Cold Case (17 page)

Barbara nodded. “When I was a kid, one year Dad gave me a small globe, the kind you shake and snow falls. This one was a little different. You turned it upside down and the whole scene changed while the snow was falling. You've just turned a sphere on its head. I have to think about all of it.”

After dropping Amy off at her house again, Barbara drove straight to the park and started to walk. It was pleasant, but the temperature was due to go up as another heat wave hit later in the week. In and out of shade, blackberries ripening, not quite ready, flashing river, egrets, it was all comfortingly familiar, yet always subtly different, too.

How to corroborate Amy's assessment of Jill Storey, that was the question, she told herself. A prosecutor would rip it apart—Amy had been little more than a child. She had a crush on David. She had misheard, misunderstood, dreamed it, made it up out of whole cloth. Her word, her interpretation, wasn't enough.

Olga? Barbara doubted it. She had fled back home to her Baptist minister father, the very conservative area around Medford, and she had remained there for several years. Pieces of the puzzle were falling into place, however. Olga had supported Jill for months during her illness, named her daughter Gillian, stayed married only three years. Were they a couple? Would she admit to being gay? Or that she'd had a gay relationship twenty-two years ago? Barbara didn't know the eastern part of Washington State where Olga lived and taught school, but she suspected it was as conservative as the Oregon side of the river, and very likely residents there would not tolerate a gay teacher for their children.

David's corroboration, if it was forthcoming, would mean little; he had too much of a motive to make the claim. It could be seen as blaming the victim, changing the subject or simple lying.

Her thighs were starting to throb, and she headed for a bench in the shade, where she continued to worry about the problem. Kids on inner tubes sped by. A canoe or two. Bicycles on the path. Joggers with agonized expressions, pushing the wall. Had there been a gay community of support two decades earlier? Had Jill feared losing her scholarship if exposed? Probably, she decided, and it could have been a real possibility then. Perhaps it still was for some of the scholarships and grants.

She started compiling a list of her gay friends who had been in the area twenty-some years earlier. It was a short list, but at least it was a starting place. She walked back to her car and drove to the office to make a few phone calls. It was going on six-thirty when she realized the time and muttered a prayer of thanks to Frank for providing dinner for that night. Leftover potato salad and ham. She had two people lined up to talk to. A starting place.

B
rice Knowlton caught up with Barbara at Martin's on Tuesday. He was beaming. “Here I am with the goods.”

She laughed, went to the door to take down her
Barbara Is In
sign and waved toward her table. “Coffee, iced coffee, is my drink these days?”

“Sounds good,” he said. “It's getting hot again. You look great, by the way.”

“Thanks.” She went to the kitchen door, but Martin was already on his way out. “Another iced coffee, please.” He nodded, smiled at Brice and vanished back into the kitchen. Seconds later he brought it.

“No problem with the transcript,” Brice said, putting an envelope on the table. “You said you had some questions?”

“Enlightenment. What happens when a good student becomes ill and can't complete her course work near the end of the year, with her graduation at hand?”

“Not a real problem,” he said. “Professors, despite all rumors to the contrary, are fairly decent people. They have a good deal of leeway in how they handle it, but most often they'll just give her more time. If she can finish the work during that school year, no problem. If it takes longer, put an I for Incomplete on her record, with a year to make up the course and get a grade. Or she can withdraw without harming her grade-point average, and there's a W on the transcript, no harm done. If she fails to make up the work within a year the Incomplete becomes an F automatically, and that can be a potential problem.”

“You said the professors have leeway. What else might they do?”

“Well, I know one instance where the instructor gave his student a list of books to read, and demanded a paper that would have amounted to a dissertation. The kid got the drift and withdrew.”

“And if she dies before she completes the makeup work?” Barbara asked.

“After a year the Incomplete becomes an F, but in that case who would care?”

Barbara nodded and sipped her coffee. “Thanks, Brice. I'm trying to fill in gaps, populate blank spots. This has been helpful. You say your father's doing well?”

His smile widened. “A changed man! Rejuvenated!”

For the next several minutes they chatted. After he left, Barbara gathered up her things, waved to Martin and his wife, Binnie, and returned to her office.

“Go home,” Barbara said to Maria. “I'll be leaving in a minute or two, and it's getting like an oven again out there.”

Maria smiled and nodded, and continued doing whatever she had been doing at the computer. Barbara went into her own office and took out Brice's envelope.

Apparently Jill had made up all her overdue work. A's and two high B's. No Incomplete, no Withdraw. As both Olga Maas and David said, she had been serious about her schoolwork.

She put the transcript in the folder on her desk and took out Shelley's envelope with the newspaper accounts of Jill Storey's murder. Very little had been reported beyond the fact that she had been strangled. She had been very pretty, Barbara thought again, studying her photograph. The accounts were simply a rehash of the bare facts, glimpses of her background, her family, her scholarship. Nothing useful. The party was hardly mentioned, just the fact that she had attended a party, drove herself home, parked, and on the walk from her driveway to the front door of her apartment house, she had been killed. Frowning, Barbara replaced the newspaper stories in the envelope and returned it to the folder. She wanted that police file, she thought vehemently. She wanted to know what they had learned and had not reported.

After another minute or two, she called Bailey. When his answering machine came on, she said, “Bailey, for God's sake, pick up the phone. I know you're there.”

He picked up the phone. “I'm here, and I'm eating dinner. I don't answer the telephone when I'm eating dinner.”

“Sorry. Just one thing. In the morning, plan to get David here at about twenty after ten.”

“Ten, twenty after, make up your mind,” he growled.

“I just did. See you in the morning.”

Hoggarth would be there at ten, David twenty minutes later. Of course Hoggarth would be sore, but what else was new? she though derisively, and decided she had done quite enough for one day. It was time, past time, to go pick up dinner and head for home.

Barbara swung by a bakery on Wednesday morning and bought an assortment of pastries before going to the office. Shelley was already on hand. Barbara stopped at her open door and said, “I'd like you to wait until David arrives, and come in with him. Okay?”

“Sure,” Shelley said.

“There's something I want to go into with Hoggarth, and you cramp his style,” Barbara said by way of explanation.

Shelley grinned and nodded. “Gotcha.”

Frank arrived a few minutes later, eyed the pastries and looked at Barbara accusingly. “What are you up to now?”

“I'll offer our guest some refreshments,” she said. “Can you call it buttering up someone if there's no butter?”

“Can you be charged if you cause a healthy man to have a coronary? You want to clue me in?”

“I want his cooperation, that's all,” she said. “I'll be humble about it. You'll see.”

Frank snorted, sat down and helped himself to coffee.

Hoggarth arrived promptly at ten, looking hot and rumpled already. His face was redder than usual from the heat, and the bald dome of his head glowed under moist skin. Eyeing the pastries, he said brusquely, “What do you want?”

Barbara waved him to one of the easy chairs. “I thought we all might like a little something while we wait for Bailey to deliver David. I believe they'll be a couple of minutes late. Coffee?” She was already pouring it, and passed the cup across the table to him. Picking up a cinnamon roll, she said, “These are from the French Horn. Still warm when I picked them up.”

Hoggarth chose a Danish, and watched her without a word.

“I've been thinking,” she said, “how it seems to work out that whenever I have a capital case client you get assigned to the investigation. Curious, I thought, but then I considered how your captain must regard us. We sometimes manage to wrap things up in a manner that makes your department look extremely good. Wouldn't you agree?”

He continued to maintain his stony silence.

“Your captain seems to like this combination, for whatever reason. Of course, we hit speed bumps now and then, but we've always overcome them.”

Frank, watching, knew that Barbara was calling in a few chips and he suspected that Hoggarth was thinking the same thing. She had saved him some embarrassment in the past, and while it was true that he owed her, it was also very likely that he did not want to be reminded of it.

“Knock it off,” Hoggarth snapped. “Just tell me what you're after this time and let's get on with things.”

“I can't fool you, I guess,” Barbara said, smiling faintly. “I do want something. The original file that Robert McCrutchen had in his possession when he got the bullet. It's already been copied, so no real effort is required.”

“No. Where's Etheridge? Tell him to get his ass out of the closet and let's start.”

She shrugged. “Or, I could go for a subpoena, but that can get messy, and there's always a bit of publicity, plus the delay. If you're building a current case based on information that's twenty-some years old, I'm almost sure a judge would agree that the defense deserves a look at that same material, if only to make certain that people say today more or less what they said then. But, more, it would mean we can't start our efforts in a truly cooperative way, but would leave the starting gate as adversaries, however friendly that adversarial posture might be.”

Hoggarth ran his hand over his scalp. He did that often, possibly in disbelief that so much hair had vanished over the years.

She smiled at him. “The cinnamon roll is delicious. I recommend them.”

He finished his Danish, wiped his hands, drank some coffee, then said, “I'll think about it.”

Barbara didn't think he meant the pastry.

A minute later Maria buzzed to say Bailey had arrived with David, and very soon David and Shelley were seated at the round table.

Hoggarth started. He covered the past, when David and Jill had been childhood friends, neighbors, up through the night of the party. It was all general until then, when he began with specific questions.

“Did you ever give her money?” he asked.

“Yes. As kids sometimes one of us had an extra quarter when the other didn't for ice cream after school, or a soda or something.”

“Did you give her money during those last six months of her life?”

David nodded. “Twice. Ten once, fifteen another time.”

“You gave her twenty-five dollars. Is that right?”

“Yes, altogether it came to twenty-five.”

“What was it for?”

“Nothing. Friendship. She was broke.”

Hoggarth went into the episode with the key in excruciating detail, a minute-by-minute account for that afternoon up to the time David gave it to Jill at the party. He did the same with the confrontation on the deck.

“You followed them both out. Why?”

David shook his head. “No real reason. Robert had been drinking, and he could get in your face when drinking. I thought he might be harassing her. He'd been flirting with every woman at the party that night.”

“The night of his engagement announcement,” Hoggarth said, not quite a question.

David didn't respond.

“Then you had a fight on the deck, didn't you?”

“Absolutely not. He took a swing at me when I said to leave her alone. I ducked and he lost his balance and took a spill into the bushes along the deck. End of it. He stepped back up on the deck and I went inside.”

“Did he accuse you of being her lover, of planning to live with her?”

“He knew about the key,” David said. “He saw me give it to her, and he assumed the worst. He was wrong.”

“Did you take Ms. Storey in with you after that?”

“No. She left when Robert fell. I didn't see her again.”

“How did you get home that night?”

“I walked.”

Hoggarth belabored the next few minutes—when did Jill leave? Who saw her leave? Did he leave with her?

He moved on to the night of Robert's murder with the same kind of painstakingly thorough questions, where he and his companions had eaten, their full names and addresses, when he got there, when they separated, when he got back to the apartment, what he did then…

After another hour, Frank said, “Milt, I think David is showing signs of fatigue. Maybe we can wrap this up soon.”

Although David was looking very tired, his voice remained steady and his answers concise, well thought out and to the point again and again. He had not once lapsed into the sarcastic mode Barbara had warned him about. During the past hour or so, his right hand had drawn up in a peculiar way, not quite clawlike, but not relaxed, either, and he had used his left hand exclusively when he raised his coffee cup.

Hoggarth nodded. “We're done for now.” He put a notebook back in his pocket. Glancing at Barbara, he said, “I'll be in touch.”

She walked out through the office with him, and at the outer door, she said, “He's going to need therapy for several months. He may never regain full use of his hand and arm.”

“I noticed,” Hoggarth said. He reached past her and opened the door, then said again, “I'll be in touch.”

Back inside her office, Barbara said, “Relax, David. Maria had orders to call Bailey the minute the lieutenant left. Then back to the hole-in-the-wall for you. Maybe a dip in the pool, nap.”

“Hard work,” he said, and for the first time he sounded as tired as he looked. “I keep having to remind myself that I'm really awake, not hallucinating. It doesn't stick. They're really trying to pin it on me, aren't they? Robert's murder, and Jill's, too.”

“It seems they're going that route,” she admitted. “I keep having the feeling that someone is feeding them a line. When I get discovery, I'll find out who that someone is.”

“What makes it interesting,” David said, “is that it has to be someone with a connection to the here and now, as well as to twenty-two years ago and Jill's murder. Rather limits the cast of characters, doesn't it? No political motive. Rule out a Salem connection.”

“You think the same person killed Jill and Robert?” Shelley asked.

“Not necessarily,” he said. “But someone who knows enough about the past to know that if her death can be tied to me, it provides my motive for Robert's death, assuming he found something that could tie that knot. Otherwise, there isn't a motive. It raises another interesting question,” he said, looking at Barbara. “Who in that small cast of characters did have a motive for killing him?”

She nodded. An interesting question, indeed.