Somewhere upstairs, a vacuum was running. The clock on the wall read 7:08. On the way to the library, he had called Will to find out if he knew anything about the murder. From what he’d heard, they had no suspects and no leads, only Wyatt.
Looking down at her nametag, he revived the conversation, “Darcy, is it?”
“Yes.”
“I appreciate you taking the time to talk to me. I just wanted to stop by and make sure things were getting along as best as could be expected.” He handed her his business card. “Please let me know if there is anything I can do for you or if you come across anything unusual you think we should know about.”
The smile returned to her face. “Thanks. I will.”
“Pleasure to meet you.” He finished and walked out through the metal detectors and out the glass front doors. It was a shot in the dark, hoping to connect anything with this murder. Still, something nagged at him as he walked down the concrete ramp leading back to the parking lot.
“Detective!” The voice came from the entrance of the library. A young woman in a denim skirt and white blouse stood holding the door open. “Wait a sec!” The brunette trotted over to him as he turned around; he was unsure of what this girl wanted. “My name is Emily Meyers. I helped Dr. Borringer every once in a while on some of his projects.”
Trent looked at her. “Did you talk to any of the other police that came around here?”
“No, sir,” she put her head down. “I was scared to talk to them. I didn’t really have any information that I thought would help them.” A guilty look came over her face. “That is, until I heard you talking to Ms. Darcy a minute ago.”
“Do you know what Dr. Borringer was working on?” Trent quizzed her.
“I can’t be sure. I was just an assistant for him. But I had been working with him the day before he died. He had me doing a lot of hieratic comparisons—sorry, those concern ancient writing systems, mostly in ancient Egypt. Very confusing stuff. Dr. B never showed me where he got some of these writings, but I know this: whatever he was working on contained a lot of ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, and Old Hebrew.”
“So you weren’t working here for him the night that he died?”
A sad look shadowed her face. “No. Dr. B had told me he was nearly finished and wouldn’t need me that night. I met up with some friends at a coffee shop for a little study session then went home.”
Morris was a little annoyed. “You felt like you didn’t need to tell the police any of this?”
She raised her eyes from the ground. “I wasn’t here when the cops arrived the first time. But I was working here in the library when that tall blond cop came around.”
“Tall blond cop?” Trent knew all his fellow detectives, and none of them fit this description.
“Yeah, I overheard him asking a lot of the same questions you were asking. I think he said his name was Jurgenson or something like that. He talked kind of funny, real deliberate. I couldn’t tell for certain, but I thought I heard a foreign accent a few times.”
Jurgenson? He’d never heard of that name before and, there were certainly not any cops that he knew of with accents, other than Southern, working for the department.
“What exactly did this blond cop ask about?”
“He kept bugging the head librarian about where Dr. Borringer did most of his research, which computer he was using, any mail that he might have sent out that day. Stuff like that.”
“What did she tell him?”
“Not too sure, but it didn’t sound like she really knew too much about what the professor was working on. Jurgenson didn’t seem very happy about her lack of information. He stormed out of the library, slamming a stack of books to the floor as he left.” The girl looked down in thought. “I don’t guess he found anything he was looking for.”
“Do you know what he was looking for?” Something about the girl’s demeanor led him to think she knew more than she was letting on.
She looked up from the sidewalk. “No, not really.”
“What do you know?”
“Only that I think Dr. B was doing this project as a favor to someone over at the IAA. Pretty sure it wasn’t for himself.”
Bingo. “You don’t happen to remember the name of the person at the IAA he was helping, do you?”
She looked around a moment, trying to recall the name. “Seems like it was Thomas…something.”
“Schultz?” He finished the sentence for her.
“Yeah, that’s it,” she said with recognition in her voice.
So there was a connection. “Thank you, Ms. Meyers. You have been very helpful.”
“You’re welcome.” She started to turn around and walk back into the library while he spun in the opposite direction.
“Detective?” she called out again.
“Yes,” he turned around, stopping in his tracks.
“I’m not going to get into any trouble for not talking to that Officer Jurgenson, am I?”
“I’ll take care of it,” he replied, walking backward away from the girl and then turned the corner at a jog.
This story wasn’t making sense, but now he had a connection. Sense could come later. Who was this Jurgenson? Sounded like there was another player involved in this fiasco. For the moment, though, his only thought was to check out the IAA headquarters and see if he could find anything else about Schultz and more importantly, Wyatt.
13
Atlanta
Sean Wyatt’s carbon-colored Maxima eased into a parking spot in front of the Borringers’ house.
