Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(15)
He glanced at his wristwatch: 12:21. “And what time do you usually return?”
“A quarter after?” she said.
“Take the full hour. I can wait.”
Huston’s office felt cold to him, empty of all vitality. DeMarco stood with his back to the closed door, allowed his eyes to scan the crowded bookshelves again, the gray metal filing cabinet, which he knew was now empty, its contents still being cataloged at the station’s evidence room. Only a telephone and blotter sat atop the desk. On a small table behind the desk chair was a short stack of students’ papers, already graded and waiting to be returned. DeMarco had glanced through those papers two days earlier: twelve short stories from Huston’s Craft of Fiction workshop. Beside these papers was a framed five by seven of Huston with his children, little Davy riding high on Huston’s shoulders as he stood at the small lakefront dock in his backyard on a summer afternoon, the toddler’s fingers buried in his father’s thick mop of sandy-brown hair. Thomas Jr. was leaning perilously over the edge of the dock, using a paddle to reach for a red canoe that was about to drift out into the lake. Alyssa stood beside her brother, waiting breathlessly, it seemed, hands held against her chest as if in prayer.
Huston’s wife did not appear in the photo. A separate headshot of her in a heavy silver frame sat just to the left of the family photo.
And what does that mean? DeMarco asked himself. Does it mean anything at all?
He crossed the room and sat in Huston’s leather chair and swiveled around to face the photos. “It could mean a couple of things,” he told Claire Huston’s softly smiling face. “You took the picture at the dock. That’s why you’re not in that photo. So you get a photo of your own. But was the placement of your picture here just a gesture on his part, something for public consumption? Or do you get a picture of your own because you hold a special place in his heart?”
He sat and waited then, waited for a whisper, a hunch.
“Talk to me, Claire,” he said.
He sat in silence. When the door to the office squeaked open, he swiveled around, expecting to see the department secretary. Instead, he faced a hulking, middle-aged man of weak posture, a surprised individual with a long, sagging face. “Sorry,” the man said and quickly closed the door again.
What the fuck? thought DeMarco. He stood so abruptly that the chair flew out from under him and slammed into the small table, knocking both photographs onto their faces. By the time he righted the photos, his radio was crackling.
“The divers found the murder weapon,” Morgan told him.
DeMarco winced, felt something snag in his chest. “I’ll be there in fifteen minutes.”
He hurried into the hallway. The corridor was empty now; even the waifish student was gone. DeMarco glanced at his watch again; it was now 12:32. He pulled the door to Huston’s office shut, locked it, refastened the police tape, and raced down the steps and outside. The department secretary was climbing into a white Celica. She spotted DeMarco hurrying toward her; she shut the car door and lowered the window.
DeMarco handed her the key. “I locked up. I have to get back to the station.”
“Oh,” she said. “Okay.”
“But there was a man,” DeMarco said. “Maybe six-one, six-two. At least two hundred pounds. Sort of reminded me of Thomas Wolfe?”
She wrinkled her brow. “The Thomas Wolfe of Look Homeward, Angel?”
“That’s the one. So who would that man have been?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know what Thomas Wolfe looked like.”
DeMarco smiled, tried to slow himself down. His heart always raced when he was excited or in a hurry, and when his heart raced, he sometimes spoke too quickly. “Actually, I don’t either. But the way I always envision him is the way this man looked. Big and kind of slovenly? With a sort of paranoid look in his eyes?”
She nodded. “That would be Professor Conescu.”
“Conescu,” DeMarco repeated. “And why would he be crossing police tape to go inside Dr. Huston’s office?”
“He did that?”
“Apparently he didn’t know I was inside.”
She glanced back at the building, then lowered her voice. “That’s just the way he is. Kind of snoopy. Always wants to know everybody else’s business.”
DeMarco smiled again and backed away from the car. “Enjoy your lunch,” he told her.
She started the engine and drove away. Now DeMarco turned to face Campbell Hall. He looked to the second floor just in time to see a shadow duck away from a window.
Eleven
Thomas Huston’s feet were blue but they were not black. Sitting as high as he could on the inside of the concrete drain pipe, buttocks four inches above the thin stream of water gurgling through the pipe, a foot braced against the other side, he had removed his soggy shoes and socks and now rubbed one bare foot and then the other until they no longer felt like packages of refrigerated meat in his hands. He rubbed away the agonizing needle prick and then kept massaging until he could flex his toes without fearing they might break off.
He had scuttled into the culvert just minutes earlier, awkwardly straddling the little stream until he was fifteen or so feet inside the pipe at more or less the center of the asphalt road overhead. According to his wristwatch, it was now 11:40 in the morning, though the hour or even the date bore little meaning to him. Something had happened to his concept of time. Time had been shattered and broken, some of the pieces melted together, others wholly lost. Ten minutes might carry the pain of a month, two days nothing more than a sliver of glass in the corner of his eye.