“Good work, Lieutenant. You’re absolutely right. Thanks for checking. Tell the officer on the scene to impound that vehicle and have it taken into the garage to be searched. Nobody’s to touch it until after the crime lab team goes over it, you got that?”
“Got it,” Congdon replied.
“And thanks,” I told him.
“Sure thing,” the lieutenant replied. “Always glad to help out.”
“How long do you think it’ll take to bring it in?”
“About half an hour or so. Not too long.”
“Good,” I told him, glancing at my watch. “I’ll be there by then, too.”
I hurried in and out of the shower and was one leg into the process of putting on my pants when the phone rang again. This time it was Ron Peters.
“Your calling me early in the morning like this seems just like old times,” I said, holding the phone pressed to my ear with one shoulder while I used both hands to zip up my pants and fasten my belt. “What’s happening?”
“Tell me everything you know about the bomb threats,” he said quietly.
I didn’t like the dangerously calm way he spoke, and it wasn’t a request so much as it was a direct challenge.
“Look, I thought we went over all that last night. Captain Harden told you to back off. That strikes me like very good advice.”
“I’m not interested in well-meaning advice, Beau, not from Harden and not from you. And I’m not backing off, either. I’m a cop, Beau, a cop who’s sworn to uphold the law. Bomb threats to public property aren’t something that ought to be swept under the rug, but in this case, not only are we not supposed to investigate it, the public isn’t supposed to know about it either. I won’t work that way.”
“But…”
“No buts, Beau. With just the few phone calls I made yesterday before Harden chewed my ass, I found out that somebody across the street is behind this thing, someone very close to the top in city government. I want to find out who that person is and what they’re up to. If somebody in this department’s in on it, if they’re dirty, too, then I want to know about that as well. I don’t like crooked cops, and I particularly don’t like crooked cops who work for crooked politicians.”
“What about Harden?”
“You mean about him ordering me to lay off? I won’t do anything about the bomb threats during my shift, but nobody tells me what I can and can’t do during my off hours. So tell me what you know, or I’ll have to track it down myself. That might create some real waves.”
And so I told him, because, God help me, I felt exactly the same way he did. During the next ten minutes, I recapped for Peters everything I had learned from Dr. Kenneth Savage and from Doris Walker as well, including all the details I could recall from Sparky Cummings’ off-limits file.
“Do you still think this has something to do with your two homicides?” Peters asked when I finished.
“I can’t say. Maybe the only real connection is that the security guard who was killed wouldn’t have been at the school district office if it hadn’t been for the bomb threats back in September. Whether or not the bomb threats have anything directly to do with his death still remains to be seen.”
“But you don’t have any specific evidence that links the two?”
I laughed. “The only thing linking them so far is pure old J.P. Beaumont cussedness.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Peters replied with a chuckle of his own. “I’d better get going.”
“Don’t stick your neck out too far, Ron,” I cautioned. “You’ve already had it broken once.”
“I noticed. Believe me, I’ll be careful.”
By the time I got off the phone with Peters, my half hour of travel time was almost gone. I was still too damn stubborn to want to bring my shiny 928 out of hiding to take its chances of being smashed to pieces on icy streets. Instead, I ran a full block and a half and crossed against a DON’T WALK light to catch up with a bus. Phone call and bus notwithstanding, I still beat the tow truck to the garage by several minutes.
I tagged along after the driver while he unhitched the crunched remains of the Volvo, dogging at his heels and asking questions.
“Was it locked?” I asked.
“What, this Volvo? Hell no, it wasn’t locked. Somebody from an apartment building around there said it had been parked there ever since the storm came through on Sunday night. Funny, ain’t it,” he added with a bucktoothed grin. “Just goes to show some people don’t even think these here hummers are good enough to steal. I don’t like ‘em much myself.”
Peering in through the windows after he left, I caught sight of a piece of yellow paper protruding from under the plastic seat belt clip on the driver’s side. It looked like another one of those Post-it telephone messages. I was eager to read it. Whatever was written there might very well contain information that would point us in the right direction.
But I had to wait, because nobody, including me, was allowed to touch the vehicle until after the crime-scene technicians did. Eventually the techs showed up, and I paced the floor impatiently while they methodically went through their interminable preliminary procedures. Forty-five long minutes later, they finally let me have a look-look but don’t touch-at the piece of wrinkled yellow paper.
Whoever had driven the car last had sat on the note, probably without even being aware it was there. The paper was crushed and wrinkled, the pencil marks smudged. The message on it hadn’t been written so much as scrawled in obvious haste.
“Mar,” it said. “Somebody’s been talking to Pete. I don’t know who. Be careful. A.”
I knew who Mar was. That had to be Marcia Louise Kelsey. And I knew who Pete was too. So who was A? Alvin Chambers? But then I realized there was one other possibility as well, one other A name in the equation-Andrea Stovall, the lady from the teachers’ union with an unauthorized set of keys to the school district office.
A flurry of questions eddied through my mind. I remembered Andrea Stovall’s obvious discomfort when we asked her about her unsuccessful attempt to see Marcia Kelsey the night of the murder. And I remembered the way she had bolted from the room, using her meeting as an excuse when, as a friend of the victim, she would logically have wanted to help us.
I stood there in the garage for some time, thinking about the message itself and what it meant. According to Pete, Marcia’s romantic escapades were a known quantity to him and had been for years, so what was it that someone had told Pete Kelsey in only the past few days that he hadn’t known before? What was it that had been damaging enough to set him off? And who was doing the talking?
I remembered Andrea Stovall telling us that the reason she went to the school district office was that she was afraid, afraid for Marcia Kelsey’s safety and well-being. Since she hadn’t found Marcia in the building, she could have placed the note on the windshield, but that meant whoever had driven the car away from the office, presumably the killer, had also seen the note. If it was Pete, why hadn’t he gotten rid of such a potentially damaging item?
My instinct about the importance of the paper in the car had been right, but now the problem was finding out who had authored it. Alvin Chambers was dead, so getting a sample of his handwriting wouldn’t be too difficult. If, however, Andrea Stovall had written the note, I would have to be somewhat less direct.
I was already fully convinced Andrea Stovall was concealing something important about that night, something she hadn’t wanted to tell us. It was high time we asked her about that, and this time no urgent summons to some lightweight meeting was going to keep her from answering my questions.