30: Final Exam

Mac had barely finished the trick, pulling the King of Hearts out of his cigar, when the shop bell above the door announced the arrival of a caller.

He raised an eyebrow. “Our first guest is early. I suppose I should have expected that.”

Looking hesitant, a slight young man with fair hair worn down to his collar made his way to the back of the store.

“Jason Danvers, I presume?” Mac said.

“Right. You must be Professor McCabe. You wanted to see me? Something about Professor Burch that you said I’d be interested in?”

“Who is this?” Marvin Slade demanded.

“I know that name from somewhere,” Erica said. She doesn’t miss much.

“Warren Burch’s strongest and most persistent advocate in the twitterverse,” I supplied.

“So, what’s this all about?” Danvers persisted. “And who are these people?”

Mac introduced them by name and occupation, unnecessarily pointing to each in turn with his walking stick. “Before I explain the purpose of this meeting, I await the presence of two law enforcement officials.”

Danvers’s face made all kinds of maneuvers, starting from the moment he heard the words “county prosecutor” after Marvin’s moniker. But he finally settled on a “confident young collegiate” façade.

“I can’t hang around. I have a party to go to.”

“Well, I have no authority to detain you, but perhaps I can entertain you.” No more magic tricks, please! “Please sit down.”

Danvers did so, warily, settling in about half-way between me and Erica.

“Here is a riddle,” Mac continued. “When is a joke not a joke?”

“When it’s taken seriously,” Erica said quickly. I guess she wanted to beat Marvin to the punch, but he looked thoroughly confused. I couldn’t blame him; I was confused, and I knew the end game.

“What the fudge?” Danvers didn’t really say fudge. Mac ignored the outburst.

“Spot on!” he told Erica. “Jefferson here and a certain young lady”—he meant Zoe Slade—“at different times suggested in jest that one of Warren Burch’s current students may have killed him because his tests were so difficult. For too long, I made the mistake of taking those comments in the spirit in which they were made.

“That changed when I looked at a certain document of my own creation in a new light. It was a timetable of Warren Burch’s offenses, headed ‘The Three Students.’ My mind suddenly went to a Sherlock Holmes story of that name—‘The Adventure of the Three Students,’ to be precise.”

“Sherlock Holmes,” Slade muttered, not in a worshipful tone.

His ex cut him down with a look.

“Are you going to listen to this?” Danvers asked Slade. Mac resumed before the prosecutor could reply.

“The theme of that story is the theft of an examination paper, which set me to thinking. Professor Burch died on the cusp of examination week. Perhaps his murder, which by all appearances was unpremeditated, happened during the attempted theft of his upcoming final examination paper. Was there any confirmation for this? There was, at least, an intriguing possibility. Officer Jackson testified that he heard the office photocopying machine the night of the murder. What better way to steal a paper without making it obvious than by photocopying it?”

“That’s a little thin.” Erica sounded like she was already planning a defense strategy.

“It gets fatter when you know that Warren Burch could not have been the person that Officer Jackson heard operating the machine. The reason is that he was not yet in the building. When Chief Decker described the video to Jefferson and me, he said it showed Professor Burch arriving, then later leaving and returning with Chinese takeout. He also said it showed Officer Jackson entering the building twice on his rounds. When I viewed the video earlier today, by Chief Decker’s sufferance, I confirmed that Burch arrived after Officer Jackson entered the building the second time and heard the machine in operation.

“Of itself that is not determinative. However, it is indicative. So is the murder weapon—a teaching award, which implied a certain animus in that direction. I felt reasonably sure that I was sound in suspecting that Burch interrupted a student in the act of copying an examination paper for the purpose of achieving a better grade.”

“Even if you’re by some chance right,” Slade said, not to be outdone by Ms. Slade in the skepticism department, “how could you narrow it down to a particular student? Burch must have had dozens.”

“Not that many. He only taught two classes. Still, the identity of the killer only came to me late last night in my study after I sent Jefferson on his way. I got to that by first inventorying what is known or can be reasonably assumed about the killer. First, he or she is not a good student—why else have recourse to steal the examination paper? Second, this person’s academic success must be extraordinarily important to him or her, or else why take such drastic measures as thievery in the night? Third, the thief must be familiar with the Professor’s office, or else why even think that he or she could find the examination paper, copy it, and get away with it? Jefferson and I recently had another case, a small matter of robbery, in which it was similarly clear that the felon had inside information.”

Santa Crook! No need to tell Marvin any more about that.

“When I put all this together, I immediately thought of an individual I myself had never met, although Jefferson had told me much about him. His parents were both highly successful in their careers, and so must have had high hopes for him. And yet, his grades were not of the best. Surely, they were disappointed with him, and perhaps made that clear.”

“That’s a lie!” Danvers snapped. The look in his eyes was almost feral.

“You assume that I refer to you, Mr. Danvers, and rightly so. It may interest you to learn that I spoke today with Professor Wendy Yazane, who administered the examination just as Warren Burch wrote it. She informed me that you did remarkably well, demonstrating a command of the material far beyond any you showed in previous tests.

“To the third point of my description of the killer, it is no great leap to posit that you were familiar with Professor Burch’s office. As he was your advisor, you must have met with him there often. Undoubtedly you did not, however, know that he was occasionally in that office quite late. That is why you were taken unawares as you attempted to copy the examination paper. Only later did you pretend to know of his working habits.”

Danvers said nothing.

“I saw those tweets about Burch supposedly being so hard-working, the late hours and all that,” Erica said. “What’s with the tweet storm? Why call attention to himself?”

“Almost certainly his original intention in defending his advisor so vigorously in the wake of Maggie’s stories was to curry favor with a professor known to craft rigorous final examinations. Having thus created the persona of the admiring tweeter, he could scarcely remain silent about the murder. That would have been a strange silence.”

Like the dog in the night-time! But please don’t say that.

After all this, the best Danvers could manage was:

“Nobody saw the killer. He didn’t even show up on the security video.”

Mac nodded. “True enough—and a fact presumably known to the killer, but not to the public. It was not reported. The killer’s apparent invisibility puzzled me so much that I put it to one side while I pursued other lines of thought. The solution came to me at the same time I realized that the original sin in this case was academic thievery. A clue to the how was buried in the sordid conduct of Professor Burch himself. My ‘Three Students’ chronology reminded me that one of his accusers testified that the dean—as he was then—asked her to stand on a chair and adjust an air vent in the ceiling so that he could look up her dress. This conduct was mentioned in the investigative report and in Maggie Burch’s Observer story. The young woman told us the same thing. Warren Burch’s new office as a professor, which is in the same building, also had an air vent. I noticed it myself when I was in the murder room.”

So did I.

“An air vent meant an air duct, and this one was right above Professor Burch’s desk. And there it was: The killer entered the murder room through an air duct, just like the notorious dormitory burglar Pierce Brooks.[10] He lowered himself to the desk and departed the same way. The Brooks case, which caused so much embarrassment to the campus police, was well covered in both the Observer and the Spectator. As a student, you could scarcely not know about it, Mr. Danvers. I presume you entered the duct at some other point, perhaps the men’s rest room, toward the end of normal business hours and there awaited your opportunity. Thus, Officer Jackson never saw you.”

Dust and dirt! I’d seen it on the papers scattered over Burch’s desk, right beneath the air vent. It must have entered the room with Danvers.

“How would I even know where the duct work ran so that I could get into it and into Burch’s office?”

“The schematic plans are a matter of public record with the Erin Department of Buildings and Inspections. As the son of a successful architect, you would either know that or could quickly learn it with a casual question to your father.

“Being of small stature, you would not find the air duct such a tight squeeze—although I imagine the wait was nevertheless a long and unpleasant one. Perhaps you were about to lower yourself into the room after the cleaning crew left, only to hear Professor Burch arrive. When he finally departed hours later, you assumed that his work was done. That turned out to be a fatal mistake—fatal for Warren Burch when he unpredictably brought his takeout dinner back to the office. No doubt you acted on impulse when you saw disaster looming before you. And yet, I rather think the use of a teaching award to end that threat was no fluke. You must have spent a very long night in that vent before exiting the next morning when the coast was clear, presumably at the point where you entered.”

Marvin thought a minute. “Why didn’t he just run out of the front door afterwards?”

“Mr. Danvers?” Taking his sullen look for a “no comment,” Mac replied: “Most likely he was aware of the video surveillance. It was installed last year with some fanfare. In addition, he would have heard Officer Jackson conversing with Burch earlier in the evening and may have feared that he, too, would return.”

Danvers squeezed his hands into fists. “You tell a nice story. Fiction is your wheelhouse, McCabe, and you should stick to it. I didn’t hear any proof.”

My turn.

“Hadley Reams knew about Burch’s murder before anybody in the professional media,” I said. “He wouldn’t tell me how, pleading ‘sources.’ But you were in his office that morning. I imagine you were trying to cozy up to him so that you could get close to the case. That seems like your style.”

Erica Slade shook her head—a bit sadly, I thought. “Sorry, Jeff, but that’s hardly proof.”

Mac’s turn.

“You are a young man who causes himself a lot of trouble by his failure to take pains, Mr. Danvers. If some of the unidentified fingerprints on the copying machine turn out to be yours, that is easily explained by Professor Burch’s role as your adviser. He may have granted you permission to use the machine, or even asked you to do so on his behalf. I concede that. However, your prints on the inside of the air duct would be harder to explain. Did you take the pains to wipe them off? Ah, I thought not.”

The panic in his face reached his feet and Danvers bolted. Where he thought he could go, I have no idea, but he stood up and started to move.

Erica moved faster. Not having her famous boxing gloves handy, she picked Mac’s walking stick off the chair and inserted it between Danvers’ moving legs. Danvers went down fast and not quietly. He displayed an impressive vocabulary of words that used to be unprintable. And he was still yelling when the shop bell jingled, announcing the arrival of Aurelia Banfield and L. Jack Gibbons.

“I guess we’re a little late,” Banfield said.

“Not too late to make an arrest,” Marvin Slade informed her. “And I don’t care which one of you does it.”

10 Jefferson mentions this individual in Chapter Five. Only later, during the trial of Jason Danvers, did I learn of a New York Times report on May 4, 2017 that a student at the University of Kentucky used an air duct to gain access to an instructor’s office for the purpose of stealing a copy of an examination paper for a statistics class. As Sherlock Holmes said, “It’s all been done before and will be again.”—S. McC.