(2012) Cross-Border Murder (22 page)

“Like Monaghan and Bull?”

“Yes, like Monaghan and Bull.” A smile played at the corners of his mouth. “And their acolytes. There’s a lot of research money there. And a lot of prestige to fight over. Such men become like gurus in our profession.”

“And you?”

“No.” He gave a defeated shrug of his shoulders. “I was never quite like that. I guess I was not made of the right stuff as they say. Well I’ll be off.” He said suddenly. “Thanks for the drinks. And for the explanation with or without the apology.” He rose and with a secretive smile ambled leisurely towards his car before I had a chance to ask him about the rifle which seemed to be missing from his gun cabinet.

As he was about to open his door, I said instead, “They found a shell casing near the motel where someone took a shot at Gina.”

He turned and stared at me. Then he shrugged.

“It was a .22 caliber.” I said.

He stared at me again, then finally he gave another quick, abbreviated shrug and got into his car. I watched him drive off, wondering whether he was really sober enough to drive. But he seemed to handle the car with a practiced competence.

I wondered why Hendricks had really come to see me. Not, surely, to exact an apology for my uninvited visit to his cottage. So why? To diminish the likelihood of his being a suspect? But why? To deflect suspicion elsewhere? Perhaps to set me on the trail of someone he wanted to see tracked down, but of whom he seemed almost mortally afraid? But whom? Gooden? Symansky? Something about our conversation nagged at me, but I could not put my finger on it.

As I went back inside, I realized that Hendricks aroused contradictory emotions in me. At times, something almost like revulsion, at other moments, pity, and even occasionally, something akin to fondness. Under different circumstances, I think I might even have grown to like him.

I phoned Tom McPhail, an engineer I knew at McGill. We had first met when we had shared a room during the summers we spent as students in the Canadian Officers Training Corps. Neither of us were that interested in becoming officers, but it was a way to earn money during the summer break without having to look each year for employment. We both agreed that it had the fringe benefit of ensuring that should serious hostilities ever break out, we would have a step up the military ladder when enlistment or conscription occurred. We had met occasionally since then, and whenever we did, I remembered noting how the hair on the top of his head had progressively thinned. With a sudden awareness of how rapidly time passed, I imagined that he now had probably only a graying fringe.

When I reached him I gave him an abridged version of my investigation, and asked if I could pick his brains to understand some of the engineering background to those events.

“Sure. But I’m not sure I can help. My field of concentration is different. But I can try. When?”

We agreed on early Monday morning at his office. Before hanging up, I remembered some of Gina’s comments about academia during our lunch in Portland, and so I asked him about the practice of professors taking credit in published articles for work that had been done by students. “Is that fairly common?”

“The short answer is yes. In many places it is more prevalent than we would like it to be. The long answer is much more complex.”

“How come?”

“Because in engineering, so many projects are group projects. Who did what work may be easy enough to decide. But who provided the essential inspiration, or the key insights at key moments is more difficult. The student may think he did, but it may well have been the supervising professor. It’s not a problem only in engineering, you know.” He gave a grim chuckle. “My shrink told me of his experiences at the Psychiatric Institute when he was a graduate student. He maintained he had done all the work on some experiment with patients, but when the results were published, the head of the Institute took all the credit. It’s a problem in all research areas where increasingly complex projects are conducted and large grants are involved.”

“I see.”

“And then there’s the other side of the coin,” he remarked.

“And what’s that?” I asked.

“Well, take my wife. She’s a professor in the History department. She had a doctoral student she was supervising. The student had to rewrite the thesis three or four times. By the time it was finished, probably ninety per cent of its key insights and conclusions had been provided by my wife. But it was the student that got the doctorate, and in a subsequent book based upon it, my wife was thanked superficially in the same paragraph as the typists and librarians!” He grunted. “In some ways, students plagiarize as much from professors, as the professors take credit for work done by their students. That doesn’t change the fact that the problem of authorship and credit is a serious problem, and that universities are not very good at dealing with it. Got to run. See you on Monday.”

I had just put down the receiver when Ryan called from Burlington.

“So how did your day go?”

I gave him a brief synopsis.

“Interesting. Particularly about Gooden.”

“Yeah.”

“And how did your day go?”

“Strange.” He laughed. “When I was a cop, I got used to bureaucrats giving me any information I wanted. Now they treat me like some smelly piece of fish the cat dragged out of the garbage!”

I remembered Leclair’s admonition. I grinned. “Just who are you referring to?”

“The customs officials on both sides of the border. I just wanted to know who was on duty Sunday and whether they could identify either Hendricks or the Symanskys. You would think I was asking to see their income tax reports.” His tone shifted. “But I did come up with something towards the end of the afternoon. A pure piece of luck. Well, not quite. Maybe it was really persistence and ingenuity.” He sounded almost smug, and there was a pause and I knew he was going to milk it for all it was worth.

I waited.

“I figured,” he said finally, “that whoever took a potshot at Gina might not have had the rifle or the ammo readily at hand. So I made a list of all the gun shops within a thirty mile radius of Essex Junction and Burlington. There were only six of them. I started with the one that was farthest away, thinking that the person might want to maintain a degree of anonymity and bingo! One of the young clerks made a positive identification of Hendricks as someone who bought a box of .22 shells on Saturday afternoon.”

I found that I was holding my breath. “Is the clerk absolutely certain?”

“Yep. Turned out to be one of life’s little ironies. It wasn’t the clerk who served him but a part-time employee, a student, a friend of the guy you bumped into at the cottage. He had met Hendricks and so he recognized him. After Hendricks left, out of sheer curiosity, he checked what Hendricks had purchased.”

“Well, well,” I said, “our first piece of solid evidence.” I tried to sound enthusiastic but my heart wasn’t in it. Part of me wanted Hendricks to be one of the innocent bystanders. And not a multiple murderer.

“You don’t sound very pleased.” Ryan said.

“No, no, I am.” I protested. “It’s a major breakthrough. It’s just that I was beginning to develop a soft spot for Hendricks. The bastard is proving to be very good at manipulating me. So where do we go from here?”

“Good question. I’m not sure. Unless we can find his rifle or the rest of the box of ammo, it’s circumstantial evidence at best. Lt. Ricci is unlikely to get a warrant to search Hendricks’ house in Montreal just on what I’ve found out so far.”

“Gina and her mother will be arriving tomorrow afternoon.” I mentioned.

“I’ll be back before then. I have one more border crossing to check out. Why don’t we all have supper together?”

“Sure.” I said. “Maybe I’ll get a bucket of fried chicken wings and a tub of salad. We can try to figure out what to do next by reading the chicken bones.”

“Chicken bones?”

“Yeah.” I gave a morose chuckle. “The Romans used them to forecast the future.”

“Hell, no wonder Rome collapsed! Jesus, I thought our methods of detection were primitive. But to get serious for a moment, I’d sure like to know what moves Hendricks makes next.”

“So would I.”

“We should hire someone to follow him.” Before I could say anything he went on, “I know an ex-cop who has his own detective agency. I’m sure he must be tired of following delinquent spouses with too much money and the genes of a chimpanzee.”

“How are we going to pay for it?”

“I’ve thought of that. Why don’t we go half and half? I’ll talk him into giving us a special rate.”

“Okay, I’m game.” I wouldn’t have been but Hendricks had got under my skin.

“I’ll call him right away.” Before he hung up, he added, “the motel I’m in has a satellite dish and over a hundred channels.” He laughed. “I’m going to spend a quiet evening zapping through all of them. See what’s new. See if it’s any better than what I have on the twenty odd channels I get at home on cable.”

I took down his number. It’s truly a postmodern world, I thought. I envisioned him zapping rapidly through hundreds of fragmentary images of a twentieth century born under a seal of contradiction and discord: a frenetic, atonal, electronic universe speeding through the night on a zillion airwaves from a lonely satellite in the sky as darkness envelops thousands of motel rooms each with their flickering monitors.

Outside my den window, twilight had descended.

Then suddenly I remembered something. It had been an odd, discordant note in my conversation with Hendricks earlier in the day. It was one of the things that had been nagging at me ever since. When I had first mentioned the shooting outside the motel, Hendricks had shown no reaction whatsoever. That now struck me as unusual because my mention of the incident should have come as startling news to him. I had certainly not mentioned it to him when I had phoned from Portland. And as far as I knew, no news report of it had mentioned my name or Gina’s. Some surprise, even consternation would have been normal. But then, given what Phil had found out, perhaps Hendricks had known all along. He would have, if he had been the one to fire the shot. On the other hand, I told myself, if Hendricks was guilty, surely he would have tried to fake surprise and display some curiosity about the shooting? Why hadn’t he?

CHAPTER SIXTEEN
 

The phone rang just before midnight. I had not yet fallen asleep. I scrambled from the bed to answer it.

“He’s on the move.” Ryan said.

“Who is?”

“Hendricks.”

“Hendricks?”

“Yeah. We were lucky. Paul Racine, the detective we just hired got there just in time. He had decided to scout the place before assigning someone tomorrow morning as we had agreed. As Paul parked nearby, Hendricks came out, packed three suitcases in his car, and took off. I was going to call you in the morning, but I thought this warranted waking you up.”

“I wasn’t asleep.”

“Well, I was. Until Paul called. I’m in constant touch with him now over his cellular phone.”

“Three suitcases?” I asked.

“Yeah. And one of them was very large. Certainly big enough to contain a rifle.”

“More luggage,” I muttered, still trying to puzzle out the significance, “than he would take for just a weekend at the cottage.”

“My thoughts exactly. At first, I thought maybe he was heading for an airport and that we would lose him. But they’re now only a few miles from the border. He’s obviously going to the cottage for tonight at least. I’ve asked Paul to keep on his tail. I’m leaving the motel now to stake out the cottage. I’ll call you later once we know what’s what.”

I tried to go back to bed. Hendricks, I thought. Like all those roads which once led to Rome, all the evidence in this case was leading towards him as our murderer. I lay there reviewing the problem of motive. His infatuation with Naomi? A rancorous encounter with Monaghan? They seemed to me to be pitifully inadequate. Then why? I had had longer conversations with him than with any of the other likely suspects. Had I got to know him too well to see him as a murderer, and yet not well enough to understand why?

I fell asleep only to be woken two hours later.

“Sorry to wake you.” Ryan said, “he’s in the cottage. He took the luggage in, and the lights have gone out. Looks like he’s planning to stay put at least until tomorrow. I’ve discussed our problem with Paul, and what we’d like to do is put two men on surveillance here first thing tomorrow morning.” In the brief pause which followed I could see the costs mounting and so I asked why.

“We could station one of them up in the woods behind the cottage with field glasses and a cellular phone, and another in a car where the road leads into the village. I’m concerned about the rifle. It’s our only solid piece of potential evidence. I think you told Hendricks that the Montreal police found the bullet and the casing?”

“The casing, yes,” I said, “but not necessarily the bullet.” But I knew I was nit-picking. They had probably found the bullet by now.

“He’d be a fool to assume they don’t have the bullet. And he’d be a fool to assume that they couldn’t match what they have with the barrel of the rifle.” I agreed, although I suspected Hendricks knew more about the forensic possibilities of all of that than I did. Ryan went on, “so if he’s brought the rifle back to the cottage, he will probably want to get rid of it soon. I would. I mean, why take a chance? And so if he does do something, and we can retrieve the evidence, we’ve got a case. But we’ve got to watch the cottage, and also be prepared to move fast by car if he decides to leave.”

“Can this Paul Racine get two men there by tomorrow morning?”

“Yeah. He can roust two of them out of bed and get them down here in time. You’ve seen the place in daylight. It’s pretty dark here now. Am I right in assuming that the woods are pretty wild and extensive behind his cottage?”

I tried to visualize the setting. “There’s certainly no cottage behind him, that’s for sure, and my impression is that the land rises fairly rapidly towards a ridge about a half mile away. It’s too rough and craggy to accommodate buildings. How wooded it is I don’t know. A lot of stunted fir trees I think, at least as far as I can remember.”