Chapter 6

The campus of Pemberton College was like Collegeland at a theme park: stone buildings on hills, winding footpaths, greensward, brick, and a bunch of trees arranged so artfully that they seemed almost accidental. There even was an occasional portico and at least one arched passageway that I drove through. I saw a number of young women, many in fine physical condition. Most of them appeared dressed to work out, or go camping. I was wearing a tee-shirt and jeans. I had my jacket off. As I drove I tried putting one arm out the window and flexing. Nobody made any attempt to flag me down and seduce me, and it was kind of cold, and it made my shoulder stiff, so I pulled my arm in and rolled up the window.

A discreet road sign said “Campus Police.” I turned off between some bushes and went in to a small parking lot behind the maintenance building. The cops were in a wing of the building, with no sign outside, hidden away like an embarrassing relative.

“My name is Spenser,” I told the young cop on the desk. “I’m looking into a murder you had here about a year and a half back.”

“May I see some ID?” he said. His name tag said Brendan Cooney.

I showed him some. He studied it closely and slowly before he gave it back.

“Whaddya need?” he said.

“I’d like to talk to the officers involved in the case,” I said.

The young cop nodded.

“Have a seat,” he said.

I sat in a straight chair near the door and read the campus parking regulations while he went into an office for a while and then came back.

“Chief will see you,” he said and opened the lift top gate in the counter, and I walked through and into the chief’s office.

“Sit down,” the chief said. “I’m Fred Livingston.”

He was a blond guy with longish hair combed back and parted on the left. His upper teeth were sort of prominent and he looked to be maybe forty-five.

“I’m working for Cone, Oakes and Baldwin,” I said. “Law firm. They want to re-examine the murder thing you had out here about a year and a half ago.”

Livingston nodded. “Melissa Henderson,” he said.

“Who handled the thing?”

“For us? I did. But there wasn’t much to handle. This isn’t a big city police force. Soon as we found her we called the town cops, and they brought the State cops with them.”

“You see the crime scene?” I said.

“Sure. One of our guys found her, Danny Ferris. Poor bastard. He called me, and I told him not to touch anything and I went right over.”

“Can you show it to me?”

“Certainly,” Livingston said. He stood, picked up a walkie-talkie from the recharge rack, put on his hat, and walked out with me.

“She was behind some bushes down from one of the dorms,” he said in the car. “Probably the first corpse Danny ever saw.”

“How’s your experience?” I said.

Livingston shrugged.

“I’ve seen a few. I was Police Chief in Agawam before I got this job. Motor vehicle mostly. Some of them are pretty ugly. Couple of gun-shot homicides. Domestic one, and one involving some gang kids from Springfield. Drugs probably, we never got the perpetrators.”

We went back under the archway between two buildings and bore to the left.

“Park over here,” Livingston said, and I did.

We were at the foot of a hill with a long gradual grade, and a footpath that ascended the hill and curved among some bushes on the way. There’s no special reason for it to curve, but landscape architects hate a straight line. Livingston led me along the path to the first clump of bushes.

“She was here,” he said.

I looked back at the roadway where we’d parked.

“How’d he see her?” I said.

Livingston made a face.

“Crows,” he said. “Danny saw a bunch of crows flapping around and came up to see what was going on.”

There didn’t seem to be anything to say about that.

“She was on her back,” Livingston said. “No clothes except for her bra pulled up above her tits. Her pantyhose were tied tight around her neck. You ever seen anybody been strangled.”

“Yeah.”

“Looked like she had cuts and bruises, too. ’Course, some of that might have been the crows.”

“ME could probably figure that out,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. He did. But I’m just telling you what we found.”

“Sure,” I said. “Go ahead.”

“That’s about it,” Livingston said. “I called the town cops, and they came over, and some State cops, and we got out of the way.”

I stood and looked at the crime scene. It told me what most crime scenes told me. Nothing. Students walked past us with books, and book bags, and knapsacks, and Diet Cokes in paper cups with plastic tops and straws sticking out. There was nothing interesting about two middle-aged guys standing around beside a clump of bushes. Nothing reminded them that a woman’s murdered body had lain here a year and a half ago. Most of them probably knew it had happened, some of them had probably known the woman. But there was nothing they could do for her now, and there were midterms to think about, and college guys, and maybe the Dartmouth winter carnival. They had places to go, so they went there. And there was no reason they shouldn’t have.

“Any clothes?” I said.

“Just the bra.”

“Anybody ever find her clothes?”

“Not so far as I know,” Livingston said. “The nigger dragged her into his car. I guess he did her there and got rid of her clothes later.”

“And brought her here and dumped her.”

“That’s what they tell me.”

I looked up at the dorm on the hill.

“Odd place to dump somebody.”

“Can’t see it from the road,” Livingston said.

“If it’s on this side of these bushes,” I said. “But then you can see it from the dorm.”

“He probably didn’t realize that,” Livingston said.

“Not hard to notice,” I said.

“Probably dark. I don’t think they ever established just when he dumped her.”

“That’s probably it,” I said. “Odd place for a black man from the city to dump a dead body, on a mostly white, all prestigious, suburban, women’s college campus.”

Livingston shrugged.

“Had to dump it somewhere,” he said. “Wouldn’t want to get caught driving it around.”

“You’d think he’d have driven into the center of the campus?”

“Might have driven until he found a spot where he was alone. Might have been traffic near the gate, people walking by on the street, how the hell do I know. They ain’t always the smartest people in the world.”

“Most folks aren’t,” I said. “Anybody talk with the dorm residents up there?”

“Couple of State detectives were around. They probably did. College worked pretty hard to protect the students.”

“From what?”

Livingston looked surprised.

“From being hassled,” he said. “People pay about thirty grand a year for their kids to go here. They don’t like it much having the kids grilled by some cop, you know?”

“Where would I get the names of the students who lived in that dorm a year and a half ago?”

“Dean of Student Affairs, I suppose. But she won’t want to give them to you.”

“Of course she won’t,” I said.

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