Corpse in the Campus (7 page)

—Sheldon... My God. Have they said anything else?

—Yes. They say that they have to tell you something very important about the Sarah Brown murder.

T
en years are too many years. However, the remorse, pain, and guilt know nothing of the passage of time, and make any event, however distant be present in one´s memory as things that have taken place just a few seconds ago.

Karen travelled in a police car driven by one of her department´s agents, and she had the passenger´s window rolled down. The wind blew her hair, and forced her to squint her eyes. It also made the cold give her goose pimples, and made them burn more gas. These were all disadvantages. However, she had decided that the best way to face past ghosts that would be awaiting her in Sheldon was to feel the fresh air that blew across the state of Iowa in her face.

The anonymous call made by a young woman that said she was related to Carol Weight, had not given her too many details, and maybe in other circumstances she would have decided not to pay any attention. However, to receive it from her just after the program about the Sarah Brown crime and this was the very program that had forced her to be sincere after over a decade of silence, had really jolted her. To sum it up, she had asked Karen to visit Carol´s father, who still lived in Sheldon. Now he was a retired widower. She was convinced that the nightmares and doubts that knawel on her insides did the same in the person she was going to visit, or even more than her. The informer had insisted that she ask the man about his daughter´s diary.

After a four hour trip, they parked in front of a good looking and well kept two storey house that was painted in front with a shiny and elegant blue with a lush garden that had nothing to envy the Versailles gardens. Karen got out of the car trembling, and not too convinced of what she was about to do.

—Are you sure you don´t want me to go in with you? —asked the agent from inside the police car.

—Completely. Only, if you see anything strange, or I take too long, step in. It´s better this way, I assure you.

Philips knocked on the door and met a man of some 60 years and good looking for that age, who was tall and muscular with friendly looking clear eyes.

—Excuse me; am I speaking with Mr. Liam Weight?

Karen made the question at the same time that she flashed her Cedar Falls local police chief badge. Immediately, she was conscious that that man was being overtaken by nerves, and he was now looking over her shoulder, of course seeing a police car parked in front of his front door.

—Yes. I am he —he replied with a deadly voice.

Philips knew from that moment on that the informer must not be more than a rude prankster that had had a good time calling from a public booth calling the department to give a false declaration so that she could drive a few agents crazy for a few days. Nevertheless, she had had her doubts. Before starting that long trip, she had checked on the alibi and Carol´s declarations, and they were solid as diamonds. In any case, she was missing something, and now she needed to ask that man a direct question, as she would launch him a direct punch that could be a real KO that would not allow him any improvisation.

—Mr. Weight, I´ve come here because I need you to show me your daughter´s diary.

Liam lost balance slightly but managed to keep himself upright. He had been expecting that visit for ten years. It may have taken too long to get there. He had always thought that it would happen after about a year or maybe even two at the most. However, now that his memory had managed to erase the past, there was that Cedar Falls local police chief there, almost trembling as he was, while she was kindly but firmly asking him to betray his own daughter. He held on to the hope that maybe that was the best that he should do because he had never felt the courage to ask his little girl , and afterward he had never found the moment. He had simply decided to build a wall of silence and reservation, with the hope that the doubt had been incomparable which was much better than a horrible certainty. However, the time for faking was over and it was time to know the truth. Maybe, and only maybe he had been wrong all of these years and his daughter was not the monster that he imagined she was. It was only through cooperation that he could put an end to so much time of suffering.

—And the gun? Are you going to need for me to give you the gun?

T
he worst was not finding a diary that was plagued with threats and hate toward Sarah Brown by her childhood friend, Carol Weight, and the worst was not finding on one of its pages a detailed confession of the horrible crime. The worst was not obtaining her fingerprints on the 22 caliber gun that belonged to her father and to relate the bullet lodged in the victim´s cranium positively to this gun. The worst was not even that this hate was a very long lasting one and that had to do with the fact that Carol was madly in love with Mark Walton, Sarah´s boyfriend. All of this had only made things easier, making it evident that some unpardonable error had been committed during the investigation, and that she finally had, and after a decade the person that was guilty of the Sarah Brown murder. Really the worst was to prove that Carol Weight´s alibi was false because the crime had been committed the very morning the student had disappeared and not in the early hours of the morning on Saturday, March 8
^th
.

Testimonies like that of Maddie, that lived at Hillside apartments, that were very near to the place that the body had been found, added on to that of the two security guards who were working that night shift on that ominous night, and the coroner´s report had led all to conclude that Sarah had been shot in the temple at 2:30 AM that Saturday. However, things had not happened that way. That was very clear.

Philips had not managed to convince the assistant district attorney of the importance of reopening the case: he needed something more, a convincing, or a forensic report that expressed in a convincing manner that really the young  girl´s body had been abandoned among the trees from first thing in the morning of March 6th. For days he had felt mortified by the idea that that had been near to impossible. However, the solution had come to her from her own home, and from one of her dear children´s voice, that wished to study medicine and was always reading scientific magazines.

—Mama, why don´t you ask for help from the University of Chicago? They have a department that is dedicated precisely to studying the process of decomposition of a body in relation to the place it is found or the environmental conditions of the area.

Only two days later, four experts had set up a cadaver farm at the cluster of trees. Luckily they were in the middle of the winter, so that they had to wait for climate conditions were similar to those. After a week, Karen had a conclusive report on her desk: at 48 hours the bodies had the same state of almost nil decomposition and a scarce presence of insect activity which is that of Sarah Brown, so therefore, this affirmed that the most probable is that the hour of the murder were situated between nine and eleven n the morning on March 6th.

Even though he was already retired, Philips went to visit the coroner that had signed the first autopsy and who had established the hour of death. She had to have everything determined and very well determined before she could face the assistant district attorney. This doctor admitted to his error saying that since then, science had advanced a great deal, and surely for this reason he had made a mistake. He accepted the new coroner´s report without any objections, and thus sealed Carol Weight´s destiny.

The former University of Northern Iowa student lived now in Marshalltown (it took them some time to locate her, because she had married a couple of years earlier and had lost her maiden name), at barely 60 miles from Cedar Falls. Nobody had warned her that the investigation was underway, nor had her father told her that he was cooperating with the agents. Thus, Carol Weight knew that she was at the end of her road and that it was time to pay for her horrible sin when she saw two police cars parked along the side of her porch.

In spite of her attorney´s advice, Carol was no problem. Amid tears and sobs she accepted all the evidence against her: the diary, the pistol, the motive that led her to kill her friend Sarah, and the manner in which she carried out her plan.

Carol had been in love with Mark from high school days, practically since the moment her best friend Sarah Brown had begun to go out with him. All of them lived in Sheldon, and they were all apparently part of a
tightly knit
group of friends. All of them had registered at the same university, and it was there that Weight had understood that Walton was crazy about her friend, and that the only possibility to get his attention was to get rid of her, as cruel or painful this could seem. She drew up a plan, and on Thursday morning March 6th, very early in the morning, she took her in her car to that cluster of trees with the excuse that she needed to find some plants for her biology project. It wasn’t a problem to shoot her in the temple and from just a few centimeters distance from her friend, entertained looking for the nonexistent plants, ignoring all that hate and her end which was very near. Carol had stolen a 22 caliber gun from her father´s house and all she had to do was to take it out of her purse and shoot. She killed Sarah, but she was not able to make Mark fall in love with her. On the contrary, all she got was pushing him into a deep depression, from which he still won’t totally recuperate.

Incredibly, the plan she had drawn out with the Waterloo trip alibi worked and even better than they had dreamed of. When she found out that the case was being shut for lack of evidence and suspects, she was almost totally shocked. She didn´t know what other tortures were awaiting her a few months later.

Weight used to curse herself every night before turning out the light and going to sleep, pursued by a truth that she understood would pursue her infinitely. In spite of everything, she was able to make a new start in her life, and somehow she escaped from the police first, and from the past afterwards. However, she forgot one detail: she had given several things to a cousin for her father to put them up in his storage room. Among these objects were a very revealing diary and a gun that would convict her.

The jury barely took an hour to decide unanimously that Carol was guilty of first degree homicide. The judge was benevolent in her sentence, since the defendant had shown repentance and had confessed her crime. She got only 25 years with possibility of revision down to 15. In ways, justice had been served.

Philips felt that all the trial had taken just a few seconds, instead of months. Maybe having to struggle with such a remote case, reconstructing it with an artisan´s precision at the same time she was facing small daily offences that came into the department daily, had distracted her mind to the point of losing the notion of the passing of time. Now that it was all over, she felt comforted on the one hand but tremendously worn out and empty on the other.

Karen had relied on her Cedar Falls local police team, and they had responded with great ability and professionally. She had kept her friend Ron Davies up to date on progress being made and he had done all he could from Chicago to speed up the process and to be an active part of the solution of the case. However, now that all was over, she should make a call. She had promised herself that she wasn´t going to bother him, nor torment him with echoes from the past and only get in touch with him when the guilty party was in prison. She thought that this was the fairest and most appropriate.

—¿Gordon?

—Karen... Is that you Karen? —asked Stevens, in surprise. Maybe it had been some five years since he had talked to Philips for the last time, but he recognized her voice immediately.

—Yes, Gordon, It´s me. We can relax now. Everything is finally over. We have brought justice to Sarah Brown. You can now forgive yourself...

Karen didn´t get an answer to her words. After a few seconds, she was able to hear only a good man´s sobbing that had just found peace with himself. Then she began to cry.

F
inally, Sarah Brown´s parents had achieved their objective by getting in touch with that program that rescued past unsolved cases. They hoped that that would move consciences of some person watching that felt some kind of remorse and that this would help to catapult police´s bogged up cases.

Gordon Stevens had driven his own car for several hundreds of miles from south Kansas to Sheldon. Now that he was in front of the Brown´s house he felt he had no energy to call at their door and offer them his condolences. He considered that it wasn´t appropriate, and that maybe those parents wouldn´t take his visit well, or that they wouldn´t know how to understand its character. Now it made no difference.

Really the old detective had not subjected himself to that wearisome seven hour trip for that. The objective of his search was elsewhere, even though not too far from there. He knew that Sarah Brown´s remains rested in the East Lawn cemetery, so he went there walking. He didn´t have the courage to ask anyone, and he took nearly three hours of walking among tombstones in order to find the student´s grave marker. It was clean and well kept with a bouquet of wild flowers that were not wilted, which showed that someone probably came by fairly frequently. The tombstone was protected by two tall and bushy trees that protected it and spread over it their majestic shade. He looked around, in order to be sure that nobody was watching. Afterwards, Gordon pressed his knees into the thick grass and started praying.  It had been some twenty years that he hadn´t prayed, but he felt the necessity and nothing or nobody was going to keep him from it. When he had finished, he left a rose on the stone.

—I´m sorry, Sarah, I´m sorry that I wasn´t up to the circumstances. I hope that wherever you are you have forgiven me. I hope that wherever you are, you may have found the peace you deserve...

D
ear reader. Thank you for having purchased this book. If you have read to here, you are already a part of it, and you have already also made it a little yours, and a little less mine. If you have liked it and you want other readers to enjoy it, you can deposit a commentary on it. You will have my infinite gratitude...