“Yes,” she hissed back. “But you never told me he’d accepted!”
In other words, the Ides of March didn’t get off to the most auspicious of starts around our place. While Mel showered in my bathroom, I went out to the kitchen to make coffee. Todd was there, eating cold leftover pizza. He didn’t say a word about Mel, and neither did I.
Todd gave me a choice of two different stacks of paper, one with reprints of articles on Destry Hennessey and the other, far larger, devoted to Anita Bowdin. I picked the Anita option and retreated to my recliner to go to work.
What I read to begin with was mostly one puff piece after another, many of them dealing with Anita’s work in founding and maintaining the SASAC. Tired of reading the same thing over and over, I skipped to what Analise Kim would have referred to as the FIFO—First In First Out—program and skipped back to the earliest one I could find, a New York Times feature article that profiled a group of six exceptionally brilliant female students, all of whom had enrolled in prestigious colleges at a time when most of their contemporaries were just venturing into high school.
Anita Bowdin, daughter of a university physics professor and an insurance executive, was one of the six very young women. All of them came from upper-crust, privileged backgrounds. All of them voiced concerns about whether or not they’d be able to fit in with the older students around them. All of them expressed some worry about being able to keep up with the course work. All of them credited teachers for encouraging them to strive. I was struck by the one Anita Bowdin mentioned—Sister Helen Thomas of Sisters of the Sacred Heart School, Ann Arbor, Michigan.
So Anita Bowdin had attended a parochial school. Was that a connection? Did the fact that Anita Bowdin had attended Catholic schools as a child have something to do with the fact that a mysterious nun was somehow involved in our series of homicides?
The next media mention of Anita Bowdin came two years later, in the July 7 issue of Ann Arbor News, where she was mentioned in her father’s obituary.
Private funeral services will be held today at 2:00 p.m. at St. Claire Catholic Church for noted University of Michigan physics professor Armand P. Bowdin, who died unexpectedly in his home late last week.
Died unexpectedly in his home. In the old days, when journalism was a more gentlemanly pursuit, those words constituted media shorthand and media newspeak for suicide. They were used primarily when either the deceased or his survivors had enough media pull that no one wanted to mention that the dead guy pulled his own plug.
The rest of the article was a mostly laudatory recitation of his educational and employment background. Anita’s name came at the very end, where she and her mother, Rachel Bowdin, were listed as survivors.
Those two snippets of Anita Bowdin’s history were as far as I’d managed to make it when Mel finally emerged from the bedroom. She was not only dressed—she was dressed to the nines: heels, panty hose, skirt, silk blouse, and blazer. Every hair was in place. Her makeup was impeccable. In other words, she was clothed in the full armor of God and ready to take on all comers.
“All right,” she said coolly, ignoring me and looking Todd straight in the eye. “What have we got?”
Wordlessly he passed Mel the Destry Hennessey file. She took that and a cup of coffee and headed for the window seat. For the next several mintues the atmosphere in the room was thick with tension. It was a relief when my phone rang.
“Detective Beaumont?”
“Yes.”
“Detective Donner here, Ambrose Donner with Bountiful PD. Sorry I wasn’t able to get that composite from the Escobar case off to you yesterday like I said I would. Turns out I ran into, shall we say, a few difficulties.”
“I know how that goes,” I said, and I did. He meant that somebody with a wad of brass on his uniform had decided sending the composite wasn’t going to happen. “That’s all right,” I added. “I was tied up all day yesterday on another case.”
“I can send it now,” Donner said. He sounded pissed. “Is that fax number you gave me still good?”
“Sure,” I said. “Send away.”
“While I was at it,” Donner continued, “I read through the case file, just for the hell of it. Did I tell you about the thread?”