Recantati's stunned gaze moved back and forth between Chapman's face and Foote's hand, which she had clamped over the telephone receiver. He seemed caught in the glare of the headlights and longing to be back in the library instead. "Have you and Ms. Cooper worked together on this kind of thing before?"
Chapman laughed. "Seventy years."
Recantati's brow furrowed more deeply. "But-?"
"I count 'em in dog years. Every one I spend with Coop feels like seven."
Recantati was responding to Mike in a way Sylvia Foote never would, looking as though he hoped the police would help him out and take the entire matter off his hands. "So, what is it you need from us?"
Foote cleared her throat. "Not that we can promise you anything before the middle of next week. We've got to clear this administratively."
"How about a command decision, Mr. President." Chapman ignored Foote completely and spoke only to Recantati. "Next week's gonna be too late. I'd like to get into Ms. Dakota's office this weekend, start checking her files, her correspondence, her computer records. I'd like to find out who knew her best, which students were in her classes, what faculty members worked with her, who liked her and hated her, who slept with her…"
Recantati's face reddened at the mere thought, it seemed, that we would be exploring such intimate aspects of Dakota's life. He was silent.
"We could walk right over to her office now, with both of you. That way you can make sure that Ms. Cooper and I don't do anything to cause trouble here."
Time to soften the approach while we had him on the line.
"You understand, sir, that not everything Detective Chapman is talking about may be necessary," I said. "It's entirely possible that Lola's death will prove to be related to her husband's efforts to get rid of her, and not to the campus community at all. We're exploring that angle first, of course. Nobody wants to involve the school or the kids, except as a last resort."
Foote was harder to fool. "Suppose I can gather together some of the political science faculty for you on Monday morning. We'll make the library available to you for interviews, so our staff members don't have to be carted downtown. Then we'll move on to talk with the students, but only if we must."
Not a bad compromise. "I've got to be in court for a hearing at nine-thirty on Monday. So if we can say two o'clock for you to have some people lined up, that will give you the morning to contact whoever you haven't been able to reach over the weekend. Shall we take a look at Lola's office while we're here?"
Foote buzzed the secretary and asked her to have the head of security bring the passkey up to us as quickly as possible. Within minutes, Frankie Shayson knocked on the door and came into the room. "Hey, Mike. Alex. Haven't seen either of you guys since that racket they threw when me and Harry left the job. Never dull, is it?" The former detective from the two-six squad, the neighborhood precinct, crossed the room and grabbed Chapman's hand as he greeted us warmly. "Want me to take 'em upstairs, Ms. Foote?"
She was obviously unhappy that we had an independent connection to the college, and she wasn't about to let him take us to Dakota's office alone. "If you give me the key, I'll return it to you later today." She reached out her hand to take the ring from Shayson, motioning to Recantati to come along.
The three of us marched down the hallway behind Sylvia Foote and up two flights of stairs to a turreted corner office. On the wall next to the door, instead of a nameplate, there was an ink and pen drawing, two inches by three inches, of a small piece of the U.S. map, with the word badlands written in the middle. The Badlands of Dakota.
Foote unlocked the door and entered first, followed by Chapman.
"Jesus, the feng shui in here is for shit."
Recantati continued to look lost and overwhelmed. "Sorry, Detective?"
"Don't you know anything about the principles of negative energy? This place is a hellhole, just like her apartment. First of all," Chapman said, kicking a box of books out of his path into the room, "all entrances should be free from obstruction. You need a generous flow into the working environment. And she's got too much black fabric in here. Bad karma-symbolizes death."
Chapman worked his way around the room, looking at books and papers that were piled on the floor, careful not to touch or disturb surface items. Foote had taken Recantati aside and was whispering something to him. I took the moment to stifle a smile and ask Chapman a question. "When did you become an expert in the Chinese art of feng shui?"
"Attila's been shtupping an interior decorator for the last six months. That's all you hear about when you work a tour with him. The office is beginning to look like a Jewish princess's idea of a Chinese whorehouse. 'Don't leave your toilet seat up 'cause your fortune will flow down into the sewer.' See, dried flowers like this?" Mike pointed at the dusty arrangement on Dakota's windowsill. "Lousy idea. Represents the world of the dead. Gotta use fresh ones."
Marty Hun was one of the guys in the Homicide Squad. Mike had nicknamed him Attila.
"We'll get Crime Scene over here this afternoon. I'd like them to process the room for prints and take some pictures. Okay with you two?"
Mike moved behind Lola's desk, noting in his steno pad what lay on top of it and sketching a general outline of the office. The smile was erased from his face, and with his pen he shifted some of the papers on top of the blotter. "Who's been in here since last night?"
"No one," answered Foote.
"I'll betcha my paycheck you're wrong on that count."
Foote approached the desk from the opposite side and placed her palm on a stack of books as she leaned over to see what had caught Mike's attention.
"You wanna get your hand off there?"
She straightened up and brought her arm down to her side.
Mike pulled open the top middle desk drawer by putting his pen into the brass handle. "It's too neat. Way too shipshape, both on top of the desk and in this first drawer. Right where you'd keep whatever it was you'd been working on most recently, or something that was pretty important. Every other pile is sloppy and out of line. Even the stack of mail is too fastidious. Somebody went through some of this stuff and couldn't resist just patting these papers into order. Nothing major, but it's just not in keeping with Lola's messy style. Maybe a careful once-over can come up with a print or something. She chew gum?"
Recantati looked to Foote and then shrugged. "Not that I ever noticed."
It was Chapman's turn to whisper now, leaning over and speaking only to me. "Let's lock up the office and get Crime Scene over here immediately. There's a wad of Wrigley's in the wastebasket. It's great for getting DNA. All that juicy saliva will tell us exactly who's been messing around in here."
Mike turned back to face the others. "Ever hear Ms. Dakota talk about a 'deadhouse'?"
Foote glanced at Recantati before both of them looked at us blankly. "Sounds more like your line of work than ours."
As Mike walked from behind the desk, he stared at a small corkboard affixed to the wall by the window. "You know who any of these people are?" he asked.
Foote moved in next to him, and Recantati looked over his shoulder. "That's a photograph of Franklin Roosevelt, of course, and this one's Mae West. I believe that woman in the corner, in period dress, is Nellie Bly. I can't place the other man."
"Charles Dickens, I think." My undergraduate major in English literature kicked in.
Foote stepped back and turned away, but continued speaking. "I'm not sure who the people are in the photos with Lola herself, but I assume they're friends and relatives. That other snapshot is one of the young women Lola taught last semester, in the spring."
Mike must have thought, as I did, that it was unusual for one student's picture to be singled out to be on the board. He asked the obvious question. "Know her name?"
Foote hesitated before she spoke. "Charlotte Voight."