I thought of Bruce. This was a regular part of his job, if not every day, then at least a few times a week. It’s what he was here for. I hoped I’d be able to see him in action some time. As the helicopter became smaller and smaller in the air, I hoped most that wherever the MAstar crew was off to, they arrived in time to help.
I felt like saluting.
I turned to Rachel. “Well, that was exciting,” I said.
And we both laughed.
With everyone gone on their mission, Rachel and I moved to the trailer living room, which sported dark brown leather-like chairs and a sofa, a combination television set and DVD player, and a wood-like coffee table. Magazines and DVDs were stacked neatly in a rack. No sign of a used glass or plate; no socks or towels flung around. The only stray item was a single remote control that was lined up with the edge of the coffee table. I wondered if the room was always this neat or if someone had picked up for our benefit this morning.
Knowing Bruce and the spit-polish code of order that seemed to prevail for military types, I guessed that even though the MAstar trailer was a sort of male bastion, these were males who’d had a heavy dose of neatness training.
We had a lot more space in this room, plus the dubious benefit of a barely working air conditioner. Rachel sniffed and cleared her throat. Her upright posture and firm expression indicated that she’d gotten over her crying jag and was ready to talk. Maybe the urgency of the flight mission had gotten to her and put things in perspective. She might be in trouble, but she was not sprawled on a highway or trapped in her car.
I sat waiting, a welcoming expression on my face.
“I lied, Dr. Knowles.”
No, no, no. A chill overtook my body, and it didn’t come from the low-end A/C unit. Had I been that far off about my assistant? A woman I thought of as a friend? In an uncontrollable reflex, my eyes shot to the exit sign over the door. If not my rational self, some part of me seemed to think I was closeted in a trailer with a murderer.
Rachel didn’t look like a killer, sitting there with her arms wrapped around herself, her straggly hair and faded jean shorts, frayed at the bottom, giving her a waif-like look. When she held a wad of tissues to her face and blew her nose loudly, it was almost comforting. Killers don’t do that, I told myself uselessly.
I stared at a point over Rachel’s shoulder where there was a map of the MAstar bases, eleven of them in all, spread across the state. I wondered if they were all on missions now and if any of their empty trailers were serving as confessionals. As for speaking, the best I could do was mimic a radio talk show host.
“I’m listening,” I said.
“You’re going to hate me.”
“I won’t hate you, Rachel.” Unless… I bit my tongue.
“At the party, okay?”
I nodded. “Okay.”
“I picked up a piece of the cake from the table and grabbed a can of soda to take to Dr. Appleton, okay?”
“Okay.”
“And I went upstairs, okay?” She paused to take care of her nose again. “When I said I knocked on Dr. Appleton’s door and he didn’t answer? That was the lie.”
“Okay.” I was getting into Rachel’s rhythm. “So Dr. Appleton did answer the door?”
“No.”
“You didn’t knock?”
She shook her head. “No.”
Bad question when the answer is ambiguous. I could see that I’d need to go into puzzle-solving mode to move this along. “The door was open.”
“Yes.”
Finally, getting somewhere. Possibly.
“You went in,” I guessed.
Rachel nodded slowly and sucked in her breath; her eyes went wide. “You could see his legs, on the floor behind his desk. I put the food on the chair near his computer table and I tiptoed over to look in case I could help him get up or something, but I was scared because I knew he’d yell at me if he was busy down there.”
“Busy on the floor?”
“Like, looking for something he dropped? Or going through the bottom drawer?”
I hadn’t thought of those possibilities. “But he wasn’t busy.”
“No.”
“What did you see, Rachel?”
She took a breath. “His shirt was torn open and you could see his undershirt. And his face was all red and his eyes”-Rachel closed her eyes as if her professor’s body was in front of her at this moment in immodest attire, a lascivious look on his face-“I couldn’t look. I didn’t touch him, but I knew he was dead. I picked up the food and ran out. Then I put the plate and soda outside the door, to make it look as if I’d never gone in.”
I let out a big sigh, feeling like I’d been at the scene myself and just got out in time before losing my lunch. I threw up my hands. “Why didn’t you call the police, Rachel? Or at least let someone know? Anyone.” I tried to keep my voice even.
“Everyone knows how bad things are going with my research, and you said yourself how I’ve been mouthing off lately. I was scared someone would think I did it.”
I didn’t feel it necessary to remind her that a very important someone did think she did it. And maybe wouldn’t have, if she’d simply reported what she walked in on. She might have been just another suspect, instead of sticking out like a prime number.
“You have to tell the police. You have valuable information that they can use in a murder investigation. Don’t you see how important this is?”
“It’s not like I actually saw anything.”
“You saw a dead body at a certain time and place yesterday. If nothing else, that helps establish a timeline.”
“I guess.”
“You guess?” I paused. The last thing Rachel needed was my anxiety-ridden response. I lowered my voice. “You have to promise me that you’ll go to the police station. In fact, you can come with me this afternoon. I have an interview there myself.”
I’d made it sound as though I’d initiated the meeting with Archie. Archie cop, me reporter.
Rachel pointed across the room to an old, round fan on a high stand. “It’s roasting in here. Can we turn that on?”
“If it works.” No promises from her about making a trip downtown, I noticed.
We shared the chore: moving the fan, finding a socket, adjusting the speed-all very legitimate distractions while Rachel stalled and stalled. I tried to think of another occasion when she’d put off a distasteful task. I couldn’t. Not even when she worked on the biology floor.
“What else can you remember? What did the office look like?”
“Just his regular office stuff. But his desk was a mess and, you know, it’s usually in perfect order.”
“Did the police tell you what they found?”
“They didn’t tell me much, except that Dr. Appleton had been poisoned, and that they were talking to everyone in the building. But I knew it was more than just routine with me because they asked me things like did I work more closely with Dr. Appleton than the undergraduates, and did I have a key to the chemical cabinet.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I just said how Dr. Appleton was a strict teacher, but people respected him for it, and I was glad I had him for an adviser. I guess all that was another lie, but I wasn’t going to make myself look worse.”
“And the key to cabinet?
“I told them the truth but then when they asked me where it was, I couldn’t find it. It’s always on a separate key ring in my purse, the one you gave me, with the metal pi symbol on it? But I went to get it, and it wasn’t there, Dr. Knowles. I lost it.”
Or someone took it.
I didn’t know too many legal terms, but premeditated was one that stood out. If someone went to the trouble of stealing Rachel’s key ahead of time, then Keith’s murder wasn’t a random act, in the heat of an argument, but a well thought out frame-up of Rachel.