Murder at the B-School Read online

  Then the Sunday papers came out.

  The Herald won the battle for most lurid headline: AND SISTER MAKES TWO, screamed the entire front page above the fold. Below the fold was a blurry photo of a stretcher being shoved into an ambulance on the semicircular driveway in front of the Four Seasons. Several angry-looking uniformed cops with outstretched arms were pushing the photographer away. There wasn’t much to see on the stretcher: a blurry black lump poking out at each end of a lumpy white sheet, with two black straps dividing the stretcher’s cargo into more or less equal thirds. Ordinarily, Vermeer wouldn’t have looked twice at such a picture. He would have sneered at the newspaper that splashed it across its front page. Now he consumed it eagerly—and apprehensively.

  The accompanying article, linking Libby’s suspicious death with her brother’s death two weeks earlier, had Brouillard declining to comment on the case, but “unnamed sources” had told the Herald that police were pursuing some hot leads and that they expected to make an arrest shortly. An accompanying sidebar, “Dying Rich,” provided a ludicrous, cartoonlike summary of the MacInnes family and fortune. Vermeer breathed a sigh of relief.

  Then he read the Globe’s version of the same story. What the Globe gave up in the headline department (SECOND MACINNES DEATH PUZZLES INVESTIGATORS), it more than made up for in colorful and mostly accurate reporting. The story had a shared byline. One of the reporters was a senior city desk reporter whose name Vermeer recognized; the other was a middle-tier business writer to whom he had provided a number of “sound bite” quotes in the past year or so—not a good sign. Much more than the Herald story, their article focused on the Harvard and the Business School connections and even included speculation offered by “well-placed sources” that the two deaths were connected through Harvard. An unidentified source “close to the investigation” identified Libby’s dinner companion on the night of her death as a “young Harvard finance professor” who had known Eric.

  His stomach flopped.

  Again, in print at least, Brouillard declined to comment beyond saying that she and her colleagues would go “wherever the trail of evidence leads us.”

  It was only a matter of time, Vermeer knew—days, maybe hours—before the reporters laid him out in lavender. They hadn’t quite had the nerve to pull the trigger and name him in the Sunday papers, but who knew what Monday would bring?

  Which was the other reason why Vermeer had headed to work early this Monday morning. Even though, as he had to admit, it wasn’t clear exactly what he was supposed to be doing at work. He had been relieved of his teaching responsibilities so that he could babysit the MacInneses and encourage the police to wrap up their investigations. That hadn’t worked out as planned: Another MacInnes was dead, and a second investigation—this time, of a clear-cut homicide—was under way.

  Not only was Sam the temp not in sight—not surprising for seven a.m., of course—but his desk in the hallway cubicle was ominously clean. It suggested strongly that Sam the temp was gone forever. A lot might have happened in a week, Vermeer realized.

  He dialed his voice mail: “You have . . . sixty-eight . . . new messages.” He thought about plowing through them but decided instead to update his voice-mail greeting. Meanwhile, his e-mail finished downloading: 151 messages. Scrolling through the most recent of these, he saw a sudden spike of messages in the past twenty-four hours, many from local media outlets. Yes, there was the Globe reporter who had always been glad to get a crumb of punditry from Wim Vermeer. Now, it appeared, he was throwing a noosed rope over the nearest stout tree branch. “Urgent statement from you needed,” read the subject line.

  Statement urgently needed from you, corrected Vermeer silently. Unless of course you’re hoping I’ll confess in an urgent kind of way.

  He trashed the most obvious spam—mortgage refinancings, penis enlargements, “make money from home,” and so on—and left the rest unread. The main reason to listen to phone messages and read e-mails at this point was to job-hunt, and no one was going to be putting him on their payroll anytime soon.

  He was riffling through the stack of mail and memos in his in-box when the phone rang. Here, well before he was ready for it, was the day’s first dilemma: Should he pick it up? Or lie low? Maybe Brouillard was right: Maybe he should hire himself a junkyard dog of a lawyer—a lawyer with fangs and claws—and just hide behind him or her. He could let the machine grab it. He could gather his wits.

  He picked it up. “Professor Vermeer’s office.”

  “Professor Vermeer?”

  “Who’s calling, please?”

  “This is Maude Friedman in Dean Bishop’s office. The dean thought you might be in early.”

  “Hello, Maude.” He thought he remembered her from behind the mahogany barricade: purposeful, brunette. “What’s going on?”

  “The dean would like to meet with you as soon as possible. Now, if you’re available.”

  The first two things he noticed, as he was ushered into the dean’s inner sanctum and the door clicked shut behind him, was that there were two people in the room—Bishop and another vaguely familiar-looking man—and that neither of them rose or gave any indication that they intended to shake his hand.

  “Good morning, Wim,” Bishop said.

  “Hello again.”

  “Please sit down. I’m not sure whether you know John Eustis, University counsel.”

  Vermeer nodded at the middle-aged man in the conservatively polka-dotted bow tie. Hand tied, of course. Lean and tanned, with a full crop of blondish-gray hair, Eustis had the look of old Brahmin money. If he were decked out in Topsiders and khakis, he would look perfectly at home on the deck of a sloop, cutting through the wave tops off Nantucket. Vermeer remembered that he had run across Eustis at a conference on corporate governance and had wondered what Harvard’s top lawyer was doing in that setting. Now he wondered what Eustis was doing in this setting.

  The answer, for the moment, was, not much. He simply nodded at Vermeer, then looked back down at an open manila folder on the big round table.

  “Well, Wim, we need to have a candid talk,” Bishop continued. “I’m sure you’ve seen the papers.”

  “I have.”

  “It pains me to say so, but in light of everything that’s been going on, I’ve decided to put you on an indefinite administrative leave, effective immediately.”

  “Indefinite paid administrative leave,” Eustis interjected quickly, addressing Bishop.

  “Of course,” Bishop resumed with a quick nod toward Eustis. “That’s correct. It appears, from everything we’re reading and hearing, that you’ve gotten far too deeply involved in the MacInnes situation. That was never my intention. After consulting with Mr. Eustis at the suggestion of the president, I’ve decided that it’s not in the school’s or university’s best interest to have you involved in what is now an official police matter.”

  Vermeer felt himself taking shallower breaths. Fight or flight. “Frankly, Dean Bishop,” he began, in a higher pitch than he had intended, “I’m a little shocked.” He pushed his voice down into a lower register. “I’m the one who’s having all these stories spread about me. I’m the one who got beat up on the sidewalk in front of my house.” He saw Eustis take a note. “And now you’re banishing me to Siberia because of some newspaper stories?”

  Bishop shook his head slowly. His eyelids had drooped slightly, making his face even more difficult to read than usual. “This has become bigger than you, or me, or the school, Wim. I asked you to take on a simple task, and—”

  But here Eustis leaned forward, again looking only at Bishop. He put two fingers on the dean’s forearm. Bishop stopped talking. Both men sat back in their chairs and regarded Vermeer steadily.

  “And you think this is fair, Dean Bishop?” Now, despite his rising anger, Vermeer felt that he was thinking clearly, as if he were watching events unfold from a safe distance. But he knew there was no safe distance here. “Hanging me out to dry just as the jackals are closing in? Wha
t about hearing my side of the story? Why isn’t our Mr. Eustis looking out for me?”

  “For the moment,” Bishop said, “we will await the outcome of the police investigation. With which you will cooperate fully, of course.”

  “You’ve caved,” Vermeer snapped back, not believing what was unfolding before him. “You got a call from Massachusetts Hall, or from the mayor’s office, and now you’re throwing me overboard!”

  The dean reddened slightly. He could have been angry, or ashamed, or some of both. “Maybe, Professor Vermeer, we’re all learning something about how the world works. About how—” But once again Eustis silenced him with two extended fingers—a smothering lawyerly blanket, putting out the fire.

  “Do I have a right to have legal representation at this meeting?”

  This time Bishop did not reply but looked to Eustis. Eustis addressed Vermeer for the first time. “No,” he said in a voice that sounded like an ice cube cracking under running water. “You don’t. And Dean Bishop has every right to take appropriate administrative actions, especially if those actions entail no financial consequences for you, and if in his judgment your continued presence here presents the possibility of a serious disruption of the educational community. That’s what is going on here. In no sense is this a legal proceeding.”

  “So that’s it? I’m just bounced out? And then I sit around and wait for the shit to hit the fan?” Vermeer remembered Brouillard’s use of the same phrase only the day before yesterday. It seemed like a long time ago.

  “Not quite,” said Eustis. “First we have to discuss the terms of your leave.”

  “Is this a negotiation?”

  “No,” Eustis said, picking up the top piece of paper from his manila folder. “It’s not that, either. First,” he began, reading, “we consider the fact of this leave confidential. In other words, Harvard will simply decline to comment if and when we are asked about your current status. And while we certainly can’t prevent you from talking to the press, we strongly believe that for you to initiate contact with the media would be ill advised, and we would strongly discourage you from doing so.

  “Second, as the dean noted, you will continue to be paid, and your benefits will continue uninterrupted. You will continue to accrue vacation time, and the period of your leave will be counted for retirement purposes.

  “Third, you will have no teaching responsibilities, and you will have no other contact with students of this school or of other Harvard departments, on or off campus, until further notice. For now, we are not formally seeking to restrict your access to the campus, but we request that you minimize your on-campus activities and presence.

  “In that spirit,” he continued, “your mail will be forwarded to your home. You should arrange to forward your office phone to an off-campus number—your residence, your cell, or whatever. You will not have access to the school’s intranet. You will not be entitled to administrative support for the duration of your leave, beyond the kinds of support that the institution extends to its employees in the normal course of business.

  “And finally,” Eustis concluded, “your failure to comply with any or all of these conditions may result in a review of your status, including but not limited to your access to the campus. You are, of course, entitled and encouraged to engage counsel to review your options. The university hopes that this temporary arrangement will meet the needs of all parties at this difficult juncture. I should point out, though, that any decision on your part to contest this course of action may similarly result in a review of your status.”

  Vermeer wondered if Eustis’s inner voice—the voice in his brain—talked in these dry, parsed-out syllables. He suspected that it did. “I hope you don’t expect me to sign something,” he said, trying to match the coldness in the lawyer’s voice.

  “No, there is nothing for you to sign, Professor Vermeer,” Eustis replied. “My office will send a copy of these conditions in a certified letter to your residence. Included in that letter will be the request that you communicate with my office, rather than Dean Bishop’s, on any matters pertaining to your leave.”

  “So Bishop throws me overboard, but you get to hear the splash?”

  Eustis had delivered his set piece; now he looked as if he had somewhere else to go. Presumably another murderer, elsewhere across the vast reaches of Harvard, needing to get sealed off like a tubercle in an infected lung. “For the record, Professor Vermeer,” he said in a voice as dry as desert sand, “I don’t accept your characterization of the dean’s action. And I certainly hope, for your sake as well as ours, that there isn’t a splash. Of any sort.”

  On his way out past Maude Friedman and the mahogany barricade, Vermeer spotted a copy of today’s Herald on a coffee table. It was unlikely, he thought, that the Herald had ever been on this table before. Today’s headline, only slightly smaller than yesterday’s, picked up where yesterday’s had left off: A BLOODY FORTUNE.

  Below the headline were three pictures. One was an out-of-date yearbook shot of Eric. The second was of a smiling Libby in an evening gown. And the third was a grainy blowup of Vermeer himself, from a picture he couldn’t quite place.

  But which was far from flattering. Looking unshaved and unkempt. Looking a little like Lee Harvey Oswald in those defiant, gun-toting pre-assassination photos.

  In other words, looking guilty as hell.

  28

  SIPPING ON HER SCALDED COFFEE—THE DREGS FROM THE graveyard shift’s last pot of the evening—Brouillard wondered where to go next.

  The Herald sat on the corner of her desk, where she had tossed it. Great headline, she thought—A BLOODY FORTUNE—but a generally crappy write-up. She would have to razz the reporter, a decent enough guy with famous marital troubles, the next time she saw him.

  Although she had been late to the scene at the Four Seasons—it took surprisingly long for Homicide to connect this new body with the ongoing investigation of Eric’s death—the case had been assigned to her. Everyone up the ladder seemed to think the two deaths had to be related somehow.

  She tended to agree. But exactly how was a mystery.

  The family tie was the obvious common thread. Boston was another, although Libby’s presence in Boston—an affair of the heart, if Vermeer’s story was to be believed—seemed unrelated to Eric’s life or death. Vermeer himself was yet another link, of course, and the one that the newspapers now were pouncing upon. But looking at motive and opportunity, Brouillard couldn’t knit the threads together in any convincing way.

  The good thing about Libby’s death, she decided grimly, was that she would now have the full weight of the department and the city behind her. Eric’s death had been clouded by uncertainty, so it had the potential to fall off the radar and get filed away with a thousand other open cases. But Libby’s death—her murder—was straightforward, violent, ugly, scary, and full of prurient interest. At least for the time being, at least until the next big, bad thing came along, the media would put pressure on the pols, and the pols would put pressure on the police, to solve this case.

  Pressure wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Doors would open sooner; phone calls would get returned faster. But if the heat got hot enough, the chief, with great fanfare, would put more bodies on the investigation. Which, statistically speaking—she looked up from her desk, surveying the mostly empty desks of her colleagues—wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

  There was also that irritating fact that she didn’t know where to go next. She was still waiting for the coroner’s findings and the lab reports on Libby. She didn’t hold out much hope for big news from either quarter. Judging from the bruises on the dead woman’s swollen neck, she had been strangled. No sign of recent sexual relations, so there was unlikely to be any helpful genetic material sitting around. Nothing under Libby’s nails, at least nothing that was visible to the naked eye. No hairs on the sheets that didn’t look like Libby’s.

  And an interview with a Midwestern couple in an adjoining room, in town on a package
-deal getaway weekend, had turned up a disturbing fact: Sometime in the middle of the night, maybe two, two thirty, they had been awakened by the buzzing of a loud hair dryer in Libby’s room. It went on for a long time, they said. Their impression was that whoever was drying her hair was walking around the suite, since the noise was first loud, then soft, then loud again. But it was loud, they agreed with each other in the kind of overlapping sentences that long-married couples tend to fall into—so loud they almost called up the front desk to complain. But they talked it over, and they decided that, well, people certainly had the right to dry their own hair in their own hotel rooms, even if it was the middle of the night, and then anyway, the noise finally stopped.

  Brouillard wasn’t thinking hair dryer; she was thinking DustBuster. Tidying up. She didn’t like the smell of that. The strong odor of calculation.

  Her intercom buzzed. “Captain Brouillard? The mayor’s office. Line seven.”

  Not much surprised, she picked up the handset and punched the flashing button. “Brouillard.”

  “Good morning, Captain. Hold for the mayor, please.”

  She was surprised at how quickly the mayor got on the line. Usually there was a queue, and usually you didn’t jump the queue.

  “Captain Brouillard? Pavone here.”

  The mayor’s lack of formality was legendary. In her few dealings with him—a photo op here, a decoration there—she had gotten the sense that Tommy Pavone was a decent enough guy who had wandered into waters that turned out to be over his head. His pre-decessor had been called to Washington unexpectedly to fill a cabinet post, and Pavone had moved up from a neighborhood-oriented city council job to being mayor of all the city. His street-level training served him well: He knew how to get snow plowed and garbage collected. The financial district types didn’t know what to make of him, so they mostly ignored him, and vice versa. With a little luck and a decent economy, he would get reelected.