“None whatsoever.”
“That’s interesting,” the chief said. “Then I suppose it would surprise you to learn that according to the telephone company, you two have been chatting back and forth quite regularly.”
Chapter Thirteen
The chief sat back with a small, smug smile on his face.
“Yes, it would surprise me enormously,” I said.
He paused, doing his usual waiting number. I waited, too, with an expression of eager helpfulness on my face. After a few moments, the chief sighed and handed me a sheet of paper. Something faxed over from Lindsay’s cell-phone carrier, I deduced from the look of it.
“Her cell-phone records?” I asked. He nodded slightly. “Yeah, this one’s my number.”
“Well?” he said, one eyebrow raised.
I flipped over to the next page.
“You don’t need to study the whole thing,” he said, reaching for the paper. “I just wanted to show you that your number does appear there.”
“I’m looking at the times of the calls,” I said. “Trying to make sense out of this. Because I think I’d have noticed if some woman called up and said, ‘Hi, I’m your fiancé’s ex-girlfriend. Mind if I come over to get murdered in your backyard?’ So maybe someone I do know was using Lindsay’s phone to call me. Which would mean someone here knows her a lot better than they’re letting on.”
He frowned, but he let me keep the sheets.
“Doesn’t have to be someone here,” he said. “Could be anyone who’s been calling you regularly over the last few days.”
“Yes, but almost everyone I’ve talked to in the last few days is here,” I said. “The Shiffleys and the eXtreme croquet players. Her number does look familiar.”
“Not surprising, since you’ve called it or gotten calls from it eleven times over the last week and a half,” he said. “Right up to last night, after she was dead—this was you calling her, of course.”
“Of course,” I said. “No cell phones in the afterlife; I hear it’s the ultimate dead zone. Hang on.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out the notebook that tells me when to breathe, as I called my giant spiral-bound “To Do” list. I flipped it open at the paper clip that served as a bookmarker for the most recent entries, then turned back one page.
“Yes, that’s Helen Carmichael,” I said.
“Beg pardon.”
“That’s what she was calling herself. Not Lindsay Tyler.”
“Just why were you talking to her under any name?”
“She claimed to be a history professor from UVa who wanted some old papers Michael and I were trying to find a home for,” I said. “There is a history professor at UVa called Helen Carmichael—I checked to make sure she was legit. I blew that, didn’t I?”
The chief frowned.
“Was there some reason you didn’t want to give them to the history department here at Caerphilly?” he asked. “I assume you know them—some of them anyway.”
“No reason at all,” I said. “Except that I tried for six months to get them even to come out and look at the stuff and finally got tired of being ignored. So I got mad one day, e-mailed the UVa history department, and a couple of weeks later this Helen Carmichael called to say she was interested in the papers and could we arrange a time for her to come and pick them up.”
“Had you arranged anything?”
“We had arranged yesterday, between noon and five,” I said. “She never showed—which makes sense if Helen Carmichael was really Lindsay Tyler; she was off getting killed about the time she’d promised to show up here. I forgot all about it, with the murder and everything. Didn’t remember till sometime in the evening. I called her number to ask what had happened, but I didn’t get an answer. Obviously.”
“We were trying to identify a dead woman, and a woman you’d never met failed to show up for a meeting, and you never mentioned this?”
“I figured that before I bothered you with it, I should make sure I wasn’t crying wolf—so I checked the photo of Professor Carmichael on the UVa Web site, and it definitely wasn’t her. Take a look for yourself if you like. How was I supposed to know that the Helen Carmichael I was talking to was a fake all along?”
The chief scribbled a few notes.
“So Lindsay Tyler was calling you, pretending to be Helen Carmichael.”
“Yes. From that number. Wait, I’ll show you.”
I pulled out my cell phone and fiddled with it until I activated the speaker-phone feature. Then I dialed my voice-message service and played her last message back for the chief. Since I had six more recent messages still on the system, he got to hear bits of those, too, until I found the right message. He looked annoyed, but I figured by the time we reached the mystery woman’s message, I’d made my point about how busy my cell phone had been.