Chapter 11
Wait Avenue Cooperative
Cornell University
Week 04
"OK, we'll look." JJ hung up the phone. "Why would someone buy yarn and fabric under a different name? It's not like its contraband."
"I have no idea." Morgan was sitting at Laura Patterson's work table, a large, folding table at one end of her dorm room. He had just finished sending Garcia what she needed to hook into Laura's computer. "I don't even know where to look in here."
They looked around the room again. It was clean. Not just clean but clean, as in vastly less cluttered than any college dorm room in history. And mostly it was institutional, she had gone with the furniture that came with the room and clearly had seen no need to heavily decorate. "This room is so impersonal." JJ muttered. "It's more like a hotel room than anything. Most women this age have a huge collage of personal pictures but she's got…two." JJ picked up the one beside the bed. "This must be her and her mom. You can tell her mom loved her, you can see it."
"And this must be her and Martha." He pointed to a picture of Laura with an older woman, all smiles and holding a quilt on their laps, that hung from the one of the two pieces of wall art in the room, a combination bulletin board full of class information, empty white board, full calendar, and hanging files full of papers. "I'm not seeing her hiding anything in here though, this place is too organized."
"And deeply private, she wasn't sharing anything with anyone. I don't even see a journal anywhere. I bet she made this quilt." The only bright thing in the room was the quilt on the bed, an old-fashioned, geometric style in bright colors. JJ was checking her nightstand, "Although she does have a dildo at least, and quite the collection of erotica under here. Miss Perfection definitely liked to dream about all the things you can do with a guy. So why wasn't she experimenting, college is perfect for that?"
Morgan shook his head. "Until you said that I was going to say Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder but…this feels like a kind of rebellion to me."
"Rebellion?" JJ pointed to the only poster on the wall, "Serenity prayer. Sure she wasn't in a 12-step?"
"Everyone swears that girl was a straight arrow, a college kid who never even tried a beer. Pardon the language but everything about this screams 'fuck you, go away' to me." Morgan looked around the room. "JJ, what kind of table is that under the tea kettle?"
JJ went and started moving things off. "It's a trunk." She opened the top and her jaw dropped. "You might be right."
"Why?"
JJ reached into the trunk and pulled out a pair of tiny baby booties. These were followed by a sweater carefully worked for someone barely larger than newborn, and then a knitted teddy bear. "This is full of baby stuff from the looks of it."
"Maybe she was hiding something." Morgan said. "Let me get Garcia to dig deeper and I'll let everyone know."
Homespun
Ithaca, NY
They met back at the yarn shop, having entered the trunk into evidence and hauling it out of there. "Excuse me again." Rossi said to the owner. "I wonder if you could help us a little further."
"Sure." Hickory said, "If I can."
"Do you have a list of everything Martha Walderman has ordered over the past four years?"
"In the computer, sure."
"If I hand you finished products could you tell me if they were made out of materials she ordered."
"Of course."
He nodded to the trunk. "Let's go."
