J. Bertrand - Pattern of Wounds

Bad news on the Jason Young front, too. The nicks on his hands are consistent with the Silk Cut fight, and the blood on the shirt recovered in the washer isn’t Simone’s. Which means we have nothing tying him to the scene.

In the break room, Ordway gives me a sullen look. “You went without me.”

“You didn’t miss anything,” I say.

He shakes an inch of nondairy creamer into his mug, then adds a little coffee on top. When he’s finished, I do the same.

“Forensics isn’t putting any wind in my sails, and I just re-canvassed with Aguilar and got next to nothing. I hate to say it, but I’m running out of juice on this one.”

“What about your professor? I heard you had some questions about her.”

“I’ll do another interview, but it’s hard to believe she’d be up for something like this.”

He replies with a snort. “Because she’s a woman? That’s a very sexist attitude.”

“She doesn’t strike me as the praying mantis type. I’m gonna follow up, though, don’t worry. Always follow up on everything.”

“No exceptions,” he says.

We clink our mugs and go back to work.

The news reports on the sexual harassment case against Joy Hill make for interesting reading, though the juicy details were sealed as part of an out-of-court settlement. According to the plaintiff, Dr. Hill attempted to initiate “inappropriate relations” with twenty-year-old Shayna Zachariassen, a female undergraduate enrolled in one of her seminars. When Zachariassen rebuffed her, Hill accused the student of plagiarism on a term paper. To back up the charge, Hill supposedly substituted a doctored paper for the one the student actually turned in.

The story sounds bogus to me, a charade cooked up by a student caught cheating. To explain away the evidence-the plagiarized paper-she had to concoct a ridiculous scenario.

After the plagiarism accusation went public, Zachariassen disappeared. Her roommates contacted her parents, who initiated a police investigation. Twenty-four hours later, the girl reappeared unharmed.

Zachariassen claimed she was abducted in the University of Houston parking lot. A man came up behind her, putting a black hood over her head, and forced her inside the trunk of her own car. She was driven to what she believed was a motel, her wrists tied together and lashed to a chair. The whole time, her abductor never spoke. He turned up the television volume. She listened to news reports of her own disappearance. After a day in captivity, the phone rang and her abductor held a muffled conversation with the caller.

“Like he was getting instructions,” she said.

He put her back in her car and started driving. Afraid for her life, she begged him to let her go. Then the car stopped and the man got out. After a long silence, she got up the courage to remove the hood and her abductor was gone. She was sitting in the same part of the lot where she’d originally been kidnapped.

The Chronicle ’s original coverage of the incident includes a quote from one of the detectives working the case, Theresa Cavallo, who offered boilerplate assurances that the girl’s story was being taken seriously. When the civil case made headlines a year later, no one from HPD was available for comment.

I haven’t talked to Cavallo in a while. I reach for my phone and dial her direct line.

“I’m looking at reports of an old case of yours,” I say. “What are you doing right now?”

She sighs. “Paperwork.”

“Perfect. How about a field trip?”

A pause. “Are you driving or am I?”

That’s what I like about Cavallo. Ready to drop everything at a moment’s notice, no explanation needed. My last ride in the passenger seat with Cavallo aged me ten years, so I volunteer as wheelman, telling her to meet me downstairs in ten minutes.

She’s waiting for me when I step off the elevator, looking sharp in a tailored pea coat. Curly tendrils of hair snake out in every direction. She greats me with a knowing smirk.

“Married life suits you, Cavallo.”

“Thanks,” she says. “I think.”

When we worked together on the Mayhew case, she was engaged to a soldier deployed in Iraq. He’d come back, tied the knot, and headed out for another hitch, this time in Afghanistan. That had to be hard, but we’ve never talked about it. That’s not the kind of relationship we have.

“Where are we going, anyway?” she asks.

“My alma mater. The University of Houston.”

In the car, I tell her about my homicide and the connection to Joy Hill, whose alibi for the time of the murder is that she was on campus all day. Then I share what I’ve gleaned about the sexual harassment suit. My skepticism about Zachariassen’s claims comes through loud and clear.

“Something did happen to her,” Cavallo says. “She took a lie detector test and passed.”

“Fair enough. But if you put her on the box, you must have had your doubts.”

“Bizarre as the story was, we all assumed she’d made it up. There was a history of emotional problems, depression. The plagiarism charge brought it all to a head. When she disappeared, the family feared suicide. So when she turned up, everybody was relieved, and yeah, the story sounded fishy, like she was trying to save face. But she insisted on it, March. And she had the hood.”

“Was there any physical evidence in her car?”

She shakes her head. “We collected some fibers, but never matched them to anything. No prints, nothing like that.”

“And later on, when you heard about the sexual harassment case, what did you think about that?”

“I’d interviewed the professor and there was definitely something weird about her.”

“Why’d you interview her?”

“Ah,” she says. “Part of the story that didn’t make it into the papers: Shayna accused her teacher of putting out a hit on her.”

“You’re kidding me.”

“When the police got involved, the professor was spooked and decided to call it off. That’s what the call Shayna overheard was about. Why are you laughing? Crazier things have happened. Like I said, she did pass the lie detector.”

“Maybe she was crazy, though. You said she had problems.”

Cavallo nods stiffly. I can’t tell if she’s irritated with me or not. “According to the professor, Shayna had formed an unhealthy attachment to her. Dr. Hill saw herself as the victim in all this. All she’d done was turn in a cheater, and people were acting like she was responsible for this girl’s mental breakdown. I guess the lawsuit made her feel even more victimized. . but it was dropped, right?”

“Settled out of court.”

“And now you’re looking at the professor as a suspect in your homicide?”

“Honestly?” I give her a noncommittal shrug. “I’m just hoping to check her off my list.”

Rising from a sea of blacktop lots, the stadium at the University of Houston is surrounded by glistening commuter cars that mostly clear out by late afternoon. On a map of the city’s crime stats, this area is ground zero, colored bright red, the highest rating on the chart. At one point the campus briefing for incoming freshmen included advice on what to do when being chased through the parking lot- Pull a security phone off the hook and keep running! — but the ratings have more to do with the surrounding neighborhoods than the campus itself.

Cavallo guides me behind the stadium to a line of trees marking the transition from pavement to deeply rutted grass and gravel. Since classes ended last week and final exams are coming up, there aren’t many cars this far back. The muddy ground is crosshatched with tire tracks, pools of stagnant water standing in the potholes.

“This is where Shayna was abducted,” Cavallo says. “After a night class, she had to walk back here alone.”