The Reveal: A Detectives Seagate and Miner Mystery (Book 6) by Mike Markel Read Free Book Online Page B

explain it to me later.
    “We’re gonna need a list of the students.”
    He held up a finger, then stood and walked to the
door. “Linda, would you print me two copies of the roster for Virginia’s porn
class?” He walked back to his chair and sat down.
    “Do you know anything about a young woman living
in her house?”
    He shook his head. “No idea. I’ve never been to
her house.”
    “She has a son. College age,” I said.
    He shrugged his shoulders but didn’t say anything.
Linda came back in and started to hand him the copies of the class roster. He
pointed to me, and she handed me the papers.
    “Here’s what we’d like you to do. Contact all the
students from the class. Get them in here at eleven o’clock this morning. Not just
an email blast or texts; phone them individually. Put them in your conference
room or a classroom, okay?”
    He nodded. “Do you want me there?”
    “Sure, you come, too.”
    I stood. “Okay, Professor Sorenson, sorry about
all this. We’ll see you a little later.”
    I thanked Linda as we left the department office.
Ryan and I made it outside the Social Science Building. The idiot smokers had
left, but it still smelled like cigarettes. I looked around. A few feet from
the door, off to the side, sat a cheap plastic planter with an inch of brown
water and a hundred butts in it. It stank.
    “Give me a second here, would you?” Ryan sat on a
low brick wall that abutted the concrete path to the building. He opened his
briefcase and pulled out his tablet.
    “Sure.” We didn’t have anything scheduled before
the eleven o’clock back here with the kids from the porn class.
    “What I thought.” Ryan was nodding his head.
“Virginia Rinaldi had much bigger enrollments than anyone else in the
department.”
    I shrugged. “You put masturbation in the title of the course, yeah, that’ll happen.”
    “Whereas the others—including Daryl Sorenson—are
pulling only half as many.”
    “Where’re you going?”
    “I’m just saying everybody’s aware of enrollments.
The university wants high enrollments. Departments like sociology, they’re
always struggling to show they’re pulling their weight. This new researcher
comes on board. She not only publishes and gets grants, she out-teaches him.
That’s got to sting.”
    “Yeah, I got that. He didn’t like her. She didn’t
like him.” I pulled my sunglasses out of my bag and put them on. “What am I
missing?”
    “I’m just saying, we shouldn’t rule him out just
yet.”
    “Go ahead.”
    “First, he’s big enough to hurt her.”
    “ So’re most of the men
in Rawlings.”
    “You catch him say he’s never been to her house?”
Ryan said.
    “Yeah. So what?”
    “You didn’t ask a question about her house. You
asked if he knew about the young woman living there. That’s the way guilty
people act: They say too much.”
    “Or he was just telling us he wasn’t social
friends with Virginia. Maybe it was a little dig at her for not inviting him
over to her place—even though she’s got students coming over all the time.” I
paused. “Anything else?”
    “He resented the direction she was pulling the
department.”
    I shook my head. “You get up near retirement age,
you resent most of the changes happening to your world. Doesn’t mean you’re
gonna kill anybody about it.”
    “She called him a pathetic loser—publicly, in that
meeting.”
    “Yeah, she sounds like a bitch. But speaking on
behalf of all pathetic losers, let me tell you a secret: We know what we are.
They’ve got different ranks for the professors, just like we do for cops and
detectives. She’s some kind of hot-shit professor. That’s the way she’s gonna
think: She’s a winner and everyone else is a loser. For all we know, Sorenson
and the rest of the deadwood thought she was an asshole for saying it in
public.”
    “You saw him twitching.”
    “Yeah, it made him mad. Maybe he twitches so he
doesn’t have to kill her. I used to get