in a flash. He pounded his fist on the door to number twelve, throwing it open when there was no answer.
“Oh, Jesus,” Jenny Price said, grabbing a sheet to cover herself. A boy Jeffrey had never seen before jumped up from the bed, slipping on his pants in one practiced movement.
“Get out,” Jeffrey told him, walking toward Julia Matthews’s side of the room. Nothing had been moved since he had been here last time. Jeffrey did not imagine Matthews’s parents felt much like going through their dead daughter’s things.
Jenny Price was dressed, more bold than she had been before. “What are you doing here?” she demanded.
Jeffrey ignored her question, searching through clothes and books.
Jenny repeated the question, this time to Frank.
“Police business,” he mumbled from the hallway.
Jeffrey turned the room upside down in seconds. There had not been much to begin with, and as with the search before, nothing new turned up. He stopped, looking around the room, trying to find what he was missing. He was turning to search the closet again when he noticed a stack of books by the door. A thin film of mud covered the spines. They had not been there the first time Jeffrey had searched the room. He would have remembered them.
He asked, “What are those?”
Jenny followed his gaze. “The campus police brought those by,” she explained. “They were Julia’s.”
Jeffrey clenched his fist, wanting to pound something. “They brought them by here?” he asked, wondering why he was surprised. Grant Tech’s campus security force was comprised of mostly middle-aged deputy dogs who hadn’t a brain between them.
The girl explained, “They found them outside the library.”
Jeffrey forced his hands to unclench, bending at the knee to examine the books. He thought about putting gloves on before touching them, but it was not as if a chain of custody had been maintained.
The Biology of Microorganisms was on top of the stack, flecks of mud scattered along the front cover. Jeffrey picked up the book, thumbing through the pages. On page twenty-three, he found what he was looking for. The word CUNT was printed in bold red marker across the page.
“Oh my God,” Jenny breathed, hand to her mouth.
Jeffrey left Frank to seal off the room. Instead of driving to the science lab where Sibyl worked, he jogged across the campus, going the opposite direction he had gone with Lena just a few days ago. Again, he took the stairs two at a time; again, he did not bother to wait for an answer to his knock outside Sibyl Adams’s lab.
“Oh,” Richard Carter said, looking up from a notebook. “What can I do for you?”
Jeffrey leaned his hand on the closest desk, trying to catch his breath. “Was there anything,” he began, “unusual the day Sibyl Adams was killed?”
Carter’s face took on an exasperated expression. Jeffrey wanted to smack it off him, but he refrained.
Carter said in a self-righteous tone, “I told you before, there was nothing out of the ordinary. She’s dead, Chief Tolliver, don’t you think that I’d mention something unusual?”
“Maybe a word was written on something,” Jeffrey suggested, not wanting to give too much away. It was amazing what people thought they remembered if you asked them the right way. “Did you see something written on one of her notebooks? Maybe she had something she kept close by that someone tampered with?”
Carter’s face fell. Obviously, he remembered something. “Now that you mention it,” he began, “just before her early class on Monday, I saw something written on the chalkboard.” He crossed his arms over his large chest. “Kids think it’s funny to pull those kinds of pranks. She was blind, so she couldn’t really see what they were doing.”
“What did they do?”
“Well, someone, I don’t know who, wrote the word cunt on the blackboard.”
“This was Monday morning?”
“Yes.”
“Before she died?”
He had the decency to look away before answering, “Yes.”
Jeffrey stared at the top of Richard’s head for a moment, fighting the urge to pummel him. He said, “If you had told me this last Monday, do you realize Julia Matthews might be alive?”
Richard Carter did not have an answer for that.
Jeffrey left, slamming the door behind him. He was making his way down the steps when his cell phone rang. He answered on the first ring. “Tolliver.”
Mary Ann Moon got right to the point. “I’m in the records department right now, looking at the list. It’s everybody who worked on the first-floor emergency department, from the doctors to the custodians.”
“Go ahead,” Jeffrey said, closing