I was still in a bad mood thirty minutes later after sitting in the reception area filling out a three-page form that wanted more detail than I could dredge up. Detective Kirby was waiting for me. As we moved into the stuffy little room where they interviewed me before, Macho Cop swaggered away down the hall. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but I could only hope that was the last time our paths would cross.
“We don’t have anything useful about that call yet, by the way. Maybe someone can pry something out of the computer records, but it’s not as easy as it looks on TV.”
“But you’ll tell me if you do get anything? I feel really exposed and vulnerable.”
“Understood. Anything we do find will become part of the Flores investigation, but if it suggests you’re in danger, we’ll let you know right away.”
Thanks, big help. I was hoping for around-the-clock police protection, but I just nodded for now.
“In looking over my notes, I have a few more questions. Probably nothing, but we’re still trying to make sense of this. You don’t mind doing it today, do you?” Kirby said, pulling up a chair. “I want to keep this investigation moving.”
“Not if it won’t take long and certainly not if it helps find the person who killed Gabby”.
“One thing that I’d like you to try and think back on,” he said, “is the timing of the events. As much as you can, can you put your story in the context of minutes passing? For example, how long was Ms. Flores down the hall before you heard voices?”
“I think five minutes, not much more or I would have noticed. She was making copies for me.”
“How many copies?”
“Maybe a dozen pieces of paper. Wouldn’t have taken long.”
“Do you have any idea of the time?”
“When I heard the other voice talking to her, I looked at my watch. Her husband was to meet her at six, and I assumed it was him, so I looked at my watch to see if we’d been there almost an hour. It was about five minutes of six, I remember.”
“And was it her husband, Mr. Kennedy?” he said.
I stopped to think. “I can’t say. The voices weren’t clear. It was a man. I’ve only spoken with Dermott a couple of times and I’m not sure I’d recognize his voice.”
“Then they weren’t arguing?”
I hesitated. Their voices had been raised, but I wasn’t about to pass along something vague that could get Dermott in more trouble. “I couldn’t hear what they were saying and it didn’t jump out at me as a fight. You know, I saw Dermott come into the building later, after I found Gabby, so it couldn’t have been him.”
“Unless he left the building and came back in later.”
“Dermott kill Gabby? No way. They were madly in love. You could see it.”
“As you say, you only saw him a couple of times.”
I was uneasy. Dermott, doubtless still in shock about his wife’s death, and now a suspect in her murder? Even though I’ve heard the police always look at the spouse, it was ludicrous. If anyone needed a good lawyer, it was Dermott, not me.
“How long after the voices started did you hear the gunshot?”
“Not long. At the time I didn’t know it was a shot. It was kind of muffled. I think I registered it as a car’s backfire or some other noise from outside the building.”
“And that’s why you didn’t come to Ms. Flores’s aid right away?”
Go ahead, lay more guilt on me. “I didn’t know she needed help.”
“Then why did you come down the hall?” he said casually.
“Because it was time to go. Gabby told me she and Dermott had a meeting that night, and I didn’t want to make them late. I had everything I needed, so I thought I’d meet her at the copy machine and head out.”
“And did you pick up the copies?”
“No. I found Gabby and I never did get them.”
“Are you sure she made them?”
“I could hear the machine.”
“Was it still on when you got there?”
“No, it got quiet right about the time I got to the end of the hall. The whole building was quiet by then.”
“So where were the copies and, come to think of it, the originals?” he said.
“I have no idea. I told you, I was looking for Gabby.”
“Were there papers on the floor in the room or the hallway?”
“No, I’m sure not. I would have noticed.”
“In the office where you found Ms. Flores?”
“No, I didn’t see anything.”
“Did you have any sense there might be someone else on the second floor?”
The thought chilled me and I went back to that awful couple of minutes when I tried to understand what might be happening, and that motionless hand lying there. “I don’t think so. But, like I told Officer McManus, I don’t remember much except seeing her.”
“When did he interview you? The night of the murder?”
“No, when I saw him at President Brennan’s office later. He asked me some of the same questions.”
Kirby jiggled his pen against the little notebook he had open on the table, making a rapid-fire tapping sound. “Okay. We’re almost finished, I promise.”
“I yelled for help. If anyone was there, they would have heard me,” I said, shrugging my shoulders to get rid of some of the tension from remembering the scene. “I did have a feeling someone was using the elevator, but I’m not sure. It’s a big building and the elevator was out of sight. I can tell you no one showed up to help before Dermott came up the stairs.”
“Can you tell me, as precisely as possible, where he was when you first saw him?”
“This is ridiculous, you know?” I said. “It’s a waste of time.” The detective opened his mouth to argue. I said, “Okay, okay, I’ll tell you, but I hope you don’t waste any time on Dermott as a suspect while the real murderer gets away. I was on the floor, trying to get Gabby to respond when I heard someone open the door downstairs and climb the stairs. I looked over my shoulder and saw Dermott as he got to the top of the staircase.”
“Could you tell from the sound where he entered the building?”
“Which door? Not really.”
“And you came in the back.”
“The street in front is blocked off to cars and I had to park in a visitor’s spot in the lot out back.”
“Was there anyone in the parking lot?”
“Yes, it was quitting time when I got there at five, and several women were talking to each other as they left the building and went into the lot. There were at least a dozen cars in the lot. Isn’t there a security camera you can check?”
“The camera that focused on the parking lot behind the building where Mr. Saylor had his office wasn’t functioning properly. When our people looked at the tape, all they saw was a patch of ground near the door, tops of heads, too fuzzy to identify, mostly leaving, but a couple heading in toward the building.”
“One of those might have been me. Could you tell?”
“Not really. The images are bad enough, but the camera uses black and white film. Your hair is kind of red.”
“Chestnut. My driver’s license says brown, but that’s only because there aren’t enough options when you fill out the form.”
His gaze moved to my hair, which he examined for a moment with the same expression I imagine he would have had if I had said it was green. “Okay. Let’s get back to Mr. Kennedy. What did he do when he came up to the second floor and saw you?”
“He didn’t know what was going on at first. I think he started to speak and then realized something was wrong.”
“Was he carrying anything?” the cop said.
“I don’t think so.”
He flipped to a fresh page. “I’d like to go back to what you saw in the copy room for a minute.”
“There was a long counter in the room with lots of papers in stacks.”
“What were the papers Ms. Flores was copying?”
A picture of Rory Brennan’s face in the dark car popped into my mind, the vaguely threatening tone of voice telling me it wouldn’t be in Lynthorpe’s best interests for me to mention Vince Margoletti. My hunch was it had everything to do with Gabby’s death, and Saylor’s. Taking a deep breath, I proceeded to lay out the basics of the consulting project, Saylor’s concerns, Gabby’s involvement, and the puzzling aspects surrounding Margoletti’s proposed donation. I didn’t share the questions about his character that the magazine article ticked off because, as Rory Brennan had said, they were mostly gossip. I felt a weight lifting from me as I spoke. I knew this was the right thing to do, consulting protocols or not. When I was finished, Kirby was silent for a full minute.
“I’m trying to see how the gift you described could be the trigger for this mess,” he said, “unless it’s the amount of money. Twenty million is a hell of a lot of cash, at least in my world. I don’t know much about donations like this, much less art. Was there something potentially illegal in the papers Flores showed you?”
“Not that I saw. There were some small irregularities. What we didn’t know was if they were clues to something we hadn’t spotted.”
“Anything confidential in them—Social Security numbers, bank account information, wills, stuff like that?”
“No, all public information, some of it on the provenance of paintings.”
He raised his eyebrows in a question.
“Provenance? It means the formal history of who owned and traded a painting or other piece of art. It’s common to keep a record of buys and sells as a way of assuring owners the work isn’t fraudulent.”
“Did you think these works were frauds?”
“Nothing that I could see suggested forgeries.”
“I’m struggling here, Ms. O’Rourke. The anonymous call you got would seem to point clearly to something in your work with the college that’s got someone scared. But you don’t know what it is. You’re telling me everything, right?”
“Believe me, if I understood what was so terrible in those papers I would tell you, I’d tell the president of Lynthorpe, I’d tell my attorney.”
“You have a lawyer?”
“I will by the end of the day, at the suggestion of a couple of friends. Just as a precaution.” My face probably reflected my feeling that even wanting a lawyer made me feel somehow less than innocent.
“Well, where do you think the papers went, if you don’t have them and you didn’t see Mr. Kennedy holding them?”
“I have no idea,” I said. Until he started asking me to reconstruct the scene, I hadn’t thought much about the papers as the key to all this. The question burned inside me now. Whoever killed Gabby must have taken the papers. They must have hoped to cover up something deeply wrong signaled by those few sheets, but who other than the man who owned the art described in them would understand their significance?