Drake left Triple D in a fog of confusion.
Another victim, so soon after the last. And only two more to go.
He and Beckett had planned to go together to speak to Dr. Tracey Moorfield, but at the last minute his friend had pulled the chute, telling him that he had to follow up on something at the morgue.
Drake had felt a twang of jealousy when Chase had asked to speak to Beckett privately, but he thought it was more than simple jealousy. They were keeping something from him.
Something that they didn’t want him to know.
Drake shook his head, trying to clear his thoughts.
Stay focused. There will be time to find out what their big secret is later.
He made his way across the city to the university, taking the route suggested by Beckett. He parked, and then strode through the cool evening toward the faculty club, where Beckett had assured him that Dr. Tracey Moorfield would be.
Despite his friend’s assertions that he wasn’t going to get anything out of her, it was still worth a shot. Officer Dunbar and Screech had their computers, but there was still a role for good old fashioned police work.
He hoped.
The door emblazoned with the gold plaque bearing Dr. Tracey Moorfield’s name was ajar, and Drake knocked heavily so that it opened wider with every rap.
“Dr. Moorfield?”
He heard someone clear their throat.
“Yes? Who is it?”
Drake put a hand on the door and pushed it open, leaning into the opening. A well-dressed woman with thin lips drawn into a frown, not entirely unlike Mrs. Armatridge and her cronies, sat in a large wooden chair, papers spread out before her atop a massive desk.
“Dr. Moorfield?” he said again, putting on his most charming smile.
“That’s what it says on the plaque, doesn’t it? Unless the university decided to change that, too.”
The smile slid off Drake’s face.
What had Beckett said? She’s like going bareback with a woman with vaginal something or other?
He shuddered at the thought of vaginal anything with this woman.
“What do you want?”
Drake stepped into the room.
“Did I say you can enter?”
Taken aback by this, Drake froze mid-step.
Dr. Moorfield sighed heavily.
“Well, you’re already in now. I’ll ask you once more, what do you want?”
Drake put his foot down and decided to forgo any small talk. He doubted if academic offices had emergency buttons beneath their desks like they did at the bank, but if they did, he suspected he only had a few seconds before Dr. Moorfield’s arthritic digits pushed it.
“I’m here to ask you a few questions. About six murders.”
One of the woman’s eyebrows raised, and she put her pencil down on the desk.
“Are you a police officer?”
“No, not exactly.”
Dr. Moorfield frowned.
“Not exactly? You’re either a police officer, or you aren’t. There is no in between. Which one is it?”
“I’m not,” Drake said flatly.
“So why is a civilian coming to my office to ask questions about murder?”
Drake grimaced and he considered that Beckett might have understated the crust on the doctor.
“Well, I was a police officer once—a detective, but—”
Dr. Moorfield held up a hand, stopping him mid-sentence.
“I’m not interested in your life story. What do you want?”
Drake’s blood pressure started to increase.
“These murders… the killer is copying your pathology notes. I believe that my friend, Dr. Campbell visited you earlier?”
Dr. Moorfield scowled.
“They let anyone become doctors these days. In my time, you had to be intelligent to be a doctor. Now, it seems all you need is hair dye and tattoos.”
Drake felt like they were having two separate conversations, and he tried to get them back on track.
“Right, well I think that the killer might have been a former student of yours. Is there anyone that you can think of that might have been… I don’t know, different? Someone with a vendetta, maybe?”
The woman’s eyes went dark and a brief silence fell over the office.
“Get out,” Dr. Moorfield said. “Get out of my office.”
Drake held his hands up.
“Dr. Moor—”
“Get out!” she suddenly shrieked. “I don’t know who you are, or why you are coming up with nonsense about murders only to bring up something that happened years ago, but I’m not falling for this.”
“Dr. Moorfield, I—”
“Get out! Get out! Get the hell out of here!”
For such a small woman, such a wire rack of a human being, Dr. Tracey Moorfield certainly had a set of lungs on her.
Ears ringing, Drake stood in the office for a moment, trying to wrap his head around what had precipitated this. Then, watching as the elderly woman’s chest heaved up and down, fearing that she was going to have a heart attack or a stroke, he spun on his heels and left the office.
“What the hell was that?” he grumbled on the way back to his car.
Maybe good old fashioned police work was dead after all.
He took his cell phone from his pocket and dialed Screech’s number.
“Screech, I’m going to need the names of the people on the tribunal board. Beckett was right, I’m—”
But then he spotted something in the parking lot that drew his attention and he stopped speaking.
“What the hell?”
He squinted into the evening at a sleek black motorbike parked not twenty spots from his own.
Beckett’s bike.
Only Beckett had said that he had urgent business at the morgue, not at the university.
Oh, there was a secret all right. And Drake hated being out of the loop.