Ada Madison - The Square Root of Murder

“You’re so good with pesty people,” I said to Ariana.

She smiled. “Lucky for you.”

Whatever that meant. I poked her in the arm in case she’d just insulted me.

With the luxury, or maybe the curse, of an empty store, Ariana and I sat on folding chairs in front of a glass counter that held a more expensive inventory of gems and charms.

“I’ll be you and you be the dean,” Ariana said.

I was nervous already. “I’ll give it a try.”

“I found something very interesting as I was cruising online, Dean Underwood,” Ariana said.

“I would say ‘browsing the Internet’ not ‘cruising online’,” I corrected.

Ariana rolled her eyes. “Okay, browsing the Internet, but try to concentrate on the big picture, Sophie.”

“Sorry. Can I get a bottle of water from the back?”

Ariana checked her watch. “Not for another ten minutes. We need to get this started.”

“You’re cold.”

“As I was saying, Dean, I was looking up some examples of statistical surveys that I could use in class and I found many of them were carried out in New York City in the sixties. Studies of marijuana use, disorderly conduct, trespassing, that kind of thing, and I was so surprised to see your name come up.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” I said, playing a thunderstruck dean.

Ariana gave me an exaggerated, skeptical look, then waved her hand dismissively. “It’s probably a different Phyllis Underwood, a sociology major who graduated in nineteen sixty-eight. One of your classmates?”

She was good. “I give up,” I said lowering my head and weeping.

“Wasn’t that easy?” Ariana said.

“I see where you’re going with this. I just let her tell me exactly what it was. And if I really am wrong, well, I won’t be any worse off than I am now.”

“You go, girlfriend,” my mentor said.

If only the dean would follow the script, I’d be one happy mathematician.

A tinkling sound interrupted us. Two customers, a mother and teenage daughter, entered. I hoped they’d be easier to deal with than the old woman in shorts.

I left Ariana to her business and went through the sparkling curtain to the back. I grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and sat down to check my emails and phone messages. Way too many emails for only about an hour and a half. I scrolled through them to prioritize. I deleted a few newsletters without opening them and flagged a couple from applied statistics students. I’d get to them later.

On to my voicemail.

I drew in my breath. A message from Virgil came in only a few minutes ago. I hoped no one was looking as I clicked on his voicemail before the one from Bruce and the three from Rachel. It might appear that I’d become a police groupie. One of the badge bunnies, as I’d heard Virgil refer to women who followed cops around.

Virgil’s message was cryptic. “Heads up, Sophie,” he said. “Our conclusion was correct. Give me a call.”

I pressed the phone against my warm forehead. Virgil could only mean one thing: that his expert had submitted his analysis and the handwriting on Rachel’s draft thesis pages was a match to Hal Bartholomew’s.

I felt a wave of nausea and lowered my head, supporting it on the table with my sweaty arms.

How did the results come back so quickly? What happened to the underfunded, understaffed police department where you had to wait three months for fingerprint analysis? I realized I was now angry at the efficiency of the Henley PD.

A callback to Virgil wasn’t going to cut it. I had to get to the police station and see and hear for myself what Virgil had learned.

Ariana was busy with the mother and daughter pair. I was glad to see that they’d amassed a considerable amount of supplies. I blew Ariana a kiss and motioned with my hand to my ear that I’d call her, a lot easier than explaining anything right now.

Driving to the police station, I parsed Virgil’s message. First, did “heads up” mean he’d told only me and not the rest of the Henley college family? Had he told Rachel? Her three messages might be shouts of joy that she was no longer in danger of losing her freedom. I couldn’t handle “joy” at the moment, not even Rachel’s if that was the case.

And “conclusion” could have meant anything. Virgil and I had drawn many so-called conclusions, including the fact that the handwriting analysis might shed no light on the killer. I played the message again in my head. Aha, Virgil had not actually mentioned the word “handwriting.” Also, Virgil had sent samples from others’ along with Hal’s. I asked myself would I be less rattled if the results had come back “Fran Emerson’s handwriting is the match?” Or Pam’s or Judith’s? Of course not.

When Virgil ended the message with “Give me a call” he might have meant there’s nothing new, just let’s Bruce and you and me get together.

I reminded myself of my students, many of whom stayed up at night analyzing the last thing their boyfriends said that evening.

“Do you think ‘see you later’ means he will or will not call me back?” was a common question in the dorms.

I could hardly wait to hear what Virgil meant by his message.

Too anxious to walk at a normal pace, I jogged part of the three blocks from where I parked my car to the police building, fast becoming home to me. The heat had let up by five o’clock, but not so much as to matter to me in my soaked shirt.

Mercifully, Virgil did not make me wait this time. I was ushered back to his desk by a uniformed officer as soon as I arrived, maybe because I looked scary. Or maybe the trick was to arrive unannounced.

I accepted a glass of iced tea, nothing so exotic as lemon zinger, and sat once again in front of Virgil’s desk.

“How did you get the report so quickly?” was my first question. I knew it sounded like a reproof, that perhaps the analyst’s work had been done too hastily, the results shoddy, therefore.

“We didn’t. It is too soon for the results from our handwriting expert. But we don’t need him. Your friend Dr. Bartholomew confessed.”

I nearly choked on the generic iced tea. “What?”

“We called him and asked him to come down to answer a few more questions.”

I wanted to ask if Hal were tortured. If so, I was sure it would have been Archie. I held back. “Just questions?” I asked. “He wasn’t arrested or anything?”

“Not arrested, but we did have the thesis pages handy and placed them so he could look at them. One ‘does this look at all familiar?’ from me and he broke down.”

“And confessed to murdering Keith Appleton?”

Virgil nodded. “And confessed to murder.”

“Why would he do that? He’s smart enough to know that some scribbles on a few pieces of paper would be inconclusive, worth even less than a polygraph would be.”

Suddenly my great faith in handwriting analysis was down the tubes, along with belief in psychics and palm readings. Ariana would not be pleased.

“You’d be surprised at how many people do confess eventually. Sometimes they can hold out just so long and then guilt takes over.”

“Maybe it’s a false confession. Didn’t something like one hundred people confess to kidnapping the Lindbergh baby?” I was reaching.

Virgil gave me a patient smile. “Yeah, it was more like two hundred, as a matter of fact. Because they wanted to be famous. That happens a lot with high-profile crimes.” He aimed an index finger pistol at me. “Your friend Dr. Bartholomew is not going to be famous for this, trust me.”

“There must be some reason-”

“What’s up, Sophie? I thought you wanted this case solved, like yesterday. It turns out you helped a lot. You found the samples. We went over them. I thought we were on the same page.”