He laughed. “No. Professor Frost.” Seeing Frank’s smile, he asked, “Do you know him?”
“We met briefly this evening. But about the contest — do you have any lists of competitors? Entry forms perhaps?”
“Yes, both, if you need them.” He moved to a file cabinet, halted, and said, “I probably shouldn’t be giving this information to you, but — well, Ben speaks highly of you. Can I trust you not to sell the names and addresses to a mailing list or telephone solicitor?”
“I’m only looking for one name — I’m not sure whose name it is. But I suspect the attacker is someone who knows the captain, so maybe he learned how to fold this plane here. Maybe somewhere else, but I’d like to give this a shot.”
Wilkes pulled three thick folders out of a drawer. “I do wish I could stay around to help with this.”
Frank declined Wilkes’s offer of a ride to his car. The air had cooled considerably from the heat of the day, and a walk on this quiet, moonlit night would be pleasant, he decided. It would give him time to think.
He made his way across the campus alone, carrying the plane’s box and the three bulky file folders. During the spring or fall, even at this hour, groups of students would have been leaving classrooms, talking in the halls. But now, during summer session, the quad was nearly deserted. He saw a few students walking toward one of the libraries, but no one else. A little later, as he passed an open window near one of the art buildings, he saw lights and heard the sound of steel drums beating, caught a peculiar mix of scents of paint and brush cleaner and linseed oil — someone listening to music while working late in one of the studios.
He took the shortcut offered by a path through the campus sculpture garden. As he strolled past the abstract metal shapes, he wondered if he had jumped to conclusions about the paper airplane. Maybe Bredloe had some other enemy and the paper airplane was just a coincidence. Maybe it didn’t have anything to do with Lefebvre’s killer — maybe he had assumed a connection that wasn’t really there just because he had come from seeing the wreckage of Lefebvre’s plane not long before.
He had a sudden sensation of being watched, and halted. He was nearly in the center of the garden, surrounded now by an alien landscape of rising curves and sharp angles — a few of the large sculptures reflected moonlight off their highly polished surfaces, but most eclipsed it, darkening the pathway.
He saw movement out of the corner of his eye and turned quickly — and beheld nothing more than the garden’s odd patchwork of shadow and light. He waited. The faint pulse of the drum music reached him, and the distant, intermittent sound of cars on a campus road. He walked a little farther, then quickly stepped behind a tall, flat piece of metal with a single, four-inch hole in it. A placard at the base said the title of the piece was “Mother.”
He watched the pathway. Although he had seen nothing more, he now felt sure that someone had followed him. From where? He would have seen anyone who waited in the hall outside Wilkes’s office. Outside the engineering building? That was a possibility. There were many places — including inside other buildings — from which someone could have watched his progress until he reached the garden. At that point, the watcher would have been forced to follow him or give up pursuit.
He considered circling back to try to come up behind the follower, but just then he thought he heard a hesitant step. He stayed still, listening, watching.
Again he caught a glimpse of movement, a shadow cast where one had not been a moment ago. He shifted the folders, keeping his right hand — his gun hand — free. Suddenly he heard running footsteps on the path, moving away from him, back toward the art studios. He followed, cautiously at first, leaving the pathway to dart between sculptures, staying low.
He reached the edge of the garden, but did not step out into the open. His pursuer could have used any one of several bordering buildings as his means of escape. Again Frank waited. The steel drum music stopped. Its absence seemed to amplify the silence left in its wake, until a mockingbird began a noisy chant in a nearby ficus. Frank moved back among the sculptures.
He stayed on the grass planted between the works of art, off the concrete path. When he reached the other side of the garden, he studied his surroundings, but now he was as sure that the follower had given up as he had been sure of his presence earlier. Still, he stayed alert on the walk from the garden to the nearby stairs, from the stairs to the adjoining lot, where he was parked. He saw no one, and no other cars were parked near his own. He got into the Volvo’s front seat and started the engine.
He was about a block from the campus when he noticed that his left side mirror was out of adjustment.
22
Tuesday, July 11, 11:30 P.M.
The Kelly-Harriman Home
Frank set the files on the dining room table, where Irene had set up her notebook computer. “Mind if I work next to you?” he asked.
“Not at all — but I’m not going to be much of a conversationalist.”
“I’m not trying to force you to talk about our argument—”
“No, that’s not what I mean. It’s just that I have to do some work tonight if I’m going to take time off to go to Phil’s funeral in the morning.”
“I’ve got some papers to look through,” he said. “I’ll keep you company.”
She glanced up at him then, perhaps catching something in his tone of voice, and said, “Everything okay?”
He shrugged. “Case is spooking me, that’s all.”
When he didn’t say more, she said lightly, “Well, nothing like a little paperwork to reassure a person — the power of the mundane. Have a seat.”
So he sat across from her. Soon she was immersed in her writing, barely aware of his presence. He opened one of Wilkes’s folders, listening to the click and tap of the keyboard while she wrote. For a few minutes, he did not read — he simply watched her, by turns taken with her intensity, then amused by the faces she made as she concentrated on the story.
He glanced through the files Wilkes had given him, but did not see any familiar names. A few of the applications were nearly illegible. He thought of Joe Koza, the lab’s questioned-documents examiner, and wondered if he’d be able to decipher them. He was reminded that he needed to check in with Koza about the bloodstained business card he had found on Lefebvre’s body. By now Joe probably had found time to run laser and other tests that would allow
