Chapter 67
Quill
A Town Full of Murderers
Collateral
Gustavo Santaolalla
Lara hugged me and wouldn’t let go.
Would she do the same if she knew I was a murderer? Did she know?
She was smart and quick to pick up on things. And I was sure she’d put two and two together.
We had barely spoken this weekend, because I had hidden under my blanket and cried, stared at the ceiling and cried again, until eventually, with a headache, I had drifted off into feverish dreams. Over and over. As if it could make things undone.
I had murdered my professor. Nothing about that was reversible.
Lara had given Davian the diary. At least, that’s what he’d told me during our conversation on Sunday, while I had been sipping tea, a blanket draped over my trembling shoulders. He had been sitting on the edge of my bed.
This weekend was a faint memory of warm, stolen touches from him that I didn’t deserve, and nightmares, just like meals I hadn’t been able to keep down.
It was as if a part of Troy were inside me. As if his memories and those gruesome entries had taken root in my mind, ready never to fade away.
The dark circles under my eyes spoke volumes.
Of course Lara knew. She knew everything.
She pulled away from me, studied me, and that spark of pity in her eyes nearly finished me off.
If it weren’t for the panic in my stomach, because just one door down, in the hallway of the Maplecrest Law Faculty’s main building where we were standing, Davian was being questioned right now.
Thomas’s sympathetic gaze was fixed on me, but I avoided it so as not to break down in tears again.
It would ruin our plan.
Davian had wanted to represent me as my lawyer, but I had refused. It would have been too suspicious, because I wasn’t really on the police’s radar. I had merely been one of the guests of honor at the Fitzek Gala and was in contact with several prime suspects. Among them, apparently, Davian.
He had read the diary. All of it. Over and over again. And I knew it had been eating away at him, that he had wanted to talk to my father.
I wouldn’t have stopped him, would have wanted him to take the diary to the police for me. But he didn’t want to.
The door opened and Davian appeared, accompanied by an Asian woman in her mid-thirties with freckles, who had tied her medium-length black hair into a ponytail.
His eyes immediately fell on me, worry in his gaze, but the next moment he put on his facade and stepped toward Lara.
“Miss Veritas?”
The woman looked back and forth between me and Lara, and I stepped forward, letting her size me up for a moment before following her into the interrogation room – actually a classroom – my heart pounding, grateful that Lara had applied a subtle layer of makeup to my eyes.
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The woman led me to a table with two chairs, offered me coffee, and I accepted so my hands would have something to hold onto and wouldn’t leave any more traces of my inner turmoil on my fingers.
The woman jotted something down while a man Davian’s age stepped forward and scrutinized me as if there were still traces of blood clinging to my cheek.
Small traces that Davian had overlooked when he’d cleansed my face with the utmost care on Saturday night before re-applying ointment to my hand scar and bandaging it.
Lara had come into the bathroom briefly, staring first at me, then at him, but Davian had been too focused to even really notice her.
His gaze had been fixed, almost absent-minded. Yet every now and then he had looked at me with that look. Full of concern, inner tension, and a trace of despair.
“Miss Veritas,” said the woman, who was concentrating on the documents as if something were bothering her. “You’re from Canada?”
Shit. We’d thought of everything. But this…
“Yes…”
She scanned the document with furrowed brows.
“Odd.” She shook her head. “You’re not on the visa list.”
Oh no…
This couldn’t be the moment I got caught.
“Davis, should I have the list updated in the system?”
Her colleague, who had been eyeing me up until now, raised his hand.
“No need. She’s not a prime suspect.”
At least that’s something.
And yet I was guilty.
“Miss Veritas.” He stepped up to the chair on the other side of the table and propped his hands on the top of the chair’s back. “Other witnesses claim you often clashed with Professor Fitzek.”
My gaze drifted to the board behind them, which was covered with photos and sticky notes, but I couldn’t read anything from where I was sitting.
My gaze lingered on the picture of my father.
He was one of the prime suspects.
Arnold and Davian were also listed. So were Anthony and two strangers I didn’t know.
“Miss Veritas?”
Startled, I looked back at the detective.
“His teaching methods go… went against all human dignity.” I corrected myself. “Against the law.”
The woman raised an eyebrow, along with a clipboard, and set her pen to paper.
“Do you want to file a complaint?”
“No”
Not against Troy.
The names of two other men were on the tip of my tongue, ready to finally be spoken. But I couldn’t. That was part of the agreement I had with Davian.
“One of the witnesses said you pushed him to his limits. Is that true?” the man pressed further and finally sat down.
“I’m not really in a position to judge what his limits were,” I replied as matter-of-factly as possible. “The only thing I can tell you is that he didn’t like it when I contradicted him or broke one of his rules.”
It would be pretty pathetic if they suspected a student of murdering her professor just because she couldn’t handle his teaching methods.
“Professor Fitzek kept a tally. You were right at the top.”
In any other situation, I would have smirked proudly. Only this situation was the most hopeless and devastating one I could possibly be in, when it came to Troy.
If only he had talked to me…
No, Quill. He too had been a murderer.
“And yet he didn’t suspend you from his course.”
Focusing on the man, I reached for the hot paper cup, forcing myself, as inconspicuously as possible, to look into the aromatic black liquid and take a sip before setting the cup down without letting go of it.
Nausea threatened to rise up inside me.
“He wasn’t allowed to. Because we were both part of the debates.”
Cancelled debates. By the director of the law department himself.
Thus, Arnold had indirectly decided who would take over the management of Maplecrest next.
It should have driven me into a rage, should have made me act rashly.
Instead, more and more veils of emptiness settled over the last bit of soul within me that was fighting for its survival.
They should investigate him until they stumbled upon all the bodies in Arnold’s basement. He deserved to betray his mentor, to feel what it was like to lose everything. As an accomplice to a Nazi. A cold-blooded murderer.
But I couldn’t even steer the investigation in his direction. The detectives would try to find some meaning behind my words. They would uncover a mountain of lies. And every word I spoke would be null and void. The words of a fraud.
“Did Professor Fitzek ever threaten you?” the man continued, while the woman jotted down more notes.
“Yes,” I admitted. “Just like many lawyers do at Maplecrest.”
The woman gave a dry laugh without looking up from her clipboard, and her colleague shot her a warning glance, which she ignored, before turning his attention back to me.
“Do you know if anyone has ever threatened Fitzek?”
That was my chance.
“Yes. His father. And Professor Richter. The old one.”
When I realized I was tapping my foot up and down, I stopped the movement and took another sip.
Images of Troy’s lifeless face flashed before my inner eye, transforming into the face of a little blond boy with blue eyes whom I had never seen.
I wanted to vomit.
“People here say Professor Joseph Richter and Professor Troy Fitzek were rivals. Just like your debate mentor, Professor Davian Rydell and Fitzek.” The man was now inspecting me like a spoiled bird of prey would its potential meal, his eyes narrowed slightly. “What was this… rivalry about?”
I was certain he’d already pried the answer out of Davian. One of those things where I couldn’t afford to lie.
I’d love to know what Arnold had fed them. How this man had talked his way out of interrogations all these years.
“Over the university. The director wanted to use the debates to decide which professor would take over the faculty chair.”
“Davis?” The woman raised her eyebrows and looked up for the first time. “I thought this position is decided by democratic elections in the Ethics Committee?”
“Actually…,” the detective began, but I cut him off.
“The director nominated the candidates. And Joseph Richter and Troy Fitzek were the main contenders.”
“Just like your mentor.”
A challenging look crossed the detective’s face.
What the…
“Indirectly,” I corrected him as tersely as possible, while confusion threatened to overwhelm me inside.
What if Davian had been right and the police weren’t working independently? But who exactly were they working for? For that man who was probably drinking a whiskey with my father right now, celebrating that Troy was finally six feet under? Since this morning.
Davian had been at the funeral. Just like my father and Anthony. But I hadn’t been able to bring myself to do that. And I was still ashamed of it.
“Miss Veritas.” I looked up, realizing only now that I’d been staring into my coffee. “Did Professor Rydell ever threaten Professor Troy Fitzek in your presence?”
Don’t hesitate. Don’t hesitate.
“No”
The lie burned on my tongue, as if I weren’t a master of deception.
The man stared me right into the ground, but I held his gaze.
“One last question,” the woman cleared her throat as the man was already about to speak, but was now forced to press his lips together. “Where were you on the night of the murder?”
The one question Davian had prepared me for over and over again.
“In the hall.”