Chapter Eleven:
The next day, Dan O’Brien’s alibi began to crack. Barb Mason called me early in the morning and asked in a choked little voice to see me — outside the station. Bradley was in a foul mood because the investigation of Darryl Harrington had stalled, and he was threatening us all with vile assignments, so I readily agreed to meet Barb at the student union before her first class. Bradley snarled at me all the way out the door.
Barb was huddled at a corner table, puffing on a cigarette and fingering a cup of coffee. The weeks since Michelle’s murder had not been kind. Her hair was carefully curled, her makeup was smooth and slick, and her clothes showed all the right labels, but her face was too harsh and thin for a nineteen-year-old woman, and even the makeup couldn’t hide all of the shadows under her eyes or the pinched look to her nose. Bright sunlight bounced off the snow and through the plate-glass windows and did cruel things to her face. I wisely sat with my back to the window. My own face couldn’t stand up to such scrutiny.
She smashed out her cigarette and smiled at me weakly. I smiled back and waited.
“I hear you’ve got somebody,” she said.
I sipped on my own cup of coffee and shook my head no.
“No?” she said, and her voice cracked a bit. She reached for another cigarette. “But they say you’ve got somebody.”
“Who says?”
She shrugged nervously. “Oh, everybody. It’s all over campus. You’ve got somebody locked up somewhere. Some nut.”
Jim had been telling me the same thing the night before. He’d heard it in one of his classes. I wondered uncharitably whether one of Mike Edwards’ campus cops had let something slip, or whether Harrington’s friends weren’t as tight-lipped as they had seemed.
“We don’t have anyone locked up,” I said, which was true. We hadn’t locked up a soul. Harrington had locked himself up.
Barb’s face almost crumpled. “You mean you don’t have anyone?”
“Not yet.”
“But why not? My God, it’s been almost three weeks, and you haven’t found anyone?”
“This isn’t television, Barb,” I said patiently. “We don’t wrap it up in sixty minutes, minus commercials.”
“But you’ve got to know. After three weeks, you’ve got to have some idea.”
I nodded. “We have ideas.”
Her eyes sharpened. “What ideas?”
I smiled indulgently. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
Her fingers tightened around the coffee cup. “Why not? Michelle was my roommate. She was killed in my house. I have a right to know.”
“And you will know. When we do — for sure.”
She batted impatiently at the cigarette smoke floating up from the ash tray. “But it’s been so long, and you just don’t know what it’s like — waiting, wondering if he’s out there, watching. My God, what if he’s not finished? What if he’s going to do it again? Who do you trust, Miss Ferris? Who?”
The gears started grinding around in my head. Young women weren’t thinking of faceless killers when they started talking about trust. They trusted only the people they knew. “I don’t think there’s anything for you to fear,” I said carefully.
“Don’t you?” She laughed harshly. “I walk into my own house and find Michelle’s brains splashed all over the walls and you say there’s nothing to fear? It could have been me.”
“Could it?”
“Why not?” she asked haughtily. “He could have broken in while I was there, too.”
“No one broke in, Barb.”
“That’s what you say.”
“That’s what I know.”
Her defiance fizzled, and she sucked morosely on her cigarette. “Don’t you see, that’s worse?” she finally asked. “Someone we know killed Michelle.”
“We?”
“If Michelle knew him, then I know him,” Barb said firmly.
“Not necessarily. You said you thought she was seeing someone, someone she didn’t want you to know about.”
“But why wouldn’t she want me to know? We were best friends. Why would she hide it from me?”
“You knew Michelle. You tell me.”
“This has all been so goddamned awful. You don’t know,” she rattled on, as though I hadn’t spoken. “I don’t dare go out at night. I’m terrified of strangers. I expect everyone on the street to pull out a gun. I suspect totally innocent people!”
I nodded sympathetically.
“You know, I even had these terrible suspicions of Dan? My Dan? We’re living together now — you know that — and the other night I looked at him and I had this horrible thought that even he could have done it, that he could have been the one with Michelle that night.”
“Dan was at a party that night,” I reminded her.
“Oh, sure, I know that. But he did leave for a while.”
I kept my voice nicely bland. “Really?”
“He went out on a beer run. But he’d had so much to drink already that he had to sit in the car to sober up. He said he slept — or passed out. He was out of it for an hour at least, and then he went back to the party, without any beer.”
Barb’s eyes were big and miserable with doubts. I wondered how long she had been torturing herself in this particular hell.
“Do you believe him?” I asked.
“Of course, I believe him,” she said, too quickly.
“Of course,” I agreed.
“But it’s so hideous, don’t you see? Suspecting even your friends while this — this maniac — is running around. You promised me you’d get him and here you tell me you don’t have anyone locked up and how am I supposed to feel? God, what’s safe anymore?”
“Is it likely that Dan would drink so much he’d pass out?” I asked.
“He’s done it before,” she said defensively, then reconsidered as her own words echoed in her head. “I mean, he can party just like any other guy, and sometimes he drinks a little more than he should. He’s not a drunk, you know. He just gets carried away sometimes.”
“Does he have a gun?”
Her eyes widened in shock. “Of course not! My God, what are you saying? I didn’t tell you about Dan because I think he could do something like that to Michelle. I told you just as — as an example.”
A pretty explicit example, I thought. I could see how it had been working on her — an offhand comment by Dan O’Brien, revealing his absence from the party, then the doubts, worming into her subconscious, even as she set up housekeeping with him. Perhaps there were memories, too — memories of Michelle laughing with Dan, talking, teasing, joking around with him. And then there would be questions — ugly little questions about the man Michelle had been seeing secretly, perhaps a brown-haired man with the obligatory mustache of the newly emancipated college student, perhaps her Dan.
Her shock turned to anger, as though I had been the one to find the nasty little tear in her boyfriend’s alibi. She slammed her books together and huffily got to her feet. “This is sick, you know? A good man like Dan and you imply — Jesus, I thought you’d help me.”
“Help you with what?” I asked quietly.
Her knuckles were white as she gripped her books. “Just find the murderer. Get him out of my life. I want to feel safe again.”
“You are safe.”
“Am I?” she choked — and ran.
I watched her flee into the restroom and chewed on my lip as I calculated the odds of getting anything else out of her. Once she powdered her face back together, I’d be the last person she’d want to see. I knew the wretched thoughts crawling through her mind. I was dangerous.
So I went to see Mike Edwards instead.
“You wouldn’t be able to use your clout to get Dan O’Brien’s class schedule, would you?” I asked as I made myself comfortable in his office.
Mike raised a big, bushy eyebrow. “Dan O’Brien? What’s wrong with Darryl Harrington?”
“Nothing,” I said hastily, “except his head.”
“You’re not sold on him?”
“I’m ninety-nine percent certain it’s him.”
“But the other one percent?”
“Wants to see Dan O’Brien.”
Mike scratched his head in mild consternation, then reached abruptly for his phone. It took five minutes of coaxing and stoking various secretaries, but finally one of them punched the right button and a computer spit out Dan’s schedule.
“He’s in a psych class right now — or should be,” Mike said as he hung up the phone. “Two buildings over, in the Main Hall. You up to something official, or just nosing aorund?”
I told him about my talk with Barb Mason.
Mike put his hands behind his head and leaned back in his big chair. It squeaked in protest, but held him. “Well, you gotta check it out, but I suspect you’ll just find a kid embarrassed ’cause he can’t hold his beer — if beer is what they were drinking.”
“You’re awfully cold on Dan O’Brien these days,” I observed. “You thought he looked pretty interesting once.”
“That was before Harrington.”
“What about him?”
Mike frowned at the ceiling. “A vet, Jo. That’s the ticket.”
“Why?”
“Combat. Killing on orders. Does something to a man.”
In the corner of my eye, hanging on the wall with the certificates and plaques and other odds and ends of his career, I could see a picture of Mike — a much skinnier Mike — and some other men in fatigues. “Korea?” I asked, quickly figuring his age.
“Hell hole,” he said as he nodded agreeably. “I’ve been thinking about it ever since Harrington surfaced, and that’s it. Killing in a war where you’re on the right side can wrench at your guts. Killing in a war where you’re the bad guys — we’ve created a whole generation of fucked-up men.”
“There were psychos out there before Vietnam.”
“Yeah, but we taught these boys how to shoot real good — then kicked them in the teeth when they came home. Bad move, Jo. Very bad move. Just make an angry man angrier.”
I thought of the unfriendly eyes that had greeted me the day I’d gone looking for Harrington at the veterans’ lounge, and shivered. “This vets’ group on campus — does it give you any trouble?”
Mike sighed and eased his chair forward. “No trouble. Fact is, I wish they’d give me more trouble. They’re too quiet. I watch ’em.”
“Closely?”
He grinned. “Real close.”
I felt myself blushing for no good reason and hastily stood to leave.
“You watch yourself, Jo,” Mike said from the deep comfort of his chair.
“With Dan O’Brien?” I scoffed. “He’s a pussy cat.”
“That’s not who I meant.”
I didn’t ask him to elaborate. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how he knew about Dave.
* * *
Dan O’Brien was laughing and joking as he walked out of his class. Then he saw me, and his smile became a little sick. I seemed to have that effect on people.
“Oh, God,” he said, “it’s Barb.”
It was a perfectly natural reaction from a man who had dealt with me only in the context of murder, and I duly made note of it as I assured him that Barb was alive and healthy. I didn’t say she was well. Her tortured eyes were far from well. But I imagined he knew that.
His fear turned to relief, then shifted to something a little more guarded. He mumbled about getting to another class.
“I’ll walk with you,” I said, and he grudgingly adjusted his pace to mine. “I’m just double-checking some of the things you told Officer Herchek.”
“Who?” he muttered.
“Officer Herchek,” I said brightly. “The policeman at Barb’s house the night she found Michelle.”
“Oh, him.” Dan shrugged, dismissing the man who had obligingly stood by while he threw up. “I don’t remember telling him much.”
I agreed that he had probably had other things on his mind.
Dan’s face became grim. “She was a nice girl,” he said of Michelle. “She was too nice for what happened to her. Why don’t you get the guy who did it?”
“We’re trying.”
“By walking me to class? That’ll get you nowhere.”
“Got to cover all the bases, Dan. Why don’t you tell me about that party you went to?”
If he’d been a smart-ass college kid back in the days when I was marching in anti-war demonstrations and chanting slogans while the Darryl Harringtons of the world were blowing away strange little people with unpronounceable names, he’d have laughed in my face and told me to go fuck myself. He’d have known his rights. But kids didn’t see things quite the same way anymore. They were more practical about their bread and butter, but they didn’t have the same kind of balls.
So he sullenly put up with my questions. I was glad he wasn’t studying law. “It was just a party,” he said as we slipped outdoors and hunched our shoulders against the wind. “Nothing special.”
“At the Chester Apartments?”‘
He grunted yes.
“When did you get there?”
” ‘Bout nine.”
“And when did you leave?”
“Maybe three or four in the morning. I’m not sure.”
He was following the story he’d given Herchek answer by answer — just a college kid partying his way through another weekend, maybe guzzling a little more than usual because his girl was out of town.
“How many people were there?”
He sighed heavily. “I’ve been through all this before, you know. No one was keeping count. People were in and out all night.”
“Make a guess.”
“Maybe twenty, maybe thirty. What difference does it make? People saw me. They’ll tell you I was there.”
“No one doubts you were there. But you didn’t stay all night.”
He glanced at me swiftly. “Who says?”
“You left for a while.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
We marched along in silence while he chewed on that piece of information. I clenched my teeth to keep them from chattering. It seemed unforgivably weak for a cop to be plagued by the cold while questioning a suspect. His teeth were supposed to be chattering, not mine.
“How’d you know I left?” he persisted.
There were enough doubts mushrooming between him and Barb Mason that I didn’t need to add to them, so I was purposely vague. “We talk to people, Dan. They say you left the party.”
He managed a sheepish grin. “Yeah, but I didn’t get very far.”
“No?”
We scurried up the steps to another building, and he politely held the door for me. Warm air rushed out at us, and the muscles in my jaw relaxed. So did he.
“Look, Miss Ferris, I hadn’t eaten all day and I started drinking a lot of beer too fast. I was supposed to go buy some more, but I never got past the car. I got sick.”
“Sick?”
“Yeah, you know, sick. And then I passed out for a while, in the car.”
“Kind of cold to sleep in a car, wasn’t it?”
He shrugged. “Warmer than today, that’s for sure.”
“So you never really left the property?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Anyone else see you in the car?”
“How would I know? I was out.”
“All night?”
“Naw.” We had stopped outside the door to a lecture hall. Dan glanced at his watch. He still had a few minutes until his class. “I woke up after a while and went back to the party. Started drinking all over again.”
“How long were you gone?”
He wrinkled his forehead in thought. “Maybe an hour, maybe a lilttle more. I wasn’t really keeping track.”
“What time was it when you left for the beer?”
“I don’t know. Couldn’t have been too late, or the stores wouldn’t have been open. Probably eleven or twelve.”
I neatly filed that away in my head and smiled. “Got a gun, Dan?”
His eyes widened. “Jesus Christ, no. Why would I have a gun?”
“Ever shoot one?”
“Went hunting with my dad a couple times with a rifle. That’s all.”
Students were pushing past us to the door. Dan looked at his watch again. “I gotta go, okay? I’ve got this class.”
I let him go. But I stood in the hall, thinking as I watched him squeeze down the aisle and settle into a seat that the timing was right. He could have slipped away that night and killed Michelle, then hustled on back to his party. He could have done it. But I didn’t have the tingle of certainty in my spine that I had when I thought of Darryl Harrington. Dan O’Brien just didn’t feel like my man.
* * *
I was barreling down cold, windswept sidewalks to my car, thinking about dead girls more than is generally considered healthy, and nearly flew right by Al Dexter and Dave. But the cane registered at the last minute, and I stopped and gave them a foolish, breathless hello.
“Got our murderer yet?” Al asked cheerfully as Dave and I cautiously exchanged glances, testing whether it was going to be awkward.
“Working on it,” I assured him, as my brain noted a little shiver between my shoulder blades and dutifully chalked it up to the wind.
Dave looked mildly curious. He also looked hungry. I felt hungry. Damned job.
“I’m disappointed, Detective Ferris,” Al chatted amiably. “I thought you police would have solved it by now.”
I testily went through the same speech I’d given Barb: This wasn’t television; bloody chases and daring rescues were not part of our daily fare; dull, plodding work, not a brilliant flash of inspiration, would make our case, blah, blah, blah. Al listened attentively. Dave poked at the ice with his cane. When I finished, Al gave me an engaging smile. “You aren’t telling us everything.”
I smiled just as engagingly. “Of course not.”
Dave did not smile. “What brings you here?”
“Nothing,” I admitted. “A dead end.”
“Too bad,” Al said smoothly. “If you’re free, we could drag you along to the union for some coffee.”
“Coffee or information?”
The edges of Al’s smile withered. “You’re right, Dave. She is a menace.”
“She doesn’t drive very well, either.”
I made a face meant for Dave, but Al caught it, too. I saw it register in his eyes, but it was too late to take it back. An amused look of comprehension spread across his face. “Maybe just the two of you would like to get some coffee?”
Dave muttered something about a class. I made up an excuse about work. I wasn’t the least bit interested in coffee anyway.
The wind was biting at us, and we said our good-byes. Dave’s eyes were questioning. I answered. Al Dexter took note.
* * *
“You’re a hell of a cop,” Dave observed, not unkindly, as we undressed in the dark. “Whatever you’re thinking is written all over your face.”
“Only some things,” I protested. “Al Dexter has no idea what I was working on.”
“He has a damned good idea who you’re sleeping with.”
“So?” I asked as I wriggled out of my pantyhouse. “Does that bother you?”
Dave tossed his shirt onto the floor. “Not particularly.”
“Besides,” I said as my slip joined his shirt, “at that moment, I wasn’t exactly sleeping with you.”
“You were thinking about it.”
“And you weren’t?”
He chuckled and worked on his belt buckle. “The thought crossed my mind.”
“I see you fought it all day.”
“Most of the day,” he admitted. It was nearly midnight. I’d just about decided that I had misread him when he had finally appeared at the door. There had been no preliminaries. We had gone straight to the bedroom.
He sat on the bed and let me pull off his jeans. He wasn’t all that helpless. He just wanted to sit back and look, and I just wanted to touch. It had been a rather long week.
I ran cool fingers down his legs. He shivered. “It’s cold, woman. Let’s get under the covers.”
I obliged him. And it felt very warm.
* * *
Dave wanted breakfast. I didn’t want to cook it. So we went out and fought the crowds of parents and alumni who had come to town for the football game that weekend and, for the sake of Dave’s leg, commandeered a booth big enough for six people. I smiled sweetly at the families coveting our booth, and Dave smiled sweetly at the waitress, and in short order, we were attacking a breakfast big enough for six people, too.
“You’re gonna get fat,” Dave said pleasantly as he surveyed the ham and eggs and hash browns that the waitress had deposited in front of me.
“No, I’m gonna have a heart attack,” I said, and pointed to the stack of pancakes on his plate. “You’re gonna get fat.”
He grunted and pinched his waist with both hands. “That is not fat, ma’am. That is stored-up energy.”
I grinned. “You feel the need to replenish the store this morning?”
He grinned back. “You afraid I can’t keep up with you?”
I laughed and tore into my food. It felt good to have a friend again.
There was little talk as we ate, but the second cup of coffee brought us around to Darryl Harrington. Apologies had been said on both sides the night before. There was no need to cover that ground again. But Harrington was still between us.
“If you knew him, you’d see why I can’t buy this idea that Darryl did it,” Dave said. There was no antagonism in his voice. He was just stating fact.
“It’s more than an idea. He has the gun — ”
” — maybe — ”
“And something triggered the state he’s in. He didn’t just go home one night and decide to crack up. Something had to set him off.”
“Agreed. But it didn’t have to be Michelle Whittier.”
“Why not?”
Dave sighed and sipped his coffee. “You don’t have any proof that he even knew Michelle.”
“They’re both connected to the university.”
“There are twenty thousand students at that university, and thousands of employees. Michelle could have spent four years at that school and never crossed Darryl’s path.”
“She crossed yours,” I pointed out.
Dave’s eyes flickered. “Are you suggesting that I did it?”
“I’m suggesting no such thing. I’m saying she didn’t have to be in any of Darryl’s classes to meet him. She could have run into him just as casually as she ran into you — in someone’s office, at the library, at the union. There are dozens of ways they could have met outside the classroom.”
“She was too young,” Dave said stubbornly.
“Nineteen isn’t all that young.”
“It is for Darryl.”
“Why?”
“He’s been through war. He started a family and lost it to divorce. The man’s forty. He needs more than a little girl just breaking away from her parents. He needs someone who can understand him, someone who can feel what has happened to him, someone who’s lived a little. Do you think Michelle Whittier could have done that? Christ, Jo, Vietnam is nothing more than a name to her generation.”
In spite of myself, I had to smile. “You mean he needs an old broad with some gray hair and some hard-earned wrinkles.”
Dave smiled back. “Something like that.”
“So did he have anyone like that?”
Dave’s smile faded. “Once. Until last summer.”
I waited patiently while the waitress refilled our coffee mugs. People were still lined up for tables, but I had no intention of dislodging Dave while he was talking so freely about Harrington. If he wanted me to believe in Harrington’s innocence, I had to know why.
“What happened last summer?” I asked as the waitress moved on to the next booth.
“Nothing happened, not in the sense of Michelle’s murder or Darryl’s breakdown. There had just been a woman — a woman in the geography department — who had been with Darryl a couple of years, off and on. They were good together. He was happy with her. But she didn’t get tenure here. She didn’t publish enough,” he said with distaste. “So she took a job at a college in Minnesota.”
“How’d Darryl take that?”
Dave shrugged. “How do you think?”
“How’d you take it?”
His eyes narrowed. “What do you mean?”
“You’ aren’t speaking about this woman in very warm terms. I don’t think you approved of her move.”
Dave smiled. “You’re learning to read me too well.”
“I’m a trained observer.”
“I’ll have to remember that.”
“I promise not to use it against you. Tell me more about this woman.”
Dave rearranged his leg and settled back comfortably in the booth. Hungry would-be diners glared. “Darryl’s my friend and he was hurt. I resent the fact that she hurt him.”
“Darryl has tenure?”
Dave nodded.
“And she didn’t?”
He nodded again.
“Sound like she made a wise career move.”
He acknowledged that she probably had. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like her for it.”
“Could that have been enough to push Darryl over the edge?”
“It didn’t help.”
“Could it have been enough to push him into a mindless little affair with a kid who could offer him nothing but sex?”
“You have something against sex?”
“Surely you jest.”
“Just checking,” he said, but his eyes were wicked again, and I knew he had no real need for reassurance.
“Is it possible he could have slipped into an affair with a student as a diversion? Just something to do? Something to take his mind off this other woman?” I persisted.
Dave sighed. “Sure, it’s possible. Any man gets lonely. Any man needs. But it’s not what I would expect of Darryl.”
“What about his family? Where are they?”
Dave shook his head. “It was a bad divorce, Jo. The kids were very, very young, and he hasn’t seen them in ten years. She remarried very soon after the divorce, and those kids may not even know who their real father is. Darryl has cut himself off completely from that part of his life.”
“He seems to have cut himself off from quite a lot,” I said cautiously.
Dave finished his coffee and carefully put the cup back on the table. “He’s no saint. Some people would say he deserted his family. Some people would look at his military record and say he’s a vicious son of a bitch. Some poeple would look at his medical records for the last fifteen years and say it’s a miracle he hasn’t blown away ten girls. But he’s my friend, Jo. He’s helped me through hard times of my own. And I say, he couldn’t have done it.”
I reached for his hand. “I want to believe you, Dave. I do. But I can’t ignore the possibility that Darryl’s the man we’re after.”
“I accept that,” Dave said uncomfortably. “But don’t ignore the possibility that someone else did it.”
I guiltily lowered my eyes. We were so sure Harrington had killed Michelle Whittier, we hadn’t been pressing the other men who had known her. Frank Pierce said he had been studying the night she was killed, but I didn’t know that for a fact. Dan O’Brien said he had passed out in his car, but he couldn’t prove it. Michelle’s landlord said he had been home with his wife, but she had been in bed with the flu, and how good an alibi was a drugged wife? And Jeff Acheson was still roaming around somewhere.
Dave squeezed my hand. “You’re too good a cop to take the easy way out, Jo. You’re too good to hang this on a man who can’t defend himself.”
“I’ll try,” I promised. “I’ll keep looking. But, damn it, Dave, if Darryl did kill her, I’m going to get him.”
“If Darryl did kill her,” Dave repeated grimly, “I’ll help you.”
Kathleen M. Fraze 
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