Charlaine Harris - Shakespeare’s Counselor

She stood to shake my hand, which I liked, and she gestured me into a chair that wasn’t too uncomfortable. Unlike Joel McCorkindale, Stokes seated herself firmly on the power side of the desk. Then we both had to pretend that no one else could hear us, which wasn’t easy, since the partitions were about as high as the detective’s head.

“I’d like to review what happened last night,” the detective said to open the interview. “And then, we’ll get a statement typed up for you to sign before you leave.”

So I’d be here a while. I nodded, resigned.

Detective Stokes had a legal pad in front of her. She opened it to a fresh page, wrote my name at the top of it, and asked, “How long have you been attending this survivors’ therapy group?”

“This would have been my third session. My third week.”

“And all the members of the group have been raped and are in the process of recovery?”

“That’s the idea.” The air conditioning, probably as old as the house, could barely keep up with the heat.

“How were you contacted to join this group? Were you already a patient at the center?”

“No.” I told her about the flyer at the grocery store and described coming to the first meeting.

“Who was there?”

“The same people that were there last night.” I went through the list.

“Did Ms. Lynd say anything about others who were supposed to come?”

“No, but that wouldn’t be surprising.” I remembered my own reluctance. “I’d expect someone to have second thoughts, or back out entirely.” I remembered Tamsin looking out into the hall that first night, as though she were waiting to hear someone knocking on the door at the end of the hall.

“I guess whoever killed that woman wore a lab coat,” I said. I hadn’t been able to stop speculating about that lab coat, the one used to prop the rolling chair in place. “Was it the nurse’s?” There was a staff nurse who did drug testing.

She appeared not to hear me. “Did you pass around any kind of sign-up sheet?” Her glasses magnified her dark eyes, which were large and almond shaped. Right now, they were fixed on me in a take-no-prisoners stare.

“No, we were supposed to have the illusion of confidentiality.”

“Illusion?”

“How could we remain secret from each other in this own?”

“True enough. Has Ms. Lynd ever said anything to you about her own history?”

I shook my head. “Well, not directly.” My inner thermostat seemed to have gone haywire. I took a tissue from the box on the desk and patted my face with it.

“What do you mean?”

“We saw the squirrel that was killed at her place. And I was there in the office when she got a phone call that seemed to upset her pretty badly.”

Of course I had to go over both incidents with the detective, but I’d expected that.

“So you had already formed the idea that Ms. Lynd was being stalked?”

“Yes.”

“Did you report that to the police?”

“No.”

Detective Stokes looked at me almost archly, which was an unnerving sight. “Why not? Wouldn’t that have been the logical thing to do?”

“No.”

“Why not? You don’t trust the police to help citizens?”

I was baffled by her manner. “It would have been logical for Tamsin or her husband to call the police themselves. It was their business.” I shifted around in the chair, trying to get comfortable.

“Did you ever think that if you had called us, that woman might not be dead?”

I was in imminent danger of losing my temper. That would be very, very bad in this situation. “If I had called here yesterday, and said that someone had killed a squirrel and hung it in a tree, what would you have done? Realistically?”

“I would have checked it out,” Alicia Stokes said, leaning forward to make sure I got her point. “I would have warned Ms. Lynd not to go anywhere by herself. I would have begun asking questions.”

I was figuring out things myself. “You already knew, too,” I said, thinking it through as I went. “You knew someone was stalking Tamsin Lynd. What did you do about it?”

For a long moment, I thought Stokes was going to lean across the desk and whop me. Then she collected herself and lied. “How could we possibly know anything like that?” she asked.

“Huh,” I said, putting a lot of disgust into it. If Alicia Stokes was playing some kind of hide-and-seek, she could do it on her own damn time.

“She did look like Tamsin, didn’t she?”

Detective Stokes laid her pen down on top of her yellow tablet. “Just what do you mean, Miss Bard?”

“You know what I mean. The dead woman. She looked like Tamsin.”

“Who mentioned that to you?” Her interest was keen now.

“No one. I’m not blind. She was pale, she was plump, she was brunette. She looked like Tamsin.”

I had no idea what the detective was thinking as she regarded me.

“But as you know, I was told by…” she checked a note on the tablet, “Melanie Kleinhoff that the dead woman was her sister-in-law, that is, the wife of her husband’s brother.”

“Melanie did say that,” I admitted. “Saralynn, wasn’t that her name?”

“And yet you told me last night you didn’t know the name of the dead woman.”

“No, I told you I hadn’t known her. You asked me if the others had recognized her, and I told you to ask them.” Splitting hairs, but I had technically told her the truth. “I don’t like repeating what other people tell me, when I don’t know it for myself.”

Detective Stokes’s face told me what she thought of that, and for once I wondered if I wasn’t just being balky, like a stubborn mule.

“So where is Saralynn’s husband, the one who raped Melanie?” I asked. “I guess he raped Saralynn, too, since she was going to join our group?”

“Tom Kleinhoff’s in jail,” Detective Stokes said, not confirming and not denying my assumption. “He didn’t make bail on the rape charge, because he already had other charges pending.”

It would have been good if he had been the guilty one. That would have been simple, direct, and over.

“Too bad it wasn’t him, isn’t it?” said Stokes, echoing my thoughts. I guess that wasn’t too great a leap to take.

I nodded.

“So let me just ask you, Miss Bard. Since your boyfriend, I understand, is a private eye.” The distaste in her voice told me she knew all about the circumstances of Jack’s becoming a private eye; he’d left the police force in Memphis under a black cloud. “If you think the dead woman was killed in mistake for Tamsin Lynd… why? Was that supposed to send a message to Tamsin Lynd herself, that a woman resembling her was killed in her office? Was it a genuine mistake-the killer finds a dark-haired fat woman in the right place so he’s sure he has the right victim? Or was the message for your group?”

I hadn’t speculated that far, wasn’t sure if that was a conclusion I’d have reached.

“Hadn’t thought about that? Well, maybe you’d better.” Alicia Stokes’s expression was definitely on the cold and hard side. “Someone thinks they’ve killed the woman supposed to be helping five rape victims, you’ve got to ask yourself why.”

She was so far ahead of me all I could do was gape at her.

“How does your boyfriend feel about you being in this group?” she asked, pounding on down the track.

“He was the one who wanted me to go to it.”

“You sure he doesn’t resent you giving such a big part of your time to a group of women? Maybe he doesn’t like some of the advice Tamsin gave you? Maybe Tamsin told you to stand up to him? How long has he lived here?”

Scrabbling for the most recent question, I said, “He’s lived here in Shakespeare for only a few weeks. He lived in Little Rock for a few years.”