I had no need to travel. The Internet is a wonderful thing.”
Finn smiled, a cat with a rat in his grasp. “It is. Walder Ostergard certainly thought so. He blogged almost every day, except for those months he was in Romania.”
“Oh?” I detected a faint tremor in Landry’s voice.
“Yessiree. Big ol’ gap in the blog for those months. Which he explained on his return to LA. He offered a rather colorful account of the mountainous area in which they filmed and its utter lack of modern amenities. Such as Internet connections.”
Landry shrugged. “I don’t know how regular his access was, but I assure you we managed to connect during his time there. He must have taken a weekend in Bucharest at some point.”
“Maybe,” Finn conceded. “But the funny thing is that he mentions talking to you on his blog. It’s just six months after you allegedly met with Rasmussen. He ranted about another foolish intellectual, this one from Texas of all places, trying to use him to get to Rasmussen. He didn’t have very kind things to say about your parentage, I’m afraid.”
The color drained from Landry’s face.
“Emily commented once about how long it took you to get that book done and out the door. You’d completed the interviews so long ago, why didn’t you just finish the manuscript? But I’m guessing you were waiting for both Rasmussen and Ostergard to die, so you could spin your story of getting the interviews without anyone around to refute it. But you didn’t count on Ostergard blogging about everything from world politics to his bathroom habits. And you didn’t count on his blog staying up and accessible after his death.”
At first, Landry didn’t respond. The dark eyes behind his spectacles glittered with calculation. He steepled his hands and gently tapped his lips with his forefingers. I must admit I felt a stab of joy watching him squirm. I didn’t imagine Sally Landry would thank me, but I felt as though we were defending her honor.
“What do you want?” he said finally.
Finn laughed. “Just the truth.”
“Right,” Landry scoffed.
I jumped in then. “Bryan figured out what you’d done, didn’t he? And that was why you killed him.”
“What? Good Lord, I didn’t kill anyone!”
Finn shrugged. “I think we’ll just have to let the police figure that one out.”
And I planned to tell the police that Landry had eaten dinner at a swanky Italian restaurant the night Emily died. The night I found a serving of restaurant tiramisu on her kitchen counter. After all, if Landry killed Bryan to cover his fraud, he could have just as easily killed Emily for the same reason.
“No,” Landry pleaded. “I didn’t kill Bryan. He . . . He did know that the interviews were faked, but we’d reached an agreement.”
“Blackmail?” Finn asked.
“Of a sort,” Landry conceded.
I felt a thrill of excitement. I couldn’t believe I’d been right that night at the Bar None. I had suspected that Bryan had been blackmailing Landry, I’d just been wrong about the subject of the extortion.
“Bryan knew better than to ask for money,” Landry continued. “Teaching isn’t especially lucrative. But he needed something more than money. He needed my support in the department. I passed him on his exams, even though his answers were execrable, and I agreed to support him in his appeal of his failure.”
Finn straightened. “You were going to help him destroy Emily Clowper’s career?”
Landry looked pained. “He hardly needed my help. She was the only one who voted to fail him, so even if Gunderson and I tried to remain neutral, our approval of his initial answers alone made her look guilty. I tried to make Emily see the futility of her position, but she was so obstinate.”
That solved one mystery. Emily had been the lone holdout, the only person standing between Bryan and his graduate career.
Finn narrowed his eyes. “Blackmailers don’t usually settle for one payment. They come back to the well again and again.”
“Not Bryan. Look, I told you I didn’t have money to give the boy, and he didn’t seem to need it. He seemed pretty flush with cash, actually. And he had an incentive to keep my secret. The success of this book will make my career and put Dickerson’s graduate program on the map. Bryan was hitching his wagon to my star. Destroying my career would hurt him, too.
“Besides,” he said, “I couldn’t have killed Bryan. I was supposed to have brunch that morning with the college’s media representative. He didn’t show, but from