Face of Murder

CHAPTER TWELVE

Zoe drove as Shelley worked from her laptop, hooked up to a Wi-Fi dongle. It was the most efficient way to both look up their new suspect and reach him as quickly as possible.

Zoe conceded that there was a lot to like about James Wardenford, as far as suspects went. Shelley read seven newspaper clippings to her as they drove: each told the story of a man who was used to respect, to recognition, and to a good reputation. He had lost all of it. Stronger men would have struggled to cope.

But an alcoholic?

For him, it must have sent him off the rails.

That would neatly tie a few things up. Zoe started to feel more excited about the idea, the closer they got to his home. As a theoretical physicist he would have been no stranger to complex math equations, but as a perpetual drunkard, he might have lost his ability to express them properly. Maybe he thought that what he was writing made perfect sense.

There was a little disconnect between the idea of someone so drunk they could not write correctly, yet sober enough to kill a man and leave so little evidence they had so far gotten away with it. But that was a detail Zoe was willing to let slide until they had actually spoken to him. Functioning alcoholism meant different things for different people.

They pulled up outside an apartment block, with small yet neatly maintained units clearly visible from the ground. The balconies outside each set of French doors held rose bushes in pots, bicycles, small outdoor table and chair sets. It was a nice place. The kind of building you might retire to on a modest yet comfortable pension.

The kind of place a once-well-paid professor and physicist might retreat to once his paychecks weren’t so guaranteed anymore.

Apartment buildings were often a little tricky. When someone came to the front door of a house and saw the police there, they had no choice but to talk. Ringing an intercom and asking for entry meant that it could be denied.

Zoe looked up as they walked toward the front door, taking in the windows that she could see. One set of French doors was open, the curtain blowing slightly in the breeze. She made a quick calculation: third floor, fourth door along. If the building was numbered in a logical way from the left front corner, she could get them in a little easier.

She pressed three-zero-four on the intercom panel, and waited for it to connect.

Shelley was checking her notes, no doubt remembering that James Wardenford was not in fact an inhabitant of 304, but before she could protest, the call connected.

“Hello?”

“Hello, ma’am. I have a delivery.”

Zoe caught Shelley’s eye, shrugged, and looked back at the intercom.

“Sure, come in.”

The entrance door buzzed and clicked, indicating that it had been unlocked. Zoe pushed through and started up the stairs, heading for the apartment that really did belong to their suspect.

“What are we delivering?” Shelley asked, a little primly. Rookie agents were always sticklers for the rules. Except for the ones that weren’t, and ended their careers quickly. She would learn to loosen up over time.

“Justice,” Zoe said, after some thought.

Shelley’s peals of laughter burst through the narrow staircase, echoing from the walls. “I like that,” she said, once the worst of her mirth had subsided.

The apartment was on the second floor, at the opposite side of the building from where they had come in. Zoe thought it a shame they hadn’t had more opportunity to gain some clues as to Wardenford’s state of mind from the exterior, but you made do with what you had. The lock on his apartment door was surrounded by scrape marks, an early clue to a habitual drunk. He missed the keyhole often, unable to see it clearly.

Zoe rapped sharply on the door as Shelley joined her, just slightly out of breath from the climb.

There was a rolling, crashing noise from within, then a few unsteady, heavy footsteps. “Jus’a minute,” a male voice slurred.

“Bet he’s real popular with the downstairs neighbors,” Shelley muttered.

Zoe simply waited. Her patience was rewarded. James Wardenford cracked open his door without bothering to engage the safety chain, leaning on the walls of his own corridor for support as he eyed them with a squint.

He was wearing only a bathrobe one size too big for him, left open to the waist, and a pair of old, stained shorts. His feet were muffled now by worn slippers, the threadbare soles almost gone at the front. There was still a bottle of beer in his hand, two-thirds empty.

“Good morning, James Wardenford,” Zoe said, deliberately raising her voice a notch. “My name is Special Agent Zoe Prime, and this is Special Agent Shelley Rose.”

Normally there was a reaction at this point. The suspect would try to run somehow, or stammer, or shrink back in fear. Or they would blink far too quickly, take in rapid breaths, other signs that Zoe had come to recognize.

Wardenford, whether due to his drunken state or something else, barely reacted at all.

“Yup,” he acknowledged. “Better come in while I get some clothes on.”

Shelley shot Zoe a puzzled look. “We’d like to talk to you about—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Wardenford said, waving a hand dismissively. “Henderson. I know. I can’t go to your station, or whatever you call it, like this.”

He shuffled away from the door, leaving it swinging open. Zoe hesitated for a moment, unaccustomed to such a reaction, before taking the initiative to follow him inside.

The thin foyer gave on to doors in all three directions, one of them lying open ahead. It was clearly a living area, a small sofa perched in front of a television, and Zoe ducked inside. Shelley closed the door and stayed there, nodding to Zoe when she glanced back. She would guard the exit. A wise move. It wouldn’t do to have him dart past them and out to freedom while they lounged around on his sofa.

Not that his sofa was much use, Zoe saw as she approached it. There were seventeen empty beer bottles scattered on the sofa, coffee table, floor, and other odd points of the room. Among them nestled a further three whiskey bottles and four of vodka—this, then, was a man not particularly fussy about his drink so long as it did the job of getting him drunk.

There was only a foot between the edge of the coffee table and the sofa. The repeated stains on the carpet, gouges in the wood, and watermarks on the fabric of the cushions indicated that it was frequently too small a gap for an inebriated man holding a glass or bottle ready to spill or drop. Two pizza boxes were stacked haphazardly on top of the trash can, and packaging for five microwaveable meals around it. It seemed he had given up on opening the trash can to dispose of his waste after blocking access himself. Across the open-plan room, the kitchen looked pitifully underused.

The story needed no further investigation. He was an alcoholic, as they already knew, and he had clearly been binge-drinking for some time.

Wardenford emerged noisily from another of the doors in the corridor. As Zoe joined him, she gained a glimpse of a bedroom strewn with clothes and the wafting scent of old vomit.

“Right, then,” he said, finishing off the last button on a crumpled shirt. “Off we go. Do you need to put handcuffs on me, or is it more informal than that?”

Zoe blinked. She had made a lot of arrests, and she had taken a lot of people in for questioning. She could not recall a single one of all those people ever volunteering to be cuffed.

“No,” she said, feeling off-balance. “This is just a chat for now. But we will take you to the field office in order to record our conversation.”

“Fine, fine,” he said, nodding a little too aggressively. The alcohol had cut his limits, stopped telling him when to stop. “Lead on.”

Over his shoulder as he walked toward the door, Zoe met Shelley’s eyes. This was odd—too odd. When did a murder suspect ever just willingly, even happily, go along to the station for questioning? It was as if the man was not just resigned to his fate, but glad of it.

They walked in convoy to the car: Shelley leading, then Wardenford, then Zoe. She kept her eyes on him at all times, thinking that if he really was their guy, he was surely going to bolt. She was tense, one hand itching to rest on the holster of her gun just in case.

Nothing happened on the walk out to the parking lot. Only when he was sitting in the back of their car, with the child locks on, did Zoe allow herself a moment to relax. He wasn’t going anywhere, except where they took him.

So, if he was a killer, why did he seem so pleased about that?

***

Zoe sat opposite James Wardenford, with Shelley in the seat next to her. The bare room—just a table and four chairs, one currently unoccupied—was dominated by one glass wall. Just like on TV, it was blacked out, impenetrable from this side. On the other side, a tech was watching closely, making sure that everything was picked up by their recording equipment.

“I knew you were coming for me,” Wardenford said, scratching the back of one of his ears. He looked all the world like a man who had not a single care. They might have been chatting to him in a local grocery store about the weather, for how concerned he seemed. “It was only a matter of time, really.”

“And why is that, James?” Shelley asked. She was doing her Good Cop bit. Playing the friend. It was what she was good at. Zoe, for the meantime, was content to stay quiet and observe until she had something to say.

She looked James over, reassessing as she had done so many times already. His height of five feet nine made him the correct size to have attacked the college student, Cole Davidson, at a slightly lower angle. His arms were bunched with muscles enough, though not so much to make him stand out. Still, she figured he would have had the strength for the first blow—which stunned the victims enough that they were unable to fight against the others.

It was his manner that irritated her. She knew the signs of panic or fear, the desire to not be found out. The sharp angles of the shoulders and elbows, the constant movement, the defiant lean. She had memorized all of them from textbooks before she had ever gone out into the field, and had enough experience to know now they were real.

But James Wardenford was calm and relaxed, even smiling. That did not sit well with her at all.

“The victims,” Wardenford said simply. “You were always going to trace them back to me eventually.”

Shelley shifted in her seat, leaning back. It seemed she was having a hard time figuring out what to make of him, too. She was switching back and forth between her usual tactics. “Is this a confession?”

James Wardenford laughed, free and easy. “Good lord, no. It just looks like me from the outside. I get that; I do. But considering I didn’t do it, I’m not worried at all. Once we’ve cleared this all up, I’ll be back at home before the day is out. It’s not like I have anything better to do today.”

Shelley sighed, rubbed the bridge of her nose for a moment. Zoe kept quiet. She watched him carefully, wishing she was better at reading the subtle nuances of expression and movement that gave people away.

“Let’s start from the beginning, then, shall we? How does it look like you from the outside?” Shelley prompted.

“It all started with Cole Davidson, of course.” Wardenford tipped his chin a few inches up, his voice increasing in volume. He was putting on a speech, as if he was addressing a lecture hall. That only unsettled Zoe further. Truthful people didn’t look up that far. “Professor Henderson—Ralph—and I had, well, a bit of a falling out. You see, Cole had a bit of talent in English, or so it seemed. Ralph was absolutely determined that he ought to be kept on, to finish his studies, but he was here on a scholarship. There, I ought to say, since I don’t work at the college anymore.”

“What does the scholarship have to do with your falling out?”

“I’m getting to that.” Wardenford’s left eyebrow shot up an inch or two before dropping down. Was he actually reproaching Shelley for interrupting him? “The scholarship was dependent on Cole keeping up a certain level across all of his grades, and he was also taking my physics class. Taking being a loose word. More often than not, he slept through my lectures. Surprise surprise, he was failing.”

“And Professor Henderson asked you to intervene,” Shelley said. She was leaning back still, but something in her manner had changed. Zoe guessed that she had found the right tack at last. A sympathetic ear. A believer.

“More than once. We got a bit out of hand, truth be told. Ralph was in my face, telling me I couldn’t possibly be doing my job correctly given the alcohol he could smell on my breath, so what did it matter if I marked the boy higher? I resented the affront to my integrity; fists were thrown. The upshot was that I was found to be drunk while teaching, and I was fired.”

“How did you react to that? It must have been a blow,” Shelley asked, shaking her head in solidarity.

“I went back to my old friend the bottle ever more than before. Moved out of my big house into a small apartment and made do. I haven’t seen Ralph since then.”

“You didn’t hold a grudge against him for getting you fired?”

Wardenford studied his hands closely, taking a moment to answer. “It wasn’t Ralph who got me fired. It was me. I shouldn’t have been drinking at work.”

There was silence for a long moment, stretching out between the three of them. Wardenford glanced up, playing into one of the oldest tricks in the book by opening his mouth to fill that silence with anything he could blurt out. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “Cole, nor Ralph. I had no grudge against them. I didn’t even realize Cole had managed to turn things around. I thought he’d have been packed off home with his tail between his legs by now.”

He wasn’t going to admit to anything—that much was clear. Zoe took the moment to make her own move, finishing the formalities. “Where were you on the night Henderson was killed?”

“At home, alone—the same as the night Cole met his end. I drank until I passed out. That was probably around nine in the evening.”

Zoe tilted her head slightly, a gesture of disbelief she was not quite fast enough to quash.

“I started early,” Wardenford said, spreading his hands and shrugging. “I tend to. I don’t have much else to fill my day, besides refreshing my inbox and wondering whether anyone is ever going to reply to any of my job applications.”

“So, you have no way to prove that you were not there in the parking garage when Ralph Henderson was killed?” Zoe pressed.

Wardenford laughed again, a sound that was so out of character with their surroundings that it seemed to jar the very air. “I’m an educated man. I know as well as you do that the absence of evidence is not evidence. You have no reason to think I was anywhere near the scene, and the burden of proving that falls to you. I don’t have to prove that I wasn’t there if you can’t prove that I was.”

That rankled. More than that—it was the kind of thing you expected a career criminal to say. Someone who knew his rights because he had been in the position to have them enforced so very often. Not an innocent professor who had only recently crossed a line for the first time in his life.

“We’ll take a break from this interview,” Shelley said, checking her watch and starting to stand. She rattled quickly through the formalities required for the tape, before Zoe followed her out of the room and into the hidden divide behind the blacked-out glass.

Once out of sight, the two women watched their suspect, both sagging a little as they let down the pretense of not being tired and overworked.

“What do you think?” Shelley asked.

Zoe chewed on her lip for a moment before answering. “I do not trust him.”

“I don’t trust him either, but I do believe him.”

Zoe turned, looking up to meet Shelley’s eyes in surprise.

Shelley sighed. “He’s a pompous ass who has seen one too many episodes of CSI, yes. But I think he’s telling the truth. His body language, his manner—he’s turning this whole thing into a joke because he feels it’s below him. He sees himself as being part of a different world from ours. For him to commit a crime like that and be arrested for it would be, well, funny to him.”

“Funny?” Zoe repeated, shooting a distasteful look at their suspect. “I do not think that murder is a joke.”

“Poor word choice, perhaps. It’s just so far from being on his radar that he could ever seriously be suspected of something like this. I really don’t think he did it, Z.”

Zoe hesitated, struggling to know what to believe. She didn’t buy the act that Wardenford had put on—and it had been an act. That ten-degree head tilt, the orator at work. She wanted it to be him, wanted to have a solution that would put all this to bed. She wouldn’t have to wrestle with those equations anymore.

But Shelley knew people, and therein lay the rub.

Who could Zoe trust—her own disbelief in his words of innocence and the lack of an alibi, or Shelley’s instinct?

And what if she trusted Shelley and let him go—and he killed again?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

He watched and moved slowly, careful not to be seen. He had left his refuge and hunkered down amongst the people at the bus stop, hiding in plain sight.

The doctor still owed him blood snakes, and he was going to get it, all right. He was going to get it, and how.

There was not much more time to wait. The doctor would be coming off shift. That was the best time to strike, oh yes. Follow him home in his refuge and strike when he was alone, get the snakes, the brains, make him pay.

The doctor came out of the building and he could barely contain his happy dance, his happy smile. He walked swiftly now, hood up against the rain, blessed rain. To his refuge and opened the door and got inside and started the engine.

He crept then, slowly on the—pathway, keeping a distance. He let the doctor go home all safe and secure, thinking he was free. Thinking he would not see his own blood snakes before the day was out. Yes, let him think that.

Let him think that, the sniveling fool, the bitter, hated enemy! How he could not wait to punish him, make him pay! How he longed for blood snakes and crushed bits of—headbox everywhere, for the doctor’s last breath!

He pulled up a few doors down from the doctor’s home, parking quick and ready to strike before the doctor got safe, when his—talk—walkie—buzzer rang. The display told the name of a friend.

Curses. But he had to take it.

“Hello?”

“Hey, did you hear about Wardenford?”

Alert, alarm bells, instant. The name of his mentor. Panic through his veins like an ice bolt; he knew, just knew something was wrong. “No?”

“He’s been arrested. They’re saying the FBI took him. For those murders, you know—Cole and that professor.”

He could not speak. N—he could not believe it.

The friend prattled on, not realizing what he had done. “He’s been on a freefall ever since Henderson got him fired. Honestly, I’m not surprised. He was always a bit of a loose cannon, wasn’t he? All those outbursts?”

“It wasn’t him.” It came blurted out, an accident. He was desperate. How could the world think such a thing? How could the beloved professor be in the frame? No, no, no, no, no, no, no!

“You reckon? FBI wouldn’t have nabbed him if they didn’t think there was a good chance.”

“It wasn’t him.”

He ended the call; couldn’t stand to listen anymore. Couldn’t stand the—snakes, ear snakes, untrue, all of them. All of them. The professor! No this, this was all wrong, all wrong.

What could he do? Let the professor be blamed? No, not that, anything but that; the professor was his favorite. He could not let the ear snakes bring down the mentor who brought him everything before this.

At least one thing was safe: he never told Wardenford about the things in his head. The accident. The cra—the cre—the crash. He never told him about the snakes in his own brain. The ones that wouldn’t come out, no matter how hard he smashed. The reason why everyone else had to lose theirs.

The doctor had gone inside, out of reach. He sat and thought, in his refuge, rain drumming on the—mirror. Too late now. Doctor had to live.

Doctor living, maybe useful.

Maybe something he could do for the professor. A gift. To release him.

Clarity came for a moment, as it sometimes did. A flash of his old brilliance. A plan formed. He saw the steps that he needed to take and how he would execute them. First of all, finding a piece of evidence that should be kept protected, in a plastic bag, a thing that could be used later. Then he could continue with his original idea, make sure that the doctor paid for everything.

God, was this all a mistake? The things he had done, the way he had left them. This wasn’t him. He didn’t act like this. He wasn’t a violent man. He was a scholar—none of this should ever have happened!

If it wasn’t for the crash—the accident. Was it even really an accident? Everything had been destroyed at that moment, but he saw now that this was not the way to react. What had come over him? This violence, where did it come from?

But now—now Professor Wardenford was on the hook. He owed it to the professor, the person who had really believed in him, to make sure that everyone knew he was innocent. That was the right thing to do. Irrefutable proof, worse than a confession. And afterward, he could go to the police and—no—he felt it slipping. Always too soon, always destroying him again. The clarity came and then it—

He wouldn’t give in. Even without the—focus, he could continue. He knew what he had to do now. It wasn’t over.

Doctor dead, blood snakes released. Soon. But first the planning. First the gift to his professor. The only one who saw—future in him. The only one who thought he could be something. He would escape. But only with his help.

Doctor, doctor. Twice you slipped away.

Third time, he thought, was the—hook.