The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (Book 6) (6 page)

I shook my head. “You get up near retirement age,
you resent most of the changes happening to your world. Doesn’t mean you’re
gonna kill anybody about it.”

“She called him a pathetic loser—publicly, in that
meeting.”

“Yeah, she sounds like a bitch. But speaking on
behalf of all pathetic losers, let me tell you a secret: We know what we are.
They’ve got different ranks for the professors, just like we do for cops and
detectives. She’s some kind of hot-shit professor. That’s the way she’s gonna
think: She’s a winner and everyone else is a loser. For all we know, Sorenson
and the rest of the deadwood thought she was an asshole for saying it in
public.”

“You saw him twitching.”

“Yeah, it made him mad. Maybe he twitches so he
doesn’t have to kill her. I used to get drunk and pass out. Twitching would’ve
been smarter.”

Ryan nodded, like I’d made a good point. He looked
down at his tablet. “Let me see how many students are in the porn class.”

I pulled the roster out of my bag. “Seventeen.”

“Long as we’re here, want to see what we can learn
about them?”

I looked at my watch: 9:30. “Yeah, we got some
time.”

“Want me to call Mary Dawson?”

“The dean of students?”

He nodded, then swiped a little bit on his tablet
screen. He pulled out his cell and punched in a number, then handed me his
phone.

I got through to her and asked if we could meet
for a couple minutes about a case we were working on. I ended the call and
handed Ryan his phone. “She said she’d be happy to meet with us.” I smiled.
“Said she looks forward to it.”

“She hasn’t heard about Virginia Rinaldi.”

“Doesn’t sound like it.”

“So why are we asking about the students?” Ryan
said.

I thought for a moment. “We’re investigating the
cause of death. Want to talk to the students, see if Virginia told any of them
she was sick. We need their contact information.”

“I already know how to get their contact
information.”

I looked at him. “Or we open with how the
professor was a total bitch. Then we’ll show her the roster and ask her which
student Virginia pissed off so bad he tossed her down the stairs.”

Ryan smiled. “Now, that’s a plan.”

Chapter 5

Mary Dawson, the dean of
students at Central Montana State University, emerged from her office to greet us.
She was an attractive woman gracefully approaching fifty. She wore
dean-appropriate clothing—wool slacks and blazer, a silk blouse, a single
strand of pearls—and used restraint in cutting and coloring her hair. Only her
multicolored eyeglass frames hinted at her youthful personality.

I’m sure she had to do all sorts of dreary and
depressing administrative chores, but most people in Rawlings saw her on TV as
the students’ proud mother hen. At graduations and award ceremonies, she was
always right up front, clapping, smiling, and making whooping noises. She
hugged the students and kissed them on the cheek. The girls drank in the
attention. Even the boys, intent on acting too cool for her, couldn’t help
smiling when she made a fuss over them. They knew she meant it.

And when a student screwed up or got hurt—which,
unfortunately, we’d seen a few times—she took it personally, like it was one of
her own kids. We’d seen her tear into a kid who let her down; and we’d seen her
crying, out of control, at a student’s funeral service.

Today she put on a tentative smile. She didn’t
have anything against me and Ryan, but she knew that detectives don’t usually
stop by to chat.

“Thanks for taking the time, Dean Dawson. You
remember my partner, Detective Ryan Miner?”

“Yes, of course. Detective.” She shook Ryan’s
hand, then turned back to me. “Call me Mary.”

She led us back into her office and gestured for
us to sit. She took one of the chairs across from ours. “I’m afraid to ask.”
She ran her fingers through her auburn hair.

“Unfortunately, it’s not good news. Virginia
Rinaldi—the sociology professor?—has died.”

“Oh, my God. What happened?” Her hand came up to
her mouth.

“We think it was an accident at her home. She fell
down the stairs.”

“This is just terrible.” She shook her head. “What
a dynamic personality. Her students loved her.”

“You heard that?”

“That’s all I heard. Dr. Rinaldi this, Dr. Rinaldi
that. She helped so many of the students—”

“You mean, like getting jobs, getting into
graduate school?”

“Well, yes, there was that. But even the ones who
weren’t her majors. She’d hook them up with community groups—internships,
volunteer work. She had them reaching out to the refugee communities, the
migrant workers, the women’s shelter, the nursing homes. Any population that
needed help. She made sociology real to them. Enrollment went up in the
courses. The number of majors went up. It was remarkable.” She shook her head.
“I’m speechless, just speechless. What a devastating loss.” She took off her
glasses, which hung on a gold chain, and dabbed at her eyes with her thumb and
forefinger, smudging her eyeliner a little. “I’m sorry.”

“That’s all right, Mary.” I paused a second. “But
some of the students weren’t fans, right?”

She frowned and waved her hand. “That’s
inevitable.” She leaned toward me. “This has always been a very conservative
environment. When a professor gets students fired up about progressive
causes—income inequality, LGBT issues, sex trafficking—there’ll be some …”

She didn’t want to say the word. I was fine with
it. “Idiots?”

She closed her eyes and nodded. “Some
students—community members, too—who see her as a threat to their own interests
and their own values.” She shook her head, as if she were trying to awaken from
a nightmare. “How can I help?”

“The incident happened last night—we think around
ten
pm
. She held a class at her
house until nine. We’re going to interview the students in a little while, back
in the sociology department. You know, see if she said anything to them about
being sick. We were hoping you could print us the transcripts of the students.
And let us know if there were any … any disciplinary problems we ought to know
about.”

The concerned look that came over Mary Dawson’s
face told me what had just happened. “What are you saying?”

“Like I said, we were hoping you could get us the
records—”

“No, I mean about how Virginia died.”

“Mary, this is just routine. We have to
investigate to determine the cause of death. One of the things is we need to
rule out foul play. It’s just protocol.”

She tilted her head quizzically. “But if you’re
asking about disciplinary problems, you’re obviously thinking—”

“Mary, don’t get ahead of yourself. The autopsy
hasn’t been conducted yet. We could find out she had some kind of heart
condition. Maybe she had a heart attack or something and fell down the stairs.
Could be just a terrible accident.” I tried for a smile, made it about halfway.

Mary Dawson stood, put her glasses on, and came
over to me. I pulled the roster out of my leather bag and handed it to her. She
carried it out of her office. I stood and walked over to the office door. She
was asking an assistant to run down the records on the students. The assistant
nodded, photocopied the roster, and handed Mary the original.

When Mary Dawson gave me back the piece of paper,
I could feel her hand shaking.

“There’s a couple other things you could help us
with.”

“Of course.” Her voice was low, her expression
somber. The lines between her eyebrows were sharper now.

“We need some information on Virginia Rinaldi. We
think maybe Human Resources might know.”

“Let me get them for you.” She picked up her desk
phone and hit four numbers. “Rhonda, this is Mary.” They did a few seconds of
small talk. “I’m with a police detective. Karen Seagate. There was … an
incident at Virginia Rinaldi’s house last night. The detective has a couple
questions. Can I put her on?” She paused a second, then handed the phone to me.
I sat down on a chair next to her desk and introduced myself to the woman. I
pulled my head back to try to read the buttons on the phone, then hit Speaker.

“Rhonda, does Professor Rinaldi list a daughter,
maybe in her twenties?” I waited.

“No, she doesn’t list a daughter. She has a son,
Robert Rinaldi, on her health plan.”

“Phone or address on him?”

Rhonda read off a phone number and a street
address. Ryan was writing it all down.

“Is there a husband?”

“No.”

“Does it show a previous last name for the
professor?”

“No.”

I thanked Rhonda and hung up.

Mary Dawson stood, walked over to the office door,
then turned back to me. “Let me see how those records are coming.”

I handed Ryan my cell. “Call the son for me.” He
punched it in, then handed me my phone. It went to voice mail. “Robert, this is
Detective Karen Seagate, Rawlings Police Department. I need you to call me
back.” I left the number and ended the call. “Shit.”

Ryan said, “He might have a roommate.”

Mary Dawson came back in and handed me a sheaf of
papers attached with a big paper clip. “I highlighted anything you might want
to look at.”

I stood. “Mary, thanks very much. Sorry to have to
tell you about this.”

She nodded slightly. “Maybe it was just a terrible
accident.”

“Yeah, I hope so. That’s probably it.” Ryan and I
walked toward her office door. She followed us out. “We’ll get back to you if
we need anything else. Appreciate it.”

Back outside the Administration Building, Ryan and
I sat down at a metal mesh table with four chairs bolted to the cement in a
little plaza. A few yards away, the sunlight reflected off a big hunk of scrap
metal that I think was supposed to be a sculpture. “How’re we gonna get to
Robert’s roommate?”

Ryan was looking at his tablet. “Robert’s address
is on South
Harson
Street in Portland. That’s three
blocks from Reed College.” He looked up at me. “Want me to try to reach their
Mary Dawson, see if we can get a name and phone?”

“Yeah, try it.”

He pulled out his phone and called the dean of
students at Reed College. He told them who he was and what he wanted. “Great,”
he said, then paused. “I see.” He ended the call. “Yes, they can do that.”

“But?”

“But they won’t.”

“Call Mary Dawson.” I held out my hand as he speed
dialed her and handed me his phone. “Mary, Karen Seagate. Sorry to bother you
again.” I explained that Reed College wouldn’t give us Robert Rinaldi’s
roommate’s contact information. She said she’d try, then get back to me. I
thanked her and ended the call.

Ryan looked up from the stack of pages we had
gotten from Mary Dawson.

I handed him his phone. “Anything?”

He shrugged his shoulders. “Not yet. There’re
seventeen students. Mary gave us the unofficial transcripts from each one, plus
a sheet they call Action Points.”

“What’s that?”

“Seems to cover a bunch of things: previous
degrees, certificates, honors and awards.” He thumbed through the pages. “Okay,
here we go.” He held up the stack for me to see. There were a couple of yellow
highlighted portions on the page. “This student—Alan Schreiner—is on the Debate
Team, which won a regional championship.” He thumbed through a few more pages,
stopping at the highlights. “Rebecca Josephson is the Vice-President of the
Student Association.” He shuffled some more. “Martin Hunt received a formal
reprimand because his fraternity—Alpha Phi Sigma—was cited for underage
drinking. He’s the president.”

“Underage drinking. I’m shocked.” I paused.
“Anything come of it?”

“Give me a second.” Ryan read a little bit. “There
was a party. Some kind of rush event. A freshman who’d been to the party got in
a car accident later, broke his arm and cut up his face. He was cited for DWI.
His father wanted to punish the fraternity for its role in the accident.”

“For his son going to a fraternity party, drinking
illegally, and driving drunk?”

“I’m just reading what it says.” Ryan looked up at
me. “At first the fraternity denied having anything to do with it because they
had no way of knowing the freshman would drive. Then the national fraternity
got involved. They must’ve convinced the local chapter to roll over. So the
chapter apologized, said they would be more vigilant about checking IDs,
et cetera
. They attended some sort of
program put on by the university about underage drinking. And the chapter
president signed off on this reprimand letter.”

“And the father went away happy?”

“Not sure about happy, but he went away.” Ryan
looked at another page. “And the son’s been a moderately successful general
business major ever since. He’s a senior now.”

“Anyone else?”

Ryan shuffled a few more pages. “Alicia Henson was
disciplined for maintaining a file with a bunch of freshman essays that she
sold to students for fifteen bucks a pop.”

“What was her story?”

“Let’s see.” Ryan paused a second. “She wasn’t
selling the papers. She was letting the students read them to learn how to
write better essays.”

“And the fifteen bucks?”

“That was to cover the costs of setting up the
system and running it. She claimed that students had to agree to a statement
about how they wouldn’t submit the papers as their own because that would be
cheating and they wouldn’t learn anything.”

“And what did the university do to Alicia?”

“They suspended her for a year so she could think
about it.”

“Which she did?”

“Apparently. She’s a junior geology major. Doing
quite well.”

“Anyone else?”

“One more. William Daley was suspended for a
semester for pulling a knife on his freshman roommate.”

“He got off easier than the girl who sold the
papers?”

“He claimed the roommate and a bunch of guys on
the floor were bullying him because he was gay.”

“Oh, I see.” I nodded. “Two wrongs make for a
light punishment.”

“Something like that, I guess.” Ryan looked at me.
“That’s all that Mary Dawson highlighted.” He straightened the papers and put
the clip back on them.

I looked at my watch. “Let’s head over now.”

“This isn’t a murder investigation, right?”

“No, just a routine investigation,” I said. “We
want to know if Virginia told any of the kids she was sick.”

“Mary Dawson saw right through that.”

“Well, then I’ll have to sell it a little better.”
I stood up. “You just sit there and look dreamy. One of the girls will get all
woozy and tell us something we didn’t know. Count on it.”

“You know, that’s kind of insulting. I’m not just
a piece of meat.”

I turned to him and put on a sad face. “You pretty
much are.”

He thought about it a second. “Yeah, you’re
right.”

Ryan was super-smart, honest, hard-working,
generous—an excellent detective in every way. He was sure to be chief of police
someplace, soon, probably before I made detective first grade here in Rawlings.
So the last thing I was going to do is tell him how much I admired and cared
for him.