“Nobody’s touched anything,” she said.
You’re lucky your lying tongue isn’t jumping out of your head and scampering away like a big pink inchworm on speed.
Joe touched Kendall’s throat and shook his head. Then he looked up and studied her. “Good to have someone here who’s spent enough time around cops that we can trust them to take care of things.”
“Yeah.”
“Crime scene secure?”
“Should be. I was here fifteen seconds after the volunteer who found the body screamed. I checked him for a pulse, like you just did. Then I had a nurse check him and sent everybody to the other side and told them to wait for you. The volunteer who found the body is over there, waiting at the front desk. Figured you’d want to start with her.”
“Good.” He took his hand away from Kendall’s throat. “Serenity, it’s good to know that when it comes to something important like this, we can still work together.”
She tried a smile, but it wouldn’t come. “Yeah,” was all she could say.
More blue shirts came in, followed by a man in a suit. Joe turned to them all. “You two, rope off this side of the library. Steve, can you talk to…” He looked at Serenity.
“Ms. Hellier.”
“Ms. Hellier at the front desk. She found the body.” He nodded at another blue shirt. “Can you get names and contact info for everybody who was in the library at the time?”
They all nodded and walked off.
Joe pulled out his notepad and turned back to Serenity.
“Okay, what do you know about this?”
“Not much more than you,” she said. “You met this guy about the same time I did, and you seemed to know more about him than I did. He came in this morning, said he worked for Bentley, and demanded to see a copy of our books. I printed him one and parked him here. When I left him here twenty minutes ago, he was going over them and making notes.”
“Bentley had him auditing your books?” He looked at her evenly. “You don’t see many requests to audit the books of a library.” He paused. “You don’t see many murders in a library, either.”
He waited. When she didn’t say anything, he said. “Fortunately, we’ve got two experts here. You know everything there is to know about libraries—particularly this one. And I know how to catch killers.”
“Lucky us,” she said.
“Anybody besides you talk to him?”
“I know he talked to Seth Burroughs, the contractor outside. And he talked to Joy a little.” She paused. “Nobody else I can think of.”
Serenity gave her formal statement to one of the blue suits and then wandered around the still-open side of the library, randomly shelving books and trying to listen in on as many statements as she could. No one had seen the murder.
She found Joy sitting alone at the checkout counter. “What have you heard?”
Joy looked bored, “Nothing worth repeating. Somebody saw Kendall sitting up reading the report. Then Hellier saw Kendall slumped down. Couldn’t get a pulse, and screamed.”
“Nothing else?” Serenity took a breath. “No reports of a tall, skinny, young, black librarian stabbing anyone?”
Joy lost her boredom and studied her boss. “C’mon. You don’t think our excitable girl did this?”
Serenity looked back at her for a long second and then said, “Of course not. Just a joke. You know Doom and all her by-any-means-necessary crap.”
They both looked at each other for another long second before they said in unison. “Of course not.”
“I just wondered how Doom seemed when you told her to high-tail it out of here,” Serenity said.
Joy hesitated a beat. “Let’s get this straight,” she said. “From this moment on, I don’t remember telling her to do any such thing. And you don’t remember telling me to get her out of here. She was gone before the first scream.”
“Yeah.”
“But, just so you know, if I had actually gone looking for her, I might have found her with her head down in an adult coloring book, coloring furiously like she does when she’s mad. And if I had told her you said to get out, she might have flown out the door like a bat out of hell, without even bothering to argue about it.”
“Shit,” said Serenity. “I’m going to my office. I’ve got to think.”
Joy started to stand up. For her that was a complicated, multi-part exercise of arms unfolding in slow motion, back shoved out of the chair and into the air, with her head raised last and slowest, accompanied by stage-voiced grunts and curses. When her head was finally solidly atop her body, she gave what passed for a smile and said, “Might come with you. I need some of that thinking juice of yours.”
“Not this time,” Serenity said. “We don’t need to be drinking now, and we don’t need to talk to the cops with rum on our breath. I’m just going to sit at my desk and stare at the wall and try to make some sense of all this.”
Joy gave her a nasty look that clearly said, “I stood up for nothing” and collapsed back into her chair.
“Fine,” she said.
“But come find me if you hear anything.”
Joy looked at her like she’d asked her to run a marathon. “Yeah. I’ll do that.”
As Serenity went to her office, the faces of her patrons all seemed to be begging for answers she didn’t have. She felt like she needed to give them a reassuring smile, but all she could do was look away without letting anyone make eye contact. She still had her eyes high when she closed her door behind her, leaned back against it, and sighed.
As the sigh finished, she saw the woman sitting in her chair smiling weakly at her. Two very polite children were sitting in her visitor chairs, noses buried in books, pretending that they weren’t sitting in a strange office and a strange woman hadn’t just walked in.
“Oh,” said Serenity. She now remembered sending them to her office but somehow didn’t expect them to, you know, actually be there.
She put on a warm, non-threatening smile as she remembered why they were there.
“I hope you’ve been all right,” she said.
“Thanks to you. Thank you so much for letting us use your office and for keeping the children out of the madhouse out there.”
“Certainly. And what wonderfully well-behaved children they are.” She smiled at them but the children didn’t look up.
The two women smiled at each other for a second.
“So,” said Serenity, “has anyone disturbed you?”
“No. I don’t think they even know we’re here.”
“No reason for them to care. Not like you have any real information for them.”
“No. My children and I didn’t actually see the… unpleasantness.”
“No.”
“Really, we’d just as soon be left out of this.”
“Of course,” said Serenity. “For the children. So, no one’s asked you for your name or anything?”
“Nothing.”
“Where are you parked?”
“Around to the side. Away from the construction.”
And away from the police cars, thought Serenity.
“Why don’t I show you the back door? We can avoid the unpleasantness.”
“Thank you so much.”
“My pleasure.”
After she closed the back door behind them, Serenity walked to the murder side of the library and wondered if that was how she would always think of that side. Joe was talking to the medical examiner. They stood front of a long black body bag lying on a gurney while two techs waited for permission to take the body away. Joe saw Serenity, nodded a curt goodbye to the ME, and the gurney was wheeled out. Joe came over to her.
“This is your fault,” he said.
She caught her breath. “No, I…”
He smiled a small smile. “Since when do you allow people to come into your library with an ice pick?”