Playing Dead (21 page)

“We’re trying to reach Professor Collier about a student of his who has been missing.”

“Oliver.” Shelley frowned as she bobbed her head. “He was such a geek, but I liked him. I was shocked that the pressure got to him. I mean, he lived for this stuff.”

“What do you mean about the pressure getting to him?”

“Don—Professor Collier—said that Oliver’s thesis wasn’t going well and he was panicked. Don thought he just left, couldn’t take it. The thesis has to be vetted by not only his advisor, but a committee. He might have had to stay another year. There’s a lot of pressure on third-year law students.”

“I’m sorry to tell you that Oliver’s dead,” Steve said.

“Oh, oh no!” Shelley looked stricken.

Mitch sat in the one guest chair and put his elbows on his knees. “We’re sorry. We’d wanted to tell the professor the news in person.”

“Maybe he heard and that’s why he canceled his classes,” she said. “Though I can’t imagine that he would do that without telling anyone about Oliver.”

“You don’t know why he canceled?”

“I thought it was a fight with one of his girlfriends. I was late to his eight a.m. class and was running across the lawn. He was standing in the middle of the walkway arguing with some woman. He walked off, angry by the looks of it, and she shouted something at him, but I couldn’t hear it. I got into class like ten seconds before he did. He went to the front of the room and said that he had a personal emergency and was canceling the lecture today. Didn’t even give an assignment. I mean, we only have two weeks until finals. He just walked out.”

“He’s never done something like this before?”

“Don? No way. He’s never sick.”

“What was his relationship like with Oliver?”

“Like, would he be distraught about his death? I guess he’d be upset. I used to be jealous of them—Oliver was his pet, everyone knew it. But then I suspected they had some big disagreement.”

“Over what?”

She shrugged. “No idea. But it had to have been major. I mean, they used to talk for hours in Don’s office, Don got him a choice internship two summers in a row, and Oliver had a key to his office so he could use Don’s personal law books. Then it just stopped. They barely spoke to each other anymore.”

“Just like that? Do you know when this argument started?”

“Hmm, not really. After classes began for the new term. That would have been end of August . . . maybe October? Early November? Definitely before Thanksgiving.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Oliver didn’t have any family nearby. Don always has his best students over for Thanksgiving, unless they go home. I was there with about eight or nine others. Oliver wasn’t. And Don said he hadn’t been invited. Really flip, very unlike Don.”

“That’s very helpful,” Mitch said. “Did you—”

She cut him off. “If you’re from the FBI, is that because Oliver was, like, murdered? And why aren’t the Davis police here?”

“I can’t really share that information with you as it’s a pending investigation,” Mitch said. “Do you have any of Oliver’s things here? Research? Perhaps notes or an outline? His thesis?”

“Oh, no. Oliver was very hush-hush about it. He wasn’t sharing anything. He wasn’t even talking to Don about it. “

“Thank you for your time,” Steve said.

“One more thing,” Mitch said. He knew the answer, but he had to ask the question. “Can you describe the woman Professor Collier was arguing with before he canceled his classes?”

Shelley said, “Pretty, dark hair. Caucasian. Twenty-five or thirty. Older than a college student. She was wearing jeans, I think. A long beige blazer. I don’t remember anything else. Oh, she was kinda on the short side. Don’s on the short side, so I noticed she was at least four or five inches shorter. Five two maybe?”

“Thank you for your time.”

They left King Hall.

“Dammit,” Mitch said. “Claire was looking at his class schedule and left early. I knew it. What does she know that we don’t?”

“I wish I knew,” Steve said.

What was Claire up to? What did she tell Don Collier that had him canceling his classes and acting strangely?

“We have to track down Collier,” Mitch said.

“Got his home address right here. He’s not too far from campus. And now I have a good reason to talk to Claire O’Brien again. Two people have identified her. It sounds like she’s a step ahead of us, too. I don’t want her to get in over her head.”

Neither do I,
Mitch thought.

Steve called Oliver’s girlfriend as they walked, and Tammy Amunson agreed to meet them on the ground-floor of her dorm. Tammy was a petite blonde, pretty, though she dressed on the plain and dowdy side. She wore small, smart glasses. Someone that an equally brilliant geek lawyer would fall for, Mitch thought.

“Tammy?” Mitch introduced himself and Steve. “Let’s sit down where it’s private.” He led her to a sitting area in the corner. There weren’t many people inside on this beautiful May afternoon.

Her face fell as she shrank into the chair. “It’s about Oliver.”

“I’m sorry to tell you this, Tammy, but he’s dead. His body was found yesterday morning.”

Her bottom lip quivered, and she bit it to make it stop. She blinked back tears, then said in a shaky voice, “Wh-what happened?”

“His body and his Explorer were in the Sacramento River near Isleton.”

“Isleton? Where’s that?”

“A small town in southern Sacramento County, in the Delta.”

“I’ve never heard of it. I’m not from around here. I can’t believe he had an accident like that. Oliver was such a good driver. I mean, sometimes he got distracted, especially when he was talking, and he’d get excited about something, but he didn’t drink and drive, never, and he was never reckless and I don’t understand how this can happen. When? Where has he been since January? Are—” She gasped. “Oh my God, he’s been dead. Since then. Since January? I knew it. I knew something bad had happened to him!” She couldn’t stop the tears from flowing, and batted them away with her hand.

“We have a few questions, if you have a moment.”

“Anything. I—” She stopped talking and stared at them, blinking rapidly. “Was it an accident?”

“That’s unclear right now, but we’re treating it as a possible homicide.”

She started shaking. Mitch put an arm over her shoulders, felt her body racked with sobs he couldn’t hear. Somehow that made her grief worse.

When the worst of the shakes subsided, Mitch said, “You said in the missing person report that the last time you saw Oliver was about noon on Sunday, January 20.”

She nodded.

“Professor Collier had a meeting with him on Monday, but Oliver canceled it.”

“Canceled it? No. That’s not right.” Tammy squeezed her eyes shut. “No,” she said more emphatically. “Professor Collier told me that Oliver never showed up for his meeting. I’m positive. That’s what had me going to the police. Because no one had seen Oliver for days, and when Professor Collier said Oliver missed his meeting—Oliver was excited about the meeting. Really excited. He and Professor Collier had a dispute ages ago, and Oliver thought this would put things right. I told the—oh. I should have known something was wrong yesterday. I got my hopes up that she would find Oliver.”

Mitch wasn’t sure he was hearing correctly. “What happened yesterday?”

“A private investigator came to me after class. She was looking into Oliver’s disappearance. I told her everything I told you, plus how excited Oliver was about his thesis, ‘The Perfect Frame’ he called it. He said he finally had the information to prove his hypothesis. I just got my hopes up that Oliver was okay. She seemed so determined to find him. I think in my heart I knew he was already gone, but—” She took a deep breath and the tears started running down her face again.

“Do you remember the PI’s name? A company?”

“Claire. Um, Claire something. From Rogan-Caruso. I have her card in my desk upstairs.”

“That’s okay,” Steve said. “We’re familiar with the company.”

Mitch’s stomach felt like lead. What was Claire doing?

“Thank you for your time,” Steve told Tammy. “Would you like me to call someone for you?”

She shook her head, wiping her nose with her sleeve. “My roommate is upstairs. I just want to go home.” She sniffed. “Do you have any idea who would want to hurt Oliver?”

“No, Tammy, but we’re working on it.”

NINETEEN

Claire walked through the glass doors of the Renaissance Towers at 8th and K Streets—known to locals as the Darth Vader Building because the top dozen floors had a shape reminiscent of the Sith lord. She showed her Rogan-Caruso badge to the guard, who waved her through. She was still mulling over the information she’d learned from Phineas at the morgue.

On the elevator, Claire punched the 18 button. It was 1:30, past the lunchtime rush, and she had the ride to herself straight through to the eighteenth floor.

Guilt washed over Claire. She was about to violate someone’s trust, and it didn’t make her feel good. She worked through a cover story—something close to the truth, but without mentioning her father had contacted her or left her a letter. She’d simply heard that Oliver Maddox was dead and she wanted to figure out what he’d learned about her father’s case. She had a right, didn’t she? Her mother had been the victim.

Half-truths were still half-lies.

Rogan-Caruso Protective Services took up the entire floor, but you wouldn’t know it when you exited the elevator into the simple yet comfortable waiting area surrounded by designer bulletproof glass, the Rogan-Caruso logo of a sword and shield etched in the center. Though the office was thoroughly modern, the logo harkened back to the days of white knights to the rescue.

Claire always felt inadequate coming into the offices. She had a small workspace that she used primarily to access protected computer files, and she briefed her boss, Henry Opacic, twice a month on her assignments or before testifying at trial if one of her investigations went that far. But today she was coming in to use the Rogan-Caruso state-of-the-art computer system to find out everything she could about this mysterious Frank Lowe.

She hated being deceptive, but she didn’t want to bring her boss or anyone else in the company under the scrutiny of the FBI. And while Rogan-Caruso played hardball with the government, they also took jobs from the same. Claire wasn’t exactly sure of everything the company did, and that was fine with her. She was happy with her low-level, below-scrutiny position, and she hoped that because of that no one would notice the computer time.

She stuck her badge into the slot that opened the first door. Aggie, the receptionist, glanced up. “Good afternoon, Claire. How are you?”

“Good, thanks.”

“Henry is out of town.”

“I’m just doing some research.”

“Go right in.”

Aggie knew everything about Rogan-Caruso.
Receptionist
was a misnomer. She buzzed Claire through, and Claire knew before the end of the day Henry would know exactly how long she’d been in the office and what internal files she’d accessed.

She wasn’t planning on looking at internal files beyond the Ben Holman investigation.

Claire walked down the quiet, plush hall, around the corner, and hesitated outside the office of the only person she truly considered a friend, Jayne Morgan, the computer genius Dave had a crush on. But Claire didn’t want to abuse her friendship, and she hated asking anyone for favors. This was her problem; she would handle it the way she preferred to handle all her personal problems: alone. Still, she peeked in and was both relieved and disappointed that Jayne wasn’t in.

She sat at her desk and quickly wrote up the report on the Holman arson investigation, scanned in Pete Jackson’s report, her interview with Holman, and what she’d learned from her informants about the medical supplies on the black market. She sent the whole report to Henry.

Claire then logged in to the Rogan-Caruso system and the world appeared at her fingertips. Jayne had created the intensive computer system which pulled public records and archived information from the Internet into a powerful database, which could be combined with secured data maintained internally or through their memberships and associations.

She typed in “Frank Lowe Sacramento,” figuring that if Lowe was involved somehow with Chase Taverton fifteen years ago it would have been local. She could expand the search if nothing came up.

Immediately, more than a dozen Frank Lowes popped up. She wished she had more to go on because she didn’t know
which
Lowe was the man Maddox had referred to. There had to be a better way to weed out the information.

She surmised that if this Lowe knew anything about Chase Taverton and the murders, he’d have been in Sacramento County in the early 1990s. That eliminated two potentials. Next she looked at ages. One Lowe had been a child in the early ’90s. She took him out.

Using similar methodology, she eliminated half the Frank Lowes she’d uncovered. Then she started going through the remaining individuals more carefully, making notes. She was particularly interested in any jail time or arrests. If Taverton had made a plea agreement with Frank Lowe, he had to have been arrested at some point.

“He’s dead,” she said out loud when she came to a petty thief who had done time for burglary. She almost deleted his records from the search except for one thing: He’d died in a fire in the early morning hours of November 18, 1993. Less than a day after Chase Taverton was murdered.

She switched to LexisNexis, where she pulled up all newspaper articles related to the fire. Lowe had been a bartender who lived above a bar called Tip’s Blarney in downtown Sacramento. The fire was ruled arson, but the owner, Tip Barney, had been cleared of any wrongdoing and no one had been arrested. The building was a complete loss. One body was recovered, burned beyond identification. There were no dental records for Frank Lowe, but Barney said Lowe was the only person who lived in the building, and he’d left him there at one a.m. when Lowe closed for the night.

Maybe she had the wrong Frank Lowe. Oliver had told her father that Frank Lowe had information. How could a dead man have information?