Chapter Eighteen:
Mike Edwards was fat and sassy after two weeks on the Coast, and he wasn’t at all surprised that we hadn’t solved the murders in his absence. He wasn’t surprised by anything as we sat in his office the next afternoon, and he watched with relish as young girls in high boots and tight pants slid past his window. I didn’t have a very good view, so I spent the time grousing about all the students who had known both Peggy and Michelle and still needed to be questioned.
“And I’m swinging to the night shift at the end of the week, and I can’t chase after all those kids by myself, ” I said. “Not in the dark.”
Mike turned reluctantly from the window. “And you want me to give you one of my men — maybe Eddie Corrigan, right?”
My cute little attempt to con him withered. Bradley would have been more his match.
“I read those computer printouts, too, Jo. You’re angling to get Eddie so you can keep an eye on him.”
“So?” I said defiantly.
“So why not just say so? You want Eddie, you can have him. But you’re wasting your time.”
“Because he’s one of your cops?”
“No, because Eddie Corrigan would rather crawl into bed with a dead goat than a giggling young woman.”
I think my jaw dropped. Dave would have been appalled at my lack of sophistication. “Oh,” I said.
“Eddie’s no raving queen,” Mike said gruffly. “He just has his preferences, and they don’t involve anything female. He lives quietly with a friend, and he does his job. You got any problem with that?”
“Not me, Mike,” I said hastily. At least that explained why a relatively young cop was on Mike’s force. A university community would be more tolerant.
Mike glared at me. “I checked him out, Jo. My man didn’t do it.”
I toyed with my purse strap, knowing it would be better to keep my mouth shut, but knowing I had to ask anyway. “It couldn’t be some kind of vengeance kick, could it? A man with a deep hatred of women expressing it by raping and mutilating them?”
Mike took it very calmly. He’d obviously thought it out himself. “Eddie might be capable of killing a woman, but he wouldn’t rape her first. He’d find it as repulsive as I find the thought of sleeping with a man. I can’t prove that, but I know it.”
I stared at my feet and felt very, very tired. “Hell, Mike, every time I get a likely suspect, it falls apart. You’re positive about Eddie Corrigan?”
“I’m wrong, I’ll work your night shift for you.”
I smiled weakly. “That’s a tempting incentive.”
Mike shrugged. “You want to take your best shot at him, go ahead. I’m not worried.”
“I’d still like to use him on the case.”
“And feel him out?”
“So to speak.”
Mike finally grinned. “Isn’t one man enough for you?”
At thirty-four, I still knew how to blush painfully. Mike chuckled heartily and radioed Corrigan to come into the station.
He was an average, nondescript sort of man who would stand out in a crowd only because of his uniform. He was properly pleasant over the introductions and agreeable to the assignment. As Mike had said, there was nothing raving about him. Henry certainly hadn’t picked up on anything when he’d questioned him, and Henry was usually the first to speculate about a man’s manliness. By the time I’d filled Corrigan in on the case, I felt fairly confident about dividing up my list of students with him. He seemed quietly competent, and he was a blessed relief from Henry.
He also offered to check up on the campus doctor.
“Any particular reason?” I asked, mildly surprised. The doctor was way down on my list of suspects.
Corrigan’s response was just as mild. “Nothing but vague talk.”
“Like what?”
Corrigan pulled on his ear lobe, grimacing as he thought. “Too many kids ask to see him. They’ve got four doctors on call at the clinic, but he runs through twice as many patients as the other three. I think he might be too free with his prescriptions, pushing too many pills.”
“Hard stuff?”
“I’m not sure. I just don’t like the feel of it.”
Mike sighed as though he’d gone over this many times before. “If it’s there, it’s not a big operation. We have nothing to nail him with.”
“Yet,” Corrigan said, and smiled broadly.
“Pushing pills isn’t the same as murder,” I reminded him.
He readily agreed. But his smile didn’t fade. “It’s still an excuse to nose around,” he said.
And it was an excuse to move the doctor higher up my list.
* * *
Most of the military records were in, and they weren’t enlightening. Many of the older men we had questioned turned up in one form or another — Darryl Harrington, Al Dexter and Marty Baker in Vietnam; Michelle’s geology professor stateside; the English professor in Europe during World War II; the girls’ fathers in the army; Mike Edwards in Korea….
“Mike Edwards?” I sputtered.
Bradley had the good grace to blush.
“You’ve been listening to Henry,” I said angrily.
“He raised an interesting point,” Bradley said defensively.
“He’s just shooting off his mouth.”
“And sometimes he’s right.”
I slapped Mike’s records onto the desk. “You aren’t taking this seriously, are you?”
Bradley admitted he was just covering his butt. “Which is the only thing this exercise with the military has accomplished.”
I thumbed through the papers again, purposely ignoring the sheet on Dave. “There has to be more than this, Brad. There’s nothing here about Darryl Harrington’s mental problems — or anyone else’s, for that matter.”
“I’m still working on the medical records.”
I shook my head. “We’ve got to have them. This stuff’s no help at all.”
“Nothing seems to be helping,” Bradley said before he disappeared for another session with the chief.
When he was safely out of sight, I pulled out Dave’s records. There was nothing damaging, but nothing very substantial, either. The records could have referred to any of thousa nds of men. There were places and dates, and quite a few medals that he never dispalyed, but little that seemed to have anything to do with the man I knew. I tried to imagine him as a young recruit, with no hair on his face and little on his head, and the image just made me giggle. I tried to picture him on patrol in Vietnam, and the image was not so funny. I could see him all too well, rolling on the muddy, bloody ground, groping for his shattered knee, and the pain scared me. But that wasn’t in his records, either. If Dave was still somewhat of a stranger to me, the young man in the typed report was even more so. There was no life in those records, nothing to unlock the secret places he hid from me.
I scratched my head. Maybe that was the problem with the whole investigation. Maybe we were relying on too many computers and too many official documents to do our digging for us. Maybe it was time to get back to the people and hound the hell out of them.
Kathleen M. Fraze 
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