“I’m aware of him.”
“I mean, yeah, there was something in it for me, too, but he’s going to build this plant on the site of the drive-in. Jobs. Maybe not as many as that private jail that was going to move in here at one point, but some. I wanted to get this town back on its feet. I wanted to show Jane. I wanted her to be proud of me again. I wanted to pay her back for all the shame I brought down on her.”
I nodded.
“You believe any of this?” he asked me.
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “Maybe.”
He stopped using the tree to support himself and looked me in the eye. “You think I did it. That I somehow did this thing to the water, so I could rush in and be the white knight.”
“Maybe,” I said again.
“If I was going to kill hundreds of people to save my political career, you don’t think I would have made sure my wife wasn’t one of the casualties?”
I searched those eyes. I didn’t know the answer to that question. It was possible he was telling me the truth.
It was also possible Jane was already deathly ill, her days numbered, and in Finley’s mind, letting her go a little early was justifiable to advance his political objectives.
But for the love of God, he was only running for mayor of Promise Falls. This wasn’t the goddamn presidency. How could someone want something that insignificant that badly?
On top of that, Jane’s death really did come down to Lindsay going against her employer’s wishes, and not being aware of what was happening in the town.
No, Randall Finley did not intend for his wife to die.
I held out a hand. He looked down at it, puzzled, then slowly took it in his and gripped it.
“I believe you,” I said.
THIRTY-SEVEN
JOYCE Pilgrim started with a call to the woman in charge of summer athletics. Thackeray ran a number of programs from May through September. They were open to any students taking courses during that period, as well as people from beyond Thackeray. In addition, Thackeray rented out its various fields to local baseball and soccer clubs through the summer.
The summer athletics director was Hilda Brownlee, and Joyce tracked her down at home.
“I’m looking for a jogger,” she said.
“A jogger?” said Hilda.
“Someone who likes to take a run around the campus late at night. I wondered if you have any students training for any track or long-distance running events.”
“I can’t think of anyone off the top of my head,” she said. “Can I get back to you?”
In the meantime, Joyce had compiled a list of all the young people who were living in Thackeray residences over the summer. There were seventy-three of them. She went through the list, name by name. Fifty-eight of the residents were female, fifteen male.
She made a list of the fifteen men.
Then Joyce went through the Thackeray student database and found the e-mail addresses for all of them, and prepared to send out a group message.
She had written something about trying to find the person who was running through the campus on the night of May 20 and into the morning of May 21. But before she hit the send button, she thought for a moment. Up to now, her suspicions were focused on the man in the car that had edged into the frame of the closed-circuit television footage. And she wanted to find the jogger who might have gotten a better look at that car, and the driver.
But what if, Joyce wondered, the jogger had killed Lorraine Plummer? What if the man in the car had nothing to do with it? She could hardly expect a possible suspect to write back and say: “Yeah, that was me! I was running around at that time and have no alibi!”
Maybe an e-mail wasn’t such a good idea.
So, name by name, she began researching the fifteen students. She started with Facebook, but she found only a couple of them there. It was Joyce’s experience that while it was young people who’d turned Facebook into a social media phenomenon, now that all their parents and grandparents were on it, posting pictures of their cats and grandkids and dim-witted sayings like “Click Like If You Love Your Niece,” it was no longer the place to be.
Joyce did broader Google searches on them all.
She didn’t turn up much of interest on any of them, at least nothing that mentioned whether they were track stars or marathon runners. And the thing was, just because a guy went for a jog at midnight did not mean he was competing for the Olympics. He might just be out for exercise.
Joyce was at home, having a late dinner with her husband, when Hilda called her back.
“I don’t have anything for you,” she said. “I mean, I don’t have anyone who’s specifically in a track program who’s attending Thackeray. I’d say eighty percent of the kids enrolled in summer stuff are from the town, anyway.”
Joyce decided she had to come at this from a different direction.
“I’m going back out,” she told her husband late that evening.
“Are you kidding me?”
She had told him about finding Lorraine Plummer, of course, but had decided not to dwell on it. She did not want to be the wife who came home and went to pieces about what had happened at work, even if discovering a murder was not the sort of thing that happened to most people encountered on the job.
“Do you want to talk about it?” her husband kept asking.
“No,” she said. “I do not want to talk about it.”
What she found, oddly enough, was that she wanted to be at the college, not at home. When Clive Duncomb had been her boss, she hated every second she was there-the guy was such a sexist asshole-but now that she was in charge, she felt a new commitment. A responsibility.
Thackeray was-she almost felt embarrassed to say this to herself because it bordered on corny-her beat. She knew she wasn’t a cop. Far from it. But she was in charge of security, and the death of Lorraine Plummer meant Thackeray wasn’t secure.
She wanted to do something about that.
Joyce was certainly not going to try to track down a killer. If she found out anything, she would pass it along to the Promise Falls police. That Duckworth guy. But given what the town had been through today, she knew the Plummer murder wasn’t going to get the attention it normally would.
At least the coroner finally showed up. Wanda Something. After she’d finished her examination of the body, she had a pretty grim look on her face. At first, Joyce figured in that line of work, everything you had to do put you in a foul mood. But Joyce could tell this was different. And when Wanda got on the phone to tell someone about what she’d found, Joyce listened in, and picked up a vibe that whoever had killed Lorraine, this was not his first outing.
Jesus.
Once the sun had set, Joyce indicated she was heading back out to the campus. Her husband said he would come with her.
“No way,” Joyce said. “Unless you’d like me to come to work with you on Tuesday morning. Hold your hand while you plaster and drywall.”
Soon after, Joyce Pilgrim was sitting in her car, parked on the street in the exact same place where that vehicle had been parked during the period Duckworth believed Lorraine had been murdered. She was, admittedly, early. If-and there were several ifs-this particular person did his run at the same time every night, she had several hours to wait. This was, of course, if he ran every night. And if he took the same route.
And, if all those ifs aligned, he’d be useful to Joyce only if he remembered seeing that car that night. Even then, he’d be useful only if he was good at telling one car from another.