Weber, straddling a chair next to Thornbury, chortled. Thornbury, knocked off guard by the question, turned bright red-a flare of another sort. Point, Max.
I reached over, paused the disk and turned off the projector.
Thornbury, normal color slowly returning, said, “No more pictures?”
Point, Thornbury, I thought as I glanced at Max. When he nodded, I said there were, and showed them, close-ups of Holloway, close-ups of me, no sound recorded.
“Who shot the film of you?” Thornbury asked.
“Chief Tejeda.”
The two detectives exchanged glances: angry, dismayed?
“I don’t understand you people.” Thornbury held out his hand for the disk, which I gave him-it was a copy. “We’re trying to investigate a murder here. Don’t you understand that? What else are you withholding?”
I thought about that as I shut down the computer. I glanced at Max, but the smug look on his face told me he was leaving an answer to me.
I said, “My uncle isn’t going to help you out, because not helping you is in his job description. But me? The only thing I’m withholding is friendship.”
“What the hell?”
“Why don’t you dial back the attitude?” I said. “It can only work in your favor.”
He let out a bark of a laugh. “You telling us how to do our job?”
“Wouldn’t presume to,” I said. “If you weren’t up to the job you wouldn’t have made it to the Homicide Bureau.
He flicked the disk. “Then what is all this shit about?”
“Trust. Respect.”
“Come again?”
“You don’t respect us. We don’t trust you. We tell you something, you dismiss it, you dismiss us. If I knew anything, I would tell Chief Tejeda or one of your colleagues before I would tell you.”
Thornbury dropped his head, sighed, stole a glance at his partner. After a moment he addressed Max.
“We met before,” he said.
“The State of California versus Micah Murray,” Max said. “You were lead investigator. Did a good job. Too bad you lost that one.”
“That time, yes, Counselor.” Thornbury managed a smile. “But we got Murray on his next bounce through the system.”
“Murray drew fifty-to-life on that one, didn’t he?”
“Something like that. They never know when to quit, do they, Counselor?”
“Job security for me,” Max said, smiling.
“So,” Thornbury said, turning his attention back to me. “What makes you think we don’t respect you?”
“Attitude. In front of me, as if neither of us counted, you called Chief Tejeda ‘Opie,’ and that’s how you treat him. Do you know anything about him?”
“Not really, no.”
“You should. Before he came here, he put in more years working big-city homicides than the two of you combined.”
Thornbury rubbed his head as if it hurt, but he kept his eyes on me.
“It’s your investigation,” I said. “But it’s his community. He tells me you shut him out because he’s hard-wired into the campus. Don’t you think you could use that to your advantage? You might start by paying attention when he tells you something.”
“Like, what haven’t we paid attention to?”
“Did he tell you that a woman named Joan Givens has a file of letters from donors who are angry with Holloway?”
The two detectives exchanged looks again before Thornbury nodded.
“We’ll get to her,” he said.
“But you haven’t contacted her,” I said. “You should know from Holloway’s daily schedule that she was at a meeting with him a few hours before he died. And you should know from speaking with the people who were at that meeting that she stayed behind to confront him with that file, privately.”
“How do you know that?” Thornbury asked.
“I was at the meeting.”
“Your name wasn’t on his calendar.”
“But I was there just the same. You haven’t spoken to anyone who was at that meeting.”
“There were two meetings after that one, and we have spoken with those people.”
“Hiram Chin and who else?” I asked.
“Were you with Chin, too?”
“No. Hiram told me he last saw Holloway at about three. Did someone come in later?”
“Couple of members of the Board of Trustees,” he said. “They left at about four. Together. Went out for drinks.”
“Marino and Juarequi?”
“I think that’s their names.”
“When I found Holloway at five, the blood on his head was already dark and congealing.”
“Everyone’s an expert now,” Weber said with a smirk on his face. “You get that from watching TV?”
Max was having too much fun. “Detective, do you have any idea who my niece is or what she does?”
“I know she was married to a cop once, if that’s what you mean.”
“It is not. What do you know about Maggie herself?”
He lifted one shoulder, frowned. “Part-time teacher who worked in TV.”
“I would never go into an interrogation without at least Googling the other person. You should try it.”
Just for show, Weber took out his BlackBerry and started tapping keys. Something came up that caught his attention. He showed Thornbury, who wheeled on me.
“You’re making some kind of movie about Holloway?”
“I am.”
“You’re hoping, what, this could be your big break, I mean because you found the body and all, you have the inside scoop on it?”
Weber hit a key and I heard the familiar voice of Kelly Lopez from the news broadcast the night before:
“Maggie MacGowen, welcome back to the network. Congratulations for signing on for a new project. Being with us again must feel like déjà vu.”
My own voice: “It does a bit, yes. It’s nice to be back working with old friends.”
“You have reported major news events from all over the world-”
Weber turned it off.
“I used to work at that network,” I said. “I had my own investigative series until December.”
Thornbury dropped his head, muttered something under his breath before he raised his chin and looked at me.
“Okay, yeah, I dismissed you. I thought, when you said you were a temp and your husband died recently, that you might be, well, out on the edge of things, taking any kind of job you could. I got it wrong, huh?”
“Not entirely, but I wouldn’t describe myself as out on the edge.”
“Can we start over?” He offered his hand. “Hello, I’m Detective Kevin Thornbury.”
“I’m Maggie MacGowen. I’m researching a documentary about Park Holloway under the aegis of one of the big three television networks.”
“I’m trying to find a murderer.”
“I’m looking for interesting material. I think we can help each other.”
“Maybe we can,” he said. I gave him a plastic sleeve for the photo disk and he slipped it into his shirt pocket. “Maybe you and I have been looking at things from different angles.”
“We haven’t seen much of you on campus,” I said.
“We poked around here, found a lot of people who are pissed off, but none of their issues seem to have enough heat behind them to make someone do what was done to Holloway. The man was a congressman for twenty years. You don’t think he might have acquired some enemies with a higher proclivity for violence than a bunch of academics?”
“I’ve wondered if an argument got out of hand,” I said. “If someone maybe took an angry swing at Holloway, he fell back, hit his head, and died.”
“Then what?” Thornbury asked. “That someone was still angry enough to string him up?”
I shook my head. “Panicked enough to try to cover up what happened.”
“In that scenario, a fight and an accident, the doer would panic-you’re right about that-and run,” he said. “Do you know what the coroner says?”
“I don’t. I put in a call to a contact at the morgue, but he hasn’t gotten back to me.”