Chapter 10
Monday morning Chris arrived early and went straight to a seven-thirty meeting with Dean Campbell-McFee. They needed to find a permanent replacement to fill the post left vacant by the unscheduled departure of Elizabeth Page from the Museum of Art. They spent forty-five minutes discussing the job description for the search before the door of the conference room burst open. A matronly secretary not known to be an alarmist stepped inside, her eyes wide and her lips trembling.
Dean Campbell-McFee was startled. "Eloise, what is it?"
Eloise tried to speak and was forced to clear her throat and start over. "Charlie Ingquist just called. Someone found Richard Bjornson dead in the sculpture studio." She looked as if she was having a hard time believing what she had just said.
Chris rose and abruptly sat back down again when her knees gave way.
The dean looked at Eloise. "Did anyone call the paramedics?"
Eloise nodded. "I think so."
Chris tried standing again, this time with more success. She said something about being needed and fled toward her office, thoughts flooding her mind. What did Richard do to himself? A sculpture studio can be a dangerous place and Richard was not inclined to be cautious. Did he get drunk and cut an artery with a power tool? Chris's worst fears for the safety of students and faculty usually centered around the sculpture and ceramics studios, as they were full of volatile gases, poisonous chemicals and sharp instruments.
Panting, she arrived at the Fine Arts Complex and found a scattering of people standing silently in small groups in the lobby area. She went straight to her office.
Charlie greeted her soberly. "They sent an ambulance, but there isn't much point," he said without preamble. "They got here about five minutes ago."
"Who found him? What happened?"
"A custodian went in to empty the waste baskets and clean up. Bjornson was on the floor in the welding area behind one of those safety curtains, so he didn't see him right away. Got a surprise when he went in there to sweep though."
"Did he cut himself or something?" Chris asked.
"Lots of blood, so that would be a good guess, except he's got a big dent in his head. I went down there with the custodian after I called nine-one-one. I think Bjornson must have been there a while 'cause he was cold when I tried to find a pulse."
Charlie's face was a mask. Chris recalled her reaction to finding Elizabeth Page and knew nothing she said would make the images in his head fade any faster. She turned and started down the art wing. He left his desk to join her. "You sure you want to go down there?" he asked quietly as they walked.
Chris nodded. A siren sounded in the distance. They turned the corner into the hallway leading to the sculpture classrooms and stopped about midway down its length outside the open door to the welding studio. The EMTs were standing just inside the door barring entrance with their gurney. From where they stood, Chris couldn't see past the safety curtains.
"Are you waiting for the police?" Chris inquired and received a nod in reply. Outside the siren grew louder, then stopped abruptly.
The University Police had arrived in the person of young Officer Anderson, who was clearly flustered. With inappropriate wryness, Chris thought, He should be getting the hang of it by now.
The young officer stood in front of the safety curtain, speaking quietly on his walky-talky. Chris got the gist of it and knew that very shortly Detective Sergeant Hjelmer Ryquist would once more be on the scene. This is crazy! she thought. She looked at Officer Anderson. "I'm going back to my office. I'll be there if you need me."
He held up one hand to keep her in place. "Who found him?"
The hapless custodian emerged just then from the men's room across the hall, still looking a little green. "I did," he admitted. "I don't gotta go back in there, do I?"
"We'll see." He gestured toward the two EMTs. "Anyone else go in there besides these guys?"
Charlie explained he'd felt for a pulse but didn't find one. Chris was then given permission to return to her office while Charlie stayed to talk to the Camford Police. She turned the corner and walked up the long corridor toward the central atrium and her office.
She was about halfway there when her son appeared, coming toward her wearing an oversized jacket with a Campus Security stencil clearly visible across the front. She stopped and gaped.
"I forgot to tell you I got a job on campus," he said. "I've been in training for a week and today is my first day." He looked over her shoulder at the knot of people forming at the end of the hall. "What's up down there?"
Chris found her voice. "What does Campus Security do? Is that the same as Campus Police?"
"Nah, we write parking tickets and we patrol between eight and midnight to walk women to their residences if they want us to. I'm on parking ticket duty today, but I got a call we might need to help over here. What happened anyway?"
"Richard Bjornson was found dead in the studio." Even though she said it, it still hadn't sunk in. "What kind of training did they give you? Are you armed? Why did they call you over here?" Motherly concern was fast replacing amazement. Every time Drew overran his allowance, and that was nearly every month, she'd suggested he get a job on campus. She had no idea he'd actually done it. She tried to temper her anxiety with an effort at self-control.
Drew sounded mildly exasperated. "Mom, chill. I don't get to carry a gun, I just write parking tickets. I guess they want someone to keep the road clear or something out by the loading dock. It's a great job. I work two half-days and one night a week and one day on the weekend. Twenty hours—more if they need people for big events and stuff." He shifted from one foot to the other. "I gotta go," he said at last, apparently waiting for Chris to give him permission.
"Go. I'm glad you got a job that fits your schedule." Bussing dishes at a frat was more what she'd had in mind.
It was all horribly familiar. Chris called the provost's office and her dean to let them know what she knew, which wasn't much. They asked to be kept informed. The provost promised to let the president know. He also said Public Relations would set to work to prevent worried parents from keeping their offspring home during spring semester. That thought hadn't even occurred to Chris and, even though it was irrational, she was irked that it was the provost's first reaction to the tragedy.
She spent most of the morning sitting in her office staring blankly at her computer screen. She found it hard to keep a coherent thought in her head. Charlie was with the police, first down in the sculpture studio and then in the conference room. It was nearly eleven before the custodian was finally released to go about his business. Charlie was dismissed soon after. He returned to his desk where coeds gazed at him with a mixture of curiosity and awe as they checked their mail for the fifteenth time that morning.
Chris stepped out of her office with a question on her lips. It died there when she saw Detective Sergeant Ryquist coming through the lobby toward the office. Charlie looked up and followed her gaze. "Your turn, I guess," he said and turned to his computer.
Chris squared her shoulders as Ryquist entered and gestured toward the privacy of her office. She nodded and they went in. Ryquist closed the door behind them.
"You look a little rough, Doc," he said with a degree of kindness Chris found consoling.
"What's going on, Hjelmer? What's happening to my nice little university?" To her embarrassment she found herself on the edge of tears.
"You tell me, Doc. I just drop in occasionally. You're here all the time. So who'd want to do in our friend?"
"Are you sure it's murder? Couldn't it be an accident? He was always doing something stupid like trying to work when he was drunk. Couldn't he have cut himself?" She realized she sounded desperate and fought to get herself under control.
"Well, unless he was seriously ambidextrous and double jointed he couldn't have dinged himself in the back of the head like that." Ryquist waited.
"Oh, God." She took a deep breath. "Maybe he fell and hit his head?
"
"There'll be an autopsy downstate, so it'll be a while before we know the official cause of death. Right now I'd give a lot for a big city crime scene unit and a forensic lab. Sending everything away wastes a lot of time and makes me crazy." He sat back in his chair and looked out the window at the soft snowflakes beginning to fall.
"I can see it would."
"If we knew right away how he died I could concentrate the troops. As it is we gotta cover all the possible scenarios, and the force is so small here we can't do that very well. I should be concentrating on the murder... if it is a murder."
"And that is clearly what you think it is," Chris said, her heart sinking in her chest.
"If you fall and hit the back of your head, how do you end up face down spread eagle in the middle of the room? And there would have to be some blood and matter on some corner or projection. I couldn't find any blood on anything he could have hit his head on."
Chris grimaced. Accident would not be the explanation.
"Nobody I talked to was exactly fond of him, Doc. Practical jokes nobody but him thought were funny, right?" Ryquist sat back and crossed his legs. "He had a habit of ticking people off, right?"
Chris spread her hands. "If that's all it took for people to commit murder, there'd hardly be a professor left standing."
"Did he have any serious enemies, Doc? Not just people who were ticked off at him?" His pen poised over his notebook.
"I don't know, Hjelmer. Someone was down in the studio with him yesterday yelling about some prank he'd played. I don't know who it was though. I also don't know anything about Richard's life outside the division. Maybe he made someone murderously mad who doesn't have anything to do with Midstate." The proposition sounded thin and she knew it, but the idea of someone in her division reacting to a practical joke by committing murder was inconceivable.
Ryquist apparently had no such problem because he quizzed her for half an hour about the shouting match she'd over-heard. When she was unable to provide any further detail, he said, "Well, I'll need to talk to all the art professors. Can you give me a list with their phone numbers? It would save me some time over searching through my notes on the Page case."
She nodded and reached in her desk for a copy of the Division of Fine Arts roster. It came complete with the names, phone numbers and email addresses of everyone who taught, from full professors to adjuncts and graduate teaching assistants.
"It's a weird wound, though," Ryquist mused aloud. "Crunched the back of his skull like a rotten melon, and that's not easy to do." When Chris gasped audibly at the picture he had planted in her head, he looked up and immediately apologized. "You and I been hanging out together so much on the Page case, I forget you aren't used to this sort of thing. Sorry."
Chris tried to hide her discomfiture. "How can you be used to it yourself, Hjelmer? I'd never heard of a murder in Camford until Elizabeth was killed."
"Well, I did my bit in Naval Intelligence when I got out of college and then I spent six years in Washington, D. C., on the force. I saw my share of murders," he said somewhat defensively. "It's just that D. C. is a lousy place to raise kids and when our first one came along we got out before he went to school. Coming back to Camford suited me and my wife fine."
"Don't you miss the action of a big city?" Chris asked.
"Sure, but not enough to like the fact that I've got two unsolved murders on my plate right now." He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "So just for form's sake, Doc, how'd you spend Sunday?"
Chris blinked. Was now the time to tell him about the Picasso? "I had a meeting at the president's house... and I have something to tell you about that later." She then described the rest of her day. Selecting images for her Wednesday final exam in Nineteenth Century European Art until five, home to dinner with Pansy, television until ten and to bed.
"So what do you have to tell me about the meeting at the president's house?" He turned a page in his notebook and looked up expectantly.
When Chris had laid out all her suppositions about the authenticity of the Picasso and he'd gone over it several times, Ryquist folded his notebook and sat back. "You've known about this since Friday. Why wait until today to tell me?"
"We don't know anything for sure. I thought if I could find the condition report, it would all be explained. It is imperative that we sort it out, but it would be awful if a rumor got started. Randall would never forgive us. And McGinnis told me to tell you right away once I'd told him." She'd stretched the truth a bit in the president's favor on that one. "Then Richard was found and I forgot all about it until now." She shrugged and hoped she looked convincing.
Ryquist eyed her for a moment. "Yeah, I guess."
"This must mean I was right about Bjornson not killing Elizabeth," Chris said after a pause.
"Well, if he did do it, we aren't going to be able to convict him of it now," Ryquist said wryly. "I was leaning toward him pretty good, but it seems I'll have to find a new scenario. Maybe Bjornson got in the way somehow." He scratched his chin speculatively. "Well, no good guessing. Solid police work will do the job eventually." He rose to leave. "We're gonna close off the sculpture area and the johns for now, that whole end of the building, maybe for a day. That going to be a big problem?"
"There are other bathrooms. We'll figure out something for the sculpture students."
"We'll need to talk to anyone who was around."
"Use the conference room as long as you like."
"Are all the faculty around right now?"
"Some. Finals started today and people will be in and out until the end of the week. We're supposed to have a division meeting late Tuesday afternoon so no one should have left for the holiday before that. Of course, the students go home as soon as their finals are over or their portfolios are turned in."
"I'd better get started then, I guess," he said and rose to leave. "You get an idea who the guy was yelling at Bjornson yesterday, Doc, you come to me, right?"
"Right." Chris nearly saluted. She watched his departing back and wondered for the umpteenth time who it was she'd heard.