“Pleasure to meet you.” He finished the talk and walked out through the metal detectors and out the glass front doors. It was a shot in the dark, hoping to connect anything with this murder. Still, something nagged at him as he walked down the concrete ramp leading back to the parking lot.
“Detective!” The voice came from the entrance of the library. A young woman in a denim skirt and white blouse stood holding the door open. “Wait a sec.” The brunette trotted over to him as he turned around, unsure of what this girl wanted. “My name is Emily Meyers. I helped Dr. Borringer every once in a while on some of his projects.”
Trent looked at her questioningly. “Did you talk to any of the other police that came around here?”
“No, sir,” she put her head down. “I was scared to talk to them. I didn’t really have any information that I thought would help them.” A guilty look came over her face. “That is, until I heard you talking to Ms. Darcy a minute ago.”
“Do you know what Dr. Borringer was working on?” Trent quizzed her.
“I can’t be sure. I was just an assistant for him. But I had been working with him the day before he died. He had me doing a lot of hieratic comparisons, very confusing stuff. Dr. B never showed me where he got some of these writings but I know this, whatever he was working on contained a lot of ancient Egyptian, Sumerian, and Old Hebrew.”
“So you weren’t working here for him the night that he died?”
A sad look shadowed her face. “No. Dr. B had told me he was nearly finished and wouldn’t need me that night. I met up with some friends at a coffee shop for a little study session, then went home.”
Morris was a little annoyed. “You felt like you didn’t need to tell the police any of this?”
She raised her eyes from the ground. “I wasn’t here when the cops arrived the first time. But I was working here in the library when that tall, blonde cop came around.”
“Tall, blonde cop?” Recognition of a detective of that description did not immediately come to his mind.
“Yeah, I overheard him asking a lot of the same questions you were asking. I think he said his name was Jurgenson or something like that. He talked kind of funny, real deliberate. I couldn’t tell for certain, but I thought I heard a foreign accent a few times.”
Jurgenson? He’d never heard of that name before and there were certainly not any cops that he knew of with accents, other than southern, working for the department.
“What exactly did this blonde cop ask about?”
“He kept bugging the head librarian about where Dr. Borringer did most of his research, which computer he was using, any mail that he might have sent out that day. Stuff like that.”
“What did she tell him?”
“Not too sure, but it didn’t sound like she really knew too much about what the professor was working on. Jurgenson didn’t seem very happy about her lack of information. He stormed out of the library, slamming a stack of books to the floor as he left.” The girl looked down in thought. “I don’t guess he found anything he was looking for.”
“Do you know what he was looking for?” Something about the girl’s demeanor led him to think she knew more than she was letting on.
She looked up from the sidewalk. “No, not really.”
“What do you know?”
“Only that I think Dr. B was doing this project as a favor to someone over at the IAA. Pretty sure it wasn’t for himself.”
Bingo. “You don’t happen to remember the name of the person at the IAA he was helping, do you?”
She looked around a moment, trying to recall the name. “Seems like it was Thomas…something”.
“Schultz?” He finished the sentence for her.
“Yeah, that’s it,” she said with recognition in her voice.
So there was a connection. “Thank you, Ms. Meyers. You have been very helpful.”
“You’re welcome,” she started to turn around and walk back into the library while he spun in the opposite direction.
“Detective?” She called out again.
“Yes,” he turned around, stopping in his tracks.
“I’m not going to get into any trouble for not talking to that Officer Jurgenson, am I?”
“I’ll take care of it,” he replied walking backwards away from the girl and then turned the corner at a jog.
This story wasn’t making sense, but now he had a connection. Sense could come later. Who was this Jurgenson? Sounded like there was another player involved in this fiasco. For the moment, though, his only thought was to check out the IAA headquarters and see if he could find anything else about Schultz and more importantly, Wyatt.
Chapter 13
Sean Wyatt’s carbon colored Maxima eased into a parking spot in front of the Borringers’ house. He and Allyson got out and looked around; the neighborhood was completely lifeless, save for the stereotypical random dog barking in the distance. Even for a Thursday, it was unusually inactive. Sean supposed the outrageous late night board games would have to wait for the weekend for the suburbanites. It was not a life he’d been interested in pursuing.
Most of his friends from college had made such a life change. The endless parties and sleepless lifestyle had been traded in for minivans with soccer balls on the back window and family nights watching wholesome television. For people who had, at one point, been persuaded to take a spur of the moment trip to the beach, six hours away, spontaneity now represented itself in an all expenses paid venture to the local fast food playground. On nights of true exhilaration, the couple might be allowed a quick visit to the local video store to rent a movie, though, with the advent of Netflix, that “inconvenience” had been remedied, removing the necessity to pack up the car with the kids and go out.
Sean saw some of those people on the rare occasion when they could find a babysitter. They would always pester him with the same questions: “When are you going to settle down? Don’t you want kids? Isn’t it time for you to be getting married?”
His responses had always been to the point and not the least bit sensitive. Though he was not a mean person or in any way cruel, marriage and family was a topic that simply annoyed Sean. He was always quick to point out that if he wanted to go to a movie, he simply looked up the show times online and went. If he wanted to go out for dinner, he just got in his car and drove to whichever restaurant he chose. Freedom, he always explained, was far better than changing diapers or watching those annoying kids’ TV shows.
There was always the same argument, too. “Don’t you want to carry on your name?” they would say. To which he would always assure them that there were plenty of Wyatts in the world to take care of that problem.
He wasn’t a loner, just an island of sorts. Maybe he just hadn’t met the right girl. Among the primary annoyers was his father, constantly nagging about the injustice Sean was doing to his parents by not giving them any grandchildren. This, though bothersome, always made him laugh a little bit. His father’s accusation was that he was too selfish, to which Sean wholeheartedly admitted. Ironically, his dad would always say, “Don’t you want any kids so that when you are older you will have someone to take care of you?”
Sean didn’t feel the need to point out the ironic absurdity in that argument. The conversations always ended with his father not understanding and Sean being content to let the older man remain frustrated. The need to procreate was something the younger Wyatt did not possess or simply ignored.
Now, he stood in the middle of what surely must have been the capital of the nuclear family. It was like an updated version of something out of a 1950s TV show. Allyson interrupted his thoughts. “This the place?” she asked and pointed to a two story ranch style home that stuck out like a sore thumb in the midst of cookie cutter urban development.