"Just luck that you've got a whistling teapot. I'm not entirely sure how to know when it's boiling otherwise." I not only loved Jake's companionship, but also the fact that he never griped about my inability to cook anything more complicated than an English muffin.
"Eight o'clock. I picked up some salmon on my way in last night. I've got a delicious recipe stuck in the back of a cookbook somewhere. That'll keep me busy till you get home."
The doorman helped me hail a taxi and I huddled in the back of it while I tried to explain to the driver, whose Urdu was incomprehensible to me, that Claremont Avenue was a block west of Broadway, near the campus of Columbia University.
A security guard stared at my face to match it to the photograph on my DA's identification card. Grudgingly, he admitted me to the building and I ran up the staircase to Sylvia Foote's office. The usual crusty expression on her face summed up her attitude about my arrival.
"They're not pleased about your coming here today. Neither one of them. But it did stop them from screeching at each other." She slammed her door shut behind us as she pointed me down to President Recantati's suite of rooms.
"What were they arguing about?"
She flashed another sour look at me. "What we're all on a short tether about. Lola Dakota. Nobody wants to be dragged into this mess."
"You're her colleagues and-"
"That doesn't mean that we wanted to be involved with her dirty laundry."
Foote knocked when she reached his office. "Come in."
Recantati had appeared so mild-mannered when Mike and I first met him the day after Lola's death. Now he scowled to see me, as much because of what we had asked him as for the fact that I knew at least one thing about him that he wished to keep a secret.
"Thomas, this is Ms. Cooper, from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office."
"Good afternoon. I'm Thomas Grenier."
The biology professor was slightly built but rather wiry-looking. He had thinning dark hair and glasses that sat tightly on the bridge of his nose. He was no more anxious to shake my hand than was Recantati.
Foote turned to walk out of the room. I had one more question for her, which I wanted both of the men to hear. "Before you go, Sylvia, I was wondering if you had any recent contact with Charlotte Voight?"
"What?"
"A call that she wanted to register for class in the new semester, perhaps? Have any of the faculty or students heard from her, that she's back in town?"
Foote and Recantati exchanged glances. "Not a word. Why do you ask?"
"Her name came up in an interview we did yesterday. I just wondered whether anyone mentioned to you that they had seen her recently."
"I told you I'd let you know if I did. It's almost five o'clock, Alex. If you don't need me here, I'm going home." She pulled the door shut behind her and left the three of us standing in Recantati's office. He asked Grenier to step out into the anteroom while he had a few words alone with me, and I sat in the chair facing his large desk.
"Ms. Cooper, first I'd like to apologize for my walking out on you during our interview the other day. It must have created a terrible impression of me and I'm simply mortified-"
His voice broke off and he stopped talking.
"Nobody enjoys talking to the police, Professor."
"I don't really understand all about DNA and what kind of evidence it leaves behind. Thomas knows a lot more than I do. I learned from talking to him that a person can simply touch things-doorknobs and drinking glasses-and it can leave enough skin cells behind to develop a DNA pattern."
"That's quite true." There was enough genetic material in the skin cells that were sloughed off in just minutes of normal contact that it was becoming possible to solve even nonviolent crimes, like burglary, with the use of this technology.
I tried to put Recantati more at ease. "In England, they use DNA to solve property crimes, like car thefts. Detectives figured out that in order to jump-start a car, the thief usually touches some place on the steering column. So the Brits just wipe that part of the car down once they've recovered it, and put the profile in their computers. They solve cases they never used to be able to any other way. No blood or semen necessary."
He wasn't listening to my evidence-collection lecture. He was trying to find a way to convince me that he had never had a sexual relationship with Lola Dakota. "I don't want to deal with Detective Chapman anymore. But I'd like you to believe me, Ms. Cooper. I was not-I was never involved with Professor Dakota. She was a friend, she was a colleague"-he hesitated before he went on-"and she was also guaranteed to be trouble. I don't look for trouble."
"But you had spent time in her apartment, right? That's why you think we might have something with your DNA on it."
"I, uh-no, never alone. I had been to Lola's apartment, but only for coffee, or when she had a few of us in for cocktails. That's not what I'm concerned about.
"My position here is tentative. I'm just here in the role of acting president. And if I don't get the permanent appointment, then I'd like to be able to go back to my job at Princeton. Without a scandal. They won't take me back if there's any scandal."
"Then, I don't understand your concern." "Ms. Cooper, I saw your Crime Scene Unit men when they came to Lola's office the day after the murder. I don't know what they're capable of determining with DNA, but they were processing the room for fingerprints, too. I've been a nervous wreck, that's why I walked out on you and the detective." "Why? What are you afraid of?"
"The morning after Professor Dakota was killed I, uh-I went into her office. I didn't take anything, I swear to you. But I went in there quite early, before anyone else was in the building." "How did you get in? Why-"
"I'm the president of the college, for the time being. When I asked the janitor to open her door for me, he would never have refused. I… um, I touched everything. I was a bit frantic. And then your policeman noticed that things seemed out of place, and the other men were called in to do all that scientific processing. I've just been beside myself." "But why did you go in?"
He lowered his voice even more and bent his head in the direction of the door. "That's just it. I had been reluctant to tell you until I could talk to Thomas face-to-face. He's just back from the West Coast this morning, on the red-eye." Why was he being so evasive?
"My wife called me from our home in Princeton at about one o'clock in the morning. I'm talking about the night after Lola was killed. She said that Thomas Grenier had called there from California, looking for me. Said he didn't have my number at the apartment in the city, which is just a sublet, so the phone isn't listed in my name. It all sounded so logical, I-I-I…" "What did he tell her?"
"Thomas told her that it was urgent that she get a message to me. That I must get into Lola's office before the police did. That there was something in her desk that would, um, well-that it could prove to be an embarrassment to the college if anyone found it.
"Not illegal. Not anything that would be a crime for me to remove. I would never, never have participated in any such thing. But to avoid a scandal-"
"What kind of scandal?"
"We had several going already, Ms. Cooper. I didn't know what he was referring to at the time. He just told Elena-that's my wife-Grenier told her that he'd explain it all to me when he got back to New York. That I was just to take the envelope and slip it under his door."
"And that's what you did?"
"That's what I tried to do." He shook his head from side to side. "I stayed up half the night worrying about it, then got here at the crack of dawn. Actually, and perhaps this just goes to my own naiveté-or, well, ignorance-it never occurred to me that the police would have any need to come to see Lola's office. I, uh, I've never had anything to do with a murder investigation. When I got that call from Elena, we all assumed that Ivan had killed Lola, and the school would have no reason to be involved."