Just One Bite Page 4

  This isn’t unnecessary detail. She’s telling me to tread carefully when it comes to the family. But a missing university professor is more obvious than a missing cab driver or store clerk, so Zinnen is probably under political pressure to solve this case quickly.

  “Mr. Blake thinks it might be a suicide,” Thistle says.

  “Oh, how awful,” Zinnen says. But there’s relief in her eyes, too. The media loves pointing fingers, and if it’s a suicide, those fingers will be pointed at the underfunded mental health services in Texas. A high-profile unsolved murder, on the other hand, could be blamed on her. “Well, I hope you can help us find his remains,” she continues. “The former director’s notes indicate that you’re the best man for the job.”

  She’s buttering me up. The last director hated me—the best his notes could possibly say is that I had a good solve rate. But...

  Oh. I shrivel a little inside. Thistle doesn’t want me here at all. Her boss pressured her into calling me.

  “I’ll do my best, ma’am,” I assure her.

  She beams. “Thank you. Let me know if there’s anything at all you need.”

  This is an empty offer. I’m only here because the FBI’s budget is, as always, stretched to breaking point. But I play along.

  “Will do,” I say.

  “Agent Thistle,” Zinnen says. “You have everything you need for this evening?”

  “Yes,” Thistle says. “Thanks.” I get the feeling she doesn’t want me to know what this question is about.

  Perhaps sensing this, Zinnen shakes my hand again and disappears back toward her office. She doesn’t ask any questions about the evidence for my theory. This makes me think she was never a cop—just an administrator who rose through the ranks.

  Thistle sighs heavily. “All right. We’ll check the strip clubs. What else you got?”

  “I’d like to meet his wife, and his coworkers.”

  “I don’t want to use up too much of your time,” Thistle says, knowing my time is worthless. “We still don’t have the budget to pay you. So just tell us what you’d like to know about them, and I’ll find out.”

  I ask her point-blank: “You don’t want me on this case, do you?”

  Thistle keeps her voice low so the cops in the neighboring cubicles won’t overhear. “Do you really want to be on it?”

  Thistle is wrong about me in a lot of ways. She thinks I helped the FBI out of a sense of justice, when really I just wanted the free food. And she thinks I don’t like her—there’s no way I could explain that I was rejecting her for her own safety. Now she has no idea why I would take this case when working with her would be so awkward.

  “I do,” I say. Not ready to say goodbye.

  Thistle looks neither pleased nor displeased by this. “Fine,” she says, picking up her keys and a black coat, polyester made to look like wool. “Where are we headed?”

  “Wait,” I say. “I need more information about Biggs.”

  “You can read the file on the way.” Thistle leans back over her computer, selects a document and hits Print. Papers start chugging out of her printer.

  “I need the file to decide where we’re—”

  I stop dead. Because I’ve just seen Biggs’s face come out of the printer. Skinny, graying hair, hollow cheeks. I know exactly where he is.

  My freezer.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  What goes up and down without moving or changing?

  “You okay?” Thistle asks.

  It’s like standing on the deck of a tilting ship. “Huh? Yeah. What?”

  Thistle looks from the picture of Biggs to me and back. “You know him?” she says.

  “No. I expected him to be older, is all.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, he’s a math professor.” My mind is racing. I’m in deep trouble. I’ve just volunteered for a case I can’t allow myself to solve.

  “Blake, if you know this guy...”

  “I don’t.”

  “You knew it was his birthday.”

  I look her in the eye. “I guessed.”

  My heartbeat is through the roof, but I’m good at keeping my face slack.

  After a long moment, Thistle raises her hands. “Okay. You were about to tell me where we were going.”

  “The university,” I say quickly. His home is the best place to start, but I need to buy some time.

  Thistle puts on her coat. “Fine. Let’s go.”

  Down the staircase, out the door to the parking lot. Thistle unlocks a white Crown Vic. Different plates from her last one, sleeker interior. The FBI bought thousands of these when Ford discontinued them. No CD player in this one. I’m sure Thistle is missing it—she’s a musician.

  I open the case file, but it’s hard to focus, knowing the information I need won’t be in there.

  Why were you naked in the woods, Biggs? The only mark on your body came from me, so who or what killed you, and how? And what the hell do I do now?

  Maybe Biggs ate some poisonous mushrooms out in the woods. He could have been starving, or, since he was a pot user, maybe he thought they were hallucinogenic. I didn’t see or smell any vomit, but maybe he kept them down. Do poisonous mushrooms make you feel hot, so you take off your clothes? I don’t know. It’s strange that he was so close to the road. He didn’t get far at all before something happened to him.

  I’ve been chewing my nails—now my hand freezes halfway to my mouth. If Biggs did eat toxic mushrooms, it’s possible that I poisoned myself when I bit him. I remember hearing that certain types of mushrooms—death caps, they’re called—cause your DNA to unravel. Your body withers away as though under attack from the world’s most aggressive cancer.

  That would serve me right.

  Thistle doesn’t speak as she drives us toward Braithwaite University. The silence is tense, but it gives me some time to scan the file. Biggs was an associate professor of mathematics who’d worked at the university for twelve years, tenured after seven. Before that he was a high school math teacher in Tennessee. He was fifty-one. Briefly hospitalized a couple of years ago, though the file doesn’t say what for. Gabriela, his wife, is a forty-eight-year-old warehouse manager. His daughter, Hope, dropped out of college to do graphic design jobs for a bank on Lamar Street. She mostly works from home. They all live together in Southampton. I can’t see any red flags, other than a professor’s daughter being a dropout.

  “Anyone else gone missing from the university?” I ask.

  “A young woman named Abbey Chapman vanished, but that was about seven months ago,” Thistle says. “And five weeks back an early-morning jogger was assaulted on a bike path near the campus.”

  “A teacher?”

  “No. Unconnected to the college, although he said the three perps—all men—looked young. Might have been students screwing around. They punched him in the head, took his phone, ran off. He couldn’t describe them well enough for us to ID them.”

  “How many students at the college?”

  “Twenty-eight thousand undergrads, eleven thousand graduate students. Most of them won’t be there today, though. Classes ended last week.”

  I spend a minute calculating odds. With that many people, it would be unusual if there wasn’t a disappearance and an assault within the last few months. Probably not relevant to my case. But I stir the information into the batter, anyway.

  “Vasquez seemed kind of tense,” I say.

  “No doubt,” Thistle says. “He’s on the Warner task force.”

  Uh-oh. “The what?”

  “It’s an organized crime case. Only a small group of agents are on it, because they’re worried about corruption. So the workload is huge, and Vasquez is still supposed to manage incoming communications for other cases.”

  The FBI is investigating Warner again. Maybe I should try to get close to Va
squez, find out what the group knows. Or maybe I should stay as far away from him as possible.

  “You’re not on the task force?” I ask.

  “I wasn’t invited,” Thistle says.

  She has suddenly become very intent on the surrounding traffic. Deliberately discouraging further questions.

  “I need to know that you can be professional,” she says finally.

  I look at her. She keeps her eyes on the road.

  “You know I can,” I say.

  “I mean it. If working with me is going to make you uncomfortable, I don’t want your help.”

  I need to be on this case so I can sabotage it. Thistle is resourceful. Without my interference, she might follow Biggs’s trail all the way to my freezer.

  “You need me,” I say.

  “I don’t, actually. I was solving cases just fine until you turned up. I’ve been solving them fine since you left, too.”

  “Your boss thinks you could use my help.”

  Thistle’s nose twitches. “She doesn’t know you like I do.”

  “What do you mean by that?” That fear again: She knows.

  “You ‘solved’ our last case by accidentally wandering into the killer’s house,” Thistle says. “If I hadn’t identified him with actual detective work, you’d be dead. I signed an NDA, so I can’t tell my boss about that. But if I could, she might not be so keen on your help.”

  “Maybe,” I concede.

  She says nothing. If I can’t mollify her, she might find some way to kick me off the case, or start working it when I’m not around.

  “Look,” I say, “I get why you don’t want me here. I was an asshole.”

  “Yup.”

  “I’ll work this case with you, and then I’ll disappear. Next time the director asks for my help, I’ll tell her I’m unavailable. What do you say?”

  Thistle spins the wheel, taking the Crown Vic into one of the campus parking lots. She glances down at my mutilated hand. A thin smile.

  “I give that plan two thumbs-up,” she says.

  * * *

  The campus is huge, with square lawns separating the sprawling yellow-brick buildings. There’s no one around, maybe because there’s nowhere to shelter from the cold wind. Only a few cars in the parking lot when we pull in at eight forty-five.

  “What kind of car did Biggs drive?” I ask.

  “A blue Prius. Security footage shows it leaving this parking lot at six p.m. on the day he went missing.”

  I look around. Note the position of the cameras. They don’t cover the road, so we can’t tell which way he turned. The missing car wouldn’t be odd if he ran away—but I know he didn’t. So where is it?

  I stick my numb hands in my pockets. “Who did you talk to last time you were here?”

  “All his students, and all the staff in his department.”

  “Including cleaners?”

  “Correct.” Thistle points. “Math department’s this way.”

  “Let’s go to the cafeteria first.”

  “I’m not buying you breakfast.”

  A shame. “It seems likely that our victim spent time there. I just want to get a look at it.”

  “Sure.” Thistle follows me into one of the buildings.

  There are three food shops inside—a sandwich place for those who like to eat healthy, a fried food place for those who don’t, plus a coffee shop. Not many students around. Most are probably studying for their last exams, or gone home for the winter break. A few young people are at tables, eating waffles or eggs one-handed while they scroll through their phones. A couple of others lounge on beanbags in the corner.

  “No teachers,” Thistle observes. “Seems unlikely that our victim ate here.”

  I grunt, and approach the sandwich place. From Biggs’s build, I’m guessing he ate mostly healthy stuff.

  As I pass the students, I get a flash of the relationships in each group. A girl is talking about her accomplishments in a video game she’s been playing while the kids around her pretend to care. Five other teens are sitting in a circle, close enough that they must know each other, but they’re all looking at their iPads, so they must not like each other that much. A chisel-jawed guy who looks like he’s here on a football scholarship is talking to three wide-eyed girls who could be freshmen. He’s trying to impress them, and it’s working on two of them.

  When I reach the sandwich place, the woman behind the counter—blond hair under a white hairnet, latex gloves, pitted skin—watches me like a TV show she’s not interested in.

  “My name’s Timothy Blake, and I’m a civilian consultant for the FBI,” I say. “This is Agent Reese Thistle. Have you seen this man?”

  I pull out the picture of Biggs from the file.

  The woman looks at it and blinks slowly, like a sloth.

  “Egg salad sandwich,” she says finally. “On low-sodium bread. He comes in on Wednesdays and Fridays. Always gets a diet soda, too.”

  Thistle and I look at each other. Witnesses aren’t usually this good.

  “You know his name?” I ask, testing.

  The woman shakes her head. “Sorry.”

  “Seen him since last Friday?”

  “Not here. Around the campus, maybe.”

  “Maybe? You’re not sure?”

  “No.”

  Thistle speaks up. “Did he usually eat with anybody?”

  “Yep. A younger guy. Ham and cheese sandwich on white bread.”

  “Seen that guy lately?”

  The woman looks around. “He was here a second ago,” she says. “Can’t see him now.”

  I scan the room. The crowd has changed since we walked in. Six more people have arrived, and three have left. Only one of the missing people was male—the chisel-jawed guy. The girls he was talking to are still here, holding identical business cards.

  “Thanks for your help,” I tell the woman, and walk over to the girls. They regard me much more suspiciously than they did the last guy.

  “Excuse me,” I say. “Can I have a look at that?”

  I snatch the business card from one of the girls—a short redhead wearing a pink sweater and hoop earrings.

  “Hey!” she says.

  The name on the card is Shannon Luxford. Says he’s a grad student/teaching assistant. Wondering what kind of narcissistic TA orders business cards, I memorize the phone number and email addresses, then I hand the card back.

  “Thanks,” I say, and walk away before she can make a thing of it. I push through the doors out into a freezing courtyard.

  Thistle catches up to me quickly. “How about you let me take point next time?” She sounds annoyed. “You remember that you have zero qualifications, right?”

  A few people are walking back and forth. I turn around and around, looking for the missing man.

  “What are you doing?” Thistle asks.

  “I saw Biggs’s dining partner before he left,” I say. “He’s a white guy with dark hair. Muscular build. Looks like Clark Kent, but without the glasses.”

  “So he looks like Superman,” Thistle says dryly. “Was his name Shannon Luxford?”

  I frown. “How did you know that?”

  “I’ve already interviewed him. He’s a TA in the math department.”

  “Well, I want to talk to him.”

  “Sure. Come on.” Thistle starts walking. “But I don’t know what he’ll tell you that he didn’t tell me.”

  As we walk past a vending machine, I note that the prices seem high. “What does tuition here cost?”

  “About ten grand per year, or thirty for students from out of state.”

  I whistle through crooked teeth. “A pretty good scam. Do these kids know they can just look stuff up in the library?”

  “Not if they want a job afterwards,” Thistle points out. />
  “Exactly. Colleges have convinced companies not to hire people without degrees, so they can squeeze tens of thousands of dollars out of parents who don’t want their kids to be unemployed. It’s a scam.”

  “Uh-huh. How would you like to get a pacemaker installed by a doctor without a degree?”

  “Doctors learn at actual hospitals,” I say. “The university only provides the piece of paper.”

  Thistle glares at me. “I learned a lot at college. Made some friends for life, too.”

  I want to point out that those friends had parents who could afford the tuition fees. The kinds of friends I never got to meet. College is where the walls go up, stopping the rich and poor from ever knowing one another in more than a superficial way. But it looks like I’ve already pushed her too far.

  “Your view might be colored by your personal experience,” Thistle adds. “Or lack of it.”

  I feel a stab of disappointment. She was supposed to be on my side. We both grew up poor in the foster system, before she was adopted out. I knew she’d made something of herself since then, but I didn’t think she’d forgotten what it was like to be hungry.

  “Maybe,” I say. “Sorry. I was just wondering if there might be a money angle to this. What’s Biggs’s salary?”

  “Eighty-eight K.”

  He’ll never be a billionaire, especially not now that he’s dead. But his income was well above the average in Texas. Maybe someone thought he was worth robbing.

  We reach the math department, which looks more like the art department. A garden of native shrubs surrounds the building, the windows have frosted patterns and a teal sculpture shimmers out the front, metal twisted into smaller and smaller spiral patterns. I get the feeling that the shapes might represent fractals, but I only half know what fractals are.

  Thistle leads me upstairs toward Biggs’s office. The building is quiet—I can feel how dense the concrete walls are, under a coat of pale yellow paint.

  We pass a row of study nooks in the corridor. A stunning woman hovers near one of them talking to a female student. She looks like she just came from a photo shoot with Vogue. Thirty-something, her porcelain face partially curtained by gleaming blond hair, her Barbie-doll figure wrapped in a high-waisted gray skirt and chocolate blouse. She bends over like a 1950s flight attendant, straight spine, hips back, showing a picture on her phone to the student. The student seems unable to resist a peek down the woman’s cleavage.