Chapter Four

 

12:30 p.m.

 

The tree-lined walking paths were void of meandering students, the benches noticeably empty despite the sun-filled lunch hour. But it wasn’t a surprise really, not in lieu of the tragedy that had struck the normally quiet campus of Ocean Point Community College.

Elise stood among the horde of students held back from the educational building by Troy Marcil, a rookie officer with the local police department. Occasionally a student would try to walk across the grass, head toward their class or the student center, completely oblivious to the police cars scattered around the area, but for the most part Officer Marcil had a pretty uneventful post. Uneventful to the average onlooker anyway. Torture, no doubt, for the policeman himself.

“Mitch is gonna freak when he finds out what he’s missing.” Troy ran the back side of his hand across his mouth then spat into the grass. “You talk to him yet?”

She shook her head. “Not about this, no. But I’m sure Chief Maynard will contact him at some point today if he hasn’t already.”

“Yeah, you’re probably righ— Hey! You! In the red sweatshirt! Step back onto the parking lot. Now!” Troy straightened his shoulders and shrugged an apology at Elise as he set off in the direction of the offender.

It was just as well. She wasn’t there to stand around talking about Mitch. She was there to find out everything she could about her teacher’s death. Pulling a notepad and pen from her backpack purse, Elise approached a young man of about twenty in a navy Ocean Point Community College sweatshirt.

“Excuse me, my name is Elise Jenkins with the Ocean Point Weekly, do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

The young man shoved his hands into his pockets and grunted an affirmative.

“Do you know anything about what’s going on?” She flipped to a clean sheet of paper and waited.

“Kinda. Some professor bit the dust at her computer. Least that’s what my roommate said.”

“How did your roommate find out?” she asked, her stomach tightening as she quoted the subject.

“Are you kidding? It’s all anyone’s been talking about for the past four hours. And what they’re not talking about, they’re emailing.” He pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit the end with a green lighter. “And you know what’s kinda funny?”

She studied his face, noticed the hazy look to his eyes. Drugs? Alcohol? “No, what’s funny?”

“The story keeps changing with each new email. Last one I read said she’d choked on a stick of gum. The one before that said she was tied up—bondage style.”

It was obvious he had nothing worthwhile to contribute. All of his information was fourth-hand hearsay at best. Thanking him politely, Elise wandered over to a small group of women in their mid to late twenties.

“Excuse me, my name is Elise Jenkins with the Ocean Point Weekly, may I ask you a few questions?”

The tallest in the group, a woman with shoulder-length blonde hair, nibbled her lower lip inward and gave a slight nod to her head. Her large green eyes were red-rimmed, her nose somewhat puffy.

“Can I ask what you know about the events inside?” Elise asked, her curiosity piqued by the woman’s distraught appearance.

“My teacher is dead.”

Elise reached a hand toward the woman’s shoulder, gave it a gentle squeeze. “I’m so sorry. How did you find out?”

The woman unraveled a tissue in her right hand and swiped at the tears that dappled her lashes. “My friend Nina is one of the people who found Ms. Daltry. I was on my way into the building for class when Nina came running out in hysterics.”

Elise wrote as rapidly as possible, new questions forming in her thoughts before the current ones were answered. “May I ask your name?”

“Jeanine Voigt.”

“Did your friend, N—” Elise looked quickly at her notes. “Nina tell you anything specific about finding the body?”

Jeanine pulled a second tissue from her jacket pocket and used it to blow her nose. “Poor Nina was completely creeped out. It was hard to understand every single thing she said, so much of it was jumbled. But she did keep saying she thought Ms. Daltry was just asleep. You know, that she’d just drifted off at her computer.” The woman’s breath hitched as she paused briefly. “Then, when she touched her shoulder to wake her, she said Ms. Daltry’s body was ice-cold and hard as a rock.”

Elise’s pen flew to the side margin, jotted an insertion note regarding rigor mortis. She knew enough from conversations with Mitch over the past ten months to know that full rigor mortis generally set in at about eight hours. And depending on a number of factors, including temperature, could last for up to seventy-two hours.

She glanced at her watch and mentally counted backward from the time the body was discovered. Considering the woman had taught a full day of classes on Saturday and had met with her critique group yesterday afternoon, anything from about four p.m. to ten p.m. seemed a safe bet for the time of death.

“Did Nina say anything else?”

Jeanine shook her head, then stopped. “She kept saying it was freezing inside. That she couldn’t get warm.”

Elise listened without writing. An inner chill was something victims and witnesses often described in relation to a crime scene. Nerves, no doubt. And understandably so.

She pulled a business card from her purse and handed it to Jeanine. “If you think of anything else, or, if you think your friend Nina would be willing to talk to me—call this number. Anytime.” She put an arm around the teary-eyed woman and gave her a quick hug. “The police will move heaven and earth to figure out who did this.”

The woman sniffed, her voice quiet and shaky. “Thank you, Elise.”

“Take care of yourself.” She walked over to the edge of the parking lot, continually scanning the notes she’d jotted from her interview with Jeanine. The case was fresh, just a few hours old, but she’d managed to piece together a good deal of information. The kind of information that brought clarity to a fuzzy picture. Ms. Daltry was working at her computer sometime last night. Odd, when you considered the fact that the community college was closed on Sunday. Yet completely in keeping with what Ms. Daltry had told the class on Saturday morning.

Assuming the woman hadn’t died of some sort of natural cause, she’d been the victim of a crime. But why would someone want to kill a forty-two-year-old creative writing teacher?

She leaned against a tree, her thoughts running in circles. Who? Why?

The robbery.

She heard the gasp as it escaped her mouth, felt the acceleration of her heartbeat. Had Ms. Daltry’s mere presence in the building been the reason for her murder?

Pushing off the tree, Elise shoved her notebook and pen into her purse and headed toward the car, her heart heavy with a realization too painful to ignore. Thirty-five years earlier a young Hannah Daltry had peered out from under a desk—too terrified to scream, too scared to move. Her solitary presence in that bank so long ago had stuck with her, affected her in ways one could only glimpse on paper. But she’d made it through that ordeal, lived to tell about it . . . until today. When, by a twist of cruel irony, she found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time once again.