Murder at the B-School Read online

  Down at street level, Leon, who had indeed refrained from pushing any envelopes in the preceding four hours, now was wasting no time. He had already pulled a retractable steel walkway out from underneath the truck and opened the cargo door. Now he reemerged into the thin sunlight pushing a two-wheeler that was heavily loaded with boxes. He steered his cargo down to street level, turned his back to the house, hefted the two-wheeler up onto the sidewalk easily, and looked up at the front door.

  “Looks like he knows what he’s doing,” Beyer said. “I’ll go open up the basement. We’ll put the equipment down there for the time being. We can put the other stuff in Mr. MacInnes’s study upstairs.”

  Vermeer soon found that he was more or less irrelevant to the unloading process. Beyer’s muscles weren’t just for show; he was astoundingly strong, hefting heavy and bulky objects with ease. And for his part, Leon had years of practice working in his favor. A far better mover than a driver, he knew how to make weight work for him. He also had an eye for figuring out how to fit ungainly pieces of workout equipment through the relatively unforgiving basement doorway—a half turn here, a jog there, now straight up to take advantage of the higher ceiling just inside. When a two-person job came up, he directed Beyer with purposeful jerks of his head, punctuated by an occasional approving or disapproving grunt.

  Vermeer took the opportunity to poke around. The basement, which extended from the front of the house to a hidden garden at the rear, was mainly the servants’ domain. It was essentially an open space, with boxed-in columns demarcating several zones of activity. Roughly the front third of the space housed mechanical systems: water heaters, oil burners, tools of all sorts. All appeared to be relatively new and high end. The middle area had been transformed into a well-equipped fitness center, which clearly didn’t need the additional treadmill, rowing machine, and weight-lifting equipment that Beyer and Leon were now moving into it.

  Toward the rear of the house, walled off by shoulder-high partitions, was a large and surprisingly sunny kitchen. Judging from the oversize ovens and stoves and the large dumbwaiter door recessed in one of the walls, this was the mansion’s main kitchen.

  There wasn’t much more to see here. Waiting until Beyer was outside with Leon, Vermeer picked up a box marked “papers” and quietly climbed the stairs. When he pushed open the door at the top, the stairwell emptied into a high-ceilinged entryway dominated by an ornate chandelier, a huge gilded mirror along one wall, and a grand white-marble stairway that looked a little oversize for the relatively narrow house.

  “May I help you?”

  Vermeer turned to face a stocky, stern-looking woman who appeared to be in her late fifties. Her graying hair was tied up in a tight bun, and she wore a chest-to-knee white apron, starched and spotless. Around her neck hung a chain with what looked like a blank ID card on its end. “Oh, hi. You must be Ellie Donahue. I’m Wim Vermeer, from Boston.” He made a show of putting down the box, which wasn’t particularly heavy, and shook her hand.

  “Yes, of course. Mr. Ralph told us you’d be arriving this morning.”

  “Dan said that the boxes of papers were supposed to go into Mr. MacInnes’s study.” Not the whole truth, but true enough. “Maybe you could show me the way?”

  “Certainly. Follow me.” She led Vermeer up the staircase and into a gloomy wood-paneled hallway. The only light came from a skylight high above the stairwell; the far end of the hall, where they were now headed, was obscured in shadows.

  The heavy wooden door to William MacInnes’s study was locked. Donahue bent forward from the waist and put her badge in front of a small plastic panel next to the door. There was a heavy click, and a red light on the panel turned green. She pushed the door open.

  “Nice system,” Vermeer said. Bank-quality locks.

  “The family pays attention to security, if that’s what you mean,” she replied sparely. “And I certainly find it preferable to carrying a set of keys all over the house.”

  The study felt neglected, as if it had once been a favorite lair but had fallen out of favor. Dominating the room was a massive wooden two-sided partners desk with a heavy oak swivel chair on one side. Vermeer remembered that he had once seen a picture of a very similar desk that John D. Rockefeller had shared with his original business partner as they invented the oil business. The carpets on the floor, probably magnificent in their day, looked comfortably worn and faded. Floor-to-ceiling bookcases lined two of the four walls. Judging from the acrid perfume that hung in the air, the clear plastic humidor on the desk was an old friend of the owner. Now, though, it was nearly empty, with two lone cigars on its bottom shelf.

  “That corner, I think.” The housekeeper pointed at a spot on the floor.

  He put the box down.

  As they left the study, Donahue gave a small tug, and the door swung shut. The lock clicked, and the light winked red again. Vermeer noted that several of the other doors leading off the hallway also had tiny red lights at the ready. One door, at the far end of the hall, was slightly ajar.

  “You know,” he said, “if you just want to prop that door open, I can just bring the rest of the stuff up without bothering you.”

  She looked appalled. “No. That wouldn’t be possible. We keep these doors closed at all times.”

  “Well, there are a lot of boxes. And it doesn’t make much sense to have you running up and down twenty times with me. Why don’t I bring all the boxes up here and stack them up in the hall? When I’m done, you can come up and open the door for me.”

  Fingering her passkey like worry beads, Donahue looked at the stairwell and then back at the now closed door, calculating the trade-offs involved. “Well,” she finally said, “I suppose that would be all right. Just come find me downstairs as soon as you’re ready.” When they reached the ground floor, she disappeared behind a door leading to the back of the house.

  In fact, there weren’t more than a half-dozen boxes, the last of which he soon had piled up outside the door to MacInnes’s study. But he had bought a little time to reconnoiter. He paused at the top of the stairwell to make sure that no one was approaching.

  Then he walked to the unlocked door at the end of the hall.

  Stepping inside, he had no doubt that this was Libby MacInnes’s room and had been for many years. Palimpsest popped into Vermeer’s mind—a hundred-dollar word favored by humanities graduate students: a parchment with several generations of writing on it, from back in the days when paper was too precious to throw away. The room looked like it had been overwritten many times, with traces of a former life surviving each time. In one corner was a custom-built set of shelves displaying a large collection of toy horses. (One long row of Appaloosas had fallen over like dominoes; it seemed unlikely that anyone would ever stand them all up again.) Some tattered wall posters testified to Libby’s past infatuations with long-disbanded boy bands. The lavender window treatments—badly overdone, to Vermeer’s amateur eye—matched the pale satin wallpaper as well as the dust ruffle on a large four-poster bed. But at some point, Libby had moved on to bolder colors. Now the primary colors of throw rugs, bolsters, and other knickknacks overwhelmed the original girlish look of the room.

  Like William MacInnes’s study, Libby’s bedroom was dominated by a desk. But the two workstations at the opposite ends of the hall were from different centuries. Libby’s desk, a vast V-shaped wedge of white, lurked in its corner like a grounded Stealth bomber. It was burdened with an array of computer equipment, only about half of which Vermeer could identify. Next to one of three flat-screen monitors, for example, he recognized a broadband modem winking green and orange, signaling its willingness to do business, like the one on his desk at home. But Libby had three of these high-speed workhorses parked at various places on her desk. Three separate broadband hookups—one for each monitor? Vermeer wondered. Was Libby running some kind of data-intensive business out of the MacInnes manse?

  Moving closer to the desk, Vermeer scanned the tidy piles of papers that sur
rounded the monitors. They appeared to be articles downloaded from various nursing-related Web sites. Lots of gerunds in the titles, he noted: managing this, understanding that, leveraging this. Vermeer had dated a nursing student, briefly. Passionate and almost universally generous in spirit, she had talked venomously about nursing research.

  The wall-mounted white bookshelves above the desk held mostly nursing and medical reference books. One lone knickknack, sandwiched between two stands of books, caught his eye. It was a five-pointed, clear Lucite star, about four inches high, on a black base. On the base was a small plaque with an inscription:

  Gold Star

  Awarded to Elizabeth R. MacInnes

  And the INRR

  By the ISMC

  Vermeer shook his head, irritated. Someone, somewhere, had saved a buck on engraving. He had no idea what “INRR” and “ISMC” stood for. Whatever the INRR did with Libby’s help, the ISMC evidently appreciated it.

  Something was nagging at him. It felt as if something was missing. He scanned the desk again and then looked around the edges of the room.

  No photos. In fact, other than the taciturn “gold star,” no personal memorabilia, mementos, or keepsakes of any kind. No family.

  “What the hell are you doing in here?”

  The sharp-edged voice caught Vermeer by surprise. He nearly jumped off his feet, like a cartoon character. In the doorway—in fact, completely filling the doorway—was Dan Beyer. He looked like an aroused guard dog behind a fence. Except that there was no fence.

  “Oh, hi, Dan.” Vermeer flashed back through what he had been doing in the past several seconds. He decided that it was bluffable. “Just finished moving those boxes up here and really needed to find the head.”

  “This isn’t a bathroom. It’s a bedroom. A private bedroom.”

  “Yeah, I can see that now, but it was the only door that happened to be open. I gave Ellie a yell, but she didn’t answer. And things were getting a little urgent. Still are, in fact.”

  Beyer calculated the plausibility of this. His face softened slightly. It was plausible. “Uh-huh. Well, now that you’ve discovered your mistake, I think you’ll want to be heading downstairs.” He stepped into the room and swept both overmuscled arms toward the door.

  “You bet. Just point me toward the bathroom, and I’m a happy guy.”

  13

  ALTHOUGH THERE WASN’T ANY UNUSUAL ODOR IN THE AIR— just the airborne molds from behind the walls of the tired-out station house, the smell of too many bodies at close quarters over too many years, the smell of generations of floor wax—Barbara Brouillard was wrinkling up her nose.

  This was a habit of concentration that dated back to when she still wore cheap glasses that tended to slide down her nose. She had been unaware of it until a few months earlier, when Dick Davidson, at the next desk, picked up on it and started riding her. Ever since then, when she surfaced from one of her reveries, she was likely to find her colleagues, seated at their desks, wrinkling their noses in exaggerated ways. Then, likely as not, someone would start to snort, piglike. And things would go downhill from there.

  Not today, though. The bullpen was quiet. Davidson was on vacation. The other self-appointed chief tormentor, Buzzy Silver, was still out on an extended medical leave. Silver had been involved in an embarrassing hunting accident in the White Mountains—alcohol was rumored to have been a factor—and had caught a fellow hunter’s .22 rifle slug in a particular part of his anatomy with lots of nerve endings. He was still receiving a steady stream of interesting get-well gifts, mostly prostheses of various sorts, from his colleagues at District 11.

  Brouillard had sent a card, but she didn’t miss him.

  She was taking advantage of the relative silence to think through the MacInnes case. And her nose was wrinkling. Because, if this was a puzzle, the pieces weren’t adding up to much. At the same time, it felt as if the pieces might fit together if she could just look at them in the right way.

  A couple of months earlier, she had attended a rubber-chicken luncheon—some sort of cops-and-community goodwill get- together; she had drawn the short straw—and found herself sitting next to an archaeologist from Boston University. As he described it, his job was heaven on earth: the occasional lecture and obligatory faculty meeting sandwiched between digs in New Mexico. There, he said a little dreamily, he and his graduate students hunted Native American artifacts by day and drank jug wine under the big sky by night.

  To Brouillard’s ears, most of his chatter was boring and self-serving. But he captured her imagination when he described the nitty-gritty of the dig: the careful delineation of zones of excavation, the hot sun and dry desert wind, the small shovelfuls, the sifting of reddish, bone-dry desert soil, the painstaking numbering and recording of objects and pieces of objects. In particular, she found herself responding to his description of the challenge and frustrations of trying to assemble a complete ancient clay pot from a small mountain of shards. “Maybe the pieces were all there,” he had said, “and you just hadn’t found the right combination.” Or maybe the pieces weren’t all there, and you had to go back to the earth. All the while knowing that you might never find what you were looking for.

  “That’s interesting,” she had said, as much to herself as to him. “That’s kind of what I do, too.” She briefly described how she assembled clues and nonclues, rearranged them in multiple ways, some of them unlikely, and went back out looking for the missing pieces of the puzzle. Back to the earth.

  The archaeologist mistook her interest. Maybe she’d like to talk further over dinner sometime, maybe this week? The slightly more aggressive pitch in his voice wasn’t well concealed. In her experience, lots of guys, especially middle-aged guys and especially middle-aged guys leading quiet upper-middle-class professional lives, found the idea of a female detective intriguing, or challenging, or whatever.

  “I don’t know,” she had said in a matter-of-fact tone. “Will you be wearing that nice gold wedding ring, or will you be taking it off before dinner?” The professor made a little show of being offended, then quickly showed her his back. He spent the rest of the lunch deep in conversation with the person on his other elbow. So much for community goodwill.

  Her phone rang. Brouillard picked it up warily. She hadn’t touched it yet this morning. Sometimes the frat boys on the evening shift did silly things to her handset. That was definitely something she was going to attend to one of these days.

  “Brouillard.”

  “Hi, Captain. Art Deming here.”

  “Hi, Art. Got anything for me?”

  “I think so, yeah.”

  “I’ll be over.”

  Pulling out of the car pool in an unmarked Taurus—reasonably new and not yet overwhelmed by the stale residue of smoke or the inevitable little green Christmas tree air freshener hanging from the rearview—Brouillard knew that this in-person trip was probably unnecessary. There wouldn’t be much to look at; a phone conversation probably would accomplish just as much.

  But the long drive would give her a chance to wrinkle her nose in private. And she could also take a detour through the old neighborhood, where she hadn’t been in a couple of months. And finally, Art liked the attention.

  Art Deming did business a block away from where Brouillard had grown up. The neighborhood had gone way upscale since then, of course. A former mayor of Somerville had detoured the Red Line way off its natural route, blocking the extension of the line until he got a subway stop in Davis Square. That, combined with Tufts University’s expansion and its long, slow climb into academic respectability, had pushed property values out of sight. Her parents had sold their triple-decker just before the boom, convinced they were getting an amazing price, and had moved to Florida. Today the house was full of graduate students and was worth ten times what her parents had sold it for. Meanwhile, down in Clearwater, they called her every week, speaking mournfully of the heat and the bugs and talking of how much they missed the changing of the seasons.


  The puzzle pieces, Brouillard reminded herself, heading over the bridge that linked Boston and East Cambridge. It featured huge decorative pillars of cast concrete that looked like the salt and pepper shakers in a cheap restaurant. Probably not the effect that the bridge designer had been aiming for, she said to herself. It was not the first time she had made that mental comment about the Salt and Pepper Bridge.

  Bear down, she scolded herself again. The puzzle pieces.

  Eric’s cause of death: drowning, but with an asterisk. Water in the lungs, consistent with drowning. But bruises and contusions at the base of the skull, consistent with a blow to the back of the head. Or consistent with whacking your head against the tiled rim of the Jacuzzi if you staggered, slipped, and fell.

  Blood alcohol levels that were probably high enough to make you stagger, slip, and fall, especially if you weren’t much of a drinker. But not high compared to your average patron of the Black Rose at Quincy Market on your average Friday night.

  One odd fact that she wasn’t sharing with anybody, even in the Dirtball Theoretical: a single tiny puncture wound midway up Eric’s left arm. Overlooked at the crime scene because it sat squarely in the middle of a mole straddling a prominent vein. The medical examiner had spotted and flagged it, although toxicology didn’t show anything other than alcohol.

  Eric hadn’t visited University Health Services. Wasn’t known to have seen a physician in the Boston area. Didn’t have allergies. Wasn’t a skin-popper. Wasn’t the type to spontaneously start tattooing himself.

  So what, Brouillard wondered, was the little hole in his arm all about?

  Clothes carefully hung on the wall pegs of the shower stall nearest to the Jacuzzi. Nothing unusual in the pockets of the pants or shirt. A wallet with ten crisp twenty-dollar bills in it, suggesting that Eric had recently visited an ATM. The bank had confirmed the transaction. For what it was worth, there hadn’t been a robbery.

  Another odd note: a missing pass card. In the pocket of Eric’s pants, hung carefully near where his body had been found, was the pass card that had gotten him into the fitness center. The thoroughly intimidated Alonzo Rodriguez had promised to find out how he had obtained it. Most of the possible answers weren’t very compelling. Brouillard wasn’t much interested, for example, in hanging some cash-strapped custodian out to dry. (That was Harvard’s issue, if it came to that.) But if other people had pass cards like this one, that was worth knowing about.