No Stone Unturned (24 page)

Morrissey and I chatted on the steps outside the Engineering Department, and I asked him if he wanted to come with me to New Holland to pursue the case; I was planning on leaving later that afternoon.

“I’ll take a rain check,” he said, and I felt a twinge of disappointment. “It looks like our killer is here in Boston.”

“Could be,” I said. “If there’s only one.”

“You think there’s two?”

“Could be. Different MO on each murder.”

“Different circumstances might explain that, but I’ll keep an open mind. I’ll let you know if there’s news. You do the same.”

He offered me his rough hand, and I took it in mine. He held on for a moment when I tried to let go and looked at me from the corner of an eye.

“You were in that apartment quite a while before we got there,” he said. “What’d you do to keep busy?”

“I threw up,” I offered meekly, not sure he’d swallow it.

Morrissey stared into my eyes a little longer, and I didn’t know where to look or what to say. Then, finally, he released my hand, turned slowly, and trudged across the green. I drew a breath and watched him go.

“Miss Stone.” A familiar voice interrupted my thoughts.

“Hello, Roy,” I said.

“I’ve just heard about Mr. Nichols. What happened?”

He walked with me toward my car as I filled him in on the latest. I found his surprise and grief ironic. He had, after all, tried to lead me in all the wrong directions the day before. I wanted to see where he might take me this day. He asked if the police had any theories on why someone would want to ransack Nichols’s flat. I shrugged my shoulders, and we walked on.

“I’ve got a question for you, Roy,” I said as we reached my car. “Your friend Jerrold: Do you have any idea why he would want police protection?”

“He must be afraid for his family after these murders.”

“But the police have been protecting him since last Saturday, when he didn’t even know about the first murder.”

“I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” he said, wagging his head again in that strange way. I opened the car door and climbed in. “Unless . . .”

I waited. I didn’t trust him, but he obviously wanted me to ask.

“Unless what?”

“Well, there is a student you may wish to talk to. His name is Hakim Mohammed.”

“What will he tell me?”

“That I can’t say. Just talk to him, but don’t mention my name. Hakim is Pakistani, you see, and we are not friendly.”

He smiled at me, wagged his head, then sauntered away, leaving me to ponder this new information.

Before searching out Hakim, I phoned the local INS office. Two referrals and one transfer later, I was connected to Gloria, a functionary in the records bureau in Boston. It’s remarkable how much information is available over the phone, if you just ask nicely. After a brief search through some files, Gloria told me she had Mr. Jerrold’s dossier in front of her.

“British subject,” she began. “First came to the United States in 1946, immigrated in 1952, permanent alien status . . .”

“Yes, I know he’s English,” I said.

“Yes and no, Miss Stone. Mr. Jerrold is a British subject, but he’s never lived in England.”

“Where did he come from, then?”

“According to my records, he was born January 12, 1918, in Calcutta, India, and lived there until the war, when he served in the Corps of Royal Engineers in Burma. Then in 1946 he obtained a visa to study at the University of Chicago.”

“India, you say?”

“That’s correct. His father was with the British colonial administration, according to this. And they stayed on after Independence.”

“What about his family here? Is there any mention of a wife and son?”

Gloria ruffled some pages. “Married Diana Reynolds, American citizen, on June 21, 1952. No record of children here.”

I found Hakim Mohammed in the graduate lounge and recognized him as one of the students who had helped Nichols the day before. He didn’t seem to like me any better this day.

“I want to ask you about Professor Jerrold,” I said. “Do you know any reason why someone would want to do him harm?”

“No,” he said, staring out the window, smoking a cigarette. “Dr. Jerrold is liked by all.”

“Someone suggested you might know why he needed police protection.”

Hakim chuckled, still not caring to look at me. “I don’t suppose it was Prakash Singh who suggested that?” I didn’t answer. “It’s curious that he should point to me, since he and Dr. Jerrold have their own differences.”

“My impression was that Jerrold was his benefactor here in the department. What differences do they have?”

“I don’t know what tricks he’s up to, but their friendship has enjoyed a recent improvement. Since the start of the semester. Before that, the bloody
Sardar
was on very thin ice.”

I begged his pardon.

“
Sardar
means ‘Sikh.’ Prakash Singh is a Sikh. Turban, beard, and kirpan.” He’d lost me again. “The dagger,” he explained. “It’s called a kirpan. All the bloody
Sardars
carry them.”

“I think I’ve heard lies from just about everyone in this place, Mr. Mohammed. No story matches the last. Why should I believe what you’re telling me?”

He looked at me for the first time. “Believe whom you will, Miss Stone. I’ve told you the truth.”

I stared him in the eye: “Do you own a car?”

“I am a student. I share rooms and meals, and I have books to buy. I can’t afford a car.”

I had just one more stop before leaving: Jordan and Ginny’s apartment building, where I looked underneath Ginny’s two-toned Buick for oil spots. None. Ditto for the cars in the other parking spaces. A search of the immediate area on Marlborough Street yielded no triangular oil drippings either, but it appeared the street sweeper had passed recently, so that didn’t prove anything.

At four o’clock Thursday afternoon, I got onto the Mass Turnpike and headed west. I stopped for gas at Framingham and called Charlie Reese collect from a phone booth while the attendant filled the tank and checked the oil.

“I’m driving back now,” I said. “I’ll be there in about three hours, and I want to run some film right away. Can you wait for me at the paper?”

“I’ll be here. They’ve just arrested Jean Trent as an accessory, and we’re working on that story,” he sighed. “We’ve got to redo the front page.”

You have ample opportunity to think while staring at the lines in the road for three hours. My thoughts bounced from New Holland and Jordan’s murder to Medford, Ginny White’s death, and D. J. Nichols’s disappearance. The responsible party had to be one of the people I’d met at the Engineering Department, but who? And why? Nichols wasn’t the Mohawk Murderer or the Boston Basher, I felt sure of that. I also eliminated the secretary, Phyllis, and Professor Benjamin from my short list. I suspected Jerrold most of all, because I believed he was closest to Jordan. And because he had charmed me with his slippery appeal. Roy had been a little too helpful to be trusted, but could a man I’d shared coffee with, a man who smiled so broadly, actually have killed two young women with his bare hands? Hakim seemed the perfect suspect—somehow sinister and churlish—but I believed he was telling the truth.

Or was it possible I hadn’t met the murderer at all? I considered my movements in Boston. I had only scratched the surface of two recently ended lives, and there was no shortage of possible avenues of investigation. I hadn’t managed to talk to Dennis, the superintendent of Jordan’s building; I had interviewed only a handful of students and faculty from the Engineering Department; I’d had no time to search out Jordan’s academic advisor, roommates from previous years, or Ginny’s parents. On one hand, I felt my investigation slipping away; it was unfurling too rapidly, growing exponentially. And George Walsh was encroaching by the minute. On the other hand . . . Well, on the other hand, nothing. I had nothing. This was an opportunity to make something of my three years in New Holland. But I was stuck.

I also thought about Jordan’s Boston bedroom. The order didn’t surprise me, but the dearth of personal touches did. Aside from the one letter under her pillow, I’d found only generic articles among her belongings, no intriguing faces in her photo album, nothing to suggest the emancipated behavior I had come to discover. Her room looked like one of those model homes, furnished with conventional, inoffensive trappings, right down to the bland framed photographs on the shelves. Could her sentimental side be so cool, so removed from the passions of her conduct, that she left no evidence? Was she capable of switching off her emotions when it came to cataloguing her love life? And if so, why had she kept the Dear Jordan letter under her pillow? And how could I forget the mushy love paean she’d written to Ginny about her night in Fatehpur Sikri with D. J.? The questions spun around in my head, but I kept arriving at the same two answers: either she had hidden the memorabilia of her love life elsewhere, or Ginny’s murderer had made off with some of Jordan’s belongings. If so, he’d missed the letter under her pillow.

On my return to New Holland, I took a few minutes to make a phone call I’d been neglecting for days: Greg Hewert. I found his name in the phone book; he was living at home with his folks.