What If... Read online

  “Good enough. Let me know if there are any abnormalities.” Abby watched as Harvey walked away and then turned to an adjacent large lecture hall, where everybody who’d attended Gertrude’s class were still being held for questioning, but not at the crime scene.

  It shouldn’t take very long to run through the questions they had. It was more a case of getting all the contact information and making sure that people would be around in case the detectives had further questions.

  At the full lecture hall of people to be questioned, Abby did her part by taking photos, getting contact info, asking the standard witness questions. By the end of it, she stepped out and compared notes with the other police officers.

  “Great. It looks like nobody saw anything, nobody heard anything. Nothing,” she said in exasperation. The others nodded in agreement. “But we’re also missing dozens of statements from students who could possibly help.”

  One officer added, “According to the students I interviewed, the two victims just died as they were sitting there, and nobody was close to them. They saw no sign that they were struggling, no evidence of sickness, no infected wounds, no shots, nothing like that of any kind.”

  Another uniformed cop spoke up. “Which, if you’d seen the bodies—I don’t know if you did—but I saw no evidence or sign of foul play at all. It’s as if both hearts just stopped at the same time.”

  Abby shook her head. “You know what? It would be a far reach for one young person to have died like that,” Abby stated, “though it’s possible. But for two of them?”

  The other cops all nodded.

  “We’ll get these reports written up,” the one stated, “and send them in tonight.”

  “That would be good.” Abby stood here, staring thoughtfully at Gertrude’s lecture hall. “I wonder if it’s possible for anybody to make it into this lecture hall and not be seen.” She entered Gertrude’s classroom and scanned the amphitheater and all the seats leading downward. She noted entrances were on both sides of the lecture podium, and also double doors were here at the top of the theater seating, where the students came in and out.

  “We can put it to a test,” one of the cops suggested. “I’ll stay here at the top, and somebody can come in from both sides down there, and we’ll see if I can see them.”

  She nodded. “Let’s do that—one pair at a time—just to make sure that we’re not thinking something happened in full view of the whole class, when it might not be as exposed as we think.”

  With the others helping her, she took a position in front of the seating, where the professor would have been, and two cops went up to the topmost desks and stood there, while two others entered the amphitheater from the bottom entrances. They were both coming in and out, as Abby acted as she thought the professor would have. As she pretended to be writing on the board, turning around every once in a while to talk to the imaginary class, she caught sight of both of them moving about.

  Now the topmost pair tried it, with the other pair on watch, and Abby playing prof. One crawled along the edge smoothly and carefully, and the second one entered the first row, heading toward where the women were. Abby didn’t see that one. When he popped up beside the dead women—soon to be transported out of here—she stared at him.

  “Oh, now that’s interesting. I did not see you there. You came down or came through when I had my back turned.” She frowned. “So potentially, that’s one avenue.” She asked the two cops nearest her. “Did anybody see him make it down here?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “Well, at least we have one avenue where an assailant could have come in,” she said.

  “But that would mean that the other girl should have seen it.”

  “If she was seeing anything. She told me that she was paying attention to the professor.”

  “Or was she sleeping?” one of them suggested.

  Abby frowned at that. “That’s something we’ll have to figure out too, won’t we? What are the chances that she was napping and that somebody knew she would be napping. Well, she won’t be napping unless somebody gave her something.” Scratching her head, Abby thought out loud. “All three coffee cups were grabbed and have been taken by forensics. Let’s find out if any drugs were in one of them. And how would the killer know that these three women would be there today?”

  “They would have to know beforehand, would have to plan by watching the students’ daily patterns,” one officer suggested. “These women would have to set up a precedence of attending all classes.”

  “Which they probably have, where this course is concerned. The prof is known to be tough, and, if you don’t show up to her class, she doesn’t give you much leeway on the marks,” Abby murmured.

  “In that case,” one of the officers said, “it’s pretty well guaranteed that the women would be here.”

  “Right. Let me check this out myself.” She walked to the two areas where the two officers had snuck in.

  One officer asked, “Do we have any security on these doors or any cameras outside that would show us if somebody had come in or not?”

  She brought out her notepad and checked. “Harvey’s collected camera footage already. I’ll have him particularly check out these side routes though.” Thanking the officers, she turned and left, thinking about heading over to the morgue.

  As she stepped outside into the evening, she looked up to see a light dusting of rain coming toward her. She sighed. “More rain.” She muttered to the heavens above, “We could really use a break, you know?” Checking her watch, she shook her head. Eleven o’clock? How did it get to be so late so fast? “Screw that. I’m going home.” She needed to catch a few hours of sleep and knew that the coroner wouldn’t have anything on these deaths in the next little bit. Unfortunately, as much as she might want to think this case was a top priority, it just wasn’t happening. If they were lucky, the two women would be on tap for tomorrow, but, barring that, it could be a couple days before they got there. It all depended on the caseload the coroner’s office had.

  She always liked to think that her cases came first, but it just was a fact of life that, in a busy morgue, there was always another case ahead of you. Sometimes a half-dozen cases. Still, she also knew that this one was out of the ordinary and would get the coroner’s interest piqued, so he would get going on it as soon as he could. Unless something was simple about it, and simple was a whole different story. If so, it would also mean that she was overlooking something.

  It was possible, though not necessarily likely, that somebody could have snuck in and killed one girl, but could he have accessed the second girl on the other side of Carrie, even if she were sleeping? And while Carrie denied sleeping, someone had gotten to these women during that class.

  How else could it have happened? No ideas came to mind, but that didn’t mean that, in her tired fugue state, other options weren’t there, just waiting for her to be clear-minded enough to see them.

  She stepped out to the parking lot and entered her vehicle, and headed home. As soon as she walked up the steps to her small townhome, she opened the door and stepped inside, happy to see Migolo stretched out on top of his cat tree. He meowed at her. Abby shook the rain off her coat and hung it up on the hook, kicked off her boots, dropped her purse, closed the locks, and armed the security system, all before walking over and scratching the stretched-out furry belly.

  “Hey, baby. I know you didn’t get dinner tonight, did you?” She gave him a cuddle, scooping him off the cat tree, and walking into the kitchen. Dinner seemed like a long time ago for her too—she wasn’t even sure she had eaten. Matter of fact, she was pretty damn sure she hadn’t. She always kept a stack of power bars in her purse for that reason. They were for nutritional value, to keep her functioning, not for their savory taste by any means. She scooped up a can of cat food, opened it, and gave it to Migolo.

  She walked to the fridge and realized it was way too late to eat. But found an open bottle of red wine. She pulled it out, poured h
erself a glass, walked through the living room and straight upstairs to her bedroom, where she turned on the fireplace—just to take the evening chill off her room—put down the glass of wine, and got ready for bed.

  Propped up in bed a few minutes later, with the wine at her side, she turned on her laptop to check the news. And, of course, her case was headline news: Two Women Dead During Class. Abby always wondered how the media outlets knew these things were actually happening, since not too many people should have been talking about this, but, with that many students, there would be a lot of talking. She shook her head.

  And a ton of media was around this, period. The biggest thing is the fact that nobody knew if it was foul play. She just couldn’t see how it could be anything but murder. One death from natural causes maybe, but two? That was much further out of the realm of possibilities. But she’d seen some pretty strange things in her life, so she would withhold judgment until they could determine the facts. She just hoped that, maybe, somewhere along the line, somebody would give them answers because otherwise this would be just a bad deal from start to finish. She tossed off the rest of her wine, closed down the laptop, and crashed.

  Chapter 3

  When Abby woke the next morning, and not because Migolo was stretched across her back, it was seven o’clock. She’d had what should have been enough sleep, but, because she’d worked so late, her body was sore and tired. And the ever-present threat of a migraine loomed in the background. Moving gently, so Migolo slid, as only a feline can, off her back, Abby shifted off the bed, headed for the shower, only feeling marginally better as she stepped out, soaking wet. Then she worked hard to get her shoulder-length hair to dry off somewhat and to get dressed, before heading downstairs for coffee and some desperately needed food. Her phone went off while she was frying eggs. She glanced at her Caller ID, frowned, and then answered it. “Morning, Harvey. What’s up?”

  “Hey, you okay? You sound worn out. Bad night again?”

  “I hardly feel like I got any sleep last night. Not to mention not getting to bed until late.”

  “I don’t think the families got any sleep at all.”

  “Great, thanks. That just makes me feel even worse,” she muttered. “Do you have a reason for bugging me so early?”

  He laughed. “Always.”

  She smiled. “Well, I’m just making breakfast, so either speak up or it can wait.”

  “Well, I’m just coming up to your front door. Do you have extra coffee?”

  She groaned. “Of course I do, but, one of these days, you’ll have to take care of your own breakfast.”

  “Well, I could, but I’m forever doing errands for you.”

  She laughed at that. “It’s called your job.” Not technically true but he loved doing them, so that worked out well for her.

  Sure enough, moments later she heard a knock on her door. She stood, hit the End button on her phone, then walked to the front door and checked to make sure it was him. She disarmed the security system and threw open the deadbolt. Her history would never make her blasé about security. “Come on in.”

  As he walked into the kitchen, he sniffed the air. “Eggs too, huh? I didn’t get time to eat.” He looked at the toast and eggs on her plate.

  She sighed. “Go ahead, sit down, and eat. I’ll make some more.”

  He looked at her. “Oh no, that’s okay.”

  She waved at him. “Don’t even play this game with me. Just eat and get on with it, will ya?”

  He didn’t even argue. As he snatched up the fork, sat down with a big grin, he said, “Thanks!”

  She smiled at the older man’s enthusiasm. “Did you get around to the professor’s last night?”

  “I couldn’t even get in to see her,” he admitted.

  She stopped and stared.

  He shrugged. “She wasn’t answering the door, and, when I contacted her nephew, he thought she’d probably taken sleeping pills and gone to sleep.”

  “Well, we’ll start there this morning then.”

  “Just remember, boss. Other people deal with stress in different ways.” He used the nickname he’d been using for years—but shouldn’t do because she wasn’t his boss. They were partners, and he was her senior by fifteen years.

  “I know. I know, but I need people available for answers.”

  “Maybe so,” he agreed, “but other people would probably say they needed to step away from all this, in order to keep their sanity.”

  She knew he was right; it was just frustrating. “We’ll start there this morning,” she repeated. “We did most of the interviews last night, but nobody saw anything. The rest of the students will be tracked down today, but I’m not holding out hope. But here’s what was interesting. After my interviews with one roomful of students, with the four cops helping me over there, we set up a scenario to see if anybody could have stepped inside the doors, murdered those two, and slipped out without half the class seeing them.”

  “And what was the verdict?”

  “Well, it was possible”—she tilted her head—“just not very likely. The professor must have been fully immersed in what she was doing up there, like writing on the board or conversing with someone intently. And everybody at the back would have had to be looking at their own stuff, instead of at the door. In our scenario, the guy managed to get to the location by crawling in along the floor to the first set of rows.”

  “Which would then imply that the women themselves wouldn’t have seen him and neither would anybody else,” Harvey noted.

  Abby scrambled more eggs and tossed them into the pan. “And, even if he had gotten to the one victim, how would he have gotten around Carrie to get to the second victim?”

  He stopped, looked at her, and then nodded. “So, either that’s not how it happened, or somebody is not telling the truth.”

  “Or somebody wasn’t even there or wasn’t aware or stepped out before the doors were locked or something.”

  “And, of course, they won’t consider even the tiniest bit of information as major.”

  “And we’re still conjecturing here,” she stated, “because we have no idea how these women died.”

  “But they did die in a classroom discussing what if scenarios. Spooky timing. What kind of a lecture is that anyway?”

  “Philosophy, and, in this case, they were doing a whole series on it.” Abby paused. “The idea is to make you think, like, out of the box, contemplating some of the things that nobody ever wants to contemplate, hoping that people come up with ideas.”

  “Interesting,” he murmured. “So, in this case, what if somebody had access to your mind?”

  She nodded. “And that’s an interesting scenario in itself because, in a case like this, with a weird death, you immediately want to know if somebody could kill someone that way. Especially considering that two women are dead and by a invisible means.”

  He looked at her in surprise. She nodded. He shivered. “That is just creepy. Damn spine-chilling.”

  “Maybe.” She shrugged. “But it’s also a very interesting adjunct to our murders. And what if somebody was trying to make it look like that?”

  “You mean, versus actually doing something like that?” he asked drily.

  She looked at him in surprise. “Do you believe in that stuff?”

  “Well, I know you sure as hell do,” he replied. “You deal with woo-woo stuff all the time.”

  “Well, I’ve dealt with some pretty crazy serial killers,” she admitted. “But something like this? Not so much.”

  “But what’s the difference? The last one was a psychic, who was murdered for her messages.”

  “Sure, but that murder was committed by a very earthly presence. If killing someone by accessing the back doors of their mind were even possible,” she stated, “I’d love for somebody to explain it to me. And talk about opening up a whole new headache.”

  “Hey, those kinds of headaches are what we specialize in.” He gave her a fat smile. “Besides, you live with he
adaches. How is yours this morning?”

  “Fine”—even though it was far from it—“besides, the other cases were all charlatans, making it look like something like that.”

  “Right. At least that’s the official department line.”

  As she sat down with her eggs, she thought about it. “I want to go through those tapes that you saw last night.”

  “I didn’t see anything, but you might.”

  She didn’t say anything to that. Her instincts were better than most, and, when it came to sussing out suspects, she was pretty damn good at it. She also didn’t have reason to look at anybody in particular, so she was throwing a wide net, hopefully catching something. “We have to sort out motives. Why those two women?” But, of course, Abby was jumping the gun, assuming they were murdered. She winced. “I can’t see a way for it to be anything but murder. I mean, how else do you see two women die in exactly the same way?”

  “Were they sisters by any chance, so shared genetics, or did they meet in some medical support group because they had health conditions?” he asked.

  “Waiting on the coroner,” she said glumly. They finished off breakfast, and she stood. “I’ll head to the office. I’ve got to start doing a history on everybody who was in that room.”

  “That will take a while.”

  She nodded.

  “Unless you want to come along to see the professor,” he offered, with a shrug.

  “I could.” She thought about it. “Okay, so I’ll come with you, and then we’ll head into the office and split up the attendee list, and I’ll go through the videos.”

  “Good enough.”

  With that, they stepped outside. She frowned. “But we have both vehicles here.”

  “Not a problem,” he said cheerfully. “I’ll ride with you.” She rolled her eyes at that. “I have no problem at all with you paying for gas.”

  “Of course not,” she muttered. But they both hopped into her car and headed for the professor’s brownstone. Abby checked her watch. “We never checked to see what her schedule was, to see if she’d be teaching today.”