The Lesson of Her Death (23 page)

“There’s something altruistic about disbursing money to needy students. Jennie helped organize last year’s AIDS walkathon. And she was also a Meals on Wheels volunteer.”

“For a month or two,” Corde said.

“For a month or two.”

“But how did she come to work for you?”

“We got to talking about how curious it was that I—a history professor—ended up in charge of financial aid and she asked if she could assist me.”

“What were the circumstances of this conversation?”

“Officer.” Sayles was riled. “I hardly recall.”

“Was there anybody in class she was particularly friendly with?”

“I never paid any attention.”

“Did you ever see her with anyone who wasn’t a student?”

Sayles shrugged. “No.”

“How often did you work together?”

“Several times a week.”

“You see her socially?”

“No, not socially. We’d have dinner after work sometimes. Often with other people. That was all.”

“You don’t consider that social?”

“No, I don’t,”

Corde watched the man’s dark eyes, which in turn studied three dirty fingernails on his right hand.

“Professor, were you asked by Loyola College to stop teaching there?”

Sayles started to reach for his red-and-blue striped tie. He stopped and tilted his head slightly, adjusting the needle valve on his indignation. “I was, yes.”

“That was because you’d been involved with a student?”

“Involved with? Yes.”

“And you assaulted her?”

“I did not. We had an affair. I broke it off. She wasn’t happy about that and called the police to report that I’d assaulted her. It was a lie.”

“Were you having an affair with Jennie Gebben?”

“No. And I believe I resent your asking me that.”

“I have my job to do,” Corde said wearily.

“And if you think anyone from the university had something to do with her death …” Sayles’s voice grew harsh. “… you’re badly mistaken. There are enough unfounded rumors about the murder already. It’s hard enough running a school and raising money for it without spooking parents and benefactors. Read the paper.
Your
department said it was a demonic killing.”

“We have to look at all possibilities.”

The watch was again gravely consulted. “I have a class in five minutes.”

“Where were you on the night she was killed, Professor?”

He laughed. “Are you serious?” Corde lifted an eyebrow and Sayles said, “I was home.”

“Is there anyone who can verify that?” Corde glanced at the narrow gold ring. “Your wife maybe?”

His voice grew soft in anger. “I was by myself. My wife was doing research at the library until midnight.”

“I understand that Brian Okun was seeing Jennie?”

“Seeing her? I’d say he was seeing her. He was sleeping with her.”

In his Chinese handwriting Corde made a small notation on a three-by-five card. “Could you tell me who you heard that from?”

“I can’t recall.”

“What’s your opinion of him?”

“Of Brian? You can’t suspect Brian of hurting Jennie.”

“Your opinion?”

“He’s brilliant. He needs to temper his intelligence somewhat. He’s a little arrogant for his own good. But
he’d never hurt Jennie.” Sayles watched Corde slowly write. “May I go now?”

Corde completed the card and looked up. “I—”

“Look, I can’t help you. I have nothing more to say.” Sayles stood and his grim surliness was at a high pitch now.

This anger seemed out of proportion to the circumstances of the questioning. At first this reinforced Corde’s suspicion of the man. But one look into Sayles’s face told another story. The source of the professor’s indignation was contempt. Contempt at himself for loving Jennie Gebben. Whatever her talents in bed, which Corde guessed were pretty damn plentiful if both Sayles and Okun had risked their jobs to have her, Jennie was still nothing more than an average student, a suburban girl, fat at the throat, the daughter of a small-business man, a Meals on Wheels volunteer, a very ordinary young woman.

And here was Randolph Sayles, Ph.D., just blistered with humiliation for the love he’d spent on this common girl.

So Corde released him. And like a squirming cat escaping at last from his master’s arms the professor stalked out of Room 121 neither dallying nor fast, absorbed with forgetting the prior moments of troubling captivity.

Returning to the office Corde found on Slocum’s desk the stack of fliers from Fast-Copy, which were supposed to be tacked up thick as litter along Route 116. Slocum was out, he learned, looking into reports of missing goats.

The difficult night at home had now caught up with him—the second photo, his guilt at missing another of Jamie’s wrestling matches tonight, a tempestuous dream that woke him at one. Unable to sleep he had sat for two hours in the back bathroom with the shotgun on his lap,
scanning the forest for any sign of the intruder. Once, he was sure he’d seen a face looking at the house and had gone so far as to chamber a shell and walk outside, hands shaking in anticipation as much as from the predawn chill. But as he stood shoeless on the slab back porch the image became a moonlit tangle of trees and leaves.

He’d turned to walk back into the house and Sarah had scared the utter hell out of him, bounding forward from the stairs. They stared at each other—Corde, shocked, the girl more disappointed than anything. She was headed for the back door and he’d thought for an instant that she was sleepwalking. But, no, she was only after a glass of water. “What’s wrong with your bathroom?” Corde asked as his heart’s gallop slowed. She had drunk the water, staring out the window, until he impatiently shooed her off to bed.

He did not get to sleep till five.

Then there’d been a fight at breakfast. Sarah had shrilly refused her mother’s demand that she study before going to school. Corde had had to both comfort his wife and calm his daughter. He tried not to take sides and they both ended up mad at him.

Now, in his office, the door closed, Corde sat at his desk for ten minutes, arranging and rearranging the tall stacks of his three-by-five cards, fat and limber from all the shuffling. He spread them out until they covered his desk.

A dull bicentennial quarter appears in his hand and begins flopping over the backs of his fingers. He stares at the cards and after a few minutes Bill Corde is no longer in the Sheriff’s Department but is on the Auden University campus and the day isn’t today but is Tuesday, April 20. It is four-thirty
P.M.

Corde pictures Jennie Gebben leaving Professor Sayles’s lecture hall and walking to the university bookstore three blocks away to cash a check for thirty-five dollars. Her picture is taken by the cashier’s security camera and the film shows her wearing a white blouse
with a button-down collar. Her dark hair is straight, a thick strand sloping over her forehead. The shutter catches her with eyelids half closed. The time on the film is 16:43:03. Jennie continues to the dorm and arrives there at about five. She and Emily Rossiter remain in their room with the door closed for about an hour. The girls on the floor can detect the roommates having what seems to be an argument though no one hears enough to know the substance of their discussion.

Lance Miller’s report on the phones shows that during the hours Jennie was at the dorm today, there have been no outgoing long-distance calls and most local calls are to innocent recipients. The only local call whose recipient can’t be ascertained is to the Auden School of Arts and Sciences; which of the sixty-four extensions the call is transferred to cannot be determined. Both Randy Sayles’s and Brian Okun’s numbers are among those sixty-four, as is Emily’s; she works as an assistant in the Sociology Department.

At about six-fifteen Jennie takes a shower and with hair still damp walks with three other girls to the cafeteria. They have asked Emily to join them but she moodily declines. The four eat dinner and talk. Jennie eats quickly and leaves early. She too is moody. Her dinner companions return to the dorm at seven-thirty and watch a TV game show for a half hour. Jennie enters the lounge and watches TV for a few minutes then looks at her watch. She seems distracted, edgy. At about eight-fifteen she leaves the lounge and tells one of the girls that she’ll be back by midnight.

The next time Jennie Gebben is accounted for, it is ten-fifty-eight. She has been raped and strangled to death and her body is lying in a bed of blue hyacinths at the muddy base of Blackfoot Pond dam.

At the site of her death: Nineteen shoe and boot prints around the body, most of them men’s or teenage boys’ sizes. The Ford pickup, covered with 530 partial and 140 full fingerprints. Scraps of standard, virtually untraceable typing paper. Cellophane wrappers from
several snack foods sold by Wise and Frito-Lay and Nabisco. Cigarette butts, beer and soda bottles and cans, a condom, the semen in which doesn’t match that found in the victim.

And the knife (whose source even the FBI has not been able to identify, despite the assistance of the Seoul Prefecture of Police and faxed inquiries to twelve professors of religion, criminology and parapsychology around the country).

None of the fingerprints found at the crime scene matches those on file in Harrison County. The prints are now in Higgins and in Washington, D.C., for similar cross-checking in state and federal files. Fingerprinting the dorm room netted 184 partial and whole prints, sixty-two of which belonged to Jennie and other students on the floor. The others are as yet unmatched.

After reporting the theft of Jennie’s letters Emily Rossiter has turned uncooperative. She still has not appeared at Room 121 and she has not returned his calls.

Corde has looked carefully through the file on the Biagotti case—the case that introduced him to Jennie Gebben. On January 15 of the previous year, Susan Biagotti was in her off-campus apartment when she was beaten to death with a hammer during a robbery. As Corde told Ribbon, Jennie could offer no insights into the crime. The girls did know each other but only casually. Susan lived two buildings away from Brian Okun’s apartment but Corde can find no other connection between the two of them. The phase of the moon on January 15 was three days after new.

The burnt scraps found in the oil drum behind Jennie’s dorm include three types of paper. Hammermill long-grain recycled white typing paper, Crane’s laid stationery, tinted violet, and sprocketed green-and-white-striped computer paper whose manufacturer has not been determined. Ninhydrin analysis has revealed two partial fingerprints on the Crane’s stationery and one complete print on the computer printout. All three are Jennie’s. The county lab reports that the amount of ash
in the drum would be equal to about fifty to seventy-five sheets of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch paper. The ash was so badly destroyed that no latent watermarks, writing or fingerprints are detectable.

The printing on the computer paper is of dollar amounts ranging from $2,670 to $6,800. The printer was a nine-pin dot matrix. The extreme faintness of the type suggests it was printed in the machine’s high-speed mode or that the ribbon was old. Both county and State Bureau of Investigation technicians report that the papers and ink are too common to provide further leads unless matching samples are recovered.

Jennie died of traumatic asphyxia. The killer strangled her with his hands then used a rope or cord to make sure she was dead. The speed with which she died makes an erotic asphyxia interlude unlikely. She did not die standing up; the backs of her shoes kicked deep impressions into the mud before they flew off, and the soles of her feet were clean. The semen in and on her body is from a single individual and was serum-typed B positive. There is evidence of both vaginal and anal intercourse.

No one has found the murder rope though a technician noticed a fresh cut on a short piece of plastic-coated clothesline dangling from a tie-down cleat in the abandoned truck. The medical examiner said the injury to her neck was consistent with that type of rope. The cult knife contains no particle residue from the cord but that is not conclusive. Moreover, the blade of the knife is razor sharp and the county forensic lab reports that the clothesline on the Ford was cut with a sharp instrument. A particle of cotton fiber, matching Jennie’s panties, was found on the stiletto.

Of Jennie Gebben, Corde knows this:

She dated frequently though these were not typical Burger-King-and-a-movie events. She simply vanished in the evenings, sometimes for the entire weekend. She rarely talked about her companions on these outings though what she did share caused a considerable stir. Sex was Jennie’s favorite topic. Not boys or dates or
engagement rings.
Sex
. Jennie had been found masturbating in the dorm bathroom a number of times and she didn’t mind being watched. She got pleasure from blunt talk
(“One time Jennie and I were in the study room, okay? And it’s all quiet and she like looks up and goes, ‘You ever take it up the ass?’ and I’m like, ‘Oh my God, did you really say that?’”)
.

Her reluctance to discuss her lovers fueled the rumors that she slept with professors. Last year she supposedly went out with one professor for much of the spring term. They kept it intensely secret though it was believed that he was in the Education School and that they had contemplated marriage.

A number of girls call Jennie’s sexual behavior disgraceful but when they do, the disdain is transparent and there is envy beneath.

Many students say that they considered her a searcher, unsettled, unhappy. Several give similar versions of the same incident: Late one night Jennie was in the stairwell of the dorm by herself. She was crying and the echoes of her voice on the concrete walls made a terrible, mournful moan. “I’m so
lonely
.…” one student believes she was saying. Another, on the floor below, heard, “If only I had him.…”

She was not religious and had never attended a church in New Lebanon. She had some tapes by New Age musicians and several crystal necklaces but little interest in spiritualism or the occult. Students have given conflicting reports about her relationship with her parents. Jennie was cool toward her mother. Her connection with her father, on the other hand, was turbulent. On the phone she sometimes told him in oddly passionate terms that she missed and loved him. Other times she slammed the phone down and announced about him, “What a prick.”