Chapter Twenty

WITH SOME ANNOYANCE, Father Lawrence asked if we’d gotten what we came for. Taking that as our cue to leave, we thanked him for his time and exited his office. I noticed Miss Lambert didn’t even look up when we passed her desk.

With the door safely closed behind us, Hannah asked, “Do you think Samuel was lying?”

“Whether you call it lying or withholding information, I don’t think he told us everything he knew.”

“For what it’s worth, I think the prick was lying through his teeth. What do we do about it?”

At that moment, Hannah got a call on her cell phone from New Orleans. “Chris,” she said, “I’m here with Terry. We’re standing in a church parking lot, and I can hardly hear you with all the street noise. We’re going to move to my car so that I can put you on speaker.”

It was my first time in the sainted BMW. To be honest, it was my first time in any BMW. I felt like I should bow. In the passenger seat, I was careful not to leave anything approaching a mark. Hannah put Chris on speaker. His booming voice came through loud and clear.

“How are my two favorite Clevelanders? You guys miss the Big Easy yet?”

“Sure, Chris,” Hannah said. “I’m still trying to adjust to food not associated with a death wish.”

“I always say if your food can’t kill you, you aren’t really eating. I called with some news regarding our mutual psychiatrist friend. We’ve finally got some real evidence linking Grieve to the crimes down here.”

“To start with,” he continued, “we did another search on Grieve’s apartment. I told the CSI boys to tear everything apart, and this time they really did. What they found was one of those fake, hollowed-out books mixed in with the other books in his library. Inside the opening, they found several vials of propofol, the same drug our killer used on a couple of his victims. I had someone check with the Behavioral Health Department at Tulane, and they couldn’t think of a single legitimate reason a psychiatrist or any other physician should have that drug in their home.”

“That would help with a jury,” Hannah said. “But you said ‘to start with.’ What else did you find?”

“We found two more things that should help. One is an additional piece of direct evidence tying Grieve to one of the crimes. The other might help us find where he’s hiding. Concerning the first, one of our detectives reinterviewed residents in Sean Doohan’s dorm, hoping to find something new about the night he died. We’re into the summer session, and the detective wasn’t expecting much.

“But this time, we got lucky. A girlfriend of one of the summer residents looked at pictures of Doohan and Grieve and remembered seeing Dr. Grieve on the night of the killing. She couldn’t recall the specific date, but she did remember it was in the dorm where she’d gone to study for her biology final the next day. We checked, and the date of her test was May 9th, the day after John was killed.”

“In my day,” Hannah said, “going to your boyfriend’s room to study for a biology final would have had an entirely different meaning.”

“Yeah, well, kids these days are a lot more studious than we were. In any case, she didn’t just recollect seeing Grieve; he and Sean were walking out of the dorm together, talking and laughing. She remembered thinking all the best-looking guys were gay.”

“I’m sure her boyfriend appreciated that comment,” I said. “But it does give us a possible explanation for why Sean was killed in the steam tunnels. His roommate thought John was confused about his sexuality. Grieve was his therapist, so if Sean were bisexual, Grieve would certainly know. As the handsome, older man, Grieve could have used his feelings to lure him someplace private. Sean might have even mentioned the tunnels in one of their sessions.”

“Choosing to have sex in a steam tunnel sounds like a stretch,” Hannah said.

“Think about it from Sean’s perspective,” I said. “He’s bisexual but probably enjoys his reputation as a lady’s man. That rules out the dorm or any of the usual hook-up places on campus. Grieve and John could have gone to a motel, but even that might have seemed too public. The steam tunnels would be the perfect place—private but with a forbidden feel.”

“I agree with Terry on this one,” Chris said. “I’m sure they wouldn’t have been the only couple to have sex in those tunnels. At the very least, this gives us another piece of direct evidence linking Grieve to one of the murders.”

“You might want to talk to John’s girlfriends,” I suggested. “Ask if he brought any of them down to the tunnels. If so, that would establish a pattern.”

“I’ll follow up, but there’s one other thing I need to fill you in on. Detective Ross has done some more work analyzing Drew’s hard drive. She thinks she figured out how Mary and Grieve were communicating while Mary was at Drew’s house. She found an account on Drew’s computer and some suspicious-looking message activity posted on the Private Matters website. That’s the online site competing with Ashley Madison as a place for married people to hook up with other partners.”

Hannah asked if we could get copies of the messages, and Chris promised to send them within an hour. I then asked if the messages were traceable. Chris pulled in Detective Ross for that part of the call.

“So far,” she said, “I haven’t had any luck with a trace. I found the IP address, but given how far back we’re looking, all that does is give you a general radius. I can tell you that Grieve sent the message from somewhere in the Cleveland area, but that’s a pretty wide range. I am working to pin it down further, but even that might not tell you much. If it were me, I’d have gone to the nearest public library and sent the message from there. Unless Grieve is a lot dumber than we think, this is not going to be a magic bullet.”

I started thinking about Tomas. While I had no doubt Detective Ross was correct about the old messages, I was considering another possibility.

“Is there any chance we can get an electronic copy of the hard drive?” I asked. “Not for the old messages, though that would save you the trouble of copying them. I was wondering if Grieve might still be monitoring the site. Don’t some services send you an e-mail prompt if someone leaves you a message? I know Facebook does that.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if there was an e-mail prompt,” Detective Ross replied, “but I can check to make sure. Are you thinking about sending Grieve a message?”

“I was wondering if we could send an e-mail that might bait him into responding from his real location. He is smart, and I have no doubt he sent his messages to Mary from another site. That being said, he’s also arrogant. I’m hoping the right message might goad Grieve into replying from wherever he’s hiding out.”

“It’d be nice,” Hannah said, “to play offense for a change.”

Chris promised to have a copy of the drive sent by courier no later than tomorrow afternoon. After he ended the call, I turned to Hannah.

“I know a computer expert who’s worked with me in the past. Any chance you could let me have the copy of the drive when it comes in?”

“Do I want to know this person’s name and what they do for a living?”

“He has a perfectly legitimate job. He just happens to have a knack with computers.” I was understating Tomas’s abilities dramatically, but my statement was still technically true.

“I’m going to trust you. I’ll have our computer guy make a copy. Your guy can review the drive, but no message gets sent without my approval.”

“Agreed. Now for the question I’ve been waiting to ask—how many biology finals did you study for in college?”

“It was actually one of my best subjects.”

I noticed she avoided the “how many” part of the question.

My next step was to talk to Tomas. I needed his opinion on the hard drive and whether my idea was even possible. I exited Hannah’s car and walked back to Hannibal. I was sure he was disgusted with me for parking him so close to a BMW. Hannibal hated expensive cars on principle alone. The fact that I’d sat in the BMW would only compound the insult. I expected a revenge breakdown or a failure to start, but before I could turn the key, Hannah waved me back to her car.

Tomas would have to wait. Detective Roberts had called while we were on the phone with Chris. The police had found Drew Allen’s car in the Cleveland airport parking lot.