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“Me?” I point back at myself in surprise. “You have questions for me?”
“I have questions for a chief medical examiner running her own facility. I could knock on the doors of other M.E.s in Copeland. In fact,” she adds, “I have. I’ve tried. But most are protected by their bulldog assistants. Yours may be the worst of all.”
“Mine?” I’m the class dunce. The idiot repeating the detectives’ witness. “What?”
“Seraphina Lewis?” Karla makes a whooshing sound in the back of her throat. “She’s fierce. Anyway, I have questions about the processes you guys run through down there at the morgue. And since you’re not technically supposed to be in this interview, I guess I find myself in a position where I can negotiate. You get this,” she concludes, “and I get coffee and half an hour with a medical examiner.”
“No—”
“Sure thing,” I speak over Archer’s refusal. “I’ll have Seraphina call you and line something up. I mean, assuming you’re not arrested, tried, and convicted of William Alves’ murder.”
Fletch drops his head back and groans.
But all Karla does is laugh. “It’s a deal. I’ve been trying to get a meet all year.”
Aubree will love getting coffee with this chick.
Karla looks over my shoulder at Archer. “What are your questions?”
“Adrianna Alves.” He comes around to the side of the oversized table and drops his ass on the edge. “Professor Jones.”
She considers his words for a moment, rolling her lips together in thought. “Okay. What about them?”
“Were they romantically involved?”
“What?” Stunned, she laughs. “No way! Professor Jones might be the type to get a little touchy with the female students. Ya know, stroking their arms,” she strokes her own to demonstrate, “a pat on the shoulder that lingers. Eye contact that crosses from normal to uncomfortable. Things like that. But no. He likes his job, Detective. And I’ve never, ever, caught whispers of student-teacher relationships in all my time there.”
“You assume you would?” Fletch counters. “Hear about it? You’re the goodie in the admin office, Karla. You know the dean. You’d be exactly the type folks doing the wrong thing would keep secrets from.”
“Okay.” She shrugs, as though accepting his point. “But even so, no way Adrianna is stepping out of her marriage.”
“Her marriage was a case study in abuse,” Archer inserts. “It was not happy. It wasn’t safe.”
“Exactly! So why the hell would she add another guy to the mix? She’s already busy with one, Detective. She’s busting her ass trying to escape a bad marriage. She’s not sleeping around and looking for a new husband. She’s going to class, learning a trade, strengthening her mind and resolve. Some women need a man in their life,” she wrinkles her nose and lips, taunting, “they can’t help themselves. They need that validation, maybe. Or the perceived safety. They need someone to tell them they’re special. But then there’s another type of woman. The kind who runs the other way the very minute a man looks for longer than a second. I assure you, Adrianna seemed to be the latter, as far as I could tell.”
“So there was no romance?” I question, ignoring the twin stares hitting me on each side. “Nothing going on between Professor Jones and any of his students?”
Karla only shrugs. “None that I knew about. Or even suspected,” she adds quickly, anticipating my next question. “He’s a friendly guy, Doctor. He takes a special interest in his students. Checking in that everyone is okay. He has other moms in his class, more than just Adrianna. He doesn’t mind if someone brings their baby, and if that baby gets fussy, he’s understanding. If we don’t hand a paper in on time, his first thing is to ask if we’re okay. He doesn’t automatically jump to tearing shreds off his students for missing a deadline.”
“Friendly,” Archer sneers. “What if I told you Jones has a history? He was a cop once.”
“We knew that already. That’s why he’s so good at what he teaches.”
“Right. But he was working in a squad that targeted a certain subset of people. What if I said he had an affair with a target and lost his job because of it?”
Stunned, I swing my head around to study Archer’s profile. What?
“Well…” This tidbit of information, at least, is not something Karla knew. “I guess that paints a certain picture about his character. He’s a good-looking man,” she ponders. “He’s not that old. I can see how he might get himself twisted up in romance like that.”
“And so, with that new lens in mind,” Fletch rumbles. Lifting his ankle to his knee and lacing his fingers together. “Can you picture the students in your class, starting with Adrianna, and see him, perhaps, pursuing something romantic?”
“I don’t…” She draws a deep breath until her chest fills. Then she exhales again and shakes her head. “I honestly don’t know. He’s a good teacher, Detective. He seemed to really care that we learn from him. It wasn’t about butts on chairs and numbers in the door. He genuinely seemed to give a crap about what he was delivering. If he got close to a student, then I guess I just assumed that’s how he worked. If his hand lingered a little longer than normal… well, no one complained. But I’m not one of those students.”
“What do you mean?” Archer’s eyes narrow to dangerous slits. “One of what students?”
“One of the kinds he lingered on. One of the students he touched.”
“He’s never patted your arm?” I ask. Screw the detectives and their demands that I shut up. I sit forward in my chair and study the young woman across from me. “Jones touched and flirted and lingered on everyone… but not you? Why not?”
