Murderous Passions E-Book

B.R. Stateham

• Herausgeber: Next Chapter
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

Working on multiple cases at the same time, homicide detectives Turner Hahn and Frank Morales have their plates full of problems.

Turner is a man with an unnerving resemblance to a 30’s movie matinee idol. He has the same jet-black hair, the same wiry, sardonic grin permanently creasing his lips, and the same deep dimples creasing his face. He's rich, he's smart, and he has a cool car.

Frank is a genetic freak. Big, with no apparent neck to speak of, he has bright carrot-colored red hair pulled back into a man bun and a thick mustache of the same color. Hidden beneath the surface is an eidetic memory that forgets nothing, and the same dry, sardonic wit that his partner has.

Whenever a tough case comes along, the higher-ups dump it into the laps of Turner and Frank. The cases nobody want to touch are the ones these two are best in solving. And they do it with a style all their own.

Leseprobe

MURDEROUS PASSIONS

TURNER HAHN AND FRANK MORALES CRIME MYSTERIES BOOK 1

B.R. STATEHAM

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

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About the Author

Copyright (C) 2021 B.R. Stateham

Layout design and Copyright (C) 2021 by Next Chapter

Published 2021 by Next Chapter

Edited by Fading Street Services

Cover art by CoverMint

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the author’s permission.

CHAPTERONE

Murder is such an up-close and personal venue.

Especially if the weapon of choice is a garrote made with piano wire. The C-string. With wood handles carved with a craftsman’s precision to fit the end of the wires for a firm, deadly grip.

Yes. A garrote is a very intimate form of death. It requires strength. Perseverance. Patience. It’s not like shooting someone with a 9mm. Stand ten feet away. Aim at the chest. Pull the trigger and then walk away. The garrote is not mundane and pedestrian. To kill with a garrote means you must stand close to your victim. As close as two bodies intertwined in a lover’s embrace. You must stand close enough to feel the victim’s body heat. Smell the victim’s fear. Taste the victim’s blood.

It’s messy.

The victim doesn’t die by strangulation so much as by drowning. If the proper technique is used the carotid artery is severed. Blood spurts everywhere. The victim drowns in his own blood. A macabre sense of retribution. Dying by drowning in your own blood.

Yes. Garroting is very personal. Someone choosing this method meant the killer wanted to enjoy the act of snuffing someone’s life out. Like a wine connoisseur wanting to savor every passing second of a rare wine.

The victim was Dr. Walter Holdridge. The Walter Holdridge. Nobel prize winner in Physics and for the last dozen years the academic catch for our own Anderson University. The victim lay sprawled across a computer terminal in the basement of the campus’ Computer Sciences building. Very dead. Very messy. And promising to be a case which would bring an overwhelming amount of bad publicity to the university. Publicity of the unwanted kind.

Anderson University is a synonym for ‘money.’ It’s in the dictionary. Look it up in Webster’s and the number three definition will say, “Anderson University–and lots of it.” The campus is six blocks of downtown prime real estate. Sculptured lawns, big platters of well-manicured flower beds, and red brick buildings of various architectural styles which somehow blend together describes the school. It has ten thousand students, and each student is in the top three percent in the nation. Smart kids. Rich kids. Money and lots of smarts.

For a cop that’s a bad combination.

The tiny room the victim claimed as his own was all white. White walls. White ceiling. White tiles for floors. The only thing not white in the room was the black vinyl office chair, two small black chairs sitting against one wall, the CRT screen, and the keyboard. There was also the professor’s scruffy-looking leather briefcase lying on one of the chairs. A big thing, looking as old as the professor himself, heavy and locked tightly shut. Everything else was pure white. Add in the fluorescent lights in the ceiling and one could easily get the impression of the movie character HAL in the movie, 2001.

Disregarding extraneous oddities out of my head, I concentrated taking in the crime scene. The professor’s dark blood contrasted sharply with the white. Reminding me, gruesomely, of a surreal painting by a moribund Picasso or de Kooning.

Ah! Murder as an art form! The ultimate sacrifice to create the ultimate piece of art. A thin crease in my lips told me I was grinning. Sometimes I have very bizarre thoughts. And my sense of humor needs working on as well.

The price you pay, I suspected, for working in Homicide too long.

Behind me I heard my partner, Frank Morales, step into the room and grunt in curiosity. Turning, I nodded, and he looked at me and shrugged.

“Must have been a bleeder.” Frank grunted, shoving hands into his pockets.

“Yeah, must have,” I nodded, my eyes returning to the body. “Who called in the report?”

“Campus security. The prof’s student-assistant came down here and found him. Dispatch sent Gonzales and Charles over in a black-and-white to take the initial squawk.”

Officers Alonzo Gonzales and Tubby Charles were two beat officers whose beat would include the campus. Good men. Good beat cops who preferred remaining beat cops.

“Where are they now?”

“Upstairs interviewing anyone who was in the building at the time the body was discovered.”

I nodded, frowned, and looked at the blood again.

“Lots of blood.”

“Yeah, a hell of a lot of blood,” Frank repeated softly, nodding. “Garroting someone is messy. But this. This is really messy.”

“The prof put up a heck of a fight. Maybe some of this belongs to the killer. When are the lab boys due?”

“Any time now.”

I nodded.

“Okay, find the security guys who found the body, and the ones who were on duty during the approximate time of the murder if there was a shift change. Interview everyone.”

Frank turned on a heel and left. I frowned and glanced at my watch. Technically the lab boys are supposed to come in and do their thing before the investigating detectives begin poking around. Technically. They weren’t here yet, so what was I supposed to do? Frowning, I turned and stepped out into the hall directly in front of the room.

The hall was an exact copy of the room. All white. White ceiling, white walls, white tile floors. Fluorescent lighting. I read somewhere about polar explorers worried about walking into a situation where everything turned white, leaving no way to ascertain a horizon or any sense of direction. Snow blindness they called it. I could understand the worry. I felt a slight sense of vertigo. Welding goggles came to mind. Something to cut down the glare of everything white.

The hall was one side of the basement. It was wide, empty, and ran past nine other rooms exactly like that of the crime scene. To my right and to my left the hall ran maybe one hundred feet in each direction. Staring in one direction and then the other, I found it most curious. All that blood in the room behind me. Lots of blood which covered both the victim and had to cover the killer as well, yet the pristine white halls were spotless. Not even a shoe scuff mark could be seen decorating the white tile. Either our killer was damned lucky in getting nothing on him. Or he was damn fastidious. Pulling on my ear thoughtfully I turned and reentered the room.

I searched the man’s pockets. I know I should have waited for the crime team to arrive first. Although, I didn’t and hurriedly, but efficiently, searched the corpse. Keys, wallet, change in his pockets, a second set of keys on a single key ring, and two pens and a mechanical pencil comprised the man’s possessions. His wallet had three credit cards and fifty bucks in cash in it. There was a driver’s license, a university medical card, a couple of phone numbers hurriedly written on two pieces of paper and folded in half before being inserted into the wallet. There were two library cards. One for the campus library and one for the city’s. What was not in the billfold was any kind of a photo. No wife, no kids, no precocious grandchildren. Nothing. As I carefully put everything back into the billfold and inserted it back into the man’s rear trousers pocket, I found myself wondering what that meant. No photos.

Although, I did find one curious item. A torn paper, ripped from a memo pad, with the words “Gamma-ray outbursts!!!!!” scribbled across it. Written so fast it was barely discernable. With five exclamation points. Folded in half, it was in the man’s upper left hand shirt pocket. It appeared like something one might find in a physicist’s pocket. However, there was something in the way it was so hurriedly scribbled which made me curious as I folded it and slipped it back into the pocket.

There were bruises around the man’s mouth and jaw. The man’s well-manicured fingernails looked messy. Meaning, with luck, there might be some skin material of his killer there. Only a good going over in the morgue would tell me that. Coming to my feet, I turned and decided to take a good look at the briefcase.

It was a big clunker of a leather briefcase. Engraved into the metal latch were the letters WH. The leather handle was sweat stained from years of toting things around in it. Where it opened, the leather was worn and grooved. Old, worn, but still serviceable. Like an old friend who should retire but can’t because he would be missed too much. Nevertheless, the clasp showed no markings of someone trying to open it. Gently lifting it with a finger it weighed enough to make do for a temporary anchor for the Queen Mary.

Frowning, I stepped back to the cubicle’s single entrance and looked the scene over again. We had a murder of a physics professor, a professor in a small, private, and I should say very expensive, college who prided itself on its academic reputation of elusiveness in its selection of students. First glance suggested it was not a murder by impulse. No thief suddenly caught in the act of burglary turning and killing his discoverer here. The garrote, a weapon of intimacy, suggested premeditation. To use a garrote, one had to be willing to take a chance, a chance of his would-be victim being more ferocious in his defending himself. And taking the chance of being caught in the act itself. This grisly picture before me looked more like an execution. Someone really disliked the idea of the good professor taking one more unnecessary breath on this planet.

I stepped out of the room, and looking down the white hall, saw the lab boys lugging in their gear herding down the hall, and behind them, Frank strolling down the hall with a scowl on his face. Nodding and waving the tech boys into the room I waited for Frank to pull up beside me and tell me what, or who, had just rained on his parade.

“Christ, this is going to be a bitch, Turn. A royal bitch.”

“How so?”

“Finished talking to the security guards. Get this. In order to get down here you have to have an identification card. It’s a magnetized card which directly connects into the campus’ mainframe. It recognizes your number and then unlocks the door to let you in. Except, you don’t automatically get in. After the computer scans the card you then have to have your thumb print scanned.”

“That’s a lot of security for a computer research area like this. What’s down here so important?”

Frank’s scowl darkened as he nodded in agreement.

“Apparently the research computer they’ve got down here is very fast, very experimental, and very expensive. The Air Force is interested in it, and they have a couple of research grants being worked on here. So, they added a third layer of security to monitor anyone coming or going. At each end of the hall there is a guard assigned to monitor those who come and go. Anyone who wants in has to scan his card, scan his thumb print, and then sign his name in a logbook, indicating the time he entered and the time he left.”

“So, we should know who was in the basement at the time of the professor’s death, right? We find out approximate time of death, then we check the logbook and computer logs, and we have our killer.”

A wicked little grin spread across the thin lips of my pasta-loving partner. Frank had this twisted sense of humor I found amusing. He loved to irritate others. He enjoyed portraying himself as a thick-headed, stupid cop who wore badly fitting cheap suits. Furthermore, he would surprise everyone by saying something or doing something which was astonishingly brilliant. He hated to investigate cases which contained any form of a puzzle in it. An incongruity, if you ask me because of his high I.Q. yet he loved to torment me by adding layers upon layers of additional complexity to an already complex case. The little twist of his lips on his cement-block head told me another little wrinkle was coming.

“Oh, but you’re gonna love this, Turn. Ready? From 2 p.m. to 5:40 p.m. the only person in here is the victim. His student-assistant comes in at 5:40 to see if he needs anything before she goes back to the dorm. That’s when she found him.”

“Well, before the professor arrives. Anyone check in but not check out?”

“Nope. The two security officers covering this area swear the students who came in before two were gone by the time the stiff arrives. When the professor comes swinging down the steps with his briefcase, something he did like clockwork every day, he was alone. No one was down here, except for security, during that time.”

There it was. A genuine, honest-to-God puzzle. Someone knows the professor’s habits and knows he comes down here to do work precisely at two. Either the killer is down here waiting for the professor, and somehow knows he is going to be in that given cubicle and no other, or he somehow has a way to bypass all the layers of security and enters unseen. Or there was, possibly, a third alternative.

“Yeah, don’t say it,” Frank grunted, frowning, and shaking his head no. “It could be one of the security officers. I thought of that too. No joy there, chum. My hunch is both are squeaky clean boy scouts and ex-marines. If it were one of them it’d have to be one hell of a reason. Except, I doubt that’s gonna pan out. So, my bucko, you have one hell of a case in front of you! Moreover, I am sooooo glad you have it, and I don’t.”

I smiled, sighed, and shrugged. Glancing at my watch I noticed it was almost seven pm. I had hopes of going down to where I kept my cars stored and working on the Road Runner for an hour or two tonight. That wasn’t going to happen. We still had the initial investigation to do. Hours of assembling the sometimes fabricated pieces of the puzzle and doing it by the numbers in a procedure every working cop knows inside and out. We’d be lucky if we rolled into our beds by midnight.

“No surveillance cameras?”

“Nope. To be installed next week.”

I nodded, wondering if this too was planned or if it was just a dumb stroke of luck for the killer.

“Who’s the student-assistant?”

Frank looked down at the small spiral notebook he used to jot down everything, flipped a couple of pages, and found the name.

“A graduate student by the name of Alicia Addams,” he said, looking up and grinning even more insidiously. “She’s upstairs in the professor’s office waiting to be interviewed. I thought you might want that one. You know … playing the brilliant young Shylock of a detective and interviewing the pretty young damsel in distress.”

I grinned and patted the hulking giant of a man on the shoulder as I stepped around him.

“That’s Sherlock, bub. Not Shylock. So, why don’t you go talk to the security guys again. See if they can give you more about our victim and about anyone who might want to see a physics professor dead.”

The computer lab in the basement was only half of the basement. Also down there were a series of chemistry, biology, and physics laboratories. The building we were in was called Ames Hall. It housed the departments of Biology, Chemistry, and Physics. Four floors up from the basement was the floor where most of the professors had their offices. Stepping off the elevator I found Dr. Holdridge’s office quickly enough. I followed the sounds of someone sobbing, and between her sobs, blowing her nose into a wad of tissues.

“Alicia Addams?”

“Yes … yes, I’m Alicia.”

Surprise. I had this impression female grad students in physics had to look like some Russian female mud wrestler. Foolish me. Alicia Addams was in her twenties, with long brown hair, green eyes, and long, finely chiseled gams. Her face was not pretty. Nevertheless, it wasn’t ugly. However, save for her legs, she was wearing a one-piece blue dress, her legs were crossed as she sat in a chair in front of the dead stiff’s desk. They were long and nice to look at. Very nice.

Her eyes were red, and her face was puffy from a long jag of crying. The wad of Kleenex in her hands looked like shredded mush. On the corner of the desk, and just out of reach, was a freshly opened box. Stepping into the closet-room sized office I reached for the box and handed it to her.

“Detective Sergeant Turner Hahn, Southside Division. I need to ask you a few questions.”

“Yes, I know. The two officers in uniform told me you would want to talk to me.”

I nodded and glanced at the office. It looked like what you might expect a Physics professor’s office should look like. Books everywhere. The wall immediately behind the desk was nothing but books from ceiling to carpeted floor and a small computer desk with a very large CRT screen. The interior wall was bare except for a set of photos of a living Dr. Holdridge standing either besides, or shaking hands with, a number of distinguished-looking men. The exterior wall had a long and narrow slit of a window which looked down on the campus commons below. The last wall was more photos.

I was impressed with the man’s desk. It had the look of precision to it. Mostly bare, with the few papers on it stacked in a neat stack, yet what caught my eye were the three pens placed with unerring accuracy directly onto the middle of the desk’s surface. They were precisely aligned. Looking at them, the word ‘perfectionist’ crossed my mind.

“You were the professor’s student-assistant?”

“Yes. For two years now. I’m working on my master’s degree in physics and chemistry.”

“When did you see the professor last? That is, before you found him in the lab below.”

“Oh, let me see …” she sighed, sniffling, and staring up at the ceiling for a moment or two to think. “This morning around ten, I think. He was here in the office working, and I just popped in to ask if he needed anything.”

“Okay, how did he look and sound?”

“He was upset. Really angry. He told me he didn’t want to be bothered until later this afternoon when he went down to work on the computer. Really, I’d have to say, it was just another normal day.”

“Normal? An upset professor is normal?”

A whiff of a smile momentarily played on the girl’s lips before disappearing. Tears welled up and she hurriedly pulled out of the Kleenex box a dozen or more and buried her face in them for a short jag of crying. It ended with her blowing her nose loudly before she looked up at me.

“That was Dr. Holdridge, Detective. He was always mad at someone. He was a great teacher and a brilliant mind. I have never heard anyone explain Quantum Mechanics so clearly like he could. Except, he was … he was … hard to get along with. He was tough. Tough and abrasive. He made a lot of demands on his students and on his peers. He often said he could not tolerate fools and he thought humanity in general were fools of the first order.”

Ah. A perfectionist and egotist.

“So, who had angered him this time?”

“Oh, that’s simple. The head of the department, Dr. Murphy. Lots of his peers angered the professor. Although, Dr. Murphy was special. He would usually become livid if he got into a row with her.”

“Dr. Holdridge was not the department head?”

“Oh, no. No way. He wanted to be. He campaigned for it. Plus, he made no effort to conceal his ire at being superseded by a woman as chair. Furthermore, there was no way Dr. Holdridge would ever become the Physics department head. He was just too … too severe. He could make the most brilliant of his students feel like a stuttering idiot when he dressed them down. He could have the entire faculty on the verge of mutiny with some of his biting commentary. To be a department head, especially the department head in physics, you must be something of a skilled diplomat and politician. You must schmooze with the alumni and with big-time business leaders. To be a top-drawer department you need lots of people and lots of corporations donating huge sums of money. You have to be a colleague with your peers. I am afraid Dr. Holdridge was not that kind of personality.”

The personality of the late Doctor Walter Holdridge sounded like that of a Rottweiler with rabies. That kind of personality guaranteed the creation of a lot of enemies. The question was, was the killer on the campus? Or were there more out there we hadn’t heard about?

“So, who else on the faculty could yank the professor’s chain?”

Again, that whiff of a smile played across the plain, yet attractive, face of the student. For a brief moment a small flicker of humor lit her green eyes, making her even more attractive. I wondered if this smiling girl, this feminine geek, might also have a motive for murder.

“Oh, goodness. Everyone, at one time or the other, yanked the professor’s chain, Detective. Just get a campus directory and go down the list. That would include the janitors for this building and the gardeners, the electricians, the plumbers. Everyone.”

I sighed and sat down in one of the small chairs beside the desk and directly opposite the child. Funny, here she was in her twenties, and not bad looking, and I was a single male barely in my forties. Nevertheless, somehow, I was thinking of her as if she was a child. A kid. Someone barely out of puberty. I was looking at her more like a father might look at his daughter.

Frankly, I didn’t like the thought. Although women and I was like mixing nitroglycerin and gasoline together, and any relationship with a woman, including my brief marriage, usually fell apart with a sudden finality to it, nevertheless I still liked to gaze upon a good-looking woman. I thought there might be a chance I might find a girlfriend. One who actually found me both attractive and interesting. One I could actually tolerate and appreciate.

Hell, it was a thought. A hope. Everyone must have a measure of hope in their souls.

“Who else on the faculty could repeatedly anger the professor?”

“Hmmm, let me see,” she began, furrowing her eyebrows and thinking for a moment before answering. “There’s Dr. Armand Peltier. He’s head of the Chemistry department. His office is next door. Dr. Peltier is very good at agitating the professor.”

“And then there’s Dr. Hodgeskins. He’s one of the professors in the Archeology department. There’s no love lost between there. Between those three, Dr. Murphy, Dr. Peltier, and Dr. Hodgeskins, that would be the list.”

I nodded.

“Tell me about this afternoon. Was it usual for the professor to be in the basement at that time of the day?”

“Yes. Every day. You could use the professor to set your watch. Every day exactly at the same time.”

“You usually checked in to see how he was doing?”

“Every day,” she smiled weakly, more tears flowing down her ruby cheeks, her lower lip beginning to tremble. “Clockwork.”

“It was you who found the body?”

For an answer she broke into a fit of hysterical crying. More Kleenex left the box in one rapid sweep of the hand. I waited in silence for the moment to pass. You learn to be patient as a cop. Especially when you’re investigating a murder.

“Yes, I came in precisely at 4:15. That’s when the professor wanted me to interrupt him. That’s when I … found him like that.”

“What did you do?”

“I … I screamed. Screamed like a silly little girl. It was then I went running to find Ralph.”

“Who’s Ralph?”

“He’s the campus security officer on duty at the south entrance. I say hello to him every day at that time. I found him and we both ran back to see if the professor might still be alive. However, he wasn’t. Ralph told me to follow him. We called the police from the phone down in the basement.”

So. There it was. A dead professor with a piano wire around his neck and an entire university as primary suspects. Swell. I smiled with an appreciation, again, of Frank’s uncanny ability at sniffing out tough cases with the least amount of knowledge and handing it to me with a smirk on his face.

Well, that’s okay. That’s why I’m paid by the city. I’m a cop. Besides, truthfully, I like what I do.

“Thank you, Miss Addams.” I said, coming to my feet and stepping toward the entrance. “We might need to contact you again with more questions later on. Please stay in town until the investigation is done. Here is my card. If you think of anything else don’t hesitate in giving me a call. Okay?”

She reached out and took the card I held in my hand. Her face came up and there was this certain look, a look I was all too familiar with, clearly painted on her face. Shit. Here it comes again.

“Detective, somehow you look familiar. You look like an old movie star. Oh! I’m sorry. I didn’t mean old. Just, your face, seems so familiar to me. Although, I can’t seem to remember the actor’s name.”

Clark Gable. Yes, I know. You must think I am an arrogant sonofabitch with an ego problem of my own if I think I look like Clark Gable. However, that’s a mistake. It’s not an ego problem. It’s genetics. One look at my mug and you can’t help but have the impression a bigger, taller, Clark Gable is standing in front of you. Besides, I don’t like it. It’s a curse.

I’m not Clark Gable. I don’t think I look like the dead actor. Although, others do. The women, for some reason, latch onto it right from the get-go. Maybe you think that’s good. Women being attracted to me. Nevertheless remember; my wife tried to poison me. Twice. At the time we were only married for three months. That should tell you something about my success with women.

I smiled and half turned as I stepped out into the carpeted hall.

“Where might I find this Dr. Murphy?”

“I think she’s downstairs in one of the labs.”

“Thanks,” I said, nodding, and turning away.

No. I’m not Clark Gable. I’m Turner Hahn. Cop. Nothing more and nothing less. Deal with it.

CHAPTERTWO

Where to begin next?

I decided to go find Dr. Karen Murphy. Murphy and Holdridge were in the same department, and it occurred to me that as vindictive and acerbic as the victim could be to his peers, the idea of a woman heading his department in what normally is a man's field of intellectual endeavor, would be a prime source of irritation for both parties.

I found the good doctor deep in the basement of the building, in a laboratory, sitting on a high bar stool peering into a microscope. So, for the second time in this investigation I was surprised at what I found. What I expected was a woman in her sixties, wearing glasses and looking through lenses about the thickness of coke bottles, hair streaked with gray, uncombed and possessing the personality of a Komodo dragon.

What I found was someone quite different in complexion and construction.

Karen Murphy was, maybe, in her late thirties or early forties. She did have patches of gray around her temples, but the shoulder length hair was mostly raven black, combed back behind her head and neatly bundled up into one long ponytail. I watched her sitting on that tall wooden stool. Her white smock was open. I could see the red and green plaid skirt she was wearing. She was also wearing bobby socks, white bobby socks pulled up over her ankles and halfway up her calves, with comfortable looking shoes on petite feet. She wore glasses, but not the thick lens affairs. Her glasses were wire-rimmed, and for now, pushed up on her forehead as she sat curled over the microscope, peering intently at something. She had on a dark maroon pull-over sweater and a quick glance at her left hand told me there was no wedding band.

While I would not call Dr. Karen Murphy beautiful, nevertheless she did not look like a physicist, nor someone strong enough to stand up in front of a curmudgeon like the murder victim and come out an equal in the debate.

“If you've brought the slides I wanted, Thomas, just lay them down on the counter and I'll get to them in a moment or two.”

“Sorry,” I said, closing the door to the lab behind me and grinning, “but I'm afraid I'm here on different business.”

She looked up from her microscope with a quick, violent jerk of her head, sending the black-haired ponytail flying across one shoulder in the process. Dark, violet-blue eyes blinked at me a couple of times after she reached up and dropped her wire-rimmed glasses down off her brow.

“And who are you?”

“Detective Sergeant Turner Hahn, Southside Division. It's about Dr. Holdridge.”

“What about Walter?”

“You haven't heard?”

“I've been down here in this lab since seven this morning, grading final exams. I haven't even been out to eat lunch.”

“I'm sorry to be the one to tell you then, Dr. Murphy. But Dr. Holdridge was murdered on campus sometime this afternoon.”

Violet-blue eyes blinked at me several times from behind the wire-rimmed glasses. There was no change in her facial expression, and even though I am an experienced homicide detective and have over the years seen the full gamut of emotions painted on the faces of the grieved loved ones and the bad guys, no such flood of emotion swept over this woman's face. She merely blinked a few times at me and then slowly twisted around in her chair and faced me directly.

“So, the pig-headed iconoclast finally got himself killed. Wonderful.”

“You don't act surprised,” I said, walking closer to the woman and finding an empty stool to sit on. “Should I be surprised that you're not surprised?”

“Do you know anything about Walter and his warm personality? I'm sorry. I said that sarcastically.”

“Only what little his student-assistant told me.”

“Alicia? Yes, she might know a little about Walter. But I can tell you, Sergeant.”

“Hahn, Turner Hahn.”

“Is Hahn the first name or the last?”

“The last. Just call me Sergeant if you want to be official. Or Turn if you want to be social.”

“What an interesting name. And say, you do look like Clark Gable. But I suppose you hear that three or four times a week, don't you, Sergeant?”

“At least,” I nodded, smiling, as I leaned an elbow on the counter and looked into her face, “but you were telling me about Dr. Holdridge's personality.”

“Right … right.” she said, nodding and smiling. “Oh, Jesus. I suppose I should experience some feeling of loss, or remorse, on hearing of Walter's death. But to be quite honest, Sergeant, I'm not surprised in the least someone finally summoned up enough internal fortitude and killed him.”

“Why?”

“Well, to be honest,” she went on, picking up a pencil and using the eraser to scratch one temple as her violet eyes looked above my head in a thoughtful glance before she went on, “he was a user. He used people and then discarded them when he was finished, much like we use some inanimate object and then get rid of the empties. Sooner or later everyone he was around realized what he was doing to them. But he didn't care what they thought of him. He was a despicable little man.”

“Yes, I get that impression,” I nodded, looking around the lab slowly and then back to the woman. “So, who, in your opinion, had the greatest reason for wanting Dr. Holdridge dead?”

Karen Murphy lifted her head and laughed softly, sadly, shaking her head in the effort. The dark, straight black hair of her ponytail fell luxuriantly from her shoulders. She looked like a teenager in her thirties. Or a woman in her thirties who was living in her past again. She was an attractive woman with a lot of brains and even more chutzpa.

“Everyone. I can't think of anyone who knew him who wouldn't want to kill him. I'm afraid, in your position, Sergeant, you have every faculty member and half of the students enrolled in physics as suspects.”

“When did you see Dr. Holdridge last, Professor?”

“Please, I don't allow my students to call me that. Call me Karen. Now, when did I last see him alive? Oh, I guess that would have been last night. Yes, last night.”

“Could you tell me about it?”

She smiled, got up off the stool and walked around the counter to a small electric burner. Picking up a coffee pot, she found two coffee cups and poured coffee in both before looking at me again.

“Sugar? Cream?”

“Both.”

She nodded, smiling, fixed the coffee, returned to her stool, and handed me my cup. Lifting it I could feel the heat lifting off the black liquid and braced myself. It was hot, thick, and tasted like something one only dreamed about in nightmares. I tried not to make a face, but apparently failed, as an amused look spread across her face.

“I'm sorry about the coffee. I'm a damned good scientist but a sorry cook. I can't boil water without screwing it up.”

I put the cup of liquid glue onto the counter and hoped we all would quietly forget about it and give it a silent burial. But I later smiled, shrugged, and gamely swallowed the scalding liquid as quickly as possible without rolling off the chair and gagging.

“Let me take you to a restaurant some time when you're free and give you the opportunity to taste a good cup of coffee.”

She lowered her cup, holding it in both of her hands, tilted her head to one side, and smiled in a pleased fashion. There was a bright look of pleasure and amusement in her eyes as she looked at me, but she said nothing for a moment or two and continued to sip her coffee.

“About last night?” I said, bringing the discussion back to the murder.

“Oh. Yes, last night. Well, he came by my apartment last night and he was rather upset with me. I'm afraid he was actually very upset with me.”

“Why?”

“I was told he just had dinner with Marvin Sloan, he's the president of the school, and Marvin told Walter he was rejecting Walter's request for a faculty review of my tenure as department head. Walter's been after my job for years, Sergeant. He had this idea he was going to get Marvin to convene a faculty review board and look into my supposed indiscretions.”

“What indiscretions?”