He didn’t seem convinced, but asked his other questions aloud. The first was, “Did the call come through the switchboard, or directly to you?”
I felt like an idiot for not checking that myself, and started to call the switchboard operator when John said, “Never mind, Kelly. I already called Doris. She hasn’t transferred any calls to you today. Must have come through direct.”
“Then it’s most likely someone you’ve met, perhaps given your business card to, right?” Frank asked.
“Maybe,” John said, before I could answer. “But it’s not that hard to learn someone’s direct dial number. There are a number of ways to do it. You could ask the switchboard operator for the number; she’ll usually give it out for anyone who’s not in upper management. If you wanted to be a little more sneaky about it, you could call another department, say, ‘Oops, I was trying to reach Irene Kelly. The operator must have transferred me to you by mistake. Could you tell me Irene’s extension?’”
“Even if it’s someone with a card — I’ve given out a lot of them,” I said. “I had a new direct dial number when I came back to the paper, so I had to let people know how to reach me. I had to re-establish contact with a lot of old sources, and I had to meet some new ones. And on almost every story, I end up giving a card to someone.”
“Well, it’s something to think about,” Frank said. “Maybe you’ll recall someone who mentioned this history professor to you, or who seemed interested in you in some unusual way — or who just seemed odd.”
“‘Odd’ will not narrow the list much.”
“Probably not. You said you found the envelope?”
I nodded, and handed it to him.
“Lydia!” John shouted, startling me. “Find something to keep Miss Kelly busy for a while.”
“Wait a minute—” I protested.
“You can live without him for five more minutes, can’t you, Kelly? You haven’t gone
I could sense something was up and that John was in a conspiratorial mood. But I couldn’t figure out a way to object before they walked off into John’s office, Frank turning at the last moment to give me a shrug of feigned helplessness.
I practiced breaking pencils with one hand while Lydia tried to find something for me to do.
4
“IF HE DIDN’T KILL HER in her office, he made a damned good start there.”
Pete Baird, Frank’s partner, had accepted our invitation to join us for dinner that night. While Frank acted as chef, Pete was filling me in on the progress they had made in the Blaylock case. “There was blood splattered everywhere — over her desk, the windows, her books, the floor, her papers. The guy went nuts. Really sprayed the place. I doubt she walked out of there, anyway. We’ll know more when the lab and coroner’s reports come in.”
You get two homicide detectives together, you have to be prepared not to let much of anything ruin your appetite.
“She was killed there,” Frank said, coating some orange roughy fillets with a mixture of herbs and a small amount of olive oil. “All the blows were to her skull. He was hitting her hard.”
“He?” I asked.
“Figure of speech,” Pete said. “But didn’t you say the voice on the phone was a man’s voice?”
“It was synthesized. No telling. But I admit the letter made me think the writer is a man. Thanatos is a male character in mythology, for starters. Clio is female, a woman was killed. Cassandra was a woman. But maybe the killer is a woman who wants us to think she’s a man, to throw us off her trail.”
“If the killer’s a woman,” Frank said, “she’s a very strong woman.”
“Why strong? You told me that you thought the professor was sitting at her desk, bent over some papers…”
“Right. Her desk faces some windows. It was late at night. If she had been looking up, she might have seen his reflection in the windows. Might not have made a difference if she had seen him, but in any case, there was no sign of a struggle on her part. I think he got her with the first blow.”
“Exactly,” I said. “One good blow to the head and she wouldn’t have put up much of a struggle. So the killer wouldn’t need to be strong.”
“If the body had been left there, I’d agree,” Pete said. “But after making all that mess, the killer was very neat. Must have bagged her — or at least wrapped her head up, because there wasn’t so much as a drop of blood out in the hallway. My guess is that he was wearing something over his own clothing — coveralls, maybe — because he couldn’t have been in that room or picked her up and carried her out without getting anything on himself. The professor wasn’t a very big woman, but even if she only weighed about a hundred pounds, that’s a lot to lug around. He carried her downstairs, took her to a vehicle, drove to the zoo, and then dumped her over a fence and in with the birds. Leaves her wallet and all her identification on her, so that we know exactly who we’ve got.”
“He’s damned sure of himself,” Frank said, putting the fish under the broiler. “No question about that.”
“Yeah, and not just because he left her ID,” Pete said. “You ever been around peacocks? They’re noisy suckers. He had to know that someone was going to hear all that racket.”
“Zoo keepers might be used to it,” I said.
“The birds were raising Cain. They’re beautiful, but not pleasant, if you know what I mean. In fact, they—” Pete halted when he caught Frank shaking his head. “Sorry. We shouldn’t be talking about this before dinner.”
If it was something that bad, I wasn’t going to challenge him.
“You said the chair of the history department let you into Dr. Blaylock’s office,” I said. “Was it locked?”
Pete nodded. “Yeah. But the killer probably just locked the door after he left. Hiding the mess for a while.”
