Nocturnal (episode n. 1) (2 page)

The scarecrow let go a rough laugh, to show that he wasn't worried by that unlikely weapon. Whom he was trying to show it to was an open question.

«Either do something or get out of my way, I'm late», she remarked.

«Are you kidding me?» was his grunted answer.

«Would you leave if I say I am?»

That last remark seemed to hit the switch in the boy, who started running at her, shaking his fists in the air. Actually, he gave the impression of falling rather than moving. The bag swung again, and this time it hit the boy full in the neck. He stumbled back, then he shook for a second as if he had been hit by a charge and fell in a heap of slim limbs.

Amanda stared, amazed, unable to understand what she had just seen. She hadn't hit that hard. Then again, she wouldn't have been able to obtain a similar effect even if she had hit much harder than she had.

Then she looked up and the mystery was no more. A man wearing a blue uniform walked to her, reaching out with a hand for some reason, as if he thought she needed help walking. «Are you OK, miss?»

Police.
WOW
. Someone had really called the police.

Now she was really going to be late.

CHAPTER 2

She was ready for an endless reproach when she left the station to go to the university, half the morning having been lost by then.

Of course it wasn't her fault, as it would have been obvious for anyone that she couldn't refuse to answer the questions of a police officer just because she was late for work. Anyone would understand. Anyone would accept that justification. What not just anyone would notice, but the rector would for sure, was that if she had left her place a few minutes earlier she would have been able to avoid “such shortcuts” and the whole problem wouldn't have existed at all. Full stop. End of the debate. She would rather confront two or three more smugglers than having to justify even once with Parker. That man had the power to make her feel guilty even when her conscience was perfectly clean. Which admittedly didn't happen that often.

She was so anxious for the unavoidable confrontation that, although she was going to regret it, when she saw the police marks around the building, and all of her colleagues kept outside by agents, she couldn't help feeling better. It took her a few seconds before she wondered what exactly she was seeing, and why.

When the doubt that something bad could have happened to one of her friends – though that was too big a word for them – arose, she had already reached the enclosed space, and she was promptly stopped by one of the policemen surrounding it.

«You can't pass.»

Dry, quick, authoritarian like a monkey and just as well-mannered.

«I work in here. I am a teacher.»

The agent stared at her as if the word “teacher” had just been invented. «Wait here. Detective!»

He kept staring, as if she could ran away if he dared to stop looking for a split second.

After a little while, a second man in plain clothes reached them.

"Plain", actually, was an exaggeration: he was wearing some green-fabric trousers under a turtleneck and a suit jacket of two different shades of brown. Altogether, he looked like an upside-down tree.

«Who are you supposed to be?» he asked, not sparing a thought for introducing himself.

Supposed to be? Amanda was reasonably sure that she was, with no conditions, but somehow she managed to keep the thought for herself.

«Amanda Sheldon. I teach compared biology.»

«Human?»

«The biology or me?»

The detective seemed to lose interest in the answer and carried on with a new question «Did you know Trey Parker?»

Why was he using the past tense?

«Of course.» The contrary would have been quite difficult. No one could work for Trey Parker and not know him.

«When did you see him last?»

«Yesterday morning. Barely.» They had met in a corridor just once in the whole day, and exchanged nothing more than a greeting. One of the best conversation they ever had, as far as she was concerned.

«Do you know if he had any enemy?»

Amanda stopped just short of answering "the whole staff of the faculty", and not only because she realized in time that she was included in that definition. Actually, no one of them could stand Parker, and even more his extreme precision and exaggerated straightforwardness, but enemies was too big a word. They didn't love him, but they respected him and no one hated him, for sure not so much as to... She realized that the information was still in mid-air, like electricity before a lightning. It seemed to her that the answer was obvious, but she needed to hear it out loud.

«What happened to him?»

Once again, receiving a question instead of an answer seemed to disconnect the detective from his personal mind processes and make him change the subject of the questioning. Or maybe he just wasn't listening to a single word she was saying.
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be ignored
.

«Where were you this morning between eight and ten?»

Amanda sighed. «Police headquarters.»

The man seemed to hear at least this answer. He opened his eyes just a bit more, and for the first time he seemed to look straight at her.

«Doing what?»

«I was assailed this morning while coming here. I had to go there to testify», she explained.

«We can check this», he remarked. Amanda glared at him with eyes wide open. She was about to answer "No, see, I was here doing whatever has been done, I just thought that saying I was at the police headquarters was a good excuse no one could deny." She stood silent.

«You can go with your colleagues. Stay within reach», the detective went on, then he added to the officer who had first stopped her «Let her in.»

Entering the area, Amanda wondered how she could not be in reach, considering she was going to be less than a hundred meters away. Once again she kept her mental notes for herself.

While she approached the small group of teachers she had spotted earlier, she couldn't help trying to look behind the uniforms that where surrounding something in the middle of the court. A blank sheet had been thrown on something that was very likely to be Trey Parker, excellent rector of the faculty of Science. The sheet was clean. There wasn't anything odd around, as long as you could avoid considering the large number of strangers in the area, most of which wearing a uniform of some kind.

She approached Damon, one of her colleagues, mostly because it was the nearest rather than for anything else, and asked the question that so far no one, except evidence, had replied to.

«What happened?»

Damon looked down at her, which was unavoidable. Rarely he could look up, or even straight at anyone of his colleagues, unless he kneeled down, considering he was more than two meters tall. That matched his bulky body, which made him look more like a bodybuilder rather than a teacher. Jet-black hair, dark eyes and a short beard where the last touches of the picture, and for some reason he always made her think of the big bad wolf, the one who demolished houses with a breath. At least until he kept silent...

«Don't you know?»

That was it. His voice was quite the opposite of all the rest of him. Soft, shrill, but most of all amazingly feminine. If both of them had been talking into a dark room, she would have had more chances to pass as a man.

«Parker was killed. This morning, or so they said.»

Yes, that gave a sense to the kind of questioning she had undergone.

«Do they know how?» she asked, not really hoping for a good answer. Damon shook his head to say they didn't. It would have been useless to ask if he knew who was suspected, provided anyone was – which she didn't believe. Police wasn't going to tell him anyway.

«Do you think they will be upset if I go into my office for a second?»

He shrugged. «They didn't tell us not to go in. But there is nothing to do inside.»

Why, is there something to do outside?

«OK, see you later» was all she answered as she walked to the building, expecting at each step to hear someone call her back and tell her she had to stay with the others. No one did.

Once inside, she didn't even go near her office, instead she went straight to Parker's.

The nameless detective had let slip that the man had been killed between eight and ten, something that made little sense to her. With all the people coming and going there in the morning, a corpse wasn't likely to stay in the courtyard more than a few minutes before anyone literally tripped into it. So, whatever was the time at which someone had found it and called for help, she was quite sure the body hadn't been there but for the previous minute or so. And if there really was any logical reason to think he had died between eight and ten, that meant one thing alone: he hadn't died out there. After all, Parker wasn't going to leave the building before lunchtime, and she was quite sure he had arrived long before lessons started. Either someone had lured him out somehow, which she thought was quite unlikely, or he had been killed in a most proper place, so to speak, then brought him where he was now. And the most likely crime scene, considering the habits of the victim, was his office, the place in which he spent most of his days.

She reached the door cautiously, expecting that the police had sealed it, or that at least there was someone examining the room, but apparently no one was there or even nearby. She tried the handle. The door opened.

A vague sense of guilt jumped on her when she went through the door. She wasn't supposed to try and find out what had happened, that was the police task. Once, she had promised she wasn't going to let mysteries and investigations tempt her, yet there she was again.

Then again, the promise had been made to Parker... and he really wasn't about to complain.

The office looked tidy. Not “maniacally tidy”, which was weird. Even though she wasn't able to understand what was... out of place was saying too much... less in place than usual... she wasn’t feeling the usual sensation of unease that place never failed to create, that sense of estrangement you felt going in, just as if you had stepped into another world. Maybe it was just the absence of the rightful owner, which was second to no one when it came to make you feel that way, but no, it couldn't be just that.

She started carefully examining every single detail, even the most irrelevant ones. The chart on the wall, right to the door, perfectly parallel to the line dividing the light-green part of the wall from the upper cream-white one. The desk, opposite the door, on which order ruled, where a speck of dust would be ashamed to fall. The chairs for guests, symmetrically placed. The bookshelf, where books where placed from the shorter to the taller. The chest... the bookshelf! She got closer to check again. She was right: a book was out of place. Not for her, actually, neither probably for any other sentient being, but from Parker's point of view it sure was, more than two centimeters taller the neighboring ones, almost equal to one another.

She reached out to take it, then stopped in mid-motion. Better take some precautions. She drew a kerchief from her pocket and used it to take the book without touching it with her bare fingers.

It was slim and tall, hard-covered and with but a few pages. On a dark blue background stood the purposely childish drawing of a lying girl – she seemed to be leaning on the left side of the cover for support – wrapped in a curtain of blond hair. The title was above, in old-style letters: "The sleeping princess". A children tale. What was it doing there, among serious science books? What was it supposed to mean?

She opened it, putting it on the desk so she could keep touching it with only one hand, turning the pages much more delicately than needed, but she found nothing different from what it seemed from the outside. Large text, even larger drawings taking most of each page, the sweetened version of a more gruesome legend, happy ending included. That made no sense.

She checked that there was nothing hidden in the cover, then put the book back where it had been. She turned and her gaze fell on something sticking out from under the desk.

A pen.

Not just any pen, actually. Parker's. The one always peeking from the pocket of his suit. She would recognize it everywhere, but the floor was the last place she expected to find it on.

She didn't pick it up – putting it back exactly where it was would have been quite hard – but she bent for a closer look. It must have fallen there, but why hadn't Parker recovered it? Unless he had no longer been able to already.

Not far there was a stain on the carpet, barely more than a shade, but it wouldn't have gone unnoticed to the owner of that room. It was too pale to be blood. Water?

She brushed it with a fingertip, surely she couldn't left prints on that fabric, and found it dry. Water wouldn't have been visible then, it would just dry without traces.

She smelled her finger, but only felt the smell of the carpet, or of whatever they used to clean it.

Three elements where a proof, but a proof of what? There was something wrong in that office, but nothing that could prove without any doubt that something serious had happened there... let alone what had.

For sure she wasn't going to find any answer there, nor probably in the entire university.

Although she didn't like the idea, there was only one place to go when you had so many questions and no acceptable answer.

The Underdark.

CHAPTER 3

Given the situation, lessons were suspended, for the great relief of the students. Less of the teachers. Indeed, sharing her time between answering useless questions to the police and attending endless extraordinary meetings to discuss the recent events didn't match the concept Amanda had of a pleasant day.

When she was finally able to leave the university, evening had already fallen, and a feeble blue light escorted her all the way to the station, which was all but empty.