Face of Murder

“More than once. We got a bit out of hand, truth be told. Ralph was in my face, telling me I couldn’t possibly be doing my job correctly given the alcohol he could smell on my breath, so what did it matter if I marked the boy higher? I resented the affront to my integrity; fists were thrown. The upshot was that I was found to be drunk while teaching, and I was fired.”

“How did you react to that? It must have been a blow,” Shelley asked, shaking her head in solidarity.

“I went back to my old friend the bottle ever more than before. Moved out of my big house into a small apartment and made do. I haven’t seen Ralph since then.”

“You didn’t hold a grudge against him for getting you fired?”

Wardenford studied his hands closely, taking a moment to answer. “It wasn’t Ralph who got me fired. It was me. I shouldn’t have been drinking at work.”

There was silence for a long moment, stretching out between the three of them. Wardenford glanced up, playing into one of the oldest tricks in the book by opening his mouth to fill that silence with anything he could blurt out. “It wasn’t me,” he said. “Cole, nor Ralph. I had no grudge against them. I didn’t even realize Cole had managed to turn things around. I thought he’d have been packed off home with his tail between his legs by now.”

He wasn’t going to admit to anything—that much was clear. Zoe took the moment to make her own move, finishing the formalities. “Where were you on the night Henderson was killed?”

“At home, alone—the same as the night Cole met his end. I drank until I passed out. That was probably around nine in the evening.”

Zoe tilted her head slightly, a gesture of disbelief she was not quite fast enough to quash.

“I started early,” Wardenford said, spreading his hands and shrugging. “I tend to. I don’t have much else to fill my day, besides refreshing my inbox and wondering whether anyone is ever going to reply to any of my job applications.”

“So, you have no way to prove that you were not there in the parking garage when Ralph Henderson was killed?” Zoe pressed.

Wardenford laughed again, a sound that was so out of character with their surroundings that it seemed to jar the very air. “I’m an educated man. I know as well as you do that the absence of evidence is not evidence. You have no reason to think I was anywhere near the scene, and the burden of proving that falls to you. I don’t have to prove that I wasn’t there if you can’t prove that I was.”

That rankled. More than that—it was the kind of thing you expected a career criminal to say. Someone who knew his rights because he had been in the position to have them enforced so very often. Not an innocent professor who had only recently crossed a line for the first time in his life.

“We’ll take a break from this interview,” Shelley said, checking her watch and starting to stand. She rattled quickly through the formalities required for the tape, before Zoe followed her out of the room and into the hidden divide behind the blacked-out glass.

Once out of sight, the two women watched their suspect, both sagging a little as they let down the pretense of not being tired and overworked.

“What do you think?” Shelley asked.

Zoe chewed on her lip for a moment before answering. “I do not trust him.”

“I don’t trust him either, but I do believe him.”

Zoe turned, looking up to meet Shelley’s eyes in surprise.

Shelley sighed. “He’s a pompous ass who has seen one too many episodes of CSI, yes. But I think he’s telling the truth. His body language, his manner—he’s turning this whole thing into a joke because he feels it’s below him. He sees himself as being part of a different world from ours. For him to commit a crime like that and be arrested for it would be, well, funny to him.”

“Funny?” Zoe repeated, shooting a distasteful look at their suspect. “I do not think that murder is a joke.”

“Poor word choice, perhaps. It’s just so far from being on his radar that he could ever seriously be suspected of something like this. I really don’t think he did it, Z.”

Zoe hesitated, struggling to know what to believe. She didn’t buy the act that Wardenford had put on—and it had been an act. That ten-degree head tilt, the orator at work. She wanted it to be him, wanted to have a solution that would put all this to bed. She wouldn’t have to wrestle with those equations anymore.

But Shelley knew people, and therein lay the rub.

Who could Zoe trust—her own disbelief in his words of innocence and the lack of an alibi, or Shelley’s instinct?

And what if she trusted Shelley and let him go—and he killed again?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

He watched and moved slowly, careful not to be seen. He had left his refuge and hunkered down amongst the people at the bus stop, hiding in plain sight.

The doctor still owed him blood snakes, and he was going to get it, all right. He was going to get it, and how.