“I’m sorry,” I said when I could speak again. “Are you sure he said the Philadelphia Eleven?”
“Yes.” The chief was frowning. “I’d rather assumed it was something rather sinister, from his tone of voice.”
That set me to giggling again.
“I’m sure Mr. Sedlak finds the Philadelphia Eleven sinister,” I managed to get out. “Before the 1970s, the Episcopal Church didn’t ordain women as priests. In 1974, a few renegade bishops ordained eleven women without going through all the usual procedures. Big scandal; everyone got very worked up, and the upshot was that the General Convention approved the ordination of women two years later. I have no idea if the Philadelphia Eleven helped bring it about or if it would have happened anyway. But of course Mr. Sedlak would loathe them, individually and collectively.”
“Difficult to see how church politics nearly half a century gone by could have anything to do with a present-day murder,” the chief said.
“Not so difficult,” I said. “As long as people like Mr. Hagley and Mr. Sedlak are around, trying to turn back the clock. Did the Thirteenth Amendment put an end to racism?”
“Good point,” he said. “Still, I don’t think the ladies of the vestry are going to be high on my suspect list. How did Mr. Hagley and Mr. Sedlak get along?”
“I like the way you think.” I thought about it for a few moments. “Mother might know better than I do,” I said finally. “I doubt if they were buddies, but I also doubt if Mr. Sedlak would want to do away with Mr. Hagley. He’d have one less ally against the insidious creeping forces of modernism.”
“Makes sense,” the chief said. “I don’t know whether to thank you for explaining all this to me, or be exasperated to find out that I’ve wasted nearly two hours of my day talking to a loon in the grip of a conspiracy theory.”
“Oh, dear,” I murmured.
“Although it wasn’t completely useless,” he said. “I did learn one interesting fact. Apparently Mr. Hagley was in the habit of giving Mr. Sedlak a ride home. Mr. Hagley begged off last night. Said he had to go somewhere else in a hurry.”
“At ten fifteen at night?” I asked. “Because that’s when the vestry meeting broke up.”
“Mr. Sedlak also found this improbable, which I suppose was why he mentioned it. He ended up scrounging a ride from your mother.”
“She and Mrs. Willis must have loved that. He lives all the way on the other side of town.”
“On the plus side, it means your mother and Mrs. Willis are very well alibied for the time of the murder.”
“And Mr. Sedlak, too, I assume.”
“Not necessarily,” the chief said. “By my calculations, Mr. Sedlak would have had just enough time after they dropped him off to drive back and attack Mr. Hagley. I don’t think he did it, mind, but it’s possible. Your mother and Mrs. Willis, though, alibi each other until shortly after you called 911.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Not that I suspect Mother, but maybe if Mr. Sedlak knows she’s alibied, he’ll calm down a bit.”
“I’m not optimistic,” the chief said. “He even finds it suspicious that she gave him a ride without asking for gas money—apparently Mr. Hagley expected it. At any rate, if Mr. Sedlak shows up in my office again, I will seriously consider charging him for obstructing justice.”
I made a mental note to tell Mother. Even if the chief didn’t do anything of the sort, the very idea would please her enormously.
“On a more practical note,” he went on, “I’m meeting with Chuck Hagley, Mr. and Mrs. Hagley’s son, tomorrow at eight. After I finish with him, he’s all yours. He’ll be staying at his parents’ house. I can give you his cell phone number.”
I pulled out my notebook and jotted down Chuck’s contact info.
“I also heard from the Blair family,” the chief said. “The mother’s dead, but there’s a sister who still lives in Middleburg.”
“Is she coming down here?”
“No.” He grimaced slightly. “She wants nothing to do with him. Says that his going to prison broke their mother’s heart, and his suicide finished her.”
“It was suicide, then?”
“Officially, accidental death,” the chief said. “But nothing I saw in the files looked the least bit accidental. What a waste.”
We both fell silent for a moment. I remembered the dates on Blair’s plaque. Only thirty-four years old.
“The sister did give us the name of one of Blair’s friends and said he can make any decisions that need to be made. A professor James Donovan. Law school faculty.” He handed me a slip of paper with Donovan’s name, phone number, and office address. “Anyone you know?”
“Not that I know of.” I shook my head. “Possibly someone I’ve met in passing at faculty events.”
“I’m meeting him at nine tomorrow. You’re welcome to contact him after I finish. And I’d appreciate it if you could fill me in after you talk to him.”
“Fill you in on what? What he wants us to do with Blair’s ashes?”
“And any other information or insights you might gain from the meeting,” he said. “I didn’t get the impression that he was particularly pleased at the notion of talking to the police about his old friend. I wouldn’t exactly call his attitude truculent, or even unfriendly, just … rather cool. But maybe he’ll warm up a little if you can convince him that I have no intention of raking up old scandals or blackening his friend’s name all over again—that I’m just trying to solve a murder.”
“Then again, he’s not just a lawyer but a law professor,” I said.
“Of criminal law, according to the faculty directory,” the chief said. “So it’s entirely possible he might be more forthcoming with you than with someone official like me.”
He might be right.
“So I play the faculty wife card and see if he unbends.”
The chief nodded.
“On the positive side, so far I haven’t had to deal with any distraught family members,” I said. “Mrs. Washington just wants us to tuck her husband’s ashes back where they belong.”
“Not the hysterical type at all.” The chief sounded as if he approved.
“Judge Jane might have a little send-off for Lacey, but both of them were pretty calm about the whole thing.”
“Although Her Honor does seem fired up to get me the information I need to examine the possible ties between Lacey’s ex-husband and the jewel thieves,” the chief said, with a smile. “I’m not at all sure how relevant it will be. Yes, Lacey was obsessed with the idea that the jewelry allegedly stolen from Mrs. Van der Lynden was actually hidden somewhere on the estate. Kept going out there with her metal detector, trying to find it. By that time Mrs. Winkleson had bought the place, and she didn’t take too kindly to trespassing treasure hunters, so we were constantly having to send officers out there to chase Lacey off. I went to talk to her a time or two myself. Impressive lady, really. Imagine Judge Jane, only six feet tall and thin as a rail. She’d be out there in a flowered dress, hiking boots, and a safari hat, methodically running her metal detector over the ground in the fields or the woods. Rain or shine, heat wave or blizzard. Made no difference to her. It got to the point that Mrs. Winkleson’s butler would just call and say ‘she’s here again,’ and we’d send a deputy out to chase her home.”
“Hard to see what that could have to do with a murder over a decade later.”
“Very hard. But at this point, anything related to the jewel robbery is potentially interesting and useful. Because with all due deference to Mr. Sedlak, I think this murder will turn out to have a lot more to do with the jewel robbery than with Episcopal Church politics.”
I nodded.
“Any idea when you’re going to see Dr. Womble?” I asked.
The chief sighed and closed his eyes briefly.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s just that I’m impatient to get all my next-of-kin notifying done, and he’s the closest thing we have to a next of kin on the John Doe.”
“That could change,” the chief said. “And possibly a great deal more quickly than I’d have anticipated. Apparently shortly before my predecessor retired, he started a campaign to solve all the department’s cold cases. He sent off several tissue samples for DNA analysis—including samples from the John Doe. So instead of having to wait weeks or even months to get the DNA results back, all we have to do is submit the results that were already in the case file to CODIS, which Horace is going to do as soon as he gets back to the office tonight.”
“That’s great,” I said. “But why wasn’t it done a long time ago?”
“Probably because the first DNA report they got back and submitted to CODIS implicated Mayor Pruitt’s brother-in-law in a 1991 murder case,” the chief said. “Orders went down that the department had better things to do than waste their time on cold cases and they should get rid of all those useless DNA reports.”
“That sounds like Pruitt-style justice,” I said. “How did you figure it out?”
“Apparently the as-yet unidentified officer who was working the cold cases balked at destroying evidence. So he filed all of it in the John Doe case file—not just the John Doe DNA report, but three other inconvenient DNA reports, and the memo from the mayor ordering him to get rid of the DNA reports.”
“So we might find out who the John Doe really is,” I said.
“We might indeed,” the chief said. “Of course, now there are several other cases I need to examine, to see if the suppression of evidence resulted in any more guilty Pruitts getting away scot-free with crimes.”
“Or any innocent people being sent to prison in their place,” I added.
“Precisely.” The chief looked grim. “So, as you can see, today was perhaps the worst possible day to have to waste time on Mr. Sedlak’s blitherings.”
“I can understand that,” I said. “I’ll try not to nag you about the next of kin. And while we’re on the subject, I realize that right now the crypt is a crime scene and you don’t have a crystal ball to tell me when you’re going to release it, and it’s not as if we have anything scheduled there—at least not until we get to the point of interring Mr. Hagley. But just to make my next conversation with Robyn easier, let’s pretend I asked you how soon we get our crypt back.”
“Okay,” he said. “And you can also pretend that I said I’m doing my best to finish with it. I’d be tempted to say sometime tomorrow, but I’d hate to get her hopes up and then disappoint her. Looks as if your grandmother has been coaching the boys in their batting again.”
I could take a hint. Time to drop the subject—not that I minded his choice of a new subject. My grandmother Cordelia had played a few seasons with the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in her youth, and she was the Eagles’ not-so-secret weapon in their quest to win the league championship again.
“She’s down this weekend especially for the baseball,” I said. “Minerva and I have already arranged for the Four Horsemen to have a sleepover Saturday night so Cordelia can work with them.”
“Good. Ah, there’s your father.”
Dad, who had been setting up comfortable canvas chairs for Mother and my grandmother Cordelia, beamed and waved when he saw us.
“I expect he’ll be over here in a minute to tell me about the autopsy,” the chief remarked.
“You don’t sound very excited.”
“If your dad had found anything exciting, he’d have called me earlier. Quite possibly before he’d completely finished the autopsy, in case I wanted to see his interesting findings for myself. No, I’m not expecting anything but a confirmation that Mr. Hagley’s death resulted from being hit over the head with that crowbar.”
I could see his point.
“Chief!” Dad exclaimed as he bounced over to us. “You’ll have my report by morning, but I can give you the highlights now. I found Mr. Hagley to be in perfect health—”
“With the tiny exception of that whole being dead thing,” I said.
“Precisely.” Dad nodded. “I’ve ordered the routine toxicology tests, but I doubt if they’ll show anything odd.”
“So he died from being hit over the head with the crowbar by person or persons unknown,” the chief said, to head off any possibility that Dad would explain Mr. Hagley’s demise in dense, polysyllabic medical terms. “And if not for our killer, he might have been with us for a good long while to come. Which makes no difference in the eyes of the law, of course, but it still feels more heinous. Excuse me, but I should take this.”
He pulled his cell phone, which had indeed buzzed discreetly while he was speaking, and stepped few paces away.
I resisted the urge to sidle a little closer, and wondered how hard it was to learn lip reading. It would be such a useful skill sometimes.