Point Of Departure

Armentrout rubbed the back of his neck with a beefy hand. His eyes were a little bloodshot. “I walked around to check. I thought somebody’d passed out or something, and maybe needed medical attention. I didn’t realized the guy was dead until I saw the blood.”

“How’d you know he was dead?”

Armentrout gave Policzki a long, level look. “I wasn’t born yesterday. It was pretty obvious.”

Fair enough. “What did you do when you realized he was dead?”

“I got the hell out. If there was a killer on the premises, I wasn’t about to hang around and wait to become his next victim. I hightailed it out of there and called 911 from the park across the street. I waited there until the cops arrived.”

“All right. Did you, at any time, touch anything?”

“Just the doorknob.”

“Were you acquainted with the victim? Was he anybody you’d met before?”

Armentrout shook his head. “I figured he was one of Kaye Winslow’s associates. I don’t know who the hell he is. Maybe she can tell you.”

She probably could, Policzki thought, if they could just locate her. “All right, Mr. Armentrout,” he said, “I think we’re done. I’ll need verification of your whereabouts earlier this afternoon, and a number where I can reach you in case I have more questions.”

“Verification of my—what the hell, am I a suspect?”

“It’s routine, sir. You’re the person who found the body. In the absence of a smoking gun or a signed confession, we have to consider you a suspect until we can rule you out. Hopefully that’ll happen sooner rather than later.”

“I don’t believe this.” Armentrout fished in his pocket for his wallet. He pulled out a business card and shoved it into Policzki’s hand. “I go out to look at a house and end up in the middle of a mess like this. My whole goddamn afternoon’s been screwed up. You’d better believe I’ll be crossing this mausoleum off my list of possibilities.” Glowering, he slid the wallet back into his pocket. “Matter of fact, I wouldn’t buy a house in Boston if somebody paid me to take it off their hands. Not after this insanity. Maybe I’ll find something in Newton or Andover. I hear Lexington’s nice.”

He left in a huff, this short, self-important businessman whose schedule had been hopelessly derailed by his discovery of a dead body. Hell of an inconvenience, Policzki thought as he watched him go. A real shame that murder had disrupted the guy’s busy day.

The door slammed shut behind Armentrout. Across the room, O’Connell, the forensics tech, closed up his fingerprint kit. “That went well,” he said.

“Right,” Policzki said. “He didn’t pull a weapon on me, or threaten to have me fired, so I guess in the greater scheme of things, it could have been worse.”

“Oh, yeah. It could’ve been a lot worse.” O’Connell nodded in the direction of the black plastic bag the two EMTs were wheeling toward the front door. “You could’ve been that guy.”

The setting sun poured like honey through the closed windows of the lecture hall, infusing it with the ambience of a sauna. The dog days of summer were a thing of the past, but so was the air-conditioning that had rendered them tolerable. Cheap construction, minimal insulation and a simpleminded administration that insisted the heating system be turned on according to the calendar instead of the thermometer all conspired to ensure that learning take place in the most hostile environment imaginable. In the midst of this tropical paradise, Assistant Professor Sam Winslow sat reading the latest Dan Brown paperback while his art history students waded through the first exam of the semester. Fifty-eight heads leaned over fifty-eight blue books as fifty-eight pens scratched diligently against paper.

Sam had come to this job six years ago with the zealous idealism of a new convert. It had taken him awhile to accept the irrefutable truth that ninety-eight point eight percent of his students simply didn’t give a shit. Back Bay Community College wasn’t the kind of place that bred art majors. His classes were well attended because everybody who graduated from BBCC needed nine hours of humanities credit. They’d heard that Professor Winslow was an easy grader, and how hard, after all, could art history be? With a few notable exceptions—primarily those few students who signed up each semester for his introductory painting class—his students were here for one reason only: the three credits that would magically appear on their transcripts if they paid attention in class, showed up on exam days and regurgitated his words back to him in some kind of meaningful form.

This was what his life had come to: he trafficked in regurgitation. Not a particularly pretty realization, especially at four forty-five on a sticky Indian summer afternoon when the only thing he’d eaten since breakfast was a couple of purple Peeps that had been left to petrify on the table in the faculty lounge. Judging by their cardboard consistency, they’d been there for a while.

At a soft rap on the door, Sam glanced up from his book and saw the face of Lydia Forbes, Dean of Arts and Sciences and his immediate supervisor, framed in the tiny window. Setting down his book, he got up from his chair, crossed the room and, with a slow sweep of his gaze over the classroom—his students were supposed to be adults, but it didn’t hurt to give them the impression that he had eyes in the back of his head—he opened the door and stepped out into the corridor.

“Lydia,” he said, leaving the door open just a crack behind him.

“Sorry to interrupt, but you didn’t look busy.” Six feet tall in her conservative two-inch heels, Lydia met him nearly eye to eye. Thin almost to the point of emaciation, she wore a brown tweed suit, her gray hair pulled back in its customary severe chignon. Eyebrows that were a dark slash in her pale face gave her a look of perpetual surprise. The first time he’d met her, he’d thought she looked just like Miss Grundy, the schoolteacher from the Archie comics. It hadn’t taken him long to see that the outer package was merely professional camouflage for a woman with an infectious laugh, a bawdy sense of humor and a relentless addiction to unfiltered cigarettes. “Take a walk with me,” she said.

He glanced back at the classroom. Reading the uncertainty in his gaze, she said, “For Christ’s sake, Sam, pull that big stick out of your ass. They’re adults. Let them be responsible for their own actions.”

Sam latched the classroom door and fell into step with her, matching her leggy stride along the silent corridor and out into the crisp October afternoon. The sun’s rays, angling between brick buildings, bathed the entire scene in a muted pink glow. Lydia walked two steps from the entryway, fired up a Pall Mall and took a drag. Eyes closed in ecstasy, she exhaled a cloud of blue smoke and said without rancor, “Damn idiotic state laws.”

Behind her back, Sam discreetly waved away the smoke. She took another drag and said, “I forwarded your tenure application to the committee yesterday.”

Moving upwind of the toxic blue cloud, he took a breath of fresh air. Or as fresh as it got on a weekday in downtown Boston. “And?”

She turned and studied him with shrewd blue eyes. Took another puff and said, “I’m worried about Larsen.”

Professor Nyles Larsen was Sam Winslow’s nemesis. He was also the chair of the tenure committee. In theory, if a professor didn’t achieve tenure, there was nothing forcing him to move on. In reality, being denied was a slap in the face, best responded to by making a rapid retreat with tail tucked firmly between legs. There was just one problem with that: Sam didn’t want to retreat. He might have come to teaching by a circuitous route, but now that he was here, he had no intention of going anywhere.

Sam furrowed his brow. “You think he’ll give us trouble?”

“I think Nyles Larsen would take great glee in denying your tenure application. He’s had it in for you since the day you first walked through the door of this place.”

It was true. Larsen had been a member of the search committee that had hired Sam, and when the man had taken an immediate dislike to him, he’d come close to losing out to another candidate. If not for the staunch ally he’d made in Vince Tedeschi, Professor of Mathematics, he’d have ended up standing on a street corner, selling pencils from a cup. Fortunately for Sam, majority vote had ruled the day, but Nyles Larsen continued to wage a one-man campaign against what he claimed were Sam’s mediocre standards and slapdash teaching methods.

“He’s jealous,” Lydia said. “Your students think you walk on water. Nyles puts his students to sleep.”

A pair of twenty-something young women carrying backpacks passed them, talking animatedly, and entered the building through the wide double doors. “So how do we counteract his influence?” Sam said.

“We’ve done as much as we can do,” Lydia said. “I’ve read your materials all the way through. Proofed them twice. Just to be sure. Your tenure packet’s thorough. You’ve provided good documentation. Your student evaluations are top-notch. Your publication record is a little thin, but it’s outweighed by other factors, like your outstanding committee work. Your peer recommendation was stellar.”

Of course it was. If not for him, it would have been his peers sitting on all those mind-numbingly tedious committees. They’d do whatever it took to keep him on board so they could continue nominating him to do the dirty work they were all so desperate to avoid. He figured it was worth the sacrifice. No matter what he was asked to do, he accepted the job with a smile. Damn little ever got accomplished in those committee meetings, but membership always looked good on paper.

“Christ, Lyd,” he said, hating the thread of desperation that ran through his voice, “I have to get tenure. If I can’t make it in this place…” The rest of the sentence went unspoken, but they both knew what he meant. When you started at the bottom, there was nowhere left to fall. “I can’t make a living from painting. And I’m not trained for anything else. If they boot me out of Back Bay, I’ll end up waxing floors at the bus station.”

Lydia took another puff of her cigarette, held in the smoke and exhaled it. Flicking an ash, she said, “You’ve done everything we asked you to do. There’s no reason on God’s green earth why you should be turned down. Not unless Larsen starts flapping his gums, and even then, the rest of the committee should ignore him. The man is irrational, and everybody knows it. They also know he’s determined to hang you out to dry. If anything goes wrong at this point, I’m holding Nyles Larsen personally responsible. If that happens, the little weasel won’t want to cross my path.”

The lowering sun slowly leached the afternoon of its warmth. Just beneath the surface of that golden glow lay October’s surprisingly sharp little teeth, nipping unexpectedly when a sudden arctic gust caught and lifted a strand of Sam’s hair.

“I appreciate the support,” he said. “I owe you.”

“You don’t owe me a thing. I just wanted to give you a heads-up.” She dropped the butt of her cigarette onto the ground and crushed it out with her foot. “And to let you know that I’m watching your back.”

Detective Lorna Abrams had a headache.

She fumbled in her black leather purse for the emergency bottle of Tylenol she always carried, opened the bottle and popped two capsules into her palm. Snapping the cap back on the bottle, she glanced around the interior of the car for something liquid, then said, “To hell with it!” and swallowed them dry.

Policzki, his hands at ten and two on the wheel and his eyes focused on traffic to prevent them from becoming yet another highway statistic, said, “I don’t know how you do that.”

“Easy. I just work up a mouthful of spit and—”

“Thanks,” he said, “but you really don’t have to go into detail.”

“Stop being so spleeny. You’re a cop, for Christ’s sake. Act like one.”

Policzki didn’t respond. It was just as well. When she was in this kind of mood, heads were likely to roll, and Doug Policzki’s head, being the nearest one, was in danger of becoming her first victim.

None of the three telephone numbers listed on Kaye Winslow’s business card had yielded results. The first, her cell phone number, was useless because in the abruptness of her departure, Winslow had left her BlackBerry behind. The second, her private line at Winslow & DeLucca, rang twice and then went directly to voice mail. Lorna had left an urgent message, but the chances of getting a response were probably zip and zilch. That left door number three. But by the time they’d finished up at the scene, it was well past closing time, and the realty office answering machine had directed her to call back after eight o’clock in the morning.

“Three strikes and you’re out,” she muttered.