Dean Lowell looked as he heard our street shoes tattooing on the gymnasium floor. His smile was friendly and welcoming. That nice guy Browning Lowell. Actually, he did seem like a nice man. He went out of his way to create that impression.
I needed as much insider’s detail as I could get from him in a hurry. Somewhere in North Carolina there had to be a missing puzzle piece that would begin to make sense out of all this murder and intrigue. I introduced Sampson and we skipped the polite small talk. I asked Lowell what he knew about Wick Sachs.
The dean was extremely cooperative, as he’d been on our first meeting. “Sachs is our campus skell, has been for a decade. Every university seems to have at least one,” Dean Lowell said and frowned deeply. I noticed that even his frown lines had muscles.
“Sachs is widely known as ‘Doctor Dirt.’ He’s got tenure, though, and he’s never been caught at anything completely untoward. I guess I should give Dr. Sachs the benefit of the doubt, but I won’t.”
“You ever hear about an exotic book and film collection that he owns, keeps at his house? Pornography masquerading as erotica?” Sampson decided to ask my next question for me.
Lowell stopped his vigorous exercises. He looked at both of us for a long moment before he spoke again. “Is Dr. Sachs a serious suspect in the disappearances of these young women?”
“There are a lot of suspects, Dean Lowell. I can’t say any more than that right now.” I told him the truth.
Lowell nodded. “I respect your judgment, Alex. Let me tell you some things about Sachs that might be important,” he said. He had stopped exercising by now. He began toweling off his thick neck and shoulders. His body looked like polished rock.
Lowell continued to talk as he dried himself meticulously. “Let me start at the beginning: There was an infamous murder of a young couple here a while back. This was in nineteen eighty-one. Wick Sachs was an undergrad at the time, a liberal arts student, very brilliant mind. I was in the graduate school then. When I became dean, I learned that Sachs had actually been one of the suspects in the murder investigation, but he was definitely cleared. There wasn’t any evidence that he was involved in any way. I don’t know every detail, but you can check it for yourself with the Durham police. It was in the spring of ’eighty-one. The murdered students were Roe Tierney and Tom Hutchinson. It was a huge scandal, I remember. In those days, a single murder case could still actually shock a community. Thing is, the case was never solved.”
“Why didn’t you bring this up before?” I asked Lowell.
“The FBI knew all about it, Alex. I told them myself. I know that they talked to Dr. Sachs several weeks ago. It was my impression that he wasn’t under suspicion, and that they had decided there was no connection with the earlier murder case. I’m absolutely sure of it.”
“Fair enough,” I said to the dean. I asked him for another big favor. Could he dredge up everything on Dr. Sachs that the FBI had originally requested? I also wanted to see the Duke yearbooks from the time when Sachs and Will Rudolph had both been students. I needed to do some important homework on the class of ’81.
Around seven that night, Sampson and I met with the Durham police again. Detectives Ruskin and Sikes showed up, among others. They were feeling heavy-duty pressure, too.
They pulled us aside before the update on the Casanova investigation. The stress had gotten to them, cooled their jets a little.
“Listen, you two have worked big, bad cases like this before,” Ruskin said. As usual, he was doing most of the talking. Davey Sikes didn’t seem to like us any better now than he had the first day we met.
“I know that my partner and I got a little territorial at first. I want you to know, though, all we want to do is stop the killing now.”
Sikes nodded his large, blocklike head. “We want to nail Sachs. Trouble is, our brass has us chasing our tails as usual.”
Ruskin smiled, and finally so did I. We all understood departmental politics. I still didn’t trust the Durham homicide detectives. I was certain they wanted to use Sampson and me or at least keep us out of the way.
Also, I had the feeling they were still holding evidence back.
The Durham homicide detectives told us they were mired in an investigation of medical doctors in the Research Triangle, doctors with any kind of criminal record or associations. Wick Sachs was the chief suspect, but not the only one.
There was still a strong chance that Casanova would turn out to be someone we hadn’t even heard of. That was the way it often worked with repeat-killer cases. He was out there—but we might have no idea who he really was. That was the scariest part of all, the most frustrating, too.
Nick Ruskin and Sikes took Sampson and me over to the suspects board that had been put up. There were seventeen names on it at this point. Five were doctors. Kate had originally believed that Casanova was a doctor, and Kyle Craig did, too.
I read off the doctors’ names.
Dr. Stefan Romm
Dr. Francis Constantini
Dr. Richard Dilallo
Dr. Miguel Fesco
Dr. Kelly Clark
I wondered again if several people could somehow be involved with the house of horror. Or was Wick Sachs our man? Was he Casanova?
“You’re the big guru.” Davey Sikes was suddenly leaning over my shoulder. “Who is he, my man? Help us local yokels out. Catch the bogeyman, Dr. Cross.”