Murder at the B-School Read online

  “I never said that I—”

  “Oh, please,” she said, with exaggerated weariness. “Please don’t tell me again that the fast-moving pace of current technology means that your intimate knowledge of this building is now out of date. I don’t buy it. You’re in a position to get the answers I need, and you’re going to get them.

  “I want to know where Eric got that unnumbered pass card, and where he got the code for the panel. I want to know if this went undetected all these months, and if so, how.

  “So I want you to call a meeting. I want you to bring to that meeting whoever it takes to answer those fairly simple questions. But for starters, I want to talk to the subcontractor who installed the security system. Tell him to bring along the as-built drawings; that will get his attention. I want the original programmers for that system, and I want anybody who’s made any kind of significant coding changes since. I want memos as to who’s got what card, and which code is assigned to whom. I want the guy who interprets the security logs for you, Mr. Rodriguez. I want the logs themselves.

  “And above all, I want you, Mr. Rodriguez, to help me get my answers. Ten a.m. sharp, the day after tomorrow.”

  He spluttered, just like in the cartoons. “But that’s ridiculous! People have schedules; people have—”

  She froze him with a look. She was angry. “Don’t tell me what’s ridiculous and what isn’t, Mr. Rodriguez. I’m investigating two deaths, and you’re standing between me and the answers I need. Believe me, that’s not a place you want to be standing.

  “And this time, let’s use the dean’s conference room. I have a feeling that he may want to join us for this one.”

  On her way out, fighting a cold wind, she made a long detour by the dean’s office. She was sure that there was some way to get to Bishop’s office underground, but she didn’t want to discover that not all tunnels were as scrubbed as Rodriguez’s.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” the polished young woman behind the dean’s polished wooden wall said cheerfully. “You’ve just missed him. He’s just left for an overnight trip. Usually, it’s a good idea to call ahead and make an appointment, especially this time of year, with so much committee work under way.”

  Brouillard did not want to be rude to this nice young woman. On the other hand, none of these nice people seemed to be getting the message. Maybe it was because none of them had gotten a shot across their bow from the mayor. “Well, Ms. Friedman,” she read off the chromed desk plaque, “way back when you were booking today’s appointments, I had no way of knowing that the Boston Police Department wouldn’t be getting the answers we needed from Harvard. That was a surprise to me.”

  “Oh, dear,” Friedman replied, looking genuinely worried. And then stopped, not sure of the ground she was on. “Well, can I give him a message? He checks his e-mail several times a day.”

  “Sure. I think I remember the dean saying he wanted a speedy wrap-up of this case. Tell him that that’s not going to happen if things keep going the way they are going at the moment. Tell him that if he has any pull with Mr. Rodriguez, this would be a really good time to use it.” Maude Friedman was taking notes in what looked like shorthand—lots of loops and swirls. “Tell him he’s invited to a meeting in his conference room the day after tomorrow at ten a.m., with Mr. Rodriguez and his associates. And finally, tell him that Mayor Pavone has personally expressed his concern about the situation. And that I wouldn’t be surprised if the land deals were on His Honor’s mind.”

  “The land deals,” the young woman repeated, as she dashed off more swirls and squiggles.

  Harvard, always growing, always wanted more land on the Boston side of the river. With the mayor’s tacit permission, the university had been buying Allston and Brighton properties through a straw, to avoid paying top dollar. All totally legal, but not a practice that endeared Mother Harvard to the neighborhoods. And this mayor knew it was the neighborhoods that would reelect him. No, he hadn’t exactly mentioned any specific deals to Brouillard that might be hanging in the balance—actually, hadn’t mentioned land deals whatsoever—but Brouillard felt she had the authority to improvise.

  “Right. Mention the land deals.”

  She made a mental note to herself to turn herself in to the mayor’s office.

  30

  BROUILLARD’S CELL PHONE STARTED CHIRPING AS SHE MADE HER way back to District—the desk sergeant. William MacInnes was in town—picking up a second dead child in as many weeks, Brouillard realized with a twinge, foolishly scribbling notes with only one eye on the road—and wanted to talk to her.

  This morning would be convenient, his people had informed the sergeant. Brouillard remembered the odd character with the sawed-off name: Mr. Ralph. She phoned the number the desk sergeant had passed along.

  “Boston Harbor Hotel. How may I direct your call?”

  Brouillard sighed. She had been expecting the Four Seasons. A visit to the Boston Harbor Hotel, a huge brick pile on the waterfront, self-consciously designed to look like an old-fashioned ferry terminal, would require her to get to the other side of the Big Dig, Boston’s endless road rebuilding project smack in the middle of town. She didn’t believe for a minute that the Four Seasons couldn’t find space for William MacInnes, even on short notice. So the old godzillionaire must have wanted a change of scene.

  “Room thirteen forty, please,” she read from her scribbled notes.

  Mr. Ralph himself answered on the first ring. “Room thirteen forty. Ralph speaking.”

  “Captain Brouillard, Mr. Ralph. I got your message. Turns out I can be there in twenty minutes.”

  “Excellent.”

  Using shortcuts—and occasionally her removable blue roof light—she made it to the Atlantic Ocean in just under fifteen. But instead of traffic opening up along the waterfront, the congestion got even worse. From several blocks out, she saw why: There was a swirling knot of people outside the Boston Harbor Hotel, and the knot was spilling out into the street. As she approached, this gradually resolved itself into a media melee: trucks, lights, cables running all over the broad sidewalk. A pair of uniformed officers was just now setting up a cordon around the main door into the hotel. TV crews jockeyed for position. One local anchorwoman was already perched on a foot-high crate, looking earnestly at her camera as she spoke into her microphone.

  Boston welcomes grieving tycoon. If William MacInnes had been looking for peace and quiet, he wasn’t going to find it here. In fact, with the back of his hotel pressed up against the harbor, he was pretty well trapped. At least at the Four Seasons, there were side doors, service entrances, loading docks, and tunnels that could be called into play. Here it was hide, dash, or swim.

  Blasting her horn rhythmically, she rolled up on the sidewalk and angled in, helping to define the southern end of the impromptu perimeter. Several pedestrians started to give the nondescript tan Crown Vic a piece of their minds. Then they looked her in the eye, and then they reconsidered, melting back into the crowd. One or two TV cameras swung her way. Either they recognized her—pretty unlikely, despite her recent media coverage—or she had more visual appeal than the revolving door behind which the hotel’s uniformed doormen were hiding. Declining to comment, nodding when one of the patrolmen moved a blue sawhorse aside to let her pass, she pushed through the crowd.

  “Sit, sit, Captain. Thank you for coming so promptly. It is ‘Captain,’ isn’t it?”

  She guessed that this was about as solicitous as William MacInnes ever got. “Yes. It’s ‘Captain.’” She sat in an overdone, overstuffed easy chair, across a standard-issue glass coffee table from MacInnes, who had sunk deeply into a couch.

  “Sorry about the circus outside, sir,” she continued. “And of course, I’m deeply sorry about your daughter.” She wished she hadn’t gotten it backward: daughter, then circus.

  “Thank you, Captain. Of course I don’t hold you responsible for either. I have asked the hotel manager to determine which employee found some personal advantage in calling in t
he media jackals, and to tell me what sort of disciplinary action he is planning to take in response. As for my daughter . . .”

  Here he paused, took a long breath, and put a hand in front of his eyes briefly. When he surfaced again, he was composed. “Libby was always her own person. She lived and died according to her own rules. I’m sorry. Does that sound harsh?”

  “It sounds realistic.”

  He grunted. “My wife is at home. Under sedation. I believe this death is even harder on her than the last one. Or maybe it’s cumulative.”

  “I’m sure this is a terrible blow to you both, sir.” She waited a decent interval. “I’m glad you called me, Mr. MacInnes. I wanted to ask you some questions.”

  “Fine. I’ll answer your questions. Within the limits of my ability and willingness. And then you can answer mine, within the same limits.”

  She smiled. “I hope to get more out of you than you get out of me.”

  “Unlikely. But fire away.”

  “Did you know that Libby was a frequent visitor to Boston, and to the Four Seasons? Like, several times a month?”

  “No. I did not.”

  “You weren’t aware of her comings and goings?”

  “No. She always made herself available for family meetings and other formal occasions. She volunteered to fill in for my nurses as necessary. Even more than was necessary, actually. Other than that, she kept her own schedule. Remember that she tended to operate out of the city house, whereas Elizabeth and I have resided primar-ily upstate in recent years.”

  “Do you have any idea why she always asked for two keys to her hotel room?”

  “Absolutely no idea. Unless she thought Dan Beyer should have one.”

  “If she had a particularly close friend here in Boston, do you have any idea who that might have been?”

  “None. That’s the last thing I would have looked into, or about which she would have wanted me to know.”

  “Do you know if she touched base with her brothers while she was up here?”

  “That’s a question for James, I’d say. I never heard either of the boys mention their sister as a frequent visitor, or even an occasional visitor. Not that they would have gone out of their way to tell me something like that, especially if Libby had . . . a swain.”

  Every once in a while, Brouillard noted, William MacInnes reminded you that he wasn’t totally a resident of this century. She had eased out her pad and pencil. She wrote down “swain,” not exactly sure of the spelling. “So why was Beyer traveling with her?”

  “Because that was his job. Libby has been subject to threats in the past. Nothing specific, but credible enough for us to hire a bodyguard. Eric’s death redoubled our vigilance. To Libby’s dismay.”

  “She didn’t like having protection along?”

  “No. She was very clear on that point. We overruled her. For all the good it did in the end,” he added.

  “Do you think Beyer could have killed your daughter?”

  “No. Of course he’s strong enough and stupid enough. But no. I believe he was very fond of her, in his own way.”

  “Do you think she felt the same way about him?”

  He shrugged heavily, as if the question either never interested him or no longer could. “I doubt it. Libby was independent, rebellious, and evidently more secretive than I ever realized. So I could be wrong about her. But at the end of the day, I believe, she was one of us. One of our family. For better or worse. No. I don’t believe she would have . . . soiled the nest by becoming involved with one of the household staff.

  “Nor do I believe that she would have chosen a specimen like Beyer, who was mainly interesting because he was overmuscled, which means he doesn’t remain interesting for long. Nor do I understand why she would bother flying up here to be in a relationship with someone who more or less lived under the same roof with her in our city house, as Beyer does. Or did. That’s a long way to go for privacy—how often did you say? Several times a month?”

  “Apparently. And for all we know, there may have been other places she traveled to. If you don’t mind, we’d like access to her credit card records, phone bills, and so on to check that out.”

  “Of course. Mr. Ralph can get you whatever you need. I assume you’ll protect my daughter’s privacy as much as possible.”

  “We will. As much as possible. And”—there was no easy way to say it—“I’ll also do what I can to get her body released as soon as possible. As soon as the medical examiner is finished.”

  He looked at her impassively. Maybe he was sedated, as well. Or maybe, as that Harvard prof Pirle had said, this family did indeed take the long view. Maybe one daughter, more or less, wasn’t going to make the difference. “Yes, do that, please, Captain Brouillard.”

  She made motions as if to go, but he held up his hand in a braking motion. “I believe we had a deal, Captain, and I don’t think you’ve lived up to your end of the bargain. It’s my turn to ask you a few questions.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “My sources tell me that Professor Vermeer is your prime suspect in the death of my son.”

  “Let me just say that he may have had the opportunity. I’m not sure about the motive. And who are your sources, by the way?”

  “No, no. You had your chance. But I will tell you that if you’re settling on Vermeer, you’re barking up the wrong tree. He is nothing in all of this. Although I believe that there are people out there who would have us believe otherwise.”

  “Who, exactly? And why?”

  He nodded unhappily. “All right, I will answer those questions. We don’t know who, and we don’t know why. Presumably to deflect attention from themselves.”

  “There are some developments,” Brouillard said, choosing her words carefully, “that make us more interested in Vermeer.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as certain e-mail traffic, although that remains to be sorted out. Such as the fact that he was the last person to be seen with your daughter. They had dinner at the Four Seasons on the night she was killed. Such as the fact that Dan Beyer waylaid him outside his apartment the next morning, apparently with the intention of hauling him off and killing him. We have Beyer in custody. I’d appreciate you keeping all that in confidence, although it’ll be public soon.”

  MacInnes thought through the implications of this news. He didn’t seemed rushed. “And yet,” he finally replied, “your line of inquiry earlier focused on Beyer. I infer that like me, you’re not buying Professor Vermeer as a serious suspect.”

  She smiled in spite of herself. “I’m pretty sure I said nothing of the kind, Mr. MacInnes.”

  “I would think less of you if you had, Captain Brouillard. Obviously, you can set a trap and use Professor Vermeer as your bait, if you like. In your shoes, that’s probably what I’d do. But I’d recommend that you forget about him as a killer. For better or worse, he doesn’t have it in him.”

  This time she laughed out loud. “I’m sorry, sir. These are serious circumstances, and I’m well aware of your loss. But did you just say ‘for better or worse, he’s not a murderer’?”

  He smiled coldly. “Yes. That would be an accurate restatement of what I said.”

  “Nice use of the subjunctive.” She said it more to herself than to him.

  Now he laughed—thumping, an odd, pneumatic sound, like a tired old steam engine. “What did you just say, Captain?”

  “From a Raymond Chandler novel. The private eye gets a walk-in from the street. This visitor is a knock-out, as they always are in those books. Long legs, a throaty voice, and a bust to die for. So she says something ‘would be’ something, and Philip Marlowe says to himself, ‘Nice use of the subjunctive. A Radcliffe girl.’ I didn’t get it at the time, so I looked it up. A conditional tense.”

  He nodded, now looking serious again. “Captain, one would make a mistake to underestimate you.”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “And by extension, it would make sense to be you
r ally.”

  “I think so.”

  “As you know, I have resources available to me that are not available to the Boston Police Department.”

  “I get that sense, yeah.”

  “And of course, you have resources that are not available to me. Normally, I would ask for reciprocity. In this case, I will not. For my part, I will let you know as soon as I find out anything that might be helpful to you in your investigation. You can tell me whatever you choose to, all the way down to nothing.”

  “I appreciate that, sir.”

  “Is there anything else?”

  “One more thing.”

  “Yes?”

  “Professor Vermeer told me that you have more or less placed a bounty on the head of Eric’s killer. Assuming, of course, that there was a killer.”

  “Oh, rest assured, Captain, there was a killer. And yes, I have offered a one-million-dollar reward to the person who delivers that killer to me. Or to the appropriate law enforcement agency, I should say. That word is now spreading out across the networks with which my family is in contact. And in my estimation, those are good networks.”

  She leaned forward, looking him in the eye. “That’s exactly what I’m concerned about, Mr. MacInnes. If you put enough money on the table, bad things may start to happen. If the price is high enough, people will start to connect the dots in the wrong ways. There are good reasons why bounty hunters were put out of business.”

  “Maybe.” He didn’t look one bit concerned about potential miscarriages of justice. “By the way, Captain, the bounty just went up. For the person who brings in the killer or killers of my two children, the reward is now two million.”

  31

  BACK AT THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY, UNEMPLOYED ON A MON- day morning, Vermeer thought through his options.