“No,” she said. “Meet me at Main Street Cafe. At noon.”
“Eleven-thirty.”
“Whatever.”
Since I had time, I went to the Masons Bay Library, which was located on Main Street in a building that had once been a lumbermill or some such. A two-story brick building, it had basically been gutted and the library built inside. Most of the books were on the first floor, because the second was largely open. A staircase behind the circulation desk rose to the second floor, which was basically a narrow balcony ringing the floor.
In addition to the circulation desk, the first floor had activity rooms, computers and rows and rows of books. At the circulation desk sat a slightly overweight guy whose name I remembered was Chad. Hanging Chad, as I’d nicknamed him.
“Hi, Henry. How are you?” he said when he noticed me.
“Oh, you remember me.”
“You’re hard to forget.”
Was he flirting?Ick.He didn’t think I’d do a fat guy, did he? Was I looking that bad? Or desperate?
But then I wondered, could I use it to my advantage?
Hanging Chad added, “You’re on the front page of theEagletoday.”
“Seriously?”
He pointed to the periodical area. I walked over and found theEaglehanging on this weird piece of furniture with a lot of wooden dowels designed specifically to hang newspapers from—kind of like a clothes rack for periodicals. There I was on the cover accepting a large fake reward check from Sheriff Crocker. We both wore phony smiles; his was a little more polished. Ineeded to stop off at Benson’s Country Store and buy a few copies.
Actually, there were several issues of theEaglehanging there, going back three weeks. One of them had a story about Reverend Hessel’s murder on the front page. There was a large picture of the minister sitting at his desk. A telephone sat at his right and an in-box was on his left. It was full of papers to be dealt with. Something sat on top of them. It took a moment to see that it was glass, a paperweight, I guess.
I picked out some of the items I’d seen in the box of Hessel’s belongings. The cup that said Treble Maker, the picture of Reagan, the plaque from Downers Grove.
He looked happy. Not at all like someone who would someday be murdered at that very desk. It occurred to me that this might happen to people a lot. We cross the spot where we’ll eventually die, over and over again. Did that make things better or worse?
Morbid thoughts. Possibly connected to my raging headache. I drifted back over to the circulation desk and asked Chad, “Do you have access to the Chicago papers? Like, historically?”
“Not here. I mean, not exactly. I can do a computer search. But the articles… I can’t access them. There’s a monthly fee and we don’t—”
“Can you do a search on Chris Hessel in the Chicago papers?”
“You’re trying to solve the reverend’s murder,” he said, excitedly. “Is there a reward? I haven’t heard about one.”
“No. No reward. My grandmother—” then I rolled my eyes like, you know, everyone’s grandmother wanted them to solve a murder.
He nodded like he understood exactly what I meant. Then he asked, “So, the search terms should be Hessel and Chris and Christopher. Anything else?”
“Choir.”
“Oh yes, that’s a good idea. I have a friend at the Evanston library, just outside of Chicago. It might take a day or two.”
“Okay.”
I gave Hanging Chad my phone number and asked that he call me if found anything out. Then, on a hunch I asked, “Do you have any books on forensics?”
“Three sixty-three,” he said with a smile. “Upstairs to your left.”
After smiling back in the most noncommittal way possible, I climbed the stairs to the second floor and followed the sign to the three hundreds. There were actually a lot more books on the second floor than I’d originally thought. Still, I quickly found the forensic books. Zeroing in on the one that seemed like it would be most useful, I pulledForensic Pathologyoff the shelf. I flipped through until I found what I wanted in the second chapter, ‘Time of Death.’
There was a lot of information about how time of death was calculated, most of it vaguely disgusting. The most interesting was that you needed to take a corpse’s temperature—which you could do rectally, ick, or by slicing the body open and sticking a thermometer directly into the liver, double ick.
The thing is—and this is what had been bothering me—is that Opal said Detective Lehman was asking about the time between eight-fifty and nine-twenty, and that didn’t make much sense. It was too exact. In all my viewings ofCSIthey always said between eight and eleven or noon and four. It was always several hours and always began on the hour.
