thanks. I will.”

  “Pleasure to meet you.” He finished and walked out through the metal detectors and out the glass front doors. It was a shot in the dark, hoping to connect anything with this murder. Still, something nagged at him as he walked down the concrete ramp leading back to the parking lot.

  “Detective!” The voice came from the entrance of the library. A young woman in a denim skirt and white blouse stood holding the door open. “Wait a sec!” The brunette trotted over to him as he turned around; he was unsure of what this girl wanted. “My name is Emily Meyers. I helped Dr. Borringer every once in a while on some of his projects.”

  Trent looked at her. “Did you talk to any of the other police that came around here?”

  “No, sir,” she put her head down. “I was scared to talk to them. I didn’t really have any information that I thought would help them.” A guilty look came over her face. “That is, until I heard you talking to Ms. Darcy a minute ago.”

  “Do you know what Dr. Borringer was working on?” Trent quizzed her.

  “I can’t be sure. I was just an assistant fo
r him. But I had been working with him the day before he died. He had me doing a lot of hieratic comparisons—sorry, those concern ancient writing systems, mostly in ancient Egypt. Very confusing stuff. Dr. B never showed me where he got some of these writings, but I know this: whatever he was working on contained a lot of ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, and Old Hebrew.”

  “So you weren’t working here for him the night that he died?”

  A sad look shadowed her face. “No. Dr. B had told me he was nearly finished and wouldn’t need me that night. I met up with some friends at a coffee shop for a little study session then went home.”

  Morris was a little annoyed. “You felt like you didn’t need to tell the police any of this?”

  She raised her eyes from the ground. “I wasn’t here when the cops arrived the first time. But I was working here in the library when that tall blond cop came around.”

  “Tall blond cop?” Trent knew all his fellow detectives, and none of them fit this description.

  “Yeah, I overheard him asking a lot of the same questions you were asking. I think he said his name was Jurgenson or something like that. He talked kind of funny, real deliberate. I couldn’t tell for certain, but I thought I heard a foreign accent a few times.”

  Jurgenson? He’d never heard of that name before and, there were certainly not any cops that he knew of with accents, other than Southern, working for the department.

  “What exactly did this blond cop ask about?”

  “He kept bugging the head librarian about where Dr. Borringer did most of his research, which computer he was using, any mail that he might have sent out that day. Stuff like that.”

  “What did she tell him?”

  “Not too sure, but it didn’t sound like she really knew too much about what the professor was working on. Jurgenson didn’t seem very happy about her lack of information. He stormed out of the library, slamming a stack of books to the floor as he left.” The girl looked down in thought. “I don’t guess he found anything he was looking for.”

  “Do you know what he was looking for?” Something about the girl’s demeanor led him to think she knew more than she was letting on.

  She looked up from the sidewalk. “No, not really.”

  “What do you know?”

  “Only that I think Dr. B was doing this project as a favor to someone over at the IAA. Pretty sure it wasn’t for himself.”

  Bingo. “You don’t happen to remember the name of the person at the IAA he was helping, do you?”

  She looked around a moment, trying to recall the name. “Seems like it was Thomas…something.”

  “Schultz?” He finished the sentence for her.

  “Yeah, that’s it,” she said with recognition in her voice.

  So there was a connection. “Thank you, Ms. Meyers. You have been very helpful.”

  “You’re welcome.” She started to turn around and walk back into the library while he spun in the opposite direction.

  “Detective?” she called out again.

  “Yes,” he turned around, stopping in his tracks.

  “I’m not going to get into any trouble for not talking to that Officer Jurgenson, am I?”

  “I’ll take care of it,” he replied, walking backward away from the girl and then turned the corner at a jog.

  This story wasn’t making sense, but now he had a connection. Sense could come later. Who was this Jurgenson? Sounded like there was another player involved in this fiasco. For the moment, though, his only thought was to check out the IAA headquarters and see if he could find anything else about Schultz and more importantly, Wyatt.

  13

  Atlanta

  Sean Wyatt’s carbon-colored Maxima eased into a parking spot in front of the Borringers’ house. He and Allyson got out and looked around; the neighborhood was completely lifeless save for the stereotypical random dog barking in the distance. Even for a Thursday, it was unusually inactive. Sean supposed the outrageous late-night board games would have to wait for the weekend for the suburbanites. It was not a life he’d been interested in pursuing.

  Most of his friends from college had made such a life change. The endless parties and sleepless lifestyle had been traded in for minivans with soccer balls on the back window and family nights watching wholesome television. For people who had, at one point, been persuaded to take a spur-of-the-moment trip to the beach, six hours away, spontaneity now represented itself in an all-expenses-paid venture to the local fast food playground. On nights of true exhilaration, the couple might be allowed a quick visit to the local video store to rent a movie, though with the advent of Netflix, that inconvenience had been remedied, removing the necessity to pack up the car with the kids and go out.

  Sean saw some of those people on the rare occasion when they could find a babysitter. They would always pester him with the same questions: “When are you going to settle down? Don’t you want kids? Isn’t it time for you to be getting married?”

  His responses had always been to the point and not the least bit sensitive. Though he was not a mean person or in any way cruel, marriage and family was a topic that simply annoyed Sean. He was always quick to point out that if he wanted to go to a movie, he simply looked up the show times online and went. If he wanted to go out for dinner, he just got in his car and drove to whichever restaurant he chose. Freedom, he always explained, was far better than changing diapers or watching those annoying kids’ TV shows.

  There was always the same counterargument, too. “Don’t you want to carry on your name?” they would say. To which he would always assure them that there were plenty of Wyatts in the world to take care of that problem.

  He wasn’t a loner, just an island of sorts. Maybe he just hadn’t met the right girl. Among the primary annoyers was his father, constantly nagging about the injustice Sean was doing to his parents by not giving them any grandchildren. This, though bothersome, always made him laugh a little bit. His father’s accusation was that he was too selfish, to which Sean wholeheartedly admitted. Ironically, his dad would always say, “Don’t you want any kids so that when you are older you will have someone to take care of you?”

  Sean didn’t feel the need to point out the ironic absurdity in that argument. The conversations always ended with his father not understanding and Sean being content to let the older man remain frustrated. The need to procreate was something the younger Wyatt did not possess or simply ignored.

  Now, he stood in the middle of what surely must have been the capital of the nuclear family. It was like an updated version of something out of a 1950s TV show. Allyson interrupted his thoughts. “This the place?” she asked and pointed to a two-story ranch-style home that stuck out like a sore thumb in the midst of cookie cutter urban development.

  “Yeah.” He left the car and strode purposefully up the walkway toward the front door. Allyson followed less confidently behind.

  Lights were still on in what he assumed to be the living room and in a few other windows upstairs. As he approached the porch, he could see a television on inside. “Looks like she’s awake,” Allyson observed.

  “She probably won’t sleep well for a while,” he empathized.

  As the two stepped up to the door, a cat appeared in the glass partition of the doorframe. The animal looked at the visitors as if he were a butler receiving guests. Sean rang the doorbell, and a few moments later, the door cracked open slightly. A woman, probably in her midfifties, judging by the streaks of gray in her thick brown hair, peeked around the corner just below a latched chain.

  “Yes?” Her voice strained like it was an effort to speak, much less be cordial.

  “Mrs. Borringer, my name is Sean Wyatt, and I was an associate of your husband’s. Would it be all right if my colleague and I came in for a minute?”

  “You were a friend of Frank’s?” Her question came from a suspicious face.

  “No, ma’am,” he answered. “I wouldn’t lie to you and say I was. I met him a few times and referred to him for a f
ew questions on occasion. I work for the IAA.”

  “I know who you work for, Mr. Wyatt. My husband had a great deal of respect for you. I’d hoped you would come by eventually. Please, do come in.” Her slight English accent had become more prevalent since her mood seemed to have lifted slightly.

  She unlatched the chain on the door and opened it wide for the two of them to enter. “Please excuse the mess; quite a lot of things to do the last week or so since the incident.”

  Mrs. Borringer stood to the side to let the two visitors in. She was casually dressed, wearing a pair of khaki pants and an Atlanta Braves sweater. The woman must have been a neat freak. There were a few boxes lying about, a small stack of letters on the table, and a small array of baking pans filled with various foods, presumably brought over by well-wishers and mourners. Hardly in disorder, though.

  “Please, come in.” She closed the door and locked it behind them, ushering the newcomers to a sitting room near a fireplace. “By all means, have a seat.” The lady motioned to a very soft-looking couch. The décor was best described as inconsistent. While the outside of the house portrayed a more neoclassical-Northwestern look, the interior appeared more of a kind of mosque/synagogue than a home. There were very few pieces of furniture save for a dark walnut table that matched the hardwood in the living room and hallways. The walls were decorated with different religious emblems and pictures from differing theologies. It seemed that each wall was dedicated to a different ancient culture or religion.

  “This is a very interesting home you have here, Mrs. Borringer.” Allyson broke the proverbial ice with her ambiguous compliment.

  “Thank you, dear.” The woman’s smile was sincere. “Frank respected all religions and cultures and appreciated each one’s contributions to the world.” She drifted off in thought then returned. “He believed that we all came from one place in history and that what had once been a singular view became twisted and changed over the years. But remaining in every religion, every cultural belief system, a part of the truth still existed.” She stood and asked if the two visitors would like coffee. “I can’t have any, though, too late in the day for me. That stuff would keep me up ‘til the morning. But I can make a pot if you’d like.” She waited expectantly.