Murder at the B-School Read online

  “Good morning, Mister Mayor. What can I do for you?”

  He snorted. “You know what you can do for me, Captain.”

  “I have a pretty good idea, sir. Arrest somebody in one or both of the MacInnes cases, and make sure the charges stick.”

  “Right. Preferably both, but I’d settle for this most recent one.”

  “We’re pursuing all leads, sir. We’re doing everything we can.”

  “But reading between the lines, Captain, you don’t have much.”

  She wanted to give him the reassurances he wanted. But as he pointed out, she didn’t have much. “Without taking up too much of your time, sir, I’m more optimistic about solving the girl’s case than the earlier case.” Which was true enough, as far as it went.

  He didn’t sound comforted. “Captain, do you know what season we’re heading into?”

  “Baseball” didn’t sound right. Nor did “Bruins playoffs.” Taxes? Spring? “Springtime, sir. Although it seems like a long way off.”

  “Yes. Springtime. Which is not that far off, by the way. And in springtime, kids all over the world decide where they’re going to go to college.”

  “Yes, sir. I’m aware of that.”

  “And in springtime, people from all over the world decide where they’re going to go on vacation this summer. Where they’re going to honeymoon. Where they’re going to have their elective surgeries, which they have postponed through the holidays. Where they’re going to hold their conventions in the next fiscal year.”

  “Yes, sir.” It was, she had to admit, a pretty good list.

  “So it’s important for us to show, you and me, that Boston is the kind of city where you want to do all those things. A safe city. A place where students can take a dip in a whirlpool without dying. Where beautiful rich young women can stay in our four-star hotels without getting strangled in their beds.”

  “I understand, Mr. Mayor, and—”

  “I’m sure you do,” he interrupted. “But maybe you don’t know exactly how big the stakes are getting. My sources tell me that one of the newsweeklies is thinking about putting this whole mess on its front cover next week. ‘Mayhem in Boston,’ or some such goddamn thing. I don’t see how we can head that off at this point. The best we can do is make sure that the punch line for their story is that we’ve apprehended the bad guy who did it, and it’s over. Or that our bad guy has pulled a Charlie Stewart and jumped off a bridge. Saving us the trouble of trying him.”

  “Yes, sir.” The Stewart case had come and gone while she was still walking a beat in East Boston. The guy shoots his pregnant wife, wounds himself superficially, gets rid of the gun, calls the cops, and blames a black guy, whom he describes in great detail. Eventually, the story unravels—the cops never really bought it, anyway—and Stewart winds up throwing himself off the Tobin Bridge. But not before race relations in Boston get set back ten years, with the media fanning the flames of “black man kills pretty, young, white mother-to-be.”

  “So let’s make it happen, Captain. Not necessarily the bridge part. The arrest part.”

  “Absolutely, sir.”

  But the line was already dead. Presumably, the next guy in the mayor’s queue was already getting his head patted or his butt reamed. More likely reamed. Now, according to procedures, she would have to write up this “m-contact” for the chief’s benefit. She pulled up an e-mail form: “Subject: m-contact. Mayor Pavone called Monday at 0930. Wants quick resolution to MacInnes situation. Brouillard.” She hit “Send.”

  The Libby file was painfully thin, so she reached instead for the Eric file. Her filing system was all her own. She used different colored Post-its to signal the age and urgency of an open question. Cool issues got cool colors; hot issues got oranges and saffrons. Hot issues moved to the front of the file. The downside to the system was that it required regular updating—daily, in the middle of a crisis. The upside was that she could carry the hot parts of the rainbow more or less in her head.

  Another downside: It looked a little fussy and amateurish. Buzzy Silver, the clown at the neighboring desk, had labeled it “girlish.” She had a standing offer from Art Deming to put together a simple computer program, complete with digital blues and saffrons, that would accomplish the same thing. So far, she had turned him down. There was something about moving along those Post-its by hand, every day or two. It worked. She didn’t want to try something new and find out it didn’t work.

  Here, in saffron—hot—was her reminder to herself to get some better answers from Alonzo Rodriguez. In her system, you could earn yourself a color. Rodriguez had earned himself a saffron by being several days late in getting back to her.

  She dialed his Harvard number. He answered on the first ring. “B and G. Rodriguez speaking.”

  “Hello, Mr. Rodriguez. This is Captain Brouillard of the Boston Police Department.” When she was trying to put people at ease, she used “BPD.” In this case, she didn’t. She emphasized “police.”

  “Oh, hello, Captain.” He didn’t sound happy to hear from her. “I was planning to call you.”

  “Don’t bother. I’ll be right over.”

  “I have a meeting at ten thirty that I—”

  “That you may be a little late for. Don’t worry about going over to the dean’s office. I’ll come to your place. I’m there in fifteen minutes.”

  29

  THE SERVICE-ORIENTED PARKING LOT ATTENDANT POINTED HER toward an odd little building at the edge of the lot, which looked like a cross between a toolshed and a bus stop. “In that door and down the stairs,” he had said crisply after taking a minute to orga-nize his thoughts. “Head for the chilled-water complex. You turn left at the bottom when you reach the tunnel. B and G’s straight ahead. You can’t miss it.”

  She didn’t like the sound of “tunnel.” There was that thing she had about spiders and snakes, which she associated with tunnels and other dark, wet places. But she was much reassured when she reached the bottom of the staircase. This was a hell of a nice tunnel, she noted with admiration: wide enough to drive a small truck through, with bright lights and bright blue and green accent colors on the gray cinder-block walls. Cheerful and soothing. Not urgent, in her color-coding system. The gray rubber flooring, big-dimpled and shiny, urged a little spring into her step. No spider webs. No obvious snake pits.

  Every twenty feet or so, the cinder-block walls opened up into broad, four-foot-square glass apertures—like sidewalk superintendents’ perches, only much nicer—and through the glass could be seen dramatic snarls of tanks and pipes, all labeled with stenciled words and arrows that indicated what was being transported in which direction. Because of the spider-and-snake thing, Brouillard had never been in the basement of her apartment building. She was sure it didn’t look anything like this.

  The chilled-water plant, Alonzo Rodriguez’s lair, was where all the pipes stopped and started. This was either the mouth of the campus or the butt, or both, Brouillard decided. A dozen people were working at desks or pawing through oversize file cabinets, behind a glass wall that demarcated the end of the tunnel and the beginning of a subterranean office area. All the workers wore the standard-issue khakis and white shirts. She pushed open an eight-foot-high pane in the glass wall, distinguishable mainly because of its chrome hinges.

  “Can I help you?” The young woman at the nearest desk asked the question in a solicitous sort of way, with an emphasis on help, suggesting that B and G didn’t get a lot of foot traffic. That, and also the fact that there was no reception area.

  “I’m Captain Brouillard, Boston Police Department, here to speak with Mr. Rodriguez. He’s expecting me.”

  “Uh, okay, I’ll just let him know you’re here.” She punched a few numbers on her phone and spoke quietly—Brouillard distinctly heard the word “police”—and a few minutes later Rodriguez emerged from a rear office. He was not smiling. He motioned that she should walk in his direction. The gesture looked a bit abrupt.

  “Please join me in
the conference room, Captain.”

  They walked down a windowless hall—the price of working ten feet underground, Brouillard observed, silently. She wondered if the window cutouts in the fancy tunnel helped keep the people who spent their entire working lives down here from going bonkers.

  “You get a lot of spiders here?” she asked, as if casually, as they seated themselves in the glassed-in conference room. The full- spectrum fluorescent lights were bright enough to grow crops under.

  “No.” His body language was guarded. “Why do you ask?”

  “No special reason. Except that I usually associate underground with spiders.”

  “I associate spiders with bad housekeeping.” On his own turf, Rodriguez was more self-confident, more willing to assert himself.

  “Well, that explains a lot about the place where I work,” she said, pulling out her pad and pencil. “So let’s get down to it. The last time we talked, you and I were wondering out loud about how Eric MacInnes wound up in Shad Hall after hours. You were going to look into that for me.”

  “That’s correct.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “I’m afraid I couldn’t get all the answers you wanted,” he began, not looking contrite. “Someone used an unnumbered pass card to access the rear door. Whoever that person was got in just after midnight, and deactivated the building alarm using a legitimate code—in other words, a code that is assigned to a legitimate card. We’ve gone ahead and—”

  She interrupted him. “An ‘unnumbered pass card’? What does that mean?”

  “It means that it didn’t show a registration number when it was swiped through the wall unit. Normally, the system sends an ID number to the building computer to indicate which particular card has been used to open certain doors. In this case, that didn’t happen.”

  “Why?”

  Rodriguez had one of those handsome faces that, when put under pressure, got less handsome in a hurry. Tipping back in his chair to the balance point, he shrugged. “That’s one of the things we haven’t figured out yet. It shouldn’t be possible. But it happened.”

  “So this person with the bogus but functioning card breaches the perimeter and has a certain amount of time to shut off the perimeter alarm, right? How long? A minute?”

  “Thirty seconds.”

  “Gotta work fast. And to shut off the alarm, you need a personal code? Whose code was punched in?”

  “That’s what I was starting to tell you.” He didn’t say the rest of the sentence out loud, but she heard it: before you interrupted me. “The eight-digit code that was used is assigned to one of our custodians, José Rosas.”

  “So Eric could have slipped him a twenty to let him into the building?”

  “Possibly, yes. But Mr. Rosas lives out in Franklin, out by 495.” This was the outer beltway—some thirty or forty miles to the west, and then south. “It’s a little hard to believe that Rosas drove in before midnight on his day off, opened the back door to let someone in, drove home, and then drove back in three hours later to open the building. Plus, it looks like the MacInnes boy did this regularly, judging from the computer records. Almost every Sunday night during the school year.”

  “Same bogus card, same code?”

  “Correct.”

  She took a note, then looked up. “You trust this José Rosas?”

  “I do. We interviewed him at some length, and I’m convinced that he knows nothing about any of this. He needs his job and wouldn’t knowingly do anything to put it at risk. In addition, I’ve known him personally for a number of years. In my opinion, he’s an entirely reliable person. Which is why he holds the position of trust that he does.”

  “Uh-huh. And how easy would it be for someone else to get ahold of his code?”

  “He says that he’s sure he’s never told it to anyone. Given the circumstances of opening up the building by himself before dawn, with a card, he’s certainly never in a situation where someone is looking over his shoulder when he punches in. Not like a crowded ATM, for example. He has admitted that he wrote his code down and hid it in his wallet—something we specifically tell our people not to do, and for which he has apologized—but he says he was worried about drawing a mental blank early one morning and not being able to shut the alarm down, and I believe him. As you say, thirty seconds isn’t a lot of time. He says his wallet is rarely out of his sight, except at home. And anyway, he put a misleading label—‘account number’—on the scrap of paper in his wallet. He showed us the paper. There’s no way someone could figure out what that number was if they came across it.”

  “He’s legal or illegal?”

  Rodriguez stiffened. “He is Puerto Rican,” he said, rolling the “Rs” very softly. “Like myself.”

  “That’s how you know him?”

  “We grew up in the same town. On an island off the coast. Vieques.”

  “So, what? You help your hometown people get work up here?”

  “Sometimes. Rarely. Is there a problem with that?”

  “Of course not. We French Canadians look out for each other, too. Happens all the time. Does he report to you directly?”

  The guarded look came back into his eyes. “No. That wouldn’t be prohibited under Harvard’s rules, but I would be uncomfortable in that situation. Our work sometimes involves assigning unpleasant tasks to people. The way those assignments are handed out has to be viewed by everybody as fair.”

  She nodded, noncommittal, writing, brow furrowed. “I’m wondering, Mr. Rodriguez,” she said without looking up, “how much contact does your staff have with the students?”

  “Excuse me?”

  She looked up. “How much contact does your staff have with the students here? How easy would it be for a student to make friends with a member of your staff, or vice versa?”

  “It would be difficult and, from our side, discouraged. Our job is to take care of the infrastructure here, Captain, rather than to service the students directly. So it would be very unusual for someone on my staff to become friendly with a student. There wouldn’t be the opportunity. A food-service person, for example, would have more opportunity. Not only that . . .” He paused.

  “Not only that, but . . . ?”

  “May I talk frankly, Captain?”

  “Please do.”

  “Well, to my eyes, the young people who go to school here see themselves as the future owners of the world. Or in some cases, like these MacInnes children, the current and future owners. To me they might show some respect, because I wear a tie, speak adequate English, and have some authority over a number of people. I manage something, even if it’s not something that these young people aspire to manage.

  “But our custodians? These young people don’t even see people like José Rosas, in my experience. And to be fair, I’m sure there’s a certain amount of envy that flows in the other direction, which would get in the way of any sort of friendship. When you see the privileges and the advantages that these young people take for granted . . .”

  “Not like growing up on”—she checked her notes—“Vieques?”

  He suppressed the beginnings of what looked like an unpleasant smile. “Nothing at all like growing up on Vieques,” he said, correcting her pronunciation slightly.

  “So if anybody in your area were going to have contact with an Eric MacInnes, it most likely would be you.”

  “Yes. If you phrase it that way.”

  “So did you?”

  “Did I what?”

  “Have any contact with Eric MacInnes.”

  “I did, yes.” He put his chair back down onto its four legs but kept his arms crossed in front of his chest. And now he crossed his legs tightly at the knees.

  “In what context?”

  “He brought a very large amount of athletic workout equipment with him when he arrived on campus. Most of that equipment required some electricity to function, although not necessarily large loads in terms of amperage. He asked us to add several outlets in the spare b
edroom, and also asked for help in moving the equipment into that room.”

  “And you did that?”

  “My people did that for a fee that was agreed upon in advance. It was added to his term bill.”

  “Unusual?”

  “Yes,” he said, “in those specifics. But not in spirit. Even though our job is to focus on the infrastructure, we try to be helpful when called upon. But the MacInnes boy got no special favors.”

  “What was your take on Eric?”

  “Pleasant. Charming. Not condescending in the sense I was just talking about. But certainly above it all. Not worried much about the things that normal people have to worry about.”

  “Have you had contact with the other MacInnes siblings?”

  “You mean the brother and the dead girl?” He obviously had been reading the papers.

  “Yes.”

  “Why would I have contact with them? The one is off campus, and the other wasn’t even a student here.” Although he didn’t actually answer the question, his tone was sharp. His accent had gotten a little thicker.

  “I don’t know; that’s why I asked. They seemed like a tight-knit family, and this place has a kind of small-town feel. I thought maybe you might have run into them, have some kind of bead on them.”

  “Well, you were wrong in thinking that.”

  “So no contact at all with either of them? James or Libby—the ‘dead girl,’ as you called her?”

  “Not that I recall. Nothing of consequence, in any case.”

  “Waffle words,” she wrote down, “re whether knows Eric/Libby.” But she couldn’t push any harder in this context.

  “Are we almost finished, here? I’m already late for my scheduled meeting. So if there’s nothing further . . .” He started to push his chair back. He was halfway up before he caught the look on her face. She looked up at him, down at his chair, and up at him again.

  “No, we’re not quite finished, Mr. Rodriguez.”

  He sat.

  “As I think you guessed ahead of time, I’m not satisfied with some of these answers. I’m not satisfied at all. After almost a week of looking into this, all you can tell me for sure is that you still can’t figure out how the hell Eric MacInnes got into your building—not just once, but many times. That’s still a problem for me. Which means it’s still a problem for you. You’re the guy that helped design the Shad security system—”