Chapter 18
Friday, New Year's Eve, arrived overcast and still. The snow had been covered with a glittering crust of ice thanks to Thursday's sleet storm. It did not promise to be an attractive day, but at least it wasn't snowing when Chris rose and staggered toward the kitchen in Walter's wake. Walter trotted briskly ahead and sat with a thump by his dish. He was torn between a need to go out and his desire to have his breakfast at the earliest moment. Chris solved his dilemma as she always did by opening the door and hustling him outside into his kennel run.
Pansy was still asleep so Chris tried to keep the noise to a minimum as she dropped kibble into his metal dish after starting the coffeepot. By the time she'd let Walter in, however, Pansy was standing in the kitchen doorway, yawning. They settled in the living room with the paper and coffee cups at their elbows and for the next hour spoke not a word other than to pass sections of the paper back and forth. All in all, it was a perfect morning but for the fact that the murders in the Division of Fine Arts were still causing far too much ink to be spilled in the local paper.
"Look, Teensy," Pansy said at one point. "They seem to have discovered that Richard Bjornson was a practical joker." She held up the front of the section devoted to regional news and pointed to a headline that read Did Joke Backfire?
Chris groaned.
"They just rehash what's been in the papers before and they don't seem to have any specifics about pranks that he pulled, but they certainly got wind of his being hard on his colleagues," Pansy said, adjusting her half-glasses on her nose.
"Just what we need now—more publicity and all of it bad," Chris groused as she rose to take their cups to the kitchen for refills.
She returned to sit and bury herself in the funnies. Pansy, for whom local politics and sports scores were supremely uninteresting, finished reading before her daughter did and made her way to the kitchen to fix Spanish omelets for breakfast. Walter followed her, sure in his knowledge that occasionally things getting chopped up land on the floor.
They were ready to sit down to eat when the phone rang. Chris answered it with the coffeepot in one hand. Pansy listened to half of the conversation and frowned in irritation. Who bothers someone on New Year's Eve with business that can surely wait? She regarded her offspring when she came to the table and sat. "Well?" she queried, ready to rush in to encourage dereliction of duty. She didn't get the chance.
"That was Oscar Stullmann, the University Safety Officer. Apparently there's been a break-in at the Music Department. He wants me to come see what's missing and talk to the police. He was really upset because they got into the band room through fire doors that he's been on me to keep closed."
"Why can't the Music Department deal with it?" Pansy asked.
"He said he tried to reach the Music chairperson and the band director but no one's at home. He wants me there right now, but this will probably take all day and I need nourishment. I told him I'd be there in an hour."
Showered, dressed and in the car she headed for the campus. Walter was in the back seat resting his chin on the front seat to watch the road, as always. Chris had decided to rebel openly against Stullmann's "no dogs allowed" pronouncement. Besides, he'd be too busy to notice.
The roads had been cleared and sanded after yesterday's sleet storm. As she drove she thought about what might have been stolen. Recording equipment, band instruments, speakers—the list was depressingly long and expensive.
Chris was totaling the potential loss in her head when she pulled into the Art Department loading dock out of habit. As she was letting herself in it occurred to her that she would have been closer to the scene of the crime had she parked by Music's loading dock. Of course, she would need to spend some time in her office anyway to deal with this fresh disaster. Walter trotted happily at her side.
They crossed the foyer without stopping at the main office and headed for the Music Department. The doors were locked tight. She used her master key. The hallway was dark and she fumbled for a light switch. The place seemed absolutely deserted. Walter, never having sniffed this hallway before, began a thorough nasal inspection of every inch as far as his leash would allow. When his person didn't move, he turned and looked at her with wrinkled brow.
"I don't know, Walter. Something's not right. Where's Stullmann and the police? They should be here. Maybe they've been here and are already gone."
She turned and tugged Walter back through the door and headed across the foyer toward her office. When she got there she struggled to unlock the office complex door before she realized finally that it was already open. Surprised, she pushed into the outer office. No lights were on and everything seemed normal.
She gritted her teeth. The price for letting faculty have keys to the main office for access to their mail was that they sometimes forgot to lock up.
She was opening her own office door when a whoosh and a loud thunk startled her into dropping her purse. She looked around. The door to the conference room directly opposite her own was standing open but she couldn't see into the depths of the windowless room. She bent to pick up her purse a fraction of a second before a second whoosh/thunk galvanized her into action.
Forgetting the purse, she shoved the door open and dragged Walter in behind her. Someone was aiming at her with what she knew at a visceral level was the same type of weapon, if not the very one, that had killed Elizabeth Page and Richard Bjornson. Before she got the door closed all the way, there was another solid thunk that ripped it violently out of her hands and banged it back against the coat rack and the inner wall of her office.
Now she was on her hands and knees, seeking cover out of range of the open door. Her heart was pounding so loudly she couldn't hear anything else. She looked behind her. The metal door was dented dramatically at head height, about six inches from the left edge. There were two other dents in the middle. She started to gasp for breath, dizzy with fear. Adrenaline flooded through her. Her arms prickled and her mouth went dry. Walter's ears were pinned back and his head was swiveling between Chris and the door. Chris hauled on his leash to bring him into the relative safety she'd found out of the line of sight from her door across the office to the conference room.
Could she reach the office door and close it? Would it even close and latch with the distorting dent in it? An image of Elizabeth's mangled skull flashed into her mind. She gasped and mentally shoved it away.
From the outer office she heard muffled muttering, the sound of something metal falling to the tile floor, and a stifled "Shit!" She looked frantically for something to use to swing the door closed without presenting a target. A yardstick was leaning against the corner of her desk. She grabbed it and stretched it across the opening to force the door toward her. The heavy door moved and began to swing shut. It was almost closed when another sickening bang slapped it back against the wall again.
There were now four dents in the door, the last so close to the edge that it had dented the face and created a bulge in the metal a little above the handle. It was clear that even if she could swing it back, the door would no longer close completely. She quivered and gasped for breath. Walter smelled her fear and began growling low in his throat. His hackles were raised. Chris gripped his leash like a lifeline.
From the outer office she heard an incongruous chuckle. Her heart leaped once again. The madman thought it was funny!
"Dr. Connery," Colin McCarty said in his smoothest actor's voice. "You can't get out of there, so you may as well give in to the inevitable."
Chris was stunned. "Colin? What are you doing?"
"Trying to kill you, of course. Silly bitch."
"Why, for God's sake?" She edged around her desk toward the phone.
"Well, that should be blindingly obvious even to you. To keep you from telling on me," McCarty said with a childish lilt in his voice. He laughed shortly.
"Telling what? To whom?" Chris said desperately, simultaneously lifting the receiver. She hoped her voice would cover any stray sound.
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"The police, of course. The university, the newspaper, who do you think?" He was scornful. "You've already figured it out. I know you have."
Chris put the phone to her ear and almost wept when she heard no dial tone. She could see the purse with her cell phone on the floor outside the door just beyond reach. Keep him talking.
Walter's growling got louder. Normally easy going to the point of sluggishness, Walter was behaving like a Doberman.
"You killed Elizabeth and Richard?" She looked for a place to hide in her spartan office and found nothing adequate beyond the kneehole in her desk.
"Well of course I did, and you know it," he said from beyond the door. "Why pretend you don't? It's too late now anyway."
Walter stared intently at the open door, then dropped his head and started toward it until his leash stopped him. Chris looked for something to throw. Nothing but art history texts. Weighty as they were, they seemed pitifully inadequate under the circumstances.
"Why did you kill them, Colin?" Chris panted slightly and tried to keep her wits from scattering like leaves before the wind.
"Oh God, Connery, do you think I'm a fool? I saw my file out on the desk. I know what you were looking for. That bitch left something that told you, didn't she?" It was not a question. As he spoke calmly, other sounds told Chris he was loading his lethal toy with another bearing.
"Do you mean about the arrest?" Chris was stacking books on her desk, whether to use them as missiles or a bulwark, she hadn't decided. "I saw the clipping, but it didn't go anywhere did it, Colin? You didn't go to jail. I would never say anything about it."
"Right. Senior professor of Drama, twice honored for teaching excellence, arrested for pedophilia? How could you resist?" He made a choking sound between a guffaw and a sob.
"I'm surprised you think so little of my integrity, Colin," Chris said, trying to sound offended rather than terrified.
"She was holding it over me so I'd help her get the damn museum out of the division. God, what a self-absorbed bitch! She didn't give a shit about anything but what she wanted!"
"What about Richard? What did he have to do with it?" Chris had every book off the shelf behind her desk and with trembling hands was stacking them between her and the door.
"You're kidding, right?" McCarty's voice sounded muffled. He had turned away from her door.
Walter's growl rose to such a pitch that Chris said, "What? I didn't hear that."
"They were lovers," he said in a louder tone. He was facing the door again. "She must have told him what she had on me because he started to pull one of his stupid little pranks, but I got him before he got me." The chuckle that followed made Chris's hands tremble violently. She gripped a book to stop the shaking.
"The two of them weren't worth your concern, Chris."
"Colin, I swear I didn't know," Chris said shakily.
"Well, too bad. You do now," McCarty said savagely. "It's all pretty ironic anyway. I was the victim! I didn't do anything wrong! That stupid, selfish child…. He thought he was so grown up, fooling me like that. He said he was twenty. Said he went to NYU. The first I knew he was a high school kid was when they came to arrest me. Can you believe that? Mister Control gets taken by a wet-nosed kid? When he finally told the truth I'd already spent two nights in jail. Me!"
Chris was being pulled into his story in spite of her fear. She couldn't help saying, "So his parents dropped the charges?"
"Pedophilia is a felony. They didn't have anything to do with the charges. The prosecutor had too much on his plate as it was and I'd been a model citizen up to that point. They reduced the charge to disorderly conduct and I got a big fine and time served. I was sent on my way without so much as an apology from the little bastard or his parents. And it was all gone, forgotten, until that self-aggrandizing bitch dredged it up again."
There were scuffling sounds coming toward Chris's door now. She opened her desk drawer with a noisy rustle of pens and paperclips. In the outer office McCarty said, "Don't try anything, Chris. You'll just make it worse."
Chris struggled to get possession of herself. In a voice far shakier than she liked she said, "Did you know I keep a gun in my desk, Colin?" The scuffling in the outer office stopped instantly. "Ever since a young man went nuts and attacked me because he got a B in an Art History survey course I taught."
"You're bluffing. I never heard about that." McCarty didn't sound as convinced of his control of the situation as he had a moment earlier.
"It didn't happen here, Colin," Chris said. "It was at Texas when I was just starting."
"Who goes nuts over a B?" McCarty said scornfully. "You'll have to do better than that." Faint noises resumed. Chris could visualize McCarty moving slowly past Charlie's desk with his E-M gun in hand, dragging an extension cord.
"A disturbed young man who had received all As in his college career up to that point, that's who," Chris said, her voice more firm and in control. Walter never stopped growling.
"You let that dog out where I can see him and he'll get it first, Chris," McCarty warned.
"You even think about hurting him and I'll shoot!" Chris said. A quaver had returned to her voice.
"Well, if you have a gun, why don't you just shoot me and get this over with, huh?" McCarty taunted. "Just show me the gun and we'll call it a draw. Stick it out where I can see it."
"And let you break my hand with your little toy? No chance." Chris was getting into the rhythm of the game at last. She was still trying to think of something to use as a weapon. Nothing more lethal than Janson's History of Art was coming to hand. Why had she never stocked the office with revolvers?
Suddenly Walter's leash began to slip from her sweating hand. She grabbed at it and stopped him from advancing more than two feet. Walter did not take his eyes off the open doorway. His throaty rumbling started deep in his chest. If McCarty didn't know what breed of dog he was dealing with, Chris might have convinced him it was a rottweiler.
Scuffling told her McCarty was much closer to the open door than he had been. "Stay back, Colin. I promise I will shoot you," Chris said as steadily as she could. He said nothing in response. Suddenly she remembered. "Oscar Stullmann is somewhere in the building too, so you'd be better off to stop now and not make it any worse for yourself."
McCarty snorted with laughter. Suddenly Oscar Stullmann's voice said, "You better come in right away, Dr. Connery. There's been a break-in in the Music Department." Chris was stunned into silence. Tears she was no longer able to suppress stung her eyes.
"Jesus, I am an actor after all," McCarty snarled with suppressed fury. "That fat bastard's twang isn't hard to imitate. I heard him complaining about those doors." Chris couldn't think of a thing to say, and then several things happened at once.
McCarty strode two long paces forward and jerked his lethal homemade device into the doorframe to point it at Chris. In doing so he pulled the extension cord out of the wall behind him in the conference room. Nothing happened when he pressed the plate that closed the circuit on top of the tube.
When McCarty and the plastic tube appeared in her doorway, Chris dropped behind her desk with its textbook ramparts and lost her grip on the leash. Walter lunged forward, snarling. Chris knew when his teeth found their target because McCarty's scream was eerily high pitched. Then she heard the door to the outer office open. She scrambled to her feet, grabbed two books to use as weapons and dashed to her open door.
Walter had sunk his considerable fangs into McCarty's crotch with outraged authority. He was on his hind legs, his front paws braced against McCarty's body. Chris tried to heave a book at McCarty, but Drew Haggarty exclaimed, "Dude!" and ducked in time to avoid being knocked cold by The Compact Oxford English Dictionary. Hartt's Twentieth Century Art followed closely.
McCarty fell backward as Drew was picking himself up. Walter began vigorously shaking McCarty's private parts, every move causing the shrieks to rise in intensity. Chris came out of her office to launch herself at eithe
r the dog or her son. It was not clear which.
"Call him off!" screamed McCarty.
"What's going on, Mom?" yelled Drew.
"He's the killer!" Chris sobbed, what little self-possession she had mustered up having deserted her completely.
After Drew had tied McCarty hand and foot with his own extension cord and left him curled in a fetal ball in front of Charlie's desk, he used his walky-talky to call the Campus Police. Chris stood shaking in her doorway, unable to move or speak. Walter, who had to be pried loose from his death grip on McCarty's privates by both Chris and Drew, leaned against Chris's legs and continued to growl. Now, however, his tail was wagging. Every time McCarty moaned or tried to move, the tail wagging ceased and the growling rose dramatically in pitch.
Though it seemed like an hour to both Chris and Drew, it was barely three minutes before the Campus Police arrived, and only two minutes after that before they were joined by Camford's finest, who startled everyone, especially McCarty, by arriving with drawn guns.
Drew put his arm around his mother, who sagged gratefully against him. They watched as McCarty was lifted to his feet and helped down the hall to a waiting police car. The front of his pants was torn and bloody and he winced with every step. He was unable to stand erect and kept insisting that he needed to go to the hospital. Whether he went there first or to the police station was of no interest to Chris, who found herself hoping his penis was hanging by a shred. The depth of that desire disquieted her, having never thought of herself as a violent person until twenty minutes ago.