I’d spent all morning avoiding the task at hand—grading the last student’s final exam from Human Origins, the undergraduate course I’d taught this spring—when the intercom in my office beeped. “Dr. B?”
I felt a rush of guilt. I’d been procrastinating for days, and now I’d been caught. “I know, I know,” I groveled into the speakerphone. “The grades were due yesterday. The NFA class ran really long. Apparently, Miranda and I buried the bodies better than we meant to. Took the trainees hours to find ’em.”
Peggy Wilhoit, my secretary, was calling from a football field away, literally. The Anthropology Department’s administrative offices, including my own spacious and ceremonial office as head of the department, were nestled under Neyland Stadium’s south end-zone stands. But my private sanctuary—the small, dingy room where I retreated when I needed to concentrate on a forensic case or a journal article or a stack of overdue exam papers—was tucked beneath the grimy girders of the north end zone. “I’m finishing the last exam right now,” I fibbed. “I’ll bring you the scores in five minutes.” Across the hundred yards of curving corridor that separated us, I imagined Peggy’s bullshit detector flashing and beeping. “Okay, that was a lie,” I admitted. “I haven’t started grading the last one, but I’ll do it now, I promise. So it’ll be more like twenty minutes.”
“I’m not calling to nag you about the grades,” she said. “Although, now that you mention it . . .”
“Forget I mentioned it,” I said. “Grades? Who said anything about grades? What can I do for you?”
“Someone’s on the phone for you. An Angie St. Claire, from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement. She says she was in the NFA class that ended yesterday.”
I was suddenly alert. “She says right; she was. Put her on.” The phone beeped once when Peggy put me on hold, then beeped again as the call was transferred to me. “Angie? Hello, it’s Bill Brockton. How are you?” There was silence on the other end. “Angie? Are you there?”
“Yes, sir, I’m here; sorry. I’m fine.” She didn’t sound fine. She sounded formal, as law enforcement people often do, but she also sounded distracted. No, not distracted; distraught was what she sounded.
“We worried about you when you had to leave so suddenly,” I said. “I hope everything’s okay.”
“Not really, Dr. Brockton. That’s why I’m calling. I’m sorry to impose, but I . . . I was wondering . . .” Her breath got deep and ragged, and then I heard the sound of sniffling.
“Angie, what’s wrong? How can I help you?”
There was another, longer pause; I heard the rustling, scratching sound of fabric covering the handset and then the muffled noise of a nose being blown vigorously once, twice, three times. “Dammit, I wasn’t going to cry,” she sighed when she came back on the line. “Oh well.”
“What can I do for you, Angie?”
“It’s my sister, Dr. Brockton. She . . . um . . . she’s dead.” Silence. I waited. “That call I got yesterday morning—the call that made me leave—it was from my husband, Ned, telling me.”
“I figured you’d gotten some really bad news. I gather it was unexpected. I’m so sorry.” I hesitated, reluctant to pry. Still, she’d called me. “Was it an accident?”
“No,” she said with sudden vehemence, and then she laughed—a short, bitter bark of a laugh that startled me. “It was definitely not an accident. That’s the one thing we can all agree on.” I resisted the urge to fire off questions. “She died from a shotgun blast to the head.” The air in my office suddenly turned electric. “The local coroner says it was suicide. I say it was murder.”
I couldn’t resist any longer. “Tell me about it. Why does the coroner think it was suicide?”
“Because her fingerprints were on the gun. And because her jerk of a husband says it was suicide. He, Don—Don Nicely, how’s that for an ironic name?—says she’d been depressed for months, which I believe, and that she’d threatened to kill herself twice before, which I don’t believe.”
“Why don’t you believe it? And why do you think it was murder?”
“Lots of reasons. For one thing, I think—I hope—she’d have told me if she felt suicidal. For another, women don’t shoot themselves. A woman takes pills or cuts her wrists. She doesn’t put a shotgun in her mouth and blow her head off. Only men are stupid enough to do that.”