It was nearly seven before I returned home to Paul. He’d gone ahead and fixed dinner, the sweetheart, although about the only good thing you can say about Paul’s five-alarm chili is that it clears your sinuses.
I was applying a medicinal glass of red wine directly to the inferno raging in my stomach when Murray Simon called. “Paul, pick up!” I yelled.
When Paul joined us on the line, Murray said, “Hannah, I have good news and bad news.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake, Murray, get on with it! Please!”
“The good news is that the FBI is dropping the case against you,” Murray said. “Seems they picked it up under pressure from NCIS, and now that the sting operation is over, they don’t think there’s enough evidence to convict you.”
“I’m so relieved.” I could actually feel my blood pressure going down.
“The bad news is that NCIS isn’t similarly inclined. They may be taking the case forward on their own.”
I was speechless, gasping for air.
Paul filled in the blank. “If there isn’t enough evidence for the FBI, why is there enough for NCIS?”
“Well, there is that other matter.”
“Murray!” I’d found my voice at last. I actually screamed into the phone. “Sometimes you can be the most infuriating man!”
“What other matter?” Paul was spitting nails.
“We know who NCIS’s key witness is, the person who saw Hannah leaving Mahan Hall the day Jennifer Goodall was murdered.”
I gripped the arm of my chair so tightly that I must have left my fingerprints embedded in the varnish. “Who?”
“Are you sitting down?”
“I’m sitting down.”
Murray cleared his throat. “It was Dorothy Hart.”
CHAPTER 25
That night I lay in bed, numbly studying the shifting shadows cast on the wall by the light of the full moon shining through the branches of the tree outside my window.
For a long while Paul lay awake beside me, trying out possible scenarios, but after a particularly lengthy lull in the conversation, followed by regular snuffling sounds, I turned my head to find that he’d drifted off to sleep.
I’d thought Dorothy was my friend. We’d worked together, laughed together, cried together. How could she betray me with such a monstrous lie?
I knew I had been nowhere near the back of Nimitz Library on the day Jennifer Goodall died. Dorothy had to know it, too.
Was she simply mistaken? That hardly seemed likely.
Was she purposely trying to frame me? As strange as her behavior had been in recent days, I couldn’t believe that either.
My bet, after staring at the ceiling for quite some time, was that in pointing the finger at me, Dorothy believed she was diverting suspicion from somebody else, somebody far more important to her than I was.
There were only two people on that list: her husband and her son.
Kevin, I knew from Emma, had an ironclad alibi. He’d been doing a Physical Readiness Test at the time of the crime. The PRT was a killer of another kind: sixty-five situps, forty push-ups, run a mile and a half in ten minutes or less, or a midshipman doesn’t graduate. Kevin’s PRT had been monitored by a couple of straight-arrow firsties.
Ted Hart had an ironclad alibi, too. He’d been briefing the Joint Chiefs.
When I asked him to, Murray Simon had confirmed both alibis.
For a change of scenery, I turned over in bed and watched the digital clock cycle from 12:01 to 12:02 to…
Three!
Hannah, you idiot! There were three people on Dorothy’s short list. Her husband, her son, and herself.
I’d always discounted Dorothy as a suspect. She was too frail to overpower a healthy young woman like Jennifer Goodall. Besides, Jennifer’s body had been found in Sweeney Todd’s trunk. There was no way Dorothy, in her weakened condition, could have moved her body from…
I sat up straight in bed. I switched on the bedside lamp. I pounded Paul on the back until he groaned and opened one bleary eye.
“Dorothy did it!” I shouted, slapping him lightly on the thigh to emphasize each syllable. “I’m not sure how, but she did it. She got Jennifer to come to Mahan Hall on some pretext, lured her up to Sweeney’s tonsorial parlor, then clobbered her with the hammer and pushed her into the trunk.”
I folded my arms across my chest and leaned back against the headboard. “I’ve been working on the assumption that Jennifer had been killed elsewhere and her body moved to the trunk because Dorothy told me that’s what happened. But I just this minute realized that I only have Dorothy’s word that it happened that way.”
Next to me, Paul fluffed up his pillow, folded it in half and stuffed it between his back and the headboard. “I thought Dorothy had an alibi. Didn’t you tell me she was getting a manicure?”
“According to Dorothy.” I slapped myself on the forehead. “Damn! Why didn’t I ask Murray to check that one out, too?”
Paul rolled over on his side to face me. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Hannah.” He stroked my arm. “Okay. Let’s assume for a minute that you’re right and that Dorothy is the killer. What’s her motive?”
“Try this. Somehow Dorothy found out that Jennifer Goodall was blackmailing her former boss, Hart, over that contract business. Either Hart himself told Dorothy or Dorothy figured it out. Maybe she ran across her husband’s checkbook or something. So, Dorothy killed Jennifer to shut her up, in order to salvage her husband’s career.”
“Works for me.”
“Or, Dorothy really believed her husband was having an affair with Jennifer Goodall and killed her in a fit of jealous rage.”
“That works for me, too.”
“Or both of the above,” I finished triumphantly.
“What I really don’t understand is what happened to Kevin,” Paul mused. “Here he’s all set to go on for the ailing star, it’s his big break, and he blows it all by taking some sort of tranquilizer. That just doesn’t wash, does it?”
“Okay, let’s think about that.” I gnawed thoughtfully on my thumbnail. “If Kevin didn’t take the tranquilizers on purpose, where did he get them from?”
“It couldn’t have been from the dining hall,” Paul said, gently pulling my hand away from my mouth. “That food comes directly from the kitchen in family-style serving dishes, and gets passed around the table. Everyone at Kevin’s table would have been whoozy.”
“Kevin said he picked up a Dr Pepper when he got to Mahan.”
“Then Kevin’s lying, Hannah. There aren’t any soft drink machines in Mahan.”
“He didn’t have to go to a soft drink machine. The cast and crew have a refrigerator in a little room backstage. We keep a supply of soft drinks in there. You drop a couple of quarters in a coffee can…” My voice trailed off.
I could see myself-was it only three weeks ago?-sitting in the tech room listening to Gadget as he helpfully explained the rules of the fridge. “And I think I know how Kevin ingested the tranquilizer! I just have to prove it! I’ll need to have another look at Mahan Hall.”
“Hannah?”
“Huh?”
“Can’t it wait until morning?”
I burrowed under the covers and wiggled closer to my husband, resting my head in the crook of his arm. “Professor Ives, are you trying to distract me?”
“I certainly am,” he whispered, his breath warm against my hair.
CHAPTER 26
Monday morning, early, I dressed in my recently acquired jogging gear, jammed a wool cap over a hopeless hairdo, and jogged stylishly off to the Academy, leaving Paul to finish his coffee and newspaper in peace.
At Gate 3, I fished the chain holding my ID out of my cleavage and showed it to the Marine guard, who studied the ID briefly before waving me through. “Have a good day, Mrs. Ives.”