The library carrel had been his own personal cubbyhole, renewed semester by semester over the years. Strictly speaking, that shouldn’t have been the case, but Quill was rich and handsome and famous for his research into innovative therapies for spinal nerve injuries. So he got by with it. And it had become a go-to place for his late-night sexual assignations, away from all eyes.
* * *
—
The killer had a thousand thoughts raging through his head. Near the top, however, was: Get out! And: DNA! And: Fingerprints!
The library was nearly silent, broken only by the vague clicks and hums of any building at night with heaters and fans. The killer stood listening, then looked down at the body, licked his lips once, thinking. The laptop came with a soft plastic cover. He used it to wrap one of his hands and then dragged Quill’s leg from the doorway into the carrel, where, with the door closed, the body couldn’t be easily seen through the narrow translucent window.
His heart was pumping hard, he was breathing like a steam engine. He tried to calm himself, took a moment, stepped on something. The fob to Quill’s BMW lay on the floor where he’d dropped it, along with his cell phone. The killer picked up the cell, the keys, and the murder weapon, took another moment to listen. As expected, the library was empty and dead silent: it closed at six o’clock, and he’d murdered Quill at the stroke of midnight.
The killer left the carrel at three minutes after midnight, pulled his black ball cap farther down over his eyes and tilted his head down to defeat any cameras. He locked the carrel door and started toward the stairs. The hair on the back of his neck suddenly bristled, like from the chill you’d get walking past a cemetery. He stopped. Was he alone? He listened, heard nothing. He walked slowly and quietly down the stairs to the first floor, creeping through it on his soft-soled running shoes, and out the door.
The river was right there. He went to the walkway running alongside it, stopped under a light to separate the professor’s keys from their fob and threw the fob in the river. The keys went in his pocket; he might find a use for them.
He continued across a bridge to the other side, saw no one. He stopped to put the computer and its soft cover in his backpack. The cell phone went into a “Mission Darkness” Faraday bag with a see-through window, along with his own. Quill had begun making a call to 911 when he was killed, so the killer had access to the phone’s operation and could keep it working with the occasional poke.
* * *
—
Back inside the library, Quill’s companion waited, frozen in place, for what seemed like hours—maybe ten minutes. After the iPhone light disappeared, she had not heard another thing.
Taking a chance, she dug silently in her purse and found the switchblade she’d purchased in Iowa, where they were legal, as personal protection. She wrapped the knife in the tail of her jacket and pushed the button that popped open the razor-sharp four-and-seven-eighths-inch serrated blade, the mechanical unlatching muffled by the cloth.
She listened for another moment, then crawled down the aisle between the book stacks, got to her knees, then to her feet, and slipped over to the carrel. The door had a small, vertical-slit window, but with translucent glass.
She muttered, “Shit,” and waited, and waited, listening, tried the door, but it was locked. She turned on her iPhone’s flashlight and directed it down through the window but couldn’t see anything at all through the cloudy pane. Nothing was moving inside.
Quill, she thought, might be dead. He was probably badly hurt, at the least. She should call the police; but she wasn’t the type.
The thought held her for a moment. She didn’t owe Quill. He’d brought her into this. If he was still alive, and survived, she could tell him that she ran away and never knew that he’d been hurt.
The decision made, she turned off the light and slipped through the library, her lips moving in a prayer that wasn’t a prayer, because she didn’t know any, but simply a Please! Please! Please! addressed to any god who might be tuned in. She made it down the stairs and out into the river air, the Mississippi curling away beneath the bridge with anything but innocence: it had seen more murders than any single man