The Probability of Murder (10 page)

I looked at the number again. The area code was the same for much of Bristol County—Lakeville, Bridgewater, Fall River, and a host of other towns, and Henley College didn’t have a unique exchange. I’d had no reason to believe I was calling my own campus. It had probably been years since I’d had the occasion to call Henley’s main landline. The few times this fall I’d called Martin Melrose’s extension, it had been from a campus line, requiring only the last four digits.

Eventually I stopped arguing my case for not recognizing my treasurer’s number.

Martin was part of a group of people, not all on campus, who pooled their money to increase their chances of winning. I knew Martin held the purse, so to speak, and maybe his number was in Charlotte’s bag simply because they had group business to discuss. In any case, I needed to talk to him and to the others in the pool.

Statistics was among the math classes I’d been teaching for years, so, when Charlotte mentioned increased odds of winning among those belonging to the lottery pool, I’d been curious about how it worked.

There were many variations, Charlotte had explained, but with hers, each member drew a different ticket, and if any one of the group won, all shared in the prize.

“So, if my ticket wins, say, one hundred dollars, and there are five in the group, I get only twenty?” I’d asked.

“That’s right,” Charlotte had said.

“Even though it was my money that bought my ticket?” I’d asked, a bit skeptical.

“Yes, but if I win one hundred dollars on a ticket I bought with
my
money, you also get twenty dollars,” Charlotte explained.

I finally understood that, although pooling didn’t increase
my chances of winning with my ticket, it did increase my chances of getting any money back at all.

The explanation did nothing to make me want to play.

I was eager to speak to Martin Melrose, but I didn’t have his home phone number and it wouldn’t do to leave a message at the office like “Marty, I found a bag of cash belonging to Charlotte Crocker and wondered if it had anything to do with your lottery pool.”

To save us both an embarrassing moment, I’d try him again on Monday morning instead.

In the meantime, there was still Garrett, of 617, Boston. Maybe he was a participant also.

I punched in the number and heard an Asian accent.

“Shop at Ease. This Kwang Ho.”

I recognized the name of a chain of convenience stores in the Boston area. Bruce and I had often stopped at one located off the turnpike while heading into the city.

“Hi, is Garrett there?”

“Garrett? He skip out.”

“He’s out for a break, or for the day?” I asked.

“He out for good.”

“Did he quit?”

“Walked out like that.” I pictured Mr. Ho snapping his fingers, but I couldn’t swear to it. “Never come back.”

“Was he fired?”

A dial tone followed.

“Thanks,” I muttered, and punched “Redial,” harder than I needed to.

“Shop at Ease. This Kwang Ho.” The same voice.

“Can you tell me where Garrett might be or how I can get in touch with him?”

“I tell you. Garrett took all stuff and not even say good-bye.”

“Where is your store located?” I asked quickly. An easy question that shouldn’t provoke Mr. Ho to blow me off again. My hope was that, if I visited the store in person, I might find an employee more cooperative than Mr. Ho.

“Bailey Landings, edge of town.”

“What’s your street—?”

A dial tone.

I had a feeling that if I redialed one more time I’d get voice mail.

Bailey’s Landing, close enough to Mr. Ho’s Bailey Landings, was a small town northeast of Henley, about an hour away. I’d been through it on my way to visit a friend in Quincy.

I went online to check out the exact address of the Shop at Ease market and found four of them in Bailey’s Landing. I printed out directions to all of them. My car was equipped with a GPS, but I always took a hard copy backup. Only kids who grew up in the digital age were really in a position to save the trees.

I reviewed my progress. I’d gotten up to speed on what the number sequences for different Massachusetts lottery games looked like, and I’d begun my tracking of the phone numbers in Charlotte’s bag. Trivial when I looked at it all honestly.

Besides Martin Melrose, the hottest lead was now a convenience store clerk named Garrett. I was already bored with the lottery numbers and needed a break before tracking down the Janes and Johns who were potentially winners of Mega Ball or Gigaball or whatever they were called.

I could start with Garrett and make that trip toward Boston after all, though it wasn’t quite what Bruce and I had planned.

I pulled on my favorite Irish knit sweater, anticipating a perfect fall crispness in the air around Massachusetts Bay. The off-white sweater was one of my mother’s first knitting projects when I was in high school, and I never wore it without picturing her, small framed like me, sharp eyed, and a powerful force for good in my life. I missed her every day.

I thought about asking Ariana, who loved water vistas, to come along for the ride. The combination of her upbeat
personality and excellent baking talent guaranteed it would be a more pleasant ride than if I visualized my meeting with Kwang Ho for an hour.

Buzzz.

My doorbell. Probably Ariana, come to claim her car. I could invite her in person.

Out of habit, I checked the peephole in the front door. I stepped back quickly at the sight: Henley PD homicide detective Virgil Mitchell. From the look on his face, he hadn’t come for a friendly game of poker.

I licked my lips and straightened my sweater, as if the school photographer had arrived for a candid, and opened the door. So far with Virgil I’d exhibited fear and intimidation, then surprise and evasiveness. How should I be on this third visit with my friend the cop?

I opened the door.

“Hey,” I said, still undecided on my persona of the moment, except to give him a weak smile.

“Sophie Saint Germain Knowles,” he said, brushing past me, not waiting for an invitation to sit at the table in the breakfast nook.

How could Virgil have remembered my full name, used by my mother when she was about to chew me out? I doubted it was because he, like my math teacher father, was enamored of my namesake, Sophie Saint Germain, an influential, self-taught French mathematician whose work spanned the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Not only did I doubt it, I knew it wasn’t true.

“You’re channeling my parents?”

A smile broke out on his face, then quickly faded. “I talked to”—he drew quote marks in the air—“‘Noah.’”

“Coffee?” I asked, heading for the stove. The venue was mine this time.

“Sure. While you’re thinking of a response.”

Virgil was frustrated, and rightly so.

I moved Ariana’s cookies from the counter to a spot on the table in front of Virgil, filled my French press with an aromatic blend, then took a seat across from him. The
autumn reds, yellows, and oranges on the placemats, which had seemed so festive lately, now seemed frivolous and unnecessary. I rolled them up and pushed them to the side, leaving bare wood as décor.

“I was going to tell you,” I said.

Virgil breathed a heavy sigh and, before I knew it, tears welled up and spilled down my cheeks. Whether they were for Charlotte or for the loss of my parents or the confused state I was in, I had no idea.

The last thing I wanted was for Virgil to think I was trying to manipulate him with the crying damsel routine. I quickly left the table, went into my hallway bathroom, and pulled myself together with a few tissues and a very deep breath.

I was back in less than three minutes, just in time to prepare the coffee.

“You’ve been holding out on me, Sophie. Why would you do that?” Virgil asked, with no reference to my little setback. “Where’s the old logical, levelheaded Dr. Sophie Knowles, math professor? The one who has a favorite prime number of the month or something like that. Where’d she go?”

“That’s a good question, Virgil.” I almost said, “I’m not myself,” but I’d made enough snarky comments to others who made that claim that I stopped in time. “I just know I want to help somehow.”

Virgil waited until he’d swallowed a large bite of cookie. “That’s not your job. That’s why you pay your taxes, so people like me can get paid to do police work.”

“Calling people Charlotte knew and telling them about what happened didn’t seem like police work. It was a harmless way to do something for my friend.”

“Until you talked to Jeff.”

I nodded, humbled. “When Jeff told me what Charlotte had done, my first reaction was anger that she’d deceived me. But then I guess I felt I needed to protect her good name. I know it was stupid.”

“What it was, was dangerous, Sophie. I can’t tell you
everything, except please step back and try to…” Virgil threw up his hands, for want of a verb.

I poured our coffee and decided to help him out. “Get on with my life.” Another phrase I’d sneered at more than once.

Virgil put his palms up and nodded. “Thank you. You took the words right out of my mouth.”

I sat down. “Did you figure out what the other notes are about?” I asked.

Virgil gave me an exasperated look. He twirled his index finger in the space between us. “What did we just decide here?”

“Even the old, sensible Sophie was a curious citizen, Virgil.”

“Okay, then how about this, citizen Knowles? I’m not at liberty to say.” Now who was calling up clichés? “But I want to make it clear that there are some dangerous, underlying…”

I came to his rescue again. “Criminal elements?” A term from my little-known hobby of watching crime dramas. “Is this about drugs or something?” I didn’t think so, but I wanted to open my mind to allow Virgil to fill it.

Virgil shook his head, not a “no” shake, but a “What am I going to do with you?” shake. “Just trust me, please. You don’t want to get in the middle of this. Mourn your friend as you knew her. And let us do our job.”

“That’s easy for you to say. Your friend wasn’t shot.”

“Where did you get the idea that Ms. Crocker was shot?”

“That’s what was going around on the cell phones at the library. She wasn’t shot?”

Virgil shook his head. “We haven’t released all the details yet. It’s interesting to see what the rumor mill churns up when it has no input.”

All this time—which seemed like weeks and weeks but was only about a day—I hadn’t thought to verify the gunshot rumor. I was annoyed, mostly with myself.

“Can you at least tell me how she died, Virgil?”

“She fell from the ladder that’s attached to the
bookshelves. The one that slides back and forth along the shelves.”

I drew a quick breath. “So it could have been an accident?” Thus, making us all feel safer, I thought.

Virgil looked at me and, to his credit, did not remind me how long he’d been a homicide detective, starting in Boston many years ago. He didn’t play a numbers game and tell me how many crime scenes he’d witnessed, how many cases he’d solved.

“The area showed signs of struggle,” he said. “And so did her body.”

I groaned. “How awful.”

“We think the guy came in while she was alone and wanted something from her. When she wouldn’t give it to him, he tried to force it out of her. She resisted and tried to get away by climbing that movable ladder. It ends at the loft that runs above the bookshelves. She was probably trying to get there.”

I knew it well. “But there are stairs for that purpose. The ladder is just to reach the high shelves in the bookcases.”

“She maybe couldn’t get to the stairs and hoped to climb over the railing from the ladder. All the killer had to do was shake the ladder off its track, and…” Virgil shrugged the rest of the sentence.

It had almost been easier to imagine a clean shot to my friend’s chest. Terrible, but over in a flash. Now I was left with a long scenario of fighting, wounds, bruises, blood, drawn-out fear, and a painful fall. Unless I could curb my imagination. Virgil had said
struggle
, I reminded myself, not
bloodletting
.

Whirrrr. Whirrrr. Whirrrr.

My cell phone ring intruded. Gratefully accepted, to put an end to the scene in my brain. The phone rang and vibrated on my counter, spinning around its center of mass, which I always found a little creepy.

“Bruce,” I said to Virgil.

“You’d better take it. You never know when he’ll get a
connection again. He doesn’t exactly travel in cell tower country. Tell him hello.”

I picked up the phone and clicked on. The motion stopped, as if I’d killed a parasite that lived in my phone.

“Hey,” Bruce said. “You okay?” He sounded far away and high up, but that was probably my imagination at work.

“I’m the one at home with gas, electricity, and central heating, so, yeah, I’m okay.”

“I mean, you know…”

“I’m fine. Virgil’s here and says hi.”

“Virge? Anything wrong?”

“No. Just some routine last questions about…yesterday.”

“Good. I’m glad you have some company. I don’t like the way you sound and I’m kicking myself for leaving.”

“I sent you,” I said.

I also wanted to correct Bruce’s impression of the police visit, inform him that his cop friend had brought more trouble than comfort, but I didn’t like the idea of sending Bruce up a mountain thinking he should have canceled the trip.

“It’s a quick trip,” he said. “We should be up and back without a hitch.”

“How’s Kevin doing?”

“Ready to get started. We’ll hike down in the dark to give him the full experience.”

“So you’ll be at sea level to sleep.”

“In the comfort of a luxury campsite.”

“An oxymoron.”

Bruce laughed. “The guys are waving at me to hurry up. There’s one excruciatingly slow group up there ahead of us. Amateurs. But most everyone else is off the mountain now, so it’s a good time.”

“What do they know that you don’t?”

“I miss you.”

Virgil’s hulking presence cramped my style, limiting
my use of endearments. I resorted to, “Me, too. Are the weather conditions good?”