Campus increases security after killing

Police have few leads
in professor's death

J. McDonnell
Editor

Parker State University has contracted a dozen security guards to patrol the campus after dark as a supplement to the existing seven-member campus police squad, Vice President of Student Affairs Jimmy Sloane said Wednesday.

The additional hires will be responsible for keeping watch over the entire school, focusing in particular on the three residence halls. The move is hoped to help alleviate fears after biology professor Dr. Harold Francis was found dead in the attic of the university library Monday.

Chief of campus police, Michael Wright, said the matter is solely in the hands of city police. The Mesquite Ridge Police Department had little to report regarding the case, other than that it is being investigated as a homicide and that so far few leads have surfaced. However, a police spokeswoman added that the death appears to be an isolated incident.

Francis was discovered after a library worker on the building's third floor noticed an unusual stain on the ceiling, according to a student who requested to remain anonymous. The library employee asked a supervisor to unlock the attic to investigate, and Francis was found "looking like a wild animal had got him."

Neither campus nor city police have suggested a specific cause of death or method of entry into the attic. The student source said there was no sign of forced entry. Head librarian Heather Herrera declined to comment on the state of the crime scene, but said the only keys to any of the building's doors are held by six library employees, all of whom have been ruled out by city police.

Francis, 66, spent 39 years teaching various biology courses at Parker State. Dean of Sciences Dr. Gerald Burk said of him: "I commend him for his dedication to this school. He was a brilliant man. It's unfortunate that Dr. Francis was so reserved; I think if more people had had a chance to really get to know him, they really would have loved him."

Several students remembered Francis as "tough" but "fair and always patient."

Francis will be buried at Mesquite Ridge Cemetery Sunday after a 1 p.m. memorial at Brothers Funeral Home.

Mac looked over her article on the computer screen again, sighing. There were so many things she'd heard about the death, things she couldn't put in her article because they couldn't be verified. She'd questioned the wisdom of including the one nameless student she had used, even though she knew he could be trusted, wondering if she would catch hell for it in the morning. But the article just seemed so empty without it. As it was, the questions far outnumbered the answers.

"Jodie," Nick said, trying to get her attention. Mac didn't budge. It had been so long since anyone called her that, she'd almost forgotten it was her name.

The lanky, red-haired photog walked up behind her. "Jodie."

She jumped. "Dammit!" she snapped.

Nick stepped away, startled. He might be The Storm's best photographer, but he was still a nervous little (well, not so little) wide-eyed freshman.

"I'm sorry," Mac said, "I guess I'm just jumpy. They can say 'isolated incident' all they want, but that still doesn't help us in the dorms sleep any better."

"I got that pic you wanted," Nick replied, handing her both the print and the negative.

It was the only photo of Dr. Francis they had, which was strange, because they had archives of The Storm all the way back to the beginning of time. Weird that a professor with a 39-year career at the school should be photographed only once by the student paper. Stranger still, the yearbook had no photo at all.

Nick's photo showed Dr. Francis judging a science fair at a local elementary school. Mac had written a little feature on the event for her series on how the college interacted with the city. It was the only time she'd ever spoken with the man -- like most of her journalism peers, she'd taken geology. Dr. Francis was short and skinny and gray-haired and shy. She couldn't guess why anyone would want to kill a harmless little old science guy.

The wording she'd used in her article about the condition of the body was putting it mildly, if the rumors were true. Students were saying there was so much blood in the stain on the third-floor ceiling it was threatening to drip. Nobody could go look at it to see if that were true, though, because the floor was restricted now. If you needed a book that was on the third floor, you had to send a library worker up to fetch it. They said the police wanted to preserve the crime scene, even the bottom of it.

Other rumors said the professor's body was so tattered -- beaten to a pulp, torn to shreds -- that his faculty badge that was the first clue to his identity. That led to early rumors that it was actually somebody else, but Dr. Burk and other professors verified that it was indeed Dr. Francis.

There were no family members to identify or claim him, so the science faculty had taken on the funeral arrangements. It was an expensive favor they'd done for their colleague. The university might find a way to reimburse them, Sloane had told Mac off the record. Nick, a computer science student, had heard from one of his science friends that the Biology Club was planning fund-raisers to provide a nice headstone. Between all this and the ongoing investigation, the sad chronicle would continue for quite some time, and The Storm would dutifully report it. As if Mac didn't have enough stress in her life.

She printed out her article and thrust it toward Keesha, her managing editor, as she walked out of the office. She needed an ibuprofen, and, as she'd found the bottle in her backpack empty, the nearest one was in her dorm. Anyway, she welcomed the opportunity to get out of the building for a few minutes. Those theater students rehearsing down the hall didn't help her headache any.

Mac hadn't even made it downtown to the press yet, and already she knew it was going to be a long night. Why was it she'd given up smoking?

She began to round the corner to the door when someone smacked headlong into her.

"Oh, I'm sorry," the assailant said. "I'm looking for the student newspaper editor."

"You've caught me," Mac scowled, looking over the other girl. She was small-boned and pale-skinned, with dark hair falling into her round glasses. Her shoes and jeans were black, and so was her blouse, the frilly kind with the laces and ruffled cuffs that they only made for thin chicks. She reminded Mac of Wednesday Addams.

The big eyes darted around as if looking for ghosts in the dim hall. It was dark outside, and as only the theater and newspaper people were in the building this late, half the lights were off. "I'm the one who found Dr. Francis," she whispered hoarsely. "But I don't want my name in the paper."

"Well I don't know who you are, but it's not. My article just says a library employee noticed the blood on the ceiling and reported it to a supervisor, and the supervisor unlocked the attic. I don't even know any names; the guy who told me that didn't say who you were, and I didn't even name him in the story."

The small girl nodded. "Good. I might need to talk to you later, though, if you'll let me be anonymous."

Mac rubbed her eyes, fighting the headache. "You can only be anonymous if you can convince me that being named would put you in some kind of danger," she said. "Rules is rules. And you can only be used as a source if I can verify for myself that you know what you're talking about, which means that I at least need to know who you are, even if I don't report it. I'm not quite in Woodward and Bernstein's league yet."

"Who?"

"They broke the Watergate scandal."

The girl frowned blankly.

"Never mind. Just do us both a favor and never tell me anything you don't want repeated if they subpoena me."

"Um ... sure. Can you do one thing for me, though? Can you change it in your article so that it just says a student found the blood stain? It's true either way, but if it says I'm a library worker, I'll be easier to track down."

Mac wondered what made the kid so nervous. "I'll need to talk to my other source, and we'll see what we can do. Can you come with me? I was headed to my dorm for some ibu. I can call the guy from there."

As they walked, Mac learned mostly superficial details about her new acquaintance. Her name was Morgan White and she was a freshman, though she had about a semester's worth of additional credits from taking concurrent college classes while she was in high school. She lived in town with her mother, and this clerk job at the library was the first job she'd ever had.

She was telling the truth about her name -- it was on her student I.D., which she had to show to the office assistant to enter the dorm -- one of the measures of the stepped-up security. Whether she really worked at the library or not could be easily verified. Mac's source, it turned out, had no qualms about Morgan's input, and Mac agreed to tweak the story. But Morgan didn't want to talk about Dr. Francis or what she was worried about right then. She kept scanning the clothing-and-paper-strewn dorm room. What was she looking for, surveillance equipment? Ants were more likely.

Whatever. Mac had a paper to put out. As soon as the Twisters' basketball game was over and the story written, she needed to get downtown to the press. She didn't have time to wait around for this girl to decide she wanted to talk. Ushering Morgan out of the building, Mac told her to drop by the office whenever she was ready. But unless she ran into her in the library, she didn't expect to see the creepy freshman again.

* * *

Once the editor was out of sight, Morgan let out a long sigh of relief. Mac McDonnell wasn't the friendliest person she'd met at PSU, but she seemed honest. She wasn't ready to let up her guard just yet, though. On campus after dark was not a place she wanted to be. It didn't matter how many cops were out or how many lights were on. There were some things that couldn't be warded off with guns.

Unlocking her bike from the rack by the student union, Morgan decided to stop by the park across the street from the school. She had an hour before her mother would expect her home.

The quickest way to the park was to go past the library. She paused a moment to gaze at the building. She'd have to go back to work in there tomorrow. Back there where she'd been shelving political science books when she felt something thick and sticky fall on her shoulder. Back there where she'd seen Dr. Francis -- well, best not to think about that any more than she could help.

The sight of the body, however, was oddly not what upset Morgan most about the scene. The library attic, a haven for dust and cobwebs, held crates of volumes no longer in circulation, mostly obsolete science and technology texts. But, she'd noticed upon visiting the scene a second time to show it to police, scattered around the professor's strewn remains were several blood-soaked books.

Morgan had read most of them. Recently. They were all works from the library's limited paranormal section: some about bigfoot and monsters, others about psychic powers and magic and various other strange phenomena. One, the last Morgan had read, was a general survey of the paranormal by an H. Francis. She'd noted the coincidence in passing when she checked it out, but thought little of it. Looking at it on the attic floor, she'd noticed there was a little slip of paper poking out with her name on it in someone else's handwriting. It certainly hadn't been there when she'd reshelved the book just the day before.

She hadn't been allowed to look at the slip to see if it said anything else -- the cops said that could compromise the evidence. She asked them to at least let her know what it said after they were finished examining it, but they told her releasing that sort of detail could hamper the investigation. After that, the only thing she could think of to do was look up More Things in Heaven and Earth online. The results did not give her much comfort.

The "H." in H. Francis did indeed stand for Harold. This Harold Francis had spotted his first bigfoot as a teen on a Boy Scout camping trip in East Texas. By the early '60s, he had become an accomplished cryptozoology researcher who also investigated parapsychology. More Things had been published in 1967 and stirred a great deal of controversy in the field. Francis' findings discredited a number of other prominent researchers. The hostility generated by his book apparently led him to leave the field, because in 1968 he sought obscurity in a job teaching biology at Parker State University. And in 2007, Morgan added mentally, he was dead.

The more she thought about it, the more of a puzzle it became. How had the killer gotten in without breaking the door or having a key? What kind of power would it take to leave a victim in such a state? Who had brought the scattered books, all of which were supposed to be on shelves, into the attic? And who stuck her name in Dr. Francis' book? She shivered and pushed her bike onward to the park, hoping she still had salt in her backpack.