The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (Book 6) (7 page)

Chapter 6

I knocked on Daryl Sorenson’s
half-open office door and stuck my head in. “Professor?”

He was sitting at his desk, his head cradled in
his palms as he stared at a sheet of paper on his desk. “Yes, Detectives.” He
looked up. “Come in, please.”

It was a minute before eleven. Ryan and I remained
standing. “How’d you do on contacting the students?”

Daryl Sorenson stood and came out from behind his
desk. He handed me the sheet of paper. It was the roster. “I marked the three
students we couldn’t get hold of.”

“Great.” I handed the paper to Ryan. “Thanks.”

“This way.” Professor Sorenson led us out of the
department offices and down the hall to the conference room. The fourteen
students were already there, seated in thinly upholstered armless chairs
arranged in a horseshoe pattern. A couple of them were chatting with each other
in low tones, but most were silent. They looked antsy, unsure why they had been
summoned.

Daryl Sorenson, Ryan, and I sat at a rectangular
table at the front of the room. Sorenson spoke. “For those of you who don’t know
me, I’m Daryl Sorenson. Chair of sociology.” His tone was somber. The students
were paying close attention. “First, I want to thank you for coming in. We have
two guests today, who will tell you why you’re here. I’m going to let them
introduce themselves.” He turned to me.

“My name is Karen Seagate. I’m a detective with
the Rawlings Police Department. This is my partner, Detective Ryan Miner. I,
too, want to thank you for coming in.” The students were silent, motionless.
“As I’m sure you’ve figured out, this has to do with Professor Virginia
Rinaldi. I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but Professor Rinaldi has died.”

There were gasps, and a few of the young women
started to cry. Nobody said anything.

“We want to ask you a few questions about the
class last night at Professor Rinaldi’s house. But I want to start by having
each of you tell us your name. Can you start, please?” I pointed to a young
woman sitting at one end of the horseshoe. As she introduced herself, I glanced
over at Ryan, who was drawing a seating chart. After we got through the
fourteen names, I thanked them.

“Okay, first question. Did Professor Rinaldi say
anything to any of you individually—or to the whole class—about how she wasn’t
feeling well? Anything like that?”

They all shook their heads. One girl spoke up.
“She told me she was feeling pretty good.”

“Had she said anything earlier—you know, not
yesterday, but around the office or at a previous class—that she was sick or
something?”

The girl said, “No, it wasn’t anything like that.
It was more about how—you know, if you didn’t grow up in Montana, and it’s
April and there’s frost in the morning—she was feeling good because the weather
was changing.” A couple of students laughed awkwardly.

I nodded. “Okay, I get you.” I paused. “Anyone else
have anything about her being sick?”

A small guy with big, thick glasses and a mop of
spiky black hair spoke up. “Can you tell us how she died? She have a heart
attack or something like that?”

“We haven’t conducted the autopsy yet, so we don’t
really know. All I can say is, she apparently fell down the stairs in her
house.”

“When did it happen?” he said.

I shook my head. “We don’t know yet. Sometime
between around ten
pm
and early
this morning.” I paused. “Did Professor Rinaldi seem upset or distracted during
the class last night?”

A bunch of the kids shifted in their seats. One
girl leaned over to another and whispered something. I turned to Ryan, who
looked down at his seating chart.

“Andrea,” he whispered to me.

“Andrea, what is it?” Everyone was looking at her.
It was clear they all knew something but didn’t want to say it out loud. I
waited a moment. “Listen, Andrea.” I glanced around the horseshoe to take in
everyone. “What you say in this room is confidential. We’re not recording it.
We’re not gonna talk to the newspapers or the TV stations. If you know
something that can help us understand what happened, please tell us.” I turned
to Andrea. “What was it happened last night?”

“So Professor Rinaldi takes a break in the middle
of the class. She went upstairs.” Andrea paused a second. “She got in a fight.”

“A fight?”

“Not a physical fight. I mean shouting.”

“Who was she fighting with? Could you tell?”

Andrea looked around at the other students. A
couple of them nodded, signaling her to say it. “I couldn’t tell who she was
fighting with—except it was a woman.”

“What were they fighting about? Could you make it
out?”

Andrea shook her head no.

The girl next to her cleared her throat and
started to speak. “I don’t think any of us knew who it was when it was going
on.”

“What do you mean?”

“We couldn’t recognize the voice, and the sound
was muffled. They were inside a room—”

“What do you mean you didn’t know who it was when
it was going on?”

A guy said, “A door opened, and Professor Rinaldi
came downstairs—you know, the break was over.”

“And she didn’t say anything about the fight?’

“No, she didn’t say anything. She just started the
class again.”

“So you never did figure out who it was she was
fighting with?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes later,” the guy said, “a
woman comes stomping down the stairs. She’s carrying a backpack. She storms
out, slams the door behind her.”

“You saw her?”

Now all the students nodded.

“Who was it?”

“Someone named Krista,” the spiky hair said.

I put out my palms. “Who’s Krista?”

Andrea said, “We don’t know a last name or
anything. She was a guest at one of the earlier class meetings. Professor
Rinaldi brought in guest speakers sometimes.”

“What was Krista doing in Professor Rinaldi’s
house?”

There was a long silence.

“Andrea, I asked you a question. What was Krista
doing in the professor’s house? Was she supposed to participate in the class or
something?”

Andrea started to blush. “When Krista spoke at our
class, Professor Rinaldi described her as a sex worker.” Andrea glanced down at
her hands in her lap.

“Tell me about that class.” I looked at Andrea,
but it was clear the topic was too much for her. “Someone say something.” I
gestured toward a young woman seated halfway around the horseshoe. She looked
like she was watching a tennis match, her head still but her eyes going back
and forth as people talked. “What’s your name, please?”

“Abby.”

“Okay, Abby, were you at that class? When
Professor Rinaldi brought Krista in as a speaker?”

Abby nodded.

“Why was Krista there?”

Abby cleared her throat and sat up a little
straighter. She was a strong, athletic looking girl of nineteen or twenty with
straight blond hair cut short around her right ear but longer on the left side,
swooping down to her jaw. She shook her head to snap the hair back into place. “I
think the point was that sexual exploitation exists in small towns and rural
America. Not just in the big cities.”

“So Krista is a local woman. And she’s a sex
worker of some kind, is that right?”

Abby nodded, her hair falling over her left eye.
She brushed it back. There was a long, thin scar on her temple, beneath the
fringe of hair.

“Did Professor Rinaldi tell you more about Krista?
What kind of work she did?”

Abby looked around at the other students to see if
they knew, then she shook her head.

A guy spoke. “Professor Rinaldi always said it
wasn’t about individuals. It was about social and economic issues. That was
what was important, she would say.”

“What did Krista say during that class? Abby? What
did she say? What was she there for?”

Abby took a deep breath. “Professor Rinaldi asked
her to tell us a little about her life. Krista said she came from Europe—”

“She say which country?”

“All she said was Europe.”

“Okay, go on.”

“And she came to the United States when she was a
teenager. She was uneducated, no skills, no money.”

“Did she elaborate on how she got here? Did she
come here to be a student at Central Montana?”

“She didn’t go into details, but I got the
impression she was tricked into coming here.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like she thought she was going to be working in a
hotel or something, maybe as a nanny for some rich people. But whoever arranged
for her to come here forced her into the sex business. I think that was the
point.”

I glanced around at the other students, whose
faces told me that was the gist of it.

“So Krista is still a sex worker, presumably here
in Rawlings or nearby. And she’s still being run by someone or some group, is
that right?” Nods told me I had it right. “When Krista was talking—during the
class—did she seem upset? Was she depressed?

A girl spoke up suddenly. The way the other heads
turned toward her, I got the feeling they were surprised that she was saying
something. “My brother came back from Afghanistan couple years ago.” She
paused, her eyes tearing up. “He was really messed up. Krista seemed like my
brother.”

“What do you mean?”

“My brother … his voice was real flat. And his
face. It didn’t have any expression. He couldn’t work or anything.”

“Has he been diagnosed with PTSD?”

Now the girl started to cry. She shook her head,
then covered her face and lost control. The student sitting next to her put her
hand on the girl’s shoulder.

“Thank you for sharing that …” I turned to Ryan,
who whispered “Donna” to me. “Thank you, Donna. I know that wasn’t easy.” I
swept my eyes around the room.
 
“Is that
what the rest of you saw? That Krista had a kind of blank look?”

 
Most of
them nodded.

“You don’t have a name for Krista? I mean, a last
name.” Nothing.

Ryan said, “Do any of you have a photo of Krista?
From that class or last night?”

A guy said, “The professor was strict about that.
All devices were turned off all the time.”

I said, “You didn’t see Krista come into the house
last night, right? She was already there when you arrived for the class at
six?”

Nods of agreement.

“Do any of you know what Krista was doing upstairs
last night?”

A good-looking guy with a couple days’ stubble was
slouched in his chair. “Upstairs is where they keep the bedrooms, right?” He
put on a leer and looked around the horseshoe for approval. When he saw the
dirty looks coming in from both sides, the leer slid off his face. He shrank
into his chair. I glanced over at Ryan, who was writing something on his
seating chart.

I said, “So Professor Rinaldi never mentioned the
fight with Krista during the rest of the class?”

Half the kids nodded their heads.

“Didn’t that seem a little odd?”

A girl with dyed red hair said, “That was
Professor Rinaldi. I remember once she told us that she wasn’t our friend. She
was our professor. She wasn’t into talking about herself—and she didn’t ask us
about ourselves. She said she was there to help us understand how to ‘do
sociology.’ I remember that phrase because it sounded … so odd.”

“What do you think she meant by that?”

“What I got out of it is that she didn’t want us
to think of ourselves as students who learned about sociology—that would be,
like, she knew all about the subject, and she’d pour that information into us
and then we’d know about it, too. That would be a waste of everyone’s time, she
said, because all we’d accomplish is that we’d
duplicate
her own biases and gaps. But if we learned how to ‘do sociology,’ we’d be
researchers. We’d be right there, creating new information.”

“What did you think about that?”

The girl with the red hair laughed. “Nobody’d ever
said anything like that … I don’t know about the rest of you,” she said, her
eyes sweeping the room, “but no one had ever said anything like that to me.
That was the thing about her.” Here she started to lose control. “She treated
us like adults who could do things on her own.”

I scanned the room and waited for anyone else to
add a comment, but they were silent.

“One last question: did Professor Rinaldi ever
mention her son, Robert? Did she talk about him much?”

I got the same vacant looks. One boy said, “Who?”

A girl said, “He the one in the pictures above the
fireplace?”

I nodded.

“He’s
kinda
cute,” the
girl said.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s stop there. Like I said,
thanks for helping us out here. My name is Seagate. If you think of anything
else that could help us, please get in touch with the Rawlings Police
Department, ask for me.”

Daryl Sorenson stood and walked over to the door.
He spoke a few words to some of the students as they filed out. Then he looked
over at me and Ryan, nodded, and left the room.

I noticed Donna had stayed in her chair. She had
stopped crying but hadn’t quite pulled herself together. She looked like she
wanted to speak to me. Ryan stayed back behind the table at the front as I
drifted over to her.

“Donna, I want to thank you for speaking up.”

She nodded. “Sorry I broke down like that.” She
tried to force a smile. “I haven’t said anything out loud about my brother to
anyone on campus.”

“He getting any help? You know, the VA?”

She took a breath. “Randy committed suicide. Right
before Christmas.” She pinched her eyes shut, then wiped at them with her
fingers.

“I’m very sorry to hear that.”

She nodded, then stood up straight like she wanted
to change the subject. “Some of the guys in this class.” She shook her head.
“Like Martin. The one who made that remark about Krista being upstairs? They’re
such …”