As soon as she left, I grabbed a jacket and my handbag and drove over to the police station, where I paid six dollars for a copy of the police report. Lieutenant Dolan wasn’t in, but I spent a few minutes chatting with Emerald, the clerk in Identification and Records. She’s a heavy black woman in her fifties, usually wary of my questions but a sucker for gossip.
“I hear Jasper’s wife caught him with Rowena Hairston,” I said, throwing out some bait. Jasper Sax is one of Emerald’s interdepartmental foes.
“Why tell me?” she said. She was pretending disinterest, but I could tell the rumor cheered her. Jasper, from the crime lab, is forever lifting files from Emerald’s desk, which only gets her in trouble when Lieutenant Dolan comes around.
“I was hoping you’d fill me in on the Spurrier accident. I know you’ve memorized all the paperwork.”
She grumbled something about flattery that implied she felt flattered, so I pressed for specifics. “Anybody see where the shot was fired from?” I asked.
“No ma’am.”
I thought about the fellow in the red Porsche. He’d been in the lane to my left, just a few yards ahead of me when the accident occurred. The man in the pickup might be a help as well. “What about the other witnesses? There must have been half a dozen of us at the scene. Who’s been interviewed?”
Emerald gave me an indignant look. “What’s the matter with you? You know I’m not allowed to give out information like that!”
“Worth a try,” I said equably. “What about the girl’s professors from the university? Has Dolan talked to them?”
“Check it out yourself if you’re so interested,” she snapped.
“Come on, Emerald. Dolan knows I’m doing this. He was the one who told Mrs. Spurrier about me in the first place. I’ll make it easy for you. Just one name.”
She squinted at me suspiciously. “Which one’s that?”
I took a flier, describing the guy in the pickup, figuring she could identify him from the list by age. Grudgingly, she checked the list and her expression changed.
“Uh-oh,” she said. “I might know you’d zero in on this one. Fellow in the pickup gave a phony name and address. Benny Seco was the name, but he must have made that up. Telephone was a fake, too. Looks like he took off and nobody’s seen him since. Might have been a warrant out against him he was trying to duck.”
“How about the guy in the Porsche?”
I heard a voice behind me. “Well, well, well. Kinsey Mill-hone. Hard at work, I see.”
Emerald faded into the background with all the practice of a spy. I turned to find Lieutenant Dolan standing in the hallway in his habitual pose: hands shoved down in his pants pockets, rocking on his heels. He’d recently celebrated a birthday, his baggy face reflecting every one of his sixty years.
I folded the police report and tucked it in my bag. “Mrs. Spurrier got in touch with me and asked me to follow up on this business of her daughter’s death. I feel bad about the girl.”
His manner shifted. “I do, too,” he said.
“What’s the story on the missing witness?”
Dolan shrugged. “He must have had some reason to give out a phony name. Did you talk to him at the scene?”
“Just briefly, but I’d know him if I saw him again. Do you think he could be of help?”
Dolan ran a hand across his balding pate. “I’d sure like to hear what the fellow has to say. Nobody else was aware that the girl was shot. I gather he was close enough to have done it himself.”
“There’s gotta be a way to track him down, don’t you think?”
“Maybe,” he said. “No one remembers much about the man except the truck he drove. Toyota, dark blue, maybe four or five years old from what they say.”
“Would you object if I checked back with the other witnesses? I might get more out of them since I was there.”
He studied me for a moment, then reached over to the file and removed the list of witnesses, which he handed to me without a word.
“Don’t you need this?” I said, surprised.
“I have a copy.”
“Thanks. This is great. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
Dolan pointed a finger. “Keep in touch with the department. I don’t want you going off half-cocked.”
I drove out to the campus area to the restaurant where Caroline Spurrier had worked. The place had changed hands recently, the decor downgraded from real plants to fake as the nationality of the food changed from Mexican to Thai. The shift manager, David Cole, was just a kid himself, barely twenty-two, tall, skinny, with a nose that belonged on a much larger face.
I introduced myself and told him I was looking into Caroline’s death.
“Oh, yeah, that was awful. I talked to her mom.”
“She says you mentioned some guy who’d been bugging her. What else can you tell me?”
“That’s about all I know. I mean, I never saw the guy myself. She was working nights for the last couple months and just switched back to days to see if she could get away from him.”
“She ever mention his name?”
“Terry something, I think. She said he used to follow her around in this green van he drove. She really thought the dude was bent.”
“Bent?”
“You know… twisted.” He twiddled an index finger beside his head to indicate his craziness.
“Why’d she go out with him?”
“She said he seemed like a real nice guy at first, but then he got real possessive, all jealous and like that. In the and, I guess he was totally nuts. He must have showed up on Friday, which is why she took off.”
I quizzed him, but couldn’t glean much more from his account. I thanked him and drove over to the block of university housing where Caroline had lived. The apartment was typical of student digs; faintly shabby, furnished with mismatched items that had probably been languishing in someone’s garage. Her roommate was a young woman named Judy Layton, who chatted despondently as she emptied kitchen cabinets and packed assorted cardboard boxes. I kept the questions light at first, asking her about herself as she wrapped some dinner plates in newspaper, shoving each in a box. She was twenty-two, a senior English major with family living in town.
“How long did you know Caroline?”
“About a year,” she said. “I had another roommate, but Alice graduated last year. Caroline and I connected up through one of those roommate referral services.”
“How come you’re moving out?”
She shrugged. “Going back to my folks’. It’s too late in the school year to find someone else and I can’t afford this place on my own. My brother’s on his way over to help me move.”
According to her, Caroline was a “party-hearty” who somehow managed to keep her grades up and still have a good time.
“Did she have a boyfriend?”
“She dated lots of guys.”
“But no one in particular?”
She shook her head, intent on her work.
I tried again. “She told her mom about some guy harassing her at work. Apparently she’d dated him and they’d just broken up. Do you have any idea who she might have been talking about?”
“Not really. I didn’t keep track of the guys in her life.”
“She must have mentioned this guy if he was causing such a fuss.”
“Look. She and I were not close. We were roommates and that was it. She went her way and I went mine. If some guy was bugging her, she didn’t say a word to me.”
“She wasn’t in any trouble that you knew about?”
“No.”
Her manner seemed sullen and it was getting on my nerves. I stared at her. “Judy, I could use a little help. People get murdered for a reason. It might seem stupid or insignificant to the rest of us, but there was something going on. What gives?”