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one out of the wall at Brian Carter's room. Got anything on it?" He listened a
minute and then said, "Okay," and hung up.
He said, "It was a twenty-two all right, a long rifle, but it was too
flattened out to get any rifling marks. Say, Jack, do you know if they use
long rifle cartridges in those target guns?"
"A single-shot will take any length--short, standard, or long rifle. But,
Brian, why would he carry as--as inefficient a gun as that? Do you figure he
planned this on the spur of the moment, and didn't have time to get himself a
gun with bigger bullets and more of them?"
"I don't think it was on the spur of the moment," I said. "I think he must
have been planning it. But he may have stuck the target gun in his pocket on
the spur of the moment. I figure it this way: The knife was his weapon. He
intended to kill us both with the knife. But he brought along the gun as a
spare. And when he got to my place after killing Dr. Roth and found you there,
Jack, instead of finding me asleep in bed, it spoiled his original idea of
coming in my window and doing to me what he did to Roth. He didn't want to
wait around until you left because he'd already made one kill, and maybe he
remembered he'd left the ladder at the side of the house.
There might be an alarm at any time."
Randall nodded. "That makes sense, Carter. Once he'd killed Roth, he was in a
hurry to get you."
Jack quit doodling with his penknife and put it in his vest pocket. "Anything
from the M.E.?" he asked.
Randall nodded. "Says the stroke across the jugular was prob-ably the first
one, and was definitely fatal. The rest of the--uh--carving was just trimming.
The ladder, by the way, belonged to a painting contractor who was going to
start on the house the next day. He painted the garage first--finished that
today. The ladder was lying on its side against a tree in the yard, not far
from where Cole used it. Cole could have seen it there from the front walk, if
he'd gone by during the day or during the early evening while it was still
light."
"Did the medical examiner say about when he was killed?" I asked.
"Roughly half an hour to an hour before he was found," Randall said. He
sighed. "Carter, have you told us everything about Cole that you think of?"
"Everything."
"Wish I could talk you into sleeping here, under protective custody. What are
your plans for the next few days?"
"Nothing very startling," I told him. "This is Friday night--Saturday morning,
now. I have to teach a class Monday afternoon at two. Nothing special to do
until
then, except some work of my own which I can do at home. As for the work I was
doing with Dr. Roth, that's off for the time being. I'll have to see what the
Board of
Regents has to say about that."
"Then we'll worry about Monday when Monday comes," Randall said. "If, as you
think, Cole is going to stay around town, we'll probably have him before then.
Do you mind Sebastian staying with you?"
"Not at all."
"And I'm going to assign two men to watch the outside of your place--at least
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for the next forty-eight hours. We won't plan beyond that until we see what
happens.
Right now, every policeman in town is looking for Cole, and every state
policeman is getting his description. Tomorrow's newspapers and the Sunday
papers will carry his photograph, and then the whole city will be on the
lookout for him. You have your gun, Sebastian?"
Jack shook his head. "Just this twenty-two I borrowed from Winton."
"You better run home and get it, and whatever clothes and stuff you'll need
for a couple of days."
"I'll go with him," I said.
"You'll wait here," Jack told me. "It's only a few blocks. I'll be right
back." He went out.
"While he's gone, Carter," Randall said, "I want to ask a few things he
already knows, but I don't. About the set-up at the university, the exact
relationship between you and Roth and between Roth and Alister Cole, what kind
of work you do--things like that."
"Dr. Roth was head of the Department of Psychology," I said. "It's not a big
department, here at Hudson U. He had only two full professors under him.
Winton, who stays where I do, is one of them. Dr. Winton specializes in social
psychology.
"Then there are two instructors. I'm one of them. An instruc-tor is somewhere
between a student and a professor. He's taking post-graduate courses leading
to further degrees which will qualify him to be a professor. In my own case,
I'm within weeks of getting my master's. After that, I start working for a
doctorate. Mean-while, I work my way by teaching and by helping in the
research lab, grading papers, monitoring exams--well, you get the idea.
"Alister Cole was--I suppose we can consider him fired now--a lab assistant.
That isn't a job that leads to anything. It's just a job doing physical work.
I don't think Cole had even completed high school."
"What sort of work did he do?"
"Any physical work around the laboratory. Feeding the menag-erie--we work with
rats and white mice mostly, but there are also Rhesus monkeys and guinea
pigs--cleaning cages, sweeping--"
"Doesn't the university have regular cleaning women?"
"Yes, but not in the lab. With experiments going on there, we don't want
people who don't know the apparatus working around it, possibly moving things
that shouldn't be moved. The lab assistants know what can be touched and what
can't."
"Then, in a way, Dr. Roth was over both of you?"
"More than in a way. He didn't exactly hire us--the Board of Regents does all
the hiring--but we both worked under him. In different capacities, of course."
"I understand that," Randall said. "Then you could say Dr. Roth's job was
something like mine, head of a department. Your relationship to him would be
about that of your friend, Sebastian, to me, and Alister Cole would be--umm--a
mess attendant over on the jail side, or maybe a turnkey."
"That's a reasonably good comparison," I agreed. "Of course I was the only
instructor who worked directly under Dr. Roth, so I was a lot closer to him
than
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