Supreme Justice

Chapter Fifty-five

All during dinner and the play, Daphne’s brain was swamped with ideas for discovering the identity of the person who had dismembered her victim. The body parts had been found in the forest surrounding the campus. That didn’t mean that the victim had to be a student at Inverness, but she was young, so Daphne decided that the college registrar’s office was not a bad place to start.

As soon as she got to work the next morning, Daphne placed the call and asked if the victim had been a student at the school. After some hemming and hawing about the confidentiality of student records and a few transfers to people further up the food chain, she learned that no one by that name had been a student at Inverness University. Daphne was disappointed until she remembered that the law school had a separate registrar’s office. She slapped her palm against her forehead. “Of course, dummy,” she murmured. “A twenty-eight-year-old would be in graduate school.”

Rather than put up with the obstruction she knew she’d encounter from the registrar, Daphne decided to pay a visit to the dean of the law school. Daphne had met Tom Ostgard on a number of occasions since moving to Inverness, and her Ivy League degree had given her the credibility she’d needed to convince him to let her co-teach a course in the law school’s clinical program.

There had been heavy flurries that morning, and the stillness that accompanies the fall of fresh snow still cloaked Inverness. The children were in school and a lot of the townsfolk had chosen to stay indoors. The college students paid no attention to the cold and wandered across campus with red noses and cherry-colored cheeks.

The Robert M. La Follette School of Law was housed in a redbrick building that stood on the eastern edge of the campus, away from the undergraduate schools. It had been named for “Fighting Bob” La Follette, who was Wisconsin ’s twentieth governor and had served the state in the House of Representatives and Senate in the early part of the twentieth century. The dean’s office was on the third floor, and Daphne climbed the stairs for the exercise, dodging students too engrossed in legal arguments to pay attention to where they were going.

Tom Ostgard, a nationally respected scholar in the area of property law, was a reed-thin man in his early sixties. He had a fringe of gray hair surrounding his shiny dome and wore wire-rimmed glasses that magnified his brown eyes.

“You’re not here to arrest me, are you?” joked Ostgard, who was fascinated by Daphne’s connection to a world of mayhem and disorder that he had never encountered.

Daphne smiled. “Have you been up to something I should know about?”

“Sadly, no. My life is still that of the dull academic. Seriously, though, what’s up? You’re going to teach next semester, aren’t you?”

“I wouldn’t miss it for the world. The students are great, and I love being back in academia.”

“Then what can I do for you?”

“You know about the body parts we found in the woods?”

Ostgard sobered.

“We’ve made an identification, and I need to know if the victim was a law student. When I tried to get information out of the registrar’s office at the college, it took me forever, so I thought I’d go to the top and see if you can cut through the red tape.”

“Of course. Give me the name.”

Ostgard grabbed a pen, but he set it down as soon as Daphne identified the victim.

“I’m afraid you’ve made a mistake,” Ostgard said.

“I don’t think so. My information is pretty solid.”

“Then check it again. Harriet Lezak is not only alive, but she’s a clerk at the United States Supreme Court.”

Daphne’s face showed her confusion. “That’s a very prestigious position. No offense, Tom, but I thought the justices took their clerks from schools like Harvard and Yale. Has La Follette Law ever placed anyone else on the Court?”

The dean looked torn.

“What’s the problem?” Daphne asked.

“I know something about the appointment that I swore to keep secret,” Ostgard said.

“This is a murder investigation, Tom.”

“I know. That’s the only reason I’m considering telling you, but I need your assurance that you’ll keep what I say confidential unless it’s absolutely necessary to reveal it.”

“I need to hear what you know before I can make that type of promise.”

Ostgard hesitated. Then he sighed. “I’m going to have to trust you to use discretion, because revealing what I say could have a major impact on the law school’s future.”

“Go ahead.”

“ La Follette School of Law has never had a graduate selected to clerk at the Court. Even our best graduates would consider the application process a waste of time. Those positions are usually reserved for law-review students at elite law schools. Actually, it’s not that often that a student is given a clerkship right out of law school. Most of the Supreme Court clerks serve a clerkship with a federal appellate judge first.”

“So what happened this time?”

“A few months before the term ended last year, I received a visit from a man named Oscar Hagglund. Mr. Hagglund said he was representing Justice Millard Price and that everything he was going to say was in confidence. Hagglund said that Justice Price was trying an experiment. He wanted me to send him the résumés of the law-review students in the graduating class so he could select one of them to be his clerk. The purpose of the experiment was to see if there was a difference between the work performed by graduates of schools like Yale, Harvard, NYU, Stanford, and Columbia and a top graduate at a school like La Follette. Of course, I was thrilled that Justice Price had selected our school, and I sent the résumés to the address Mr. Hagglund gave me.”

“Was the address different from the address of the Court?” Daphne asked.

Ostgard nodded. “It was a post office box. Hagglund explained that Justice Price was using this address to keep his project secret.”

“What did Hagglund look like?”

“He was a big man. He looked very fit.” Ostgard closed his eyes for a moment. “Blond hair, blue eyes, very Scandinavian. I detected an accent-Swedish, Danish, I’m not certain, but my ancestors came from those parts, and he sounded a little like my grandfather.”

“What happened after you sent the résumés?”

“A week later, Hagglund called and told me the justice’s choice.”

“Did the choice surprise you?” Daphne asked.

“Yes and no. Harriet was third in the class, but she had no other distinctions besides her excellent grades. If I remember correctly, she worked her way through college and did well at a small liberal-arts school. I don’t remember the school, but it was in Iowa. Then she worked as an accountant for a few years before applying to law school, so she was a little older than most of the students. Harriet received some financial aid, but she worked for her tuition here until she received a scholarship when she made law review. She had no extracurricular achievements except the review, which is understandable if you’re working your way through. Still, her résumé was rather sparse.

“Ned Randall, who graduated first, was editor of the law review. He’d been in Iraq with the Marines before applying to law school. His undergraduate record was not exceptional, but he’d been a star athlete. And Marla Jones, who graduated second in the class, is an African American who is very active politically and had a very varied résumé. Of course, given Price’s politics, that may have worked against her.”

“Can you get me Miss Lezak’s records? I’d like to ask her parents if they’ve talked with her recently.”

“Harriet is an orphan. An aunt raised her, but I think she passed away, too. That’s why she had to work her way through.”

“Did she have any close friends, a boyfriend?”

“I don’t know anything about her social life.”

“When is the last time you saw Miss Lezak?”

“At graduation, but I didn’t speak to her very much. I did have a very nice chat with her when I relayed Justice Price’s offer of the clerkship.”

“How did she react?” Daphne asked.

“She was stunned, literally speechless. I told her she would have to go to Washington and interview with Justice Price. She was very excited. She’d never been out of the Midwest. She was concerned about one thing. She’d accepted an offer from a very good firm in Chicago, but I assured her that any firm would gladly defer her job for a year if she was clerking at the Court. I even offered to call the firm. I’m a personal friend of one of the senior partners.”

“I’ll call Washington to find out if Miss Lezak is working at the Court,” Daphne said, “but I’d like to get as much background as I can before I do that. Do you think there’s anyone at the law-review office who knew her-another student or a professor?”

“Let me call the law-review office,” Ostgard said.

Ten minutes later, a tall, attractive blonde dressed in jeans and a forest green cable-stitch sweater was ushered in by the dean’s secretary.

“Ah, Gayle. Thanks for coming. Have a seat,” Ostgard said. “Detective Haggard, this is Gayle Blake, one of our shining stars.”

The young woman’s smile vanished when she heard that Daphne was with the police. Ostgard laughed.

“Not to worry,” he assured Blake. “You’re not in any trouble. Detective Haggard needs to ask you some questions about Harriet Lezak.”

“She graduated,” Blake said.

“I know that,” Daphne said. “And you don’t have to worry about getting her in hot water. This conversation will stay here. I don’t plan on writing a report about it. What I’m interested in is background. For instance, how well did you know her?”

“Not well, and I can’t think of anyone who did. Harriet worked very hard, and she always completed her assignments on time, but she didn’t socialize.”

“No beers after putting the review to bed?”

“She wasn’t a hermit. She joined the staff when we went out for a group dinner or, like you said, a beer. But she was quiet, kept to herself. I know she spoke up on occasion. She had political views. But I honestly can’t remember anything she said, not one conversation. Oh, she did run a lot. It was her way of blowing off steam. She’d run for miles on the trails behind the campus.”

“So there was nothing wrong with her legs?”

Blake’s brow furrowed. “You know, she did mention a biking accident once. We were talking about working out. I do a lot of cardio in the gym. She said she used to ride a bicycle, but she broke her leg a few years back and decided that running was safer.”

“What about boyfriends or just friends?” Daphne asked.

“I never saw her with a boy where it looked romantic. She had a study group: some of the other third-years on the review. Oh, and I did see her walking around campus with a woman on a few occasions toward the end of the term. They looked friendly. Actually, now that I think about it, Harriet and this woman looked very similar, like sisters. So maybe she was a relative.”