Face of Murder

He was wearing only a bathrobe one size too big for him, left open to the waist, and a pair of old, stained shorts. His feet were muffled now by worn slippers, the threadbare soles almost gone at the front. There was still a bottle of beer in his hand, two-thirds empty.

“Good morning, James Wardenford,” Zoe said, deliberately raising her voice a notch. “My name is Special Agent Zoe Prime, and this is Special Agent Shelley Rose.”

Normally there was a reaction at this point. The suspect would try to run somehow, or stammer, or shrink back in fear. Or they would blink far too quickly, take in rapid breaths, other signs that Zoe had come to recognize.

Wardenford, whether due to his drunken state or something else, barely reacted at all.

“Yup,” he acknowledged. “Better come in while I get some clothes on.”

Shelley shot Zoe a puzzled look. “We’d like to talk to you about—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Wardenford said, waving a hand dismissively. “Henderson. I know. I can’t go to your station, or whatever you call it, like this.”

He shuffled away from the door, leaving it swinging open. Zoe hesitated for a moment, unaccustomed to such a reaction, before taking the initiative to follow him inside.

The thin foyer gave on to doors in all three directions, one of them lying open ahead. It was clearly a living area, a small sofa perched in front of a television, and Zoe ducked inside. Shelley closed the door and stayed there, nodding to Zoe when she glanced back. She would guard the exit. A wise move. It wouldn’t do to have him dart past them and out to freedom while they lounged around on his sofa.

Not that his sofa was much use, Zoe saw as she approached it. There were seventeen empty beer bottles scattered on the sofa, coffee table, floor, and other odd points of the room. Among them nestled a further three whiskey bottles and four of vodka—this, then, was a man not particularly fussy about his drink so long as it did the job of getting him drunk.

There was only a foot between the edge of the coffee table and the sofa. The repeated stains on the carpet, gouges in the wood, and watermarks on the fabric of the cushions indicated that it was frequently too small a gap for an inebriated man holding a glass or bottle ready to spill or drop. Two pizza boxes were stacked haphazardly on top of the trash can, and packaging for five microwaveable meals around it. It seemed he had given up on opening the trash can to dispose of his waste after blocking access himself. Across the open-plan room, the kitchen looked pitifully underused.

The story needed no further investigation. He was an alcoholic, as they already knew, and he had clearly been binge-drinking for some time.

Wardenford emerged noisily from another of the doors in the corridor. As Zoe joined him, she gained a glimpse of a bedroom strewn with clothes and the wafting scent of old vomit.

“Right, then,” he said, finishing off the last button on a crumpled shirt. “Off we go. Do you need to put handcuffs on me, or is it more informal than that?”

Zoe blinked. She had made a lot of arrests, and she had taken a lot of people in for questioning. She could not recall a single one of all those people ever volunteering to be cuffed.

“No,” she said, feeling off-balance. “This is just a chat for now. But we will take you to the field office in order to record our conversation.”

“Fine, fine,” he said, nodding a little too aggressively. The alcohol had cut his limits, stopped telling him when to stop. “Lead on.”

Over his shoulder as he walked toward the door, Zoe met Shelley’s eyes. This was odd—too odd. When did a murder suspect ever just willingly, even happily, go along to the station for questioning? It was as if the man was not just resigned to his fate, but glad of it.

They walked in convoy to the car: Shelley leading, then Wardenford, then Zoe. She kept her eyes on him at all times, thinking that if he really was their guy, he was surely going to bolt. She was tense, one hand itching to rest on the holster of her gun just in case.

Nothing happened on the walk out to the parking lot. Only when he was sitting in the back of their car, with the child locks on, did Zoe allow herself a moment to relax. He wasn’t going anywhere, except where they took him.

So, if he was a killer, why did he seem so pleased about that?

***

Zoe sat opposite James Wardenford, with Shelley in the seat next to her. The bare room—just a table and four chairs, one currently unoccupied—was dominated by one glass wall. Just like on TV, it was blacked out, impenetrable from this side. On the other side, a tech was watching closely, making sure that everything was picked up by their recording equipment.

“I knew you were coming for me,” Wardenford said, scratching the back of one of his ears. He looked all the world like a man who had not a single care. They might have been chatting to him in a local grocery store about the weather, for how concerned he seemed. “It was only a matter of time, really.”

“And why is that, James?” Shelley asked. She was doing her Good Cop bit. Playing the friend. It was what she was good at. Zoe, for the meantime, was content to stay quiet and observe until she had something to say.

She looked James over, reassessing as she had done so many times already. His height of five feet nine made him the correct size to have attacked the college student, Cole Davidson, at a slightly lower angle. His arms were bunched with muscles enough, though not so much to make him stand out. Still, she figured he would have had the strength for the first blow—which stunned the victims enough that they were unable to fight against the others.

It was his manner that irritated her. She knew the signs of panic or fear, the desire to not be found out. The sharp angles of the shoulders and elbows, the constant movement, the defiant lean. She had memorized all of them from textbooks before she had ever gone out into the field, and had enough experience to know now they were real.

But James Wardenford was calm and relaxed, even smiling. That did not sit well with her at all.

“The victims,” Wardenford said simply. “You were always going to trace them back to me eventually.”

Shelley shifted in her seat, leaning back. It seemed she was having a hard time figuring out what to make of him, too. She was switching back and forth between her usual tactics. “Is this a confession?”

James Wardenford laughed, free and easy. “Good lord, no. It just looks like me from the outside. I get that; I do. But considering I didn’t do it, I’m not worried at all. Once we’ve cleared this all up, I’ll be back at home before the day is out. It’s not like I have anything better to do today.”

Shelley sighed, rubbed the bridge of her nose for a moment. Zoe kept quiet. She watched him carefully, wishing she was better at reading the subtle nuances of expression and movement that gave people away.

“Let’s start from the beginning, then, shall we? How does it look like you from the outside?” Shelley prompted.

“It all started with Cole Davidson, of course.” Wardenford tipped his chin a few inches up, his voice increasing in volume. He was putting on a speech, as if he was addressing a lecture hall. That only unsettled Zoe further. Truthful people didn’t look up that far. “Professor Henderson—Ralph—and I had, well, a bit of a falling out. You see, Cole had a bit of talent in English, or so it seemed. Ralph was absolutely determined that he ought to be kept on, to finish his studies, but he was here on a scholarship. There, I ought to say, since I don’t work at the college anymore.”

“What does the scholarship have to do with your falling out?”

“I’m getting to that.” Wardenford’s left eyebrow shot up an inch or two before dropping down. Was he actually reproaching Shelley for interrupting him? “The scholarship was dependent on Cole keeping up a certain level across all of his grades, and he was also taking my physics class. Taking being a loose word. More often than not, he slept through my lectures. Surprise surprise, he was failing.”

“And Professor Henderson asked you to intervene,” Shelley said. She was leaning back still, but something in her manner had changed. Zoe guessed that she had found the right tack at last. A sympathetic ear. A believer.

“More than once. We got a bit out of hand, truth be told. Ralph was in my face, telling me I couldn’t possibly be doing my job correctly given the alcohol he could smell on my breath, so what did it matter if I marked the boy higher? I resented the affront to my integrity; fists were thrown. The upshot was that I was found to be drunk while teaching, and I was fired.”

“How did you react to that? It must have been a blow,” Shelley asked, shaking her head in solidarity.

“I went back to my old friend the bottle ever more than before. Moved out of my big house into a small apartment and made do. I haven’t seen Ralph since then.”

“You didn’t hold a grudge against him for getting you fired?”

Wardenford studied his hands closely, taking a moment to answer. “It wasn’t Ralph who got me fired. It was me. I shouldn’t have been drinking at work.”

There was silence for a long moment, stretching out between the three of them. Wardenford glanced up, playing into one of the oldest tricks in the book by opening his mouth to fill that silence with anything he could blurt out. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “Cole, nor Ralph. I had no grudge against them. I didn’t even realize Cole had managed to turn things around. I thought he’d have been packed off home with his tail between his legs by now.”

He wasn’t going to admit to anything—that much was clear. Zoe took the moment to make her own move, finishing the formalities. “Where were you on the night Henderson was killed?”

“At home, alone—the same as the night Cole met his end. I drank until I passed out. That was probably around nine in the evening.”

Zoe tilted her head slightly, a gesture of disbelief she was not quite fast enough to quash.

“I started early,” Wardenford said, spreading his hands and shrugging. “I tend to. I don’t have much else to fill my day, besides refreshing my inbox and wondering whether anyone is ever going to reply to any of my job applications.”

“So, you have no way to prove that you were not there in the parking garage when Ralph Henderson was killed?” Zoe pressed.

Wardenford laughed again, a sound that was so out of character with their surroundings that it seemed to jar the very air. “I’m an educated man. I know as well as you do that the absence of evidence is not evidence. You have no reason to think I was anywhere near the scene, and the burden of proving that falls to you. I don’t have to prove that I wasn’t there if you can’t prove that I was.”

That rankled. More than that—it was the kind of thing you expected a career criminal to say. Someone who knew his rights because he had been in the position to have them enforced so very often. Not an innocent professor who had only recently crossed a line for the first time in his life.