Page 73 of Hell Bent

Turner sighed. “Not well. We thought we’d found a connection between Dean Beekman and Professor Stephen.”

“Oh yeah?” Alex was eager to talk about anything that wasn’t Linus Reiter.

“Stephen blew the whistle on data coming out of one of the labs in the psych department. She had concerns that it was massaged by at least one of the fellows and that there’d been shoddy oversight from the professor who published the findings.”

“And the dean?”

“He headed up the committee that disciplined the professor in question. Ed Lambton.”

“Judges,” Alex murmured, remembering Professor Stephen’s finger resting between the Bible pages. “It makes a kind of sense.”

“Only if you’re being literal,” Turner replied. “Judges isn’t about judges the way we think of them. It was just another word for leaders in biblical times.”

“Maybe the killer didn’t go to Sunday school. Did Lambton lose his job?”

Turner shot her an amused glance. “Of course not. He’s got tenure. But he’s on paid leave and had to retract the paper. His reputation is in ruins. The psych study was on honesty so he’s become a bit of a punch line. Unfortunately, I can’t find any holes in his alibi. There’s absolutely no way he could have gone after Dean Beekman or Professor Stephen.”

“So now what do you do?”

“Follow the other leads. Marjorie Stephen had a volatile ex-husband. Beekman had an old harassment charge on the books. We’re not short on enemies.”

I know the feeling.

“Beekman was connected to the societies too.”

“Was he?” Alex asked. Had Turner scooped the Professor Walsh-Whiteley lead?

“He was in Berzelius.”

Alex snorted. “Berzelius is barely a society. They don’t have any magic.”

“Still a society. Do you know Michelle Alameddine?”

He knew she did. He’d seen them together at Elliot Sandow’s funeral. Was Turner interrogating her?

“Of course,” she said. “She was Darlington’s Virgil.”

“She also spent time in the psych ward at Yale New Haven. She was part of a study led by Marjorie Stephen, and she was in the city the night Dean Beekman was killed.”

“I saw her,” Alex admitted. “She said she had to catch a train back to New York, that she was having dinner with her boyfriend.”

“We have her on camera at the train station. Monday morning.”

Not Sunday night. Michelle had lied to her. But there could be countless reasons for that.

“How did you know about the psych ward?” Alex asked. “That should be confidential, right?”

“It’s my job to find out who murdered two faculty members. That kind of concern opens a lot of doors.”

Silence stretched between them. Alex thought of all the supposedly sealed records, the court cases, the write-ups by therapists and doctors in her past. The things she thought no one would ever know about her. She felt fear crowding in and she had to push it away. There was no point waltzing with old partners when her dance card was already full.

She shifted in her seat to face him. “I don’t want to ask you to go back to that map with me. But Halloween is two days away and we need to find our fourth.”

“Your fourth. Like you’re playing doubles tennis.” Turner shook his head. He kept his eyes on the road when he said, “I’ll do it.”

Alex knew she shouldn’t look a gift cop in the mouth, but she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing. Turner had no love for Darlington, no sense of obligation. He hated everything that Lethe stood for, especially after that trip to the Peabody basement. “Why?”

“Does it matter?”