The Square Root of Murder (Professor Sophie Knowles)

Could her motive have to do with a crime that Keith found out about? She did, after all, belong to the generation that was known for activism that sometimes led to violence.
    I ran the numbers. How old was she, other than the one hundred and ten years old she seemed to most of us? I remembered a discussion at a faculty meeting about extending the mandatory retirement age for administrators. I wished I’d paid more attention. My best recollection was that the dean, a case in point at that meeting, was in her early sixties, making her now about sixty-five or–six. That put her smack in the late sixties as a college student. The college website would give her year of graduation.
    What if she did something back then that wouldn’t look so cool now for a college dean? Something she wouldn’t be proud of or want shown off as Virgil’s dad did? I pictured the young, if she ever was, Phyllis Underwood. Smoking pot, protesting, maybe even getting arrested. I would have laughed hysterically if I weren’t surrounded by cops who might misunderstand my behavior and carry me away.
    Virgil and I took seats at a small table in Interview One. Whew. My ex-student Terri had been right about the difference between this room and Interview Two. Interview One was air-conditioned, even cooler than the outside areas, and the chairs stood even on four good legs.
    “Are arrest records available to the public?” I asked Virgil.
    He raised his eyebrows. “Anyone in particular?”
    “Just curious.” I pointed to my bag of cards and notes. “It’s about another matter entirely.” Maybe, maybe not, I said to myself.
    Virgil sat back. “On the arrest records, yes and no. You have to have a ‘need to know’ such as the press would have, but your average citizen would not. The press is entitled to the report for factual information, like name, age, date and time of the arrest, but we can limit what else they can see.” He gave me a questioning look. “Does that help?”
    “A ‘yes’ would have been more help,” I said.
    “Well, there are some exceptions, like with Megan’s Law where you can find out if someone has been arrested for certain sex crimes. In fact, you can check that on the Internet. But if your car is stolen and the police recover it being driven by someone they arrest, you’re entitled to the theft report but not to the arrest report. Once the case was charged by the DA’s office for a criminal prosecution, it used to become a public record, but not anymore. There’s this thing called ‘probable cause’—”
    I held up my hand. “Thanks. Any more is too complicated.”
    “And you teach math.”
    “Trust me, the Chi-square test is much simpler.”
     
     
    It flashed by me that breaking into a police department or courthouse records office would be harder than slipping into Keith’s office in Franklin Hall. I’d have to come up with another way to dig into the dean’s past.

CHAPTER 22
     
    I couldn’t fault Virgil for his pleasant cooperative attitude. He’d mounted the crime scene photographs on a small bulletin board that he’d propped up on the table. We sifted through card after card and note after note. Some were easy to dismiss.
    I’d found only one sample of Lucy’s handwriting, on a sign-up sheet for the picnic potluck in the middle of June. Why the month-old sheet was stuck between other notes, I had no idea, except to guess that I’d scooped up and moved a pile of pages to be filed from my campus office desk to my home office desk, making the latter even messier.
    What Lucy had written was: “LUCY BRONSON—MEDIUM SIZE MACARONI SALAD.” Lucy had capitalized all the words describing her offering, with great flourishes for the Ms and the Ss. Like both Casey Tremel and Liz Harrison, Lucy had used tiny circles to dot her Is. None of the three samples were even close to the red markings on Rachel’s thesis pages.
    Fran Emerson had a tiny scrawl of a style. No match. Robert, Keith’s chairman, had such widely spaced words in the sample that I made a note to check with Ariana about what it meant, besides the fact that Robert Michaels hadn’t tampered with Rachel’s yellow pages.
    Dean Underwood’s handwriting checked out also as “no match.” If she did have an embarrassing blot on her resume it wasn’t enough for her to kill him. But maybe enough to snatch away what was in his files about her while she had the chance.
    And so it went, with biology chair Judith Donohue and student