Voice Mail Murder (7 page)

Chapter Twelve

As she rounded the corner of the second floor of Blake Hall, she peeked into Willard Swinton’s office next to hers. Willard was at his desk talking to a student. The professor and his protégé were intently involved and she doubted that Willard even saw her pass by. Even so, she gave him a quick wave. Across the hallway, Joan’s door was also open and she moved across the hall to see if Joan was also busy, advising a student or typing frantically on one of her many papers. Now that Charlotte Clark was gone and no longer the Department’s top researcher and grant-getter, Joan had assumed the position formerly held by the dead diva. Of course, Joan was not given to tooting her own horn as Charlotte had, and let her work speak for itself. But Pamela knew what a workhorse Joan Bentley was, churning out award-winning publications month after month, year after year. Today, however, Joan’s fingers were not flying over the keyboard. She sat leaning back in her desk chair, her eyes staring at a photograph on her desktop. Pamela knew the photograph well as it had held a position of honor there ever since Pamela had known Joan, which was almost fifteen years. The photo was a family picture of Joan, her deceased husband Neville, and their two sons, Charles and Jack.

“Joan,” said Pamela softly, not wishing to disturb her reverie, “how are you?”

“Oh, Pamela,” replied Joan, sitting up quickly and setting the framed picture back on her desk. “I’m having trouble getting motivated.”

Pamela entered Joan’s office. The cheery room belied Joan’s present state. Joan had bedecked her small space with numerous live plants (or real plants as Pamela called them because she far preferred the artificial variety that required no tending). Although Joan had stacks of papers, articles, and computer print-outs from her various research studies piled around the room, there was a definite order to the chaos. Joan had sticky notes on the tops of each of the various piles, indicating their nature. Her office reflected her life—a cheery blend of disciplined work in progress.

“That doesn’t sound like you,” chided Pamela gently.

“No,” agreed Joan, “but it’s hard to function at work, when my life at home is in such disarray.”

“You mean with Jack?”

“Of course,” agreed Joan. “Oh, Pamela, why did I ever suggest to the boy that he should move back home? He’s just driving me crazy!”

“Is this because he hasn’t found a job?”

“Not hasn’t found—won’t look for one.”

“I know how hard it is to . . .”

“He’s not looking!” Joan exclaimed. “He could find something if he would just go out there and look. You know as well as I do, Pamela, that job hunting is a full-time job! Jack assumes that an employer is just going to call him with an offer if he’ll just wait long enough!”

“And the two of you aren’t getting along?” Joan’s face bore the truth of her constant bouts with her youngest and most volatile son.

“He’s an adult!” she screamed, then tempered her voice as she realized that students in the hallway might overhear her voice. “But he acts like a teenager. He expects me to be his . . . mother!”

“Ungrateful wretch,” said Pamela, smiling.

“I mean he expects me to be his slave, his butler, his maid, his psychiatrist, his chef, his tailor, his personal shopper, his mechanic, his secretary, his matchmaker, his entertainment coordinator . . . you get the picture.”

“I do,” agreed Pamela, sitting in Joan’s leather chair in front of her desk. “I, of course, have never had any similar experience . . .”

“But, Pamela,” whispered Joan, leaning forward, “just imagine how much more awful it would be if Angela were out on her own and you thought your days of being a Mommy were through and then . . . she returned home to live!”

“Horrible, I agree.”

“You seem rather chipper today,” said Joan. Her usual calm had partially returned and she sat up straighter, turning down the corner of the collar of her crisp peplum blouse that had rolled up in an unsightly display of irregularity.

“I’m happy to report that my off-spring is living in sin and out of my house and I couldn’t be happier!”

“Bravo!” said Joan. “I’m all for living in sin.” She gave Pamela one of her customary rolling eyed glares.

“There’s your problem,” said Pamela, pointing a finger in Joan’s direction.

“What?”

“Jack cramps your style,” she explained. “Your swinging single lifestyle. I assume it’s pretty hard to be the wild party woman that I know you to be when your twenty-eight-year old son is sleeping down the hallway from you.”

“That too,” scowled Joan. “That three.”

Joan had been a widow for many years. Although Neville had been the love of her life, Joan was not one to sit at home and knit. She enjoyed partying—and other things. She was discreet, of course—with carefully selected gentlemen from time to time.

“I might suggest that you need a night on the town with the gals,” offered Pamela. “I realize that it wouldn’t be nearly as exciting as one of your outings to that local ballroom dancing place, but it would do you good to get out.”

“Yes,” said Joan. “It would. Why don’t you check it out with Arliss, and let me know when we’re on.”

“Will do,” said Pamela, standing and heading for the door. “And by the way, you might try a football game. They’re quite invigorating. And there are lots of men there.”

“How would you know?”

“I was at the home game Saturday,” Pamela tossed the remark Joan’s way as she strode out the door.

Crossing the hallway, she could hear Joan gasp, but she laughed to herself. Let Joan figure out why her friend had attended her first ever football game after fifteen years as a non-athletic supporter. When she was situated at her desk and had her lunch secured in her small refrigerator, she pulled out her campus phone book from the top left-hand drawer of her desk. Quickly she located the number she sought and dialed a three-digit extension. It was picked up on the first ring.

“Margaret Billings, Nursing,” said the voice.

“Margaret, Pamela Barnes.”

“Pamela,” exclaimed the woman, “it’s been years! How are you? We miss you on the Human Subjects’ Committee!” The friendly voice conveyed exactly what Pamela knew the woman to be—a cheerful, older woman who not only was a figure-head in the Nursing program, but who also had made a name for herself as long-time Chair of the Human Subjects’ Committee, a thankless but necessary job, Pamela always thought. Pamela had served a three-year stint on the committee several years ago and had come to respect and admire Margaret Billings as one of the few people on campus who was genuinely honest and thoughtful.

“Margaret, are you still serving refreshments at the Human Subjects’ Committee meetings?”

“Of course, my dear,” laughed Margaret, “no one would come to the meetings if I didn’t.”

“Your refreshments were the main reason I always attended,” said Pamela, joining in with her laugh.

“You were very regular in your attendance and always so punctual,” noted Margaret. Pamela thought that it was sweet that Margaret remembered probably the only contribution that Pamela had made throughout her three years on the Committee.

“I tried to be,” stammered Pamela. “Margaret, I called because I have a quick question for you.”

“What can I do for you, my dear?” asked Margaret, her warm personality beaming through the phone lines.

“I was curious about the Coach’s daughter . . . I understand she’s a Nursing major.”

“Oh, terrible tragedy. Terrible. The poor girl. She was just in my office last week, Pamela. We were doing her graduation check. She’s scheduled to graduate this spring, you know. Oh my, she’s an outstanding student! Outstanding! This is so horrible. I can’t imagine what’s she going through . . . but I haven’t seen her since . . .”

“I know,” consoled Pamela, “It’s just terrible. I agree.”

“Is she in one of your classes, Pamela?” The obvious question. Pamela beat around the proverbial and incredibly obvious bush.

“I . . . had heard she was in Nursing . . . and a senior . . . and I was concerned if any of this would . . . affect her graduation. I know it’s probably the last thing to consider . . .”

“No, of course not, my dear,” said Margaret gently, “if you have her in class, I certainly hope you’ll give her the benefit of the doubt. I mean if she’s absent or late with an assignment, I’m sure she’ll pull herself together, but do give her a bit of slack. This is just a terrible thing to happen to her and it’s all so public . . . and her mother in a wheelchair!”

“I heard, yes,” said Pamela, feeling guilty that Margaret had assumed that the student was one of Pamela’s and that Pamela had not corrected this misconception. “I’m sure she’ll need to be there for her mother now . . . and her little sister.”

“Absolutely, she’ll need to be,” said Margaret, “and she will be. She’s very strong. That’s why she went into Nursing, you know—because of her mother’s illness. She’s a remarkable young woman. She would do anything for her mother. You can’t say that about every young person.”

“No, you can’t,” agreed Pamela, wondering just how far Elizabeth Croft was willing to go to protect her invalid mother . . . and her sister. Would she go as far as murder?

Chapter Thirteen

The morning had progressed smoothly—for a Monday. After her classes and a relaxing lunch of sliced beef on Asiago cheese bread with a nice homemade vinaigrette sprinkled over the lettuce and tomato wedge, she tossed her lunch sack into her waste basket and sauntered over to her desk, still sipping her blackberry tea from her thermos. Her office hours had officially started and as no students were lined up at her door, she decided she might as well get started on the voice mail analysis.

Repeating her actions of the previous week where she had studied the original recording, she opened the second CD container and placed it in her disk drive drawer. The original voice mail messages were already saved and numbered in her software program. As she brought up the second recording—the one Shoop had presented to her after the football game, the one of the sample segments from all of the suspects the police had interviewed regarding the Coach’s murder, she leaned back in her desk chair and reached for her earphones. She decided that she would listen to the entire recording first—to get a general overview of the number and type of voices—and to see if any of them jumped out at her as obvious matches to the three voice mail speakers.

It took about two minutes to listen to the entire tape. Pamela noted that the police had done an efficient job of annotating the various speakers and selecting appropriate segments from each. At the beginning of each segment, a man’s voice announced the speaker’s number, and then the segment played. She soon realized that whoever had put the tape together understood how it would be used. The segments selected were innocuous and provided no indications as to each speaker’s identity. That is, she did not hear any of the speakers refer to themselves by name or by their relationship to the deceased (wife, daughter, secretary, colleague, etc.). The segments were truly drawn from the least incriminating sections of the interviews. Although each segment was mundane in content, the person who had created this master recording had done a fairly good job in selecting segments that demonstrated each speaker’s vocal features. Some speakers used a lot of pitch variety—going from highs to lows in the course of a few words. Others were more monotone. Some spoke with a slow, lugubrious drawl; others whipped along like they were being chased by a train. All of these features and more were evident in the short samples she had before her—because as short as these samples were—they were somewhat longer than the snippets that had been provided to her for the voice mail speakers. She began to believe that she might actually be able to accomplish her task.

However and it was a big however, after listening to the interview recording several times, she had no sense that she had heard any of these voices on the voice mail recording. Maybe she was wrong. She had promised Shoop that she would conduct a thorough analysis and see if any of the people interviewed were identical to the three women who had left messages on Coach’s voice mail. She had to get to it.

Step one. A quick mental calculation made her realize that she was in for a long afternoon. Just as she had done when she compared the seven messages on the original voice mail recording to determine that there were actually three speakers who had produced those seven messages, now she would have to repeat this process, comparing what turned out to be eight speakers on the interview recording to each of the three speakers on the voice mail recording. That would mean twenty-four separate analyses. Each voice mail speaker would need to be compared and contrasted with each interviewed speaker.

She brought up the first voice mail speaker who was already saved in her software program. The top line filled with a spectrograph line representing this woman’s voice as she said:

“Hi, I’m really excited to see you. I’m here, just like you said. Can you come over?”

She fast-forwarded through the second CD to the first speaker’s segment and uploaded it into her program. Clicking on the beginning of the segment she ran her cursor to the end, highlighted it, and transferred it into the slot directly below the first voice mail speaker’s message. Immediately, the spectrographic line appeared for this speaker. Of course, the two lines were no match. Even if the first voice mail speaker were the same person as the first interview speaker, the lines would not match because the speakers were not saying the same message. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? She thought. Maybe I could get Shoop to re-interview all the suspects and have them say all the messages from the voice mail speakers. Then I can look for a direct match in my spectrograph lines and identifying the women would be child’s play. Unfortunately, she realized that that would be unlikely.

What she would have to do is exactly what she did with the voice mail speakers—use her expertise and her judgment. She’d have to listen for similarities, for patterns in vowel production, or unusual consonant formation—anything that might make one of the voice mail speakers unique—and that might be recreated in the voice or voices of one or more of the interview speakers. She enlarged some of the vowels in the top line and looked for a similar sound in the second audio line. When she found a similar sound, she examined the visual output and listened again several times on the headphones. She did the same routine with comparable consonants that appeared in both segments. After about fifteen minutes, she looked up and heaved a deep sigh. It was clear that the first interview speaker was not the first voice mail speaker. My God, she thought, this is going to be exhausting. Even so, she clicked out of the first voice mail speaker’s segment, and loaded the second voice mail speaker’s message in its place. Then, she repeated the entire routine—looking, listening, repeating. She searched for clues—any clue that might indicate that the two women who were speaking were one and the same. She found nothing. Finally, she loaded the third voice mail speaker and conducted the same activities all over again. As with the first and second speaker, it appeared that the first interview speaker—whoever she was—was simply not one of the women who had left a message on the Coach’s voice mail. She had a definitive piece of news that she could report to Shoop. It was negative news—but news just the same.

She hoped that the routine she had established would become easier. An hour had gone by and she was just getting started. She stopped to take a sip of her tea and found that it had become lukewarm. She stood and stretched her legs, walking over to her window and looking out at the campus. Students were passing along the paths below, scattering leaves from the trees as they went. They seemed untouched by the tragedy that had befallen this campus. She guessed that most were untouched, unless they were involved with the football team in some way. Most just went about their business—went to class, studied, held down part-time jobs, and tried to find some time to have fun once in a while. She wished that she were among them and not embroiled in this murder investigation. Yet, she was excited. She liked knowing that her talents could actually be used for something so practical as to bring a criminal to justice. Of course, she enjoyed academic success and getting her manuscripts published, but she had to admit that her crime fighting successes over the last few years had brought her a sense of pride and accomplishment that she never experienced from publishing a journal article.

Refreshed, she returned to her desk and began work on the next of the eight interview speakers. She repeated the routine that she established with the first and got the same results. She then went on to the third interview speaker and also found no match between this woman and the voice mail speakers. This was very discouraging, although she wasn’t surprised as her original listening to the interview recording hadn’t revealed any obvious similarities. She pushed ahead, still being careful to give each speaker her full attention. She didn’t want to miss anything because she was discouraged. When she reached the final interview speaker, she realized, even before she ran the analysis that she wasn’t going to be able to identify any of the three women on the voice mail. Even so, she ran the last set of recordings and inspected the visual line and listened to the audio of both.

When the phone rang, she could almost guess who it was. Did the man have a bug planted in her office?

“Hello.”

“Dr. Barnes.” Shoop’s gruff voice, brusque as always, came over the line. “Do you have those interview speakers analyzed for me? Are any of those women the same as on the cell phone?”

“Believe it or not, Detective,” she intoned, “I just finished listening to them and running them through my software spectrograph program.”

“And?”

“I’m sorry to report that there are no matches that I can tell.”

“You mean none of those women we interviewed were on that voice mail?” He sounded annoyed with her, as if she had anything to do with it.

“I’m sorry, Detective,” she apologized. Why am I apologizing, she thought, mad at herself. “It doesn’t seem that they are, but I could be wrong—the segments on both recordings are very short and don’t give a complete picture of each speaker’s vocal characteristics.”

“But you’re fairly sure that there’s no match?” he asked pointedly.

“Fairly sure.”

“Hmm. I . . .”

Now she felt sorry for the man. He sounded flustered. She guessed that he must have been hoping that she would find a match with one of the speakers on the interview recording and that he would have a new suspect and a new line of inquiry. Now he was back to square one, which was nowhere, she realized.

“I’m really sorry, Detective,” she continued. “I wish I had something concrete for you, but these women on the voice mail message recordings are different . . . .”

“How different?” he asked abruptly.

“I mean, different from the women on the interview tape. They have different vocal features.”

“Tell me, Dr. Barnes,” he said slowly, obviously thinking aloud, “just how much can you tell me about the women on the voice mail recording? I’m thinking. I mean, you were able to determine that there were three of them, not seven. What else could you tell me about them?”

“That depends on what you want to know.” What was the man getting at?

“I want to know which one of them killed Coach Croft,” he said.

“I can’t tell you that,” she allowed, “but I could try to work up a profile of each of them, if you’d like . . .” My God, why not just offer the man my first born child? She’d already spent most of her day—and hours of the last few days on his project.

“Like a personality profile?” he asked.

“Something like that,” she agreed. “It’s not fool-proof. Certainly, an accomplished actor could manipulate vocal features. However, on the voice mail recording, I don’t think we’re hearing three accomplished actresses speaking, do you?”

“No,” he said, “I don’t. It might be worth a try. How long would it take you to work up these profiles?”

“I don’t know,” she replied. “I do have classes to teach. Analyses like this take lots of time—and more detailed personality type profiles would be very time-consuming.”

“The sooner, the better,” he said. “Someone stabbed this man in the back, Dr. Barnes—seven times. A brutal murder. Right now, our best suspects are the three women on this recording. Anything you can tell us about them may lead us to capturing his killer.”

“I know. I understand,” she said.

“Then, get to it,” he concluded, and hung up. Would she ever be through with this man, this murder, and this case? Yet, she felt obligated—he made her feel obligated and she didn’t like it.