Corpse in the Campus by Harry Glum Read Free Book Online Page A

climb up the wobbly rungs of the wooden folding ladder one by one since it was uncomfortable and narrow. The attic was a tiny and smelly room, just barely lit by a tiny window that had its pane caked with filth and with a very low ceiling that didn´t allow one to stand up.
    —How disgusting! This guy makes me want to puke. Hell, I didn´t know him too much, but I thought he was a decent person —mumbled Ron, as if he were talking to himself out loud.
    —Now, I want you to see this. I was not able to vomit when I discovered it.
    The young agent lit up a corner of the room with her flashlight, He had built a sort of prison cell there with wire and wooden posts reinforced with sheet metal. A small door that looked like it was for a child was the only way to get in and out, and it was fixed by several thick padlocks. The floor was a mixture of straw, defecation and disgusting stains from who knows where.
    —What the hell is this! —exclaimed Davies, grabbing his head with his hands, and thinking that his capacity of amazement had just broken all known records.
    —A cage, Ron. A damn cage to keep a young girl kidnapped and to be able to do whatever you want to with her —replied Stevens, with a voice charged with irony and disgust.

XV
    D uring the next two days, several agents spent time reviewing the guard´s records, and they discovered, to their amazement, that he had tried to enter the police force on numerous occasions in several different states. Normally all of this seemed to go well, but all of these attempts had come across the same obstacle: the psychological evaluation. The result had always been negative, and therefore always invalidated him as a possible agent. Finally, Tom Campbell had resigned himself to be a security guard, which was something that didn´t require such strict testing and that also allowed him in a way, to be a protector and keeper of the law.
    They  also discovered that it hadn´t been the first time he had been obsessed with a case, since at least on five occasions he had tried to cooperate with different county sheriff´s offices where he lived in order to clear up some or other murder. This fact from the start had provoked alarm at the police department, but they soon saw that all those cases were already solved, and that Campbell had had nothing to do with them. However, in criminalist matters it was well known that on numerous occasions the subject guilty of homicide tried to get involved in the investigation, faking cooperation: sometimes only to be informed on the progress of the investigation, and others, simply to block police work and to put the police agents off track.
    Stevens felt euphoria for the first time since Sarah Brown´s body had been found. He felt strength to participate in all the meetings and talked excitedly with anybody that could provide the latest information on Tom Campbell. He knew that they had it. The autopsy on the cadaver had confirmed the initial hypothesis: suicide due to overdose of sleeping pills. Surely this guy had not been able to put up with the pressure, and according to his own investigation he had seen that they would catch up with him sooner or later. A sweet death, sitting at home was much better than facing a trial, and surely a life sentence to prison full of inmates anxious to take out their frustrations on a miserable creature like him that had murdered an innocent young girl that had all of her life before her. Even prisons have their own moral and ethic code that is put into practice according to unwritten rules that are applied unfalteringly.
    In the meanwhile, the  Cedar Falls police department received the ballistics report for the gun that Aaron Stone had supposedly used to kill Sarah Brown. Negative. It not only did not match the bullet in the victim´s cranium, but that gun had not been fired for at least a year. There was no trace of Sarah´s presence in Mr. Stone´s station wagon that was what his son according to him had used