The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (Book 6) (4 page)

He’s pretty easy to identify, even from a
distance. He’s somewhere between three-fifty and four-hundred pounds, with a
shiny scalp, no matter the temperature. Due to all the blubber, he rarely wears
a coat. Today he was sporting a short-sleeve plaid shirt, shiny-ass brown
polyester pants, and his black shoes with the Velcro straps and the soles worn
down on the outsides.

When I got in the house, Harold was breathing
heavily and holding onto one of the balusters on the staircase. He gave off a
scent of baby powder. “Good morning, beautiful,” he said to me, with a smile
that wrinkled up his whole face. Tiny dots of perspiration covered his face. Ryan
was standing there, looking concerned, as if he thought Harold’s heart was
going to explode any minute. I wasn’t sure what Ryan thought he was going to do
about it.

“Sorry to drag you in early, Harold.” I pointed to
the woman on the stairs. “We’re right on the edge about Virginia Rinaldi here.”
I wanted him to be able to look at the body and explain how it could’ve been
something other than homicide.

“She took a nasty tumble, I see.” He looked at the
body for a few seconds. “I’d like to get a little closer.” He shook his head in
frustration, then walked around the staircase so that he was next to the fourth
step. But with the wide staircase and her being up close to the wall, he
couldn’t reach far enough through the balusters and touch her arm. He glanced
over at Ryan. “You see her right wrist, where it’s swollen?”

“Yep.”

“Climb up there, would you? Get right up close to
the wrist. Tell me what you see.” Harold reached into his shirt pocket and
pulled out a penlight, which he handed to Ryan. “Take this.”

Ryan climbed up the stairs, turned on the
penlight, and leaned in close to her arm. He looked at it, then lifted it
carefully with his gloved hand and studied the underside of the wrist. He put
it down gently and worked his way down the steps backwards. He handed Harold
his penlight. “Little red and purple dots. About fifty of them.”

Harold nodded.

“What is it?” I said.

“They’re called
petechiae
.
She’s got petechial hemorrhage.”

“From the fall?”

Harold shook his head. “More likely, it’s what we
used to call an Indian burn. Someone grabbed her wrist, twisted it pretty hard,
broke the little blood vessels. But there’s all kinds of tendons and ligaments
in there. When I open it up, I’m going to see some damage.”

“That’s the swelling?” I said.

“Yeah.” He nodded. “I vote for homicide.”

“Ryan, call Robin, would
ya
?”
I turned back to Harold. “Thanks, handsome.” I walked out the front door.
“Truman, put up the tape.”

Chapter 3

The sun was breaking free
of the foothills as I drove my Honda toward headquarters from the victim’s
house in the North End. I shielded my eyes with one hand and fished around with
my other one for the sunglasses that had burrowed to the bottom of my big
leather bag. The red-orange ribbon of sky along the horizon was beautiful.
Someday, some year, I would make the time to look at it.

I carded my way through the rear entrance to the
building and headed to Dispatch to try to track down whoever called in about
Virginia Rinaldi’s house this morning.

“Yes, Detective?” A small woman, an admin named
Patel, gave me the best smile she could muster at a few minutes past eight in
the morning.

“Around 6:30 you got a call from a woman telling
you to check out a house on 411 Harkins. Truman responded. Was it you took that
call?”

Patel hit a few keys on her computer, then
squinted at the screen and nodded. “Yes.”

“Tell me about the call.”

“Young woman, I’d say. Under thirty. She gave me
the address and asked us to check it out.”

“She say why?”

“I asked. She repeated, ‘Please check it out.’ I
asked again, you know, if everything was all right, if there was a problem. She
hung up. So I put out the call. Truman responded.”

“All right,” I said. “I’m gonna ask the chief for
authorization to try to run down that call. You mind getting that number to
him?”

She was good with that. I thanked her and headed
to the detectives’ bullpen to meet up with Ryan and brief Chief Murtaugh.

I checked my watch: 8:05. The night-shift guys had
already cleared out by the time I got into the detectives’ bullpen. The place
was starting to come alive. The techs and the civilian staff were all settling
in at their desks. Computers and printers beeped. The smell of coffee drifted
in from the break room.

Ryan was just hanging his coat on the rack in the
corner of the bullpen, a rectangular room maybe thirty feet across. I tossed
mine on the back of my chair and we walked down the hall, past the incident
rooms and some administrative offices toward the short hall that led to the
chief’s office. His secretary, Margaret, wasn’t at her desk. I stuck my head
around the corner to see if his office door was open. It was.

Robert Murtaugh was seated at his desk, frowning
at his screen. He was a good-looking man in his late fifties, a full head of
hair going salty, tough-guy features. As always, he wore a white shirt, tie,
and jacket, even at his desk.

“Morning, Chief.”

He looked up. “Good morning, Karen.” He tilted his
head a little to see past me. “And Ryan.” He glanced at his watch. He’s usually
at his desk by six-thirty. That’s after forty-five minutes of lifting weights
in the gym downstairs. “Catch a case already?”

I nodded. He gestured for me and Ryan to come in
and sit. Ryan and I took the two soft chairs up against the wall. The chief
came out from behind his desk and sat on the small sofa.

“A professor, named Virginia Rinaldi.”

He picked up a yellow pad from the little table
aside the couch and started to write down the little I could tell him: about
the party or the class there last night, about the college-age guy in the
photos and the young woman with the slutty outfits. About Harold telling us why
he thought it was homicide. About how the canvass turned up nothing. I ended
with the request to track down the number of the woman who called in early this
morning.

“I’ll notify Billingham.” The chief sighed. “Tell
him we’re on top of it.” Charles Billingham was the president of Central
Montana State University. “When Harold officially calls it accident or
homicide, you get back to me, all right?”

“You bet,” I said.

“Need anything else now?”

I looked at Ryan, who shook his head. We stood up.
“We’re good, Chief.”

We made our way back to our desks in the bullpen.
Ryan logged onto the system to see what we could learn about Virginia Rinaldi.
I went to get a cup of coffee. I could tell it was going to be a good day:
Someone had tossed yesterday’s coffee. Today’s was already dripping into the
pot.

I passed the hot mug back and forth between my
hands as I walked back to my desk. “She in there?”

Ryan was staring at his screen. “She drives fast.
Three citations in the last four years.” He was silent as he studied the screen
a little bit more. “And six misdemeanors: four disorderly conducts and two
failures to disperse.”

“Really? What pushes her buttons?”

“I’d say social justice. She was charged with
‘using obscene, threatening, or abusive language’ from the visitor’s gallery at
the state house during a debate on LGBT rights, and she joined a demonstration
that blocked the entrance to the parking lot during a session on migrant workers’
rights. She disrupted a hearing about leaseholder’s rights to stop certain
kinds of oil drilling on their property. She also didn’t like the law against
making secret videos about animal abuse on cattle ranches and dairy farms.”

“And the failures to disperse?”

“Apparently she’d handcuff herself to cars,
fences, cops, whatever.”

“Pretty tame stuff.”

“Not the kind of thing that’ll get you killed,”
Ryan said. “Even in Montana.”

“Can you get her CV?”

Ryan gave me a playful snort of derision and hit a
few keys. “Virginia Rinaldi was the Evelyn
Cornay
Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Central Montana State University, the
first named professor in the College of Social Sciences. Came here four years
ago. Her PhD was from Cal-Berkeley, fifteen years ago. Wow. Six books.
Feminism, social justice, immigrant rights. The Internet and the alienation of
Gen Y students. And about fifty articles.”

“So what’d she doing out here on the frozen plains?”

“I’d say the Distinguished Professorship has
something to do with it. Salary, research assistants, not that much teaching.” Ryan’s
father is a professor. He knows how to read professors’ CVs.

“So she can afford all those hundred-dollar
disorderlies
,” I said.

“At least a thousand of them a year.”

“You’re
shittin
’ me. A
hundred K a year?”

“More likely in the neighborhood of one-fifty,”
Ryan said.

“Nice neighborhood.” I checked my watch: 8:16. “How
about this for a plan? Robin’s going out to the
vic’s
house. She’ll be there a couple of hours, at least. Maybe she can figure out
where Virginia’s son lives—and who the woman is. Meantime, we’ll head over to
campus, see what we can learn about Virginia Rinaldi.”

“Let me set up the appointments on campus.”

“I’ll be right back.” I headed back to the break
room to grab some calories. By the time I returned, Ryan was ready.

“We’re going to meet with the provost, Audrey
Miller, in ten minutes. Next up is Daryl Sorenson, the chair of the sociology
department.”

As I drove us over to campus under crisp,
cloudless skies, Ryan phoned Robin and asked her to bring in Virginia Rinaldi’s
laptop and explained what we wanted to know about her son and the woman. I
parked the Charger in a metered spot behind the Administration Building, which
housed the provost’s office.

We approached the big glass doors with the names
of the president and the provost. “We worked with Audrey Miller before?”

“Yep. On the Austin Sulenka case last year. The
grad student?”

It came back to me. “She gave us the envelope with
the phony reference letters, right?”

“That’s right.”

“What was the professor’s name again?”

“Suzannah Montgomery.”

Turns out Suzannah Montgomery was screwing the
grad student but didn’t kill him. Audrey Miller used the investigation to fire
Suzannah Montgomery. It was a complicated and nasty case.

The provost’s assistant escorted us back to Audrey
Miller’s office. The provost, a stocky sixty-something woman with a dark
complexion and liver spots ringing her eyes, stood there, her hands on her
hips, as if she didn’t want to invite us in, didn’t want this to be how she
started her day. Her expression grim, she nodded, turned, and walked into her
big office. It was filled by a massive walnut desk, a round table that could
seat six, and a small couch and two armchairs. “Detectives,” she said.

She didn’t tell us her name or ask us ours, but I
introduced us anyway. “President Billingham told you about Professor Rinaldi?”
I said. If she wanted to cut through the civilities, that was fine with me. She
pointed to the couch. We sat. She took an armchair.

“A few moments before you called me.”

I expected her to talk about what a terrible loss
it was. She didn’t. She looked at me.

“Did you know her personally?”

“I’d been part of the hiring process, worked with
her on some committees.”

“But you weren’t social friends.”

“Not at all.”

I thought about whether to follow up on that but
decided to hold off. “Can you tell us about her role here on campus?”

“Her role was to be a high-profile international
scholar in the social sciences and to stir the pot here on campus.”

“Stir the pot?”

“With all the emphasis on STEM lately—”

“STEM?” It’s rude to use jargon I have no way of
knowing. I don’t mind interrupting people when they do it.

She paused, the frown lines coming down her jaw
showing a hint of annoyance. “Science, technology, engineering, math. STEM.
We’ve put a lot of resources into STEM the last few years, and we wanted to pay
some attention to the social sciences, which haven’t received nearly the same
funding.”

“So, stirring the pot?”

She waved her hand, as if she shouldn’t have to
explain. “Bring in interesting speakers. Start student groups. Make up new
courses. Write provocative pieces in the local paper and the student paper.”
She paused. “Raise the visibility of the social sciences.”

“And did she do that?”

There was a hint of a smile on Audrey Miller’s
face. “Indeed, she did.”

I looked at her for a moment. “Could you give us
an example?”

“There are many. She was very active in raising
our awareness of local and state policies on a number of issues, including income
inequality, migrant-worker rights, LGBT issues. Refugees. The list goes on.”

“Provost Miller, you didn’t care for Professor
Rinaldi, did you?”

She took a moment. “As provost, I’m the
administrator in charge of the faculty. It is not my job to like the faculty—or
be liked by them. My job is to encourage each member of the faculty to promote
the legitimate interests of Central Montana State University.”

I took a deep breath, then exhaled. “My chief,
Robert Murtaugh, has promised your boss, President Billingham, that we’re gonna
do everything we can to apprehend whoever killed Professor Rinaldi. We need you
to help us.” I held her gaze. “Will you help us?”

She didn’t say anything. Her expression was stony.
“That is exactly what I have been trying to do.”

“Let me come at this from another angle. Can you
think of anyone on campus who might’ve wanted to hurt Virginia Rinaldi?”

“No, I cannot. There were people on campus who
disagreed with some of her positions—myself among them—but we are a civilized
intellectual community. Our mission is to create and disseminate knowledge.
That can be a messy process that involves constructive disagreement. But I
cannot imagine anyone who might have wanted to hurt her.”

Ryan shifted in his chair and put on his
thoughtful expression. “Not Richard Albright?”

I had no idea who the hell Richard Albright was.
Ryan does this all the time. He reads up on the case without telling me about
it. On the computer on his desk in the detective’s bullpen. On his tablet when
we’re in the cruiser and he’s talking to me. At home. Then, when he gets a
sense the person we’re interviewing is bullshitting us or stonewalling
us—doesn’t matter the reason—he drops a name or a date or a place to let them
know he’s getting impatient.

Audrey Miller’s head pulled back, just a little.
“You’re referring to the student?”

“Yes, I am,” Ryan said.

“Mr. Albright has made some immoderate comments
about Professor Rinaldi, that is true. But we have no indication that he is a
violent person—or even capable of violence, for that matter.”

“You’ve looked into it?”

She tilted her head, her expression puzzled. “No,
we have not looked into it. I’m not sure what that would entail, or whether
that would be appropriate or even permissible. I am saying simply that we have
no reason to believe
that Mr. Albright posed a
threat to Professor Rinaldi or to anyone else.”

Audrey Miller turned to face Ryan more directly.
She held her gaze, as if inviting him to follow up if he could.

“And Cletis Williams?” Ryan looked right back at
the provost.

Audrey Miller raised her eyebrows. “Yes? What
about him?”

“Same question,” Ryan said. “Any reason to think
Cletis Williams might have posed a threat to Professor Rinaldi?”

I turned to the provost, curious to hear her
response. I was back in college, watching the professor and the smart kid
talking about someone I’d never heard of. Except now I wasn’t hung over.

“I’m not sure what you’re referring to.”

I didn’t believe her.

Apparently, Ryan didn’t, either. “Last year? When
Professor Rinaldi spoke up at the State Board of Education meeting, and Cletis
Williams made those comments about lesbians, comments that made it into the
paper?”

She nodded, with a trace of a smile, but didn’t
say anything.

“And then Williams resigned from the State Board?”
Ryan paused. “Do you know what happened there?”

Audrey Miller’s face was a blank. “No, I don’t.
That was a state personnel matter, which, by law, is confidential.”