Well, the FBI had asked him for his opinion, hadn’t they?
Matthias sat down silently on the sofa when Wardenford gestured for him to do so, offering a slim smile. These bright kids—it was always hard to tell with them, wasn’t it? They hadn’t spent a great deal of time developing social skills, usually, and so while they were excellent at navigating classes and partnering up for assignments, talking out of class was another thing.
“Would you like a coffee?” Wardenford asked, checking the temperature of the glass and pouring himself a top-up. “It’s fresh-made.”
“Yes, please,” Matthias said, and Wardenford was buoyed by this.
With the two cups steaming on the coffee table and both of the men seated comfortably, Wardenford found that he was going to have to carry the conversation. Matthias had not said anything more. Rather than asking him outright why he had come—a question to which he might not like the answer, particularly if it turned out to deflate his ego—Wardenford decided to take this opportunity to extract any and all gossip he could about his former faculty.
“So, what’s new at Georgetown?”
“People are mostly talking about the bodies.” There was a measured, deliberate way to the way that Matthias spoke now. Like he was choosing each word carefully, and with great effort. What had happened to him…?
“Of course, of course.” Wardenford nodded. “I’m sure there’s a lot of upset about it. Professor Henderson was a much-loved member of the staff.”
“Yes.” Matthias sipped at his coffee, his face largely blank.
“You had lectures with him as well, didn’t you? I seem to recall you mentioning that you were taking some English classes alongside your physics and mathematics.”
Matthias nodded. “I stopped.”
“Oh, well, that’s a shame.” Wardenford paused. “Not for you, necessarily. After all, you can take whichever classes seem best fitted to your needs. I simply mean, I would like to know how things are now. I presume there will be a TA or one of the other members of staff filling in. Have you heard if they have engaged a new lecturer for his position yet?”
Matthias shook his head. “I’m just glad the real killer has been caught.”
One thing about that struck Wardenford as odd, and then as he thought about it more, two things. The “real” killer? Did Matthias know that he had been arrested and spoken to?
Did everyone know it?
The other point was that Wardenford had thought he was the only one to know about the latest development. Had the police somehow made it public overnight? He had checked both local and national news this morning, and seen no updates about an arrest in the case.
“Caught?” he replied, treading cautiously. “Did they say who it was?”
Matthias made a face. “Pear. Uh, white. Pear white. No, something…”
“Dr. Applewhite,” Wardenford corrected quietly. So. They really had arrested her. Well. When he had presented what he could see himself, the equations pointing the way, he did not know if he really believed it could be true. But if they had taken her in—“How did you hear about that? I haven’t seen anything in the news.”
Matthias shrugged. He was depending on gestures today, Wardenford noticed. Fewer words and more gestures. As if he was unwilling to spare any more words to get his point across. “Campus rumors,” he said.
Ah, yes. The old rumor mill. Wardenford had been quite fond of it once, before he became the headline story for a while. Since then, of course, he had barely heard a thing. Even if someone had been willing to tell him, he wouldn’t have remembered any of it, not with the amount he had been drinking.
Still, it sent a shiver down his spine. News traveled fast around here, and if someone had managed to see Dr. Applewhite being arrested and spread it around the campus already, it seemed quite likely that they had done the same for him. So, another dent to his already battered reputation.
Mind you, at least he had been released. Maybe that would help matters.
The sound of a car horn blaring outside startled Wardenford, and he rose to look out the window. “Goodness me,” he muttered, shaking his head. “They shouldn’t be making that kind of racket this early in the morning. Some people are still asleep. What time is it now, anyway?”
“It’s nine-sixteen.”
Nine-sixteen…? That didn’t sound right, surely? Had so many hours flown by while Wardenford was staring into the bottom of a coffee cup? No, and the city was still quiet, people only just getting onto their commutes, school buses just starting to go past for the first time. Wardenford glanced at his watch, scratched and battered from many a drinking session that ended badly, and saw that he was right.
It was six-nineteen.
He opened his mouth to laugh and tell Matthias that he had got it the wrong way around, but then stopped himself. Hang on a second, here, James, he told himself. Now, just hang on and think about this.
The equations were all jumbled up, all out of order. The numbers, the letters, in the wrong places.
And Matthias was speaking so carefully, with so much control, using as few words as he possibly could.
Not that there was any need to read too far into that, was there? Perhaps he was overtired. Yes, that was probably all. To read any more into it would be absurd.
“Well,” Wardenford said briskly, turning back from the window and resuming his spot on the sofa. “Some people just don’t have any sense of what’s right, do they? I imagine there was barely any reason for them to hit the horn at all. You know what these road-rage inner-city drivers are like.”
Matthias laughed politely, nodding his head.
And Wardenford remembered something—something he had not thought of for a long time. The equation that Dr. Applewhite had shared with him. The fact that he had then shared it with Matthias, hoping that the lad would be able to use his talents to find the correction.
He’d been working on it, hadn’t he? Back then. Before the scandal hit.
Matthias had seen the equation, and there was something wrong with him now. The numbers. He had mixed up the numbers when he read the time.
Just like the numbers had been mixed up in the equations.
And, oh god, there it was: Matthias had been a student of Henderson’s. He’d known Cole. God, there it all was.
It was him.
This benign-looking, innocuous student. This college dropout who had once had everything at his feet thanks to his supreme intelligence. This boy who Wardenford had spoken with and come to know, and hoped to lead to greatness.
He was a murderer.
Wardenford made sure to smile at him, willing himself to carry it right through to his eyes. Matthias had never been stupid, and he wasn’t now. If there was any way that he suspected that Wardenford knew who he really was—and, he realized with an extra thrill of fear—why he was really there, it would be over.
Because Matthias Kranz wasn’t there for a cup of coffee and a nice chat about old times.
He was there to murder James Wardenford.
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
Zoe hit the brake hard and quickly shifted into reverse. “Damn it! This one?”
“Yeah, down there,” Shelley said, doing her best to juggle her attention between the GPS and the phone in her hand. “No, not you, Fred. Right. And there’s no connection?”