I returned to my office. But Tony doesn’t need a key, if he’s got a job with the physical plant…he might be using another name.
After I finished with my email, I stopped by campus police and asked if I could talk to the officer who’d handled Chuck’s mugging. I gave him my staff ID and tried to seem as little like a thrill seeker as possible.
He looked at the plastic card, grunted, and shoved it back to me. “Why are you so interested?”
“Because there’ve been several other incidents connected to the archaeology department,” I said. “And that theft at the museum might well be connected. I might be able to identify the guy.”
The campus police officer looked up sharply. “We’d love to get this guy. Jim was a friend of all of ours. There’s been way too much trouble around here lately.”
I nodded. When I’d seen the confirmation of Jim’s death in the campus paper, I’d felt the world tilt away, couldn’t feel my feet beneath me. One more thing to nail Tony for.
The officer’s face was taut, the muscles of his jaw flexed. “He was declared DOA when he got to the hospital.” The officer watched me a moment, then seemed to decide. He made a quick phone call, speaking in phrases so clipped that I could barely tell that the officer was available. He hung up. “Come with me.”
I followed him down another hallway to a back office, and he told my story to another uniformed guard. “We’re working with the Caldwell Police on this,” the second guy said. “Nasty thing, but if you think you can help, I’ll send you to them. Take a seat.”
They sat me down and set a file in front of me. I wasn’t sure what to expect, but nothing they might have told me would have prepared me for what I saw.
The file held a series of indistinct photographic images, obviously taken over time by some security camera. Then, as I understood what each successive image meant, saw what was happening, I wished that it was video, so it would be over that much faster. Even the illusion of speed would have been better than this.
And the pauses between the pictures only left that much more to my imagination.
Chuck was immediately recognizable, even in a bad image. Not just his dreads, not just his recycled basmati rice bag book tote, there was something upward in his gait that wouldn’t be confined, even by a still, two-dimensional picture. There was a little flash, and I knew he’d turned his head, toward a light that he couldn’t see. He was turning because someone had called him and a streetlight reflected off his glasses. That someone came out from an alley between two buildings. A man, large and powerfully built, face and hair covered with the hood of his sweatshirt, for which it was far too warm this time of year. Loose fitting pants, sweats, maybe. Running shoes.
In one frame, Chuck looked down at his watch: He’d been asked the time. In the next, the man was swinging, his legs a blur as he dove into Chuck.
Do something, Chuck, I whispered to myself, don’t let him hurt you! Scream, run, kick him…do anything.
But it was already done. Already too late.
Three more shots, like a slide show. One: Chuck was down, the man on top of him, arms raised and blurred with motion. Two: Chuck’s hands were over his face, but it did him little good, and the attack continued, a brutal pantomime. Three: Chuck’s hands were limp, on the ground beside him and there were dark patches on his face and shirt. I realized it was blood.
I tried not to, but I found myself doing the math: one picture every thirty seconds. Two minutes of a beating is a very long time. Most people would be exhausted, fighting back after thirty seconds, even if nearly none of the punches landed.
Chuck didn’t fight back. He never had the chance, even if he wanted to.
It wasn’t over.
The next picture there was another blur, another flash, and I saw—or at least imagined that I now saw—a knife. The man pulled something from Chuck’s trouser pockets.
Leave now, I thought. You’ve got whatever it is you wanted, not that Chuck had anything much to begin with. If you’d asked him, he would have given it to you. All you had to do was ask: Chuck would have done it and been happy about it. There was no need for any