Fortune's Wheel Page 2

  “There was something in the article about red powder in the room,” Nicole said. She told Ian what they’d read in the news about the powder being sprinkled around the bedroom and on the body.

  Ian said, “That’s right. The professor who originally suggested the idea that the powder may have been spread around the room to recall ancient burial practices, would not discuss the issue again with journalists.”

  “Why not?” Claire asked.

  Ian made eye contact with Claire and Nicole. “Maybe the head of his department suggested he keep quiet so as not to bring suspicion on anyone associated with the college’s department.”

  Claire’s eyes widened and she sat up. “Did suspicion fall on anyone in the department?”

  “Suspicion fell on a number of people, but nothing stuck.”

  “Who was considered a possible suspect?” Nicole asked.

  “Some friends, the boyfriend, neighbors. It also could have been random.”

  “A random killer seems unlikely though, doesn’t it?” Claire asked. “Considering the objects piled on the woman’s head and the sprinkling of the powder, don’t those aspects of the case make a random killer kind of a stretch?”

  “The powder may have been in the apartment from Leslie’s art work,” Ian reminded them. The killer may have delighted in performing some ritualistic acts as a display of power. The killer may not have known that what he or she did with the powder after killing Leslie was related in any way to ancient burial practices.”

  Claire sighed and went inside to get a glass of craft beer for Ian and a bottle of wine and two glasses for her and Nicole. The white lights she’d strung between the trees sparkled in the darkness and she lit a few of the tin lanterns around the small yard before patting the dogs’ heads and returning to the table.

  “Before we hear more about crime scene details and suspects, can you tell us anything about what Leslie was like?” Claire asked. “Is there any anecdotal information about her as a person?”

  Ian flipped through a few pieces of paper in his folder. “Leslie was bright, energetic. She played tennis, she loved to paint and draw. People described her as friendly, helpful, cheerful, fun. She sincerely cared about others. She volunteered to tutor elementary school kids and she volunteered with a group that made visits to the elderly. Leslie loved reading about history and learning about ancient civilizations.”

  “Any siblings?” Nicole asked.

  “Leslie was an only child,” Ian said.

  Claire asked, “Are her parents living?”

  “Both are deceased.”

  “What did the parents do for a living?” Claire questioned.

  “They were both professors. The father was a researcher in chemistry at the university and the mother was a mathematics professor at a college in Boston.”

  “Did the parents live in Cambridge at the time their daughter was killed?” Nicole asked.

  “The family home was in Arlington,” Ian reported.

  “How was the relationship between Leslie and her parents?” Claire asked.

  “I remember reading in the notes that the family had a warm relationship.”

  Nicole said, “The newspaper article stated that a woman was murdered in the same building complex a few years before Leslie’s murder. Could the two killings have been related? Might the same person be responsible?”

  Ian said, “The initial answer to that was no, the same person probably did not kill both women. The first woman, Denise Pullman, was thought to be a victim of a serial killer, Anthony Bender.”

  “But…?” Nicole asked.

  “But that may be incorrect. A few years ago, the body of Mr. Bender was exhumed and DNA tests linked him to the murder of one of the twenty victims of the suspected serial killer. Authorities are still unsure who killed Denise Pullman. Law enforcement leans towards Bender, but there isn’t any hard-fast, conclusive evidence which makes a lot of people think Bender did not kill Denise Pullman. I do believe he was the killer of Ms. Pullman.”

  Claire ran her finger over the side of her wine glass. “Did Leslie have any enemies? Were there any run-ins with someone? Did someone bear her a grudge or did anyone feel slighted by Leslie in some way?”

  “There was a guy who wanted to date her, but Leslie wasn’t interested.” Ian swirled the beer around in his glass. “There was one other thing.”

  Claire and Nicole leaned forward slightly.

  “It seems that Leslie and a professor may have engaged in an affair,” Ian told them.

  “An affair?” Claire’s eyes went wide. “With a professor?”

  “Leslie was involved in an affair with one of her professors?” Nicole’s mouth hung open.

  “It wasn’t someone she took a class with. It was a professor from another university. She met him on an archaeological dig.”

  “Was this just rumor?” Claire asked.

  “At the time, a couple of people mentioned it to detectives. The professor denied it, of course. It’s something to keep in mind.”

  “How old was the professor?” Nicole questioned.

  Ian glanced at the notes. “The man was new to his department. He’d been hired two years prior. He was thirty-one-years old when he was on the dig with Leslie. His name was Malden Ambrose.”

  “That would make him sixty-four now,” Claire observed. “A lot of people who were around at the time of the crime must be in their fifties, sixties, or seventies. Some might have passed away.”

  “Which makes it all the more maddening that the DA’s office won’t release any of the records,” Nicole said. “The killer could very well be dead.”

  Bear and Lady whined and got up from the grass. They headed to the table where Lady put her nose against Ian’s leg and Bear pushed his head under Claire’s hand for a patting.

  Ian closed the folder. “If you’re willing, I can make copies of Marty’s notes for you to read. We can get together again to go over anything you find odd or have a question about. I’d like to get your impressions about what the notes say … does anyone stand out to you as suspicious, are there things that seem like they don’t add up, anything like that.”

  “You think we can help?” Nicole asked with a touch of surprise in her voice.

  “You both seem to have strong intuitive skills. I’d like to get your take on the information. It certainly can’t hurt.”

  Claire and Nicole agreed to read through the notes.

  Ian cleared his throat. “There’s something else I’d like to ask you to do.”

  A sensation of anxiety caught in Claire’s throat.

  “Marty tells me that the person renting Leslie’s former apartment is moving out. I’d like to visit the place.” Ian’s brown eyes looked from Claire to Nicole. “Would you come along with me when I go to see the apartment?”

  Despite the crime having been committed so long ago, the idea of visiting the murder scene made Claire’s heart sink.

  “I’ll go with you,” Nicole told Ian.

  Ian looked at his girlfriend and took her hand. “Claire?”

  “Okay, I’ll go along,” Claire said softly. She could feel the murder case pulling at her and the sensation of it made her want to run … far, far away.

  3

  Located three blocks from Harvard Square, the building complex that Leslie Baker lived in nearly thirty-three years ago wasn’t really a complex at all. It was a triplex of brick buildings on College Avenue with short brick walkways leading to the three main doors on the first floors. There were flowering bushes and colorful flowers blooming in beds around the perimeter of the buildings, each one four stories tall.

  Claire, Nicole, and Ian stood on the sidewalk and stared up at the third floor.

  Ian said, “Leslie’s apartment was on the third floor at the rear of the building. There are four apartments on each floor running along a hallway accessed by the front and back staircases. Thirty-three years ago, the place was in rundown condition. The locks on the main doors didn’t work.
Leslie’s neighbors told police that the door to her apartment hardly ever locked properly so most of the time, Leslie didn’t even try to lock it.”

  “Sheesh,” Nicole said. “What terrible security.”

  “Years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for people to leave their doors open and unlocked,” Ian said. “Now, it would be remiss to be so cavalier about personal safety. It’s a changed world.” Pulling a set of keys from his pocket, he held them up. “The renter has moved out so we have access to the apartment. Ready?” Ian led the way inside.

  As Claire took another look up at the third floor windows, she let out a sigh and stood straight, silently repeating to herself there was nothing to worry about.

  Just inside the small entryway, a staircase stood in front of them, and slightly to their left, there was a small elevator that could hold four people if they squished together.

  “I’ll walk,” Claire said after getting a look at the tiny elevator. Ian and Nicole agreed.

  At the landing on the third floor, Ian pointed out the door to Leslie’s former apartment. “Two graduate anthropology students, both women, lived in the apartment across the hall, another graduate student lived alone in the front place and across from him, there was another grad student, a young man.”

  “Were they all students in the anthropology department?” Nicole asked.

  “Yes, they were.” Ian placed the key in the lock, turned it, and pushed open the door. “Here we are.”

  They walked into the empty living room, a rectangular space with three windows that faced the rear of the building. The wood floors were in need of polishing, but the room had high ceilings and a non-working fireplace stood on one wall. A kitchen was off the living room in a tiny alcove and a short hall about eight feet long led to a small bedroom and then to a bathroom.

  “A fire escape runs along the living room and the bedroom just outside the windows,” Claire observed, trying to stay focused and attempting to ignore the growing sense of dread that threatened to overcome her. Her heart beat like a sledgehammer against her chest wall. “I don’t suppose these windows were locked since the doors were never locked either. Someone could have snuck up the fire escape and come in through one of the windows. It’s doubtful the person would have been seen. It was after midnight, at the back of the building. It would have been easy to gain access without being noticed.”

  All of the rooms were empty of furniture and a bit of dust had gathered in the corners of the spaces. Ian and Nicole walked around getting a feel of the place. Claire couldn’t shake the eerie feeling from being in a room where a murder had occurred. Her head started to pound and she wished she hadn’t agreed to come.

  “Was Leslie strangled?” Nicole asked. “We never did finish reading that newspaper article.”

  Ian said, “Leslie was on the bed on her back. She’d been bludgeoned to death. She had deep lacerations at the back of her head. Initial suggestions were that she’d been attacked with a hammer, a rock, maybe a small hatchet. She may have been asleep on her side or her stomach when they attacker struck or she may have been sitting up and was hit from behind.”

  “If the attacker came in with a weapon, then the murder was premeditated,” Claire said. “Did Leslie keep a hammer or a hatchet in her room? Did anyone look into that?”

  Ian said, “She kept a few tools in her room that she’d taken on archeological digs, but the medical examiner reported that the injuries could not have been made with those tools, and anyway, they were all present and accounted for and none of them had any blood on them.”

  Claire crossed her arms over her chest. “So someone came in here carrying a weapon with the intent to do Leslie harm.”

  “It seems so.”

  “What about the people who lived on this floor with Leslie?” Nicole asked. “Was she friendly with them?”

  Ian gave a nod. “Leslie was on a dig the prior summer with one of the residents. The woman’s name is Amy Wonder. She lived across the hall from Leslie with a roommate. Amy’s boyfriend, Henry Prior, lived on this floor in one of the front apartments. All of the students reported being friends, or at least, friendly. Amy’s roommate, Jill Lansing, was often at her boyfriend’s apartment on the other side of Harvard Square and wasn’t around much.”

  “Was Jill here that night?” Claire asked.

  “She was here when Leslie arrived home from a date with her boyfriend. Leslie stopped by their apartment to chat for about thirty or forty minutes. Amy’s boyfriend, Henry, was there, too. Jill reported that she left the building about thirty minutes after talking with Leslie in order to go to her boyfriend’s place for the night.”

  Claire said, “So Leslie went out on a date and when she returned home, she stopped by Amy and Jill’s apartment to talk. They chatted, Leslie went to her own place, and thirty minutes later, Jill left the building to go to her boyfriend’s apartment. Is that right?”

  “That’s what the notes say.” Ian ran his hand over his short, brown hair.

  “No one reported hearing signs of a scuffle or a struggle or any screams?” Nicole asked.

  “That’s right.” Ian put a hand in his suit jacket pocket. “So Leslie was either asleep when the attacker hit her or she knew the person and was sitting on the bed when she was hit.”

  “People probably were coming and going in this building all the time,” Nicole noted. “With so many students living here, there must have been people visiting all the time, there must have been parties, there must have been music playing, people must have gathered together often to study. It might have been a noisy place. Maybe that’s why no one heard anything or they didn’t pay any attention if there was some noise.”

  “Good points,” Ian said and then looked over to Claire who was standing at the threshold to the bedroom.

  “It’s strange, isn’t it?” Claire asked. “Luck … fate, how the world turns. Would Leslie have been killed if she’d leased a different apartment? Did someone take offense to some minor remark she made and planned to kill Leslie because of it? Did a man become enraged because she wouldn’t date him or because she broke off with him? Encounters, interactions, running into the wrong person, being in the wrong place at the wrong time, it can all have major consequences, but we hardly ever think about such things.”

  Nicole let out a sigh. “We’d never leave the house if we thought about every little thing. We wouldn’t be able to function.”

  Claire turned to Ian. “You mentioned that Leslie went out on a date that night. She was seeing a young man, right? Was he the one she was out with the night she was killed?”

  “Yes, the young man was from England. His name is Peter Safer. They’d dated on again, off again for almost two years. Some people referred to Peter as Leslie’s boyfriend, other people called him her friend.” Ian walked to the bank of windows and looked out. “I don’t know if Leslie would have referred to her going out with Peter that night as a ‘date’. Maybe they were out together as friends.”

  “Do you know what they did that evening?” Nicole asked.

  “They went out for pizza and then they stopped for a drink at a pub where they ran into some friends.”

  “The police must have interviewed Peter extensively,” Claire said. “They didn’t consider him a suspect?”

  “Oh, they did,” Ian said. “Peter told detectives he walked Leslie home. She had her exam the next morning so he didn’t want to keep her up late so he said goodnight, wished her good luck, and headed back to his apartment.”

  “Did anyone see him? Did he have roommates?”

  “Peter Safer lived alone. No one in his building saw him return home. Peter said he went home and watched a movie, then went to bed.”

  “And what about the people in Leslie’s building,” Claire asked. “Jill left the building shortly after Leslie went to her own apartment. What did Amy and her boyfriend do after that? What was their story?”

  “After Jill left, Amy Wonder and Henry Prior made some fried eggs and toast, watche
d a little television, and then Henry went back to his place.”

  “They heard nothing out of the ordinary?”

  “Nothing,” Ian said. “At least, that was their claim.”

  Claire tapped her chin with her index finger. “Leslie was supposedly having an affair with a professor then? Was it still going on at the time of her murder?”

  “That depended on who you talked to,” Ian said.

  “Did Leslie’s boyfriend know about the affair?” Nicole asked.

  “Supposedly not. Peter was said to be shocked when the investigators brought it up. The young man said it wasn’t true and that some jealous person made the whole thing up to make Leslie look bad.”

  “Someone must not have liked Leslie very much if they’d make up a story like that.” Claire absent-mindedly twirled a lock of her hair around her finger. “Did that person dislike Leslie enough to kill her?”

  “Too many questions, too many suspects, and too much time has passed since Leslie was killed.” Nicole rubbed the back of her neck. “How could anyone solve this so long after the fact?”

  “It’s possible,” Ian said. “It’s happened before. Crimes have been solved years later. Sometimes, many years later.”

  “Are people still around who were here at the time of the murder?” Claire asked.

  “Some, yes.”

  Claire’s mind was trying to process all the details. “Is your friend, Marty, talking to them?”

  “He has, yes.”

  “And it hasn’t been any help?” Claire asked.

  Ian shook his head. “Not so far.”

  Claire glanced around the empty bedroom. What went on in here? Who killed you? Why did he do it? How did he get away with it? A flash of anger raced through Claire’s body.

  Ian’s friend, Marty, was so distressed that no one had been brought to justice that he hoped his last acts on earth would help point to the killer. Claire didn’t want any part of the case … she did not want to get involved, but standing in the room where Leslie was killed and thinking about Marty yanked at her heart strings.

  Although the weight of the sadness pressed hard against her and she wanted nothing more than to flee the building, Claire could sense answers floating on the air, silently moving past her like ghosts from the past … answers that were still available to be found. She knew she had to help. With slumped shoulders, she turned and reached for Ian’s hand. “Someone knows something … but someone isn’t talking.”