Sounds of Murder

Chapter 21

Chapter 21

Pamela had spent most of the weekend-when she wasn't at the memorial or romancing her husband--listening to the recording of the murder and the sounds of Charlotte choking. Oh, she did manage to get the family laundry done and she attempted to vacuum the living room rug (with "attempted" being the key word), but her focus was on the recording of the murder. She felt certain that Charlotte was not saying--or trying to say-the killer's name or anything else. If she had been, that would really have been unusual. Charlotte was just struggling to breathe. The sounds-or rather, the noises--that were overlaid onto Charlotte's strangled voice, however, were another story.

Pamela guessed that those sounds were probably comprised mostly of Charlotte bumping and scraping things on the computer desk, but she couldn't be sure. Even if she could identify the sounds, what good did it do? Identifying the sounds didn't tell her who the killer was. She felt totally stymied.

When Monday morning arrived, she headed to campus feeling depressed and disappointed with her efforts. After her morning classes, she worked some more on analyzing the recording, but made little headway. Over and over again, she played the recording--Charlotte's strangled choking, the myriad of bumps, clicks, scrapes, and scratches that were probably made by Charlotte fighting for her life. How was any of this helping her? Shoop was right, she realized in frustration; this was a job for the police.

She stopped briefly at noon and gobbled down her regular lunch of sandwich and tea, clicking out of her acoustic software program when anyone came within a few yards of her office door. She kept the volume on her speakers low so the repeated sounds of Charlotte choking were not audible to hallway strollers. Anyone entering her office would assume she was working on her research--which, in a way, she was.

Several students came in during the early afternoon to discuss topics for their class papers and projects. She was even happy for the interruption, because it was obvious that she wasn't getting anywhere with identifying the noises on the disk.

As the time neared three o'clock, students started gathering outside the large lecture classroom next to her office which was directly above the computer lab on the main floor, waiting for Rex Tyson's Introduction to Psychology class. Pamela usually tried to get out of her office before this time, because Rex had two mass lectures back to back on Monday and the noise usually got to be too much for her. Often, she'd go downstairs to the lab and work in one of the carrels when it was clear that no more students were going to show up for her office hours. She always left a note on her door saying where she was just in case. Why not, she thought. I have every reason to go down there and work.

Grabbing the disk from the drawer in her computer, she locked her office door and headed downstairs to the lab. As she expected, Kent was at the check-in desk, signing in the new participants for her study that he'd rescheduled from last week.

"Hi, Kent," she greeted him, "I'm just going to do some work in the computer databases." And I'd really like to know, she thought, if you plan to be romancing my 18-year-old daughter or were the events of last week all my imagination? No. She determined to keep her concerns about Angela to herself.

"Sure, thing, Dr. B," he responded, and went back to the line of subjects signing in. None of them seemed to be particularly upset by being in a lab where a murder had recently taken place.

Pamela went to the first row of computers. She went to Carrel #3, immediately next to the infamous Carrel # 4. Pulling out the wheeled desk chair, she sat down, as close to the spot where Charlotte Clark had lost her life as she could be and still be able to use the terminal, seeing as how all the equipment in Carrel #4 was still missing.

She looked around. What could Charlotte see from here? As she looked around her, she imagined what she would or wouldn't notice if she were Charlotte and were totally involved in her computer research. Charlotte was looking at Culver's dissertation in the subscription database for something--she wondered what. Did she hear the killer enter?

Pamela noticed the sounds of Kent talking to the students at the check-in desk. The acoustic panels in the carrel did an excellent job of muffling the sound. Oh, she realized that people were talking, but she thought it would be quite possible that a person working intently at this computer wouldn't notice someone entering the lab and quietly closing the door. They probably wouldn't even notice the sound of someone walking up behind them. Indeed, the student participants walking to their stations in the second through fourth rows were almost inaudible to her as she sat surrounded by the carrel walls.

Placing the disk in its slot and putting on headphones to muffle the sounds of Charlotte's murder from the students in the lab, she hit play. Would she ever get used to Charlotte's tortured cry? As each noise appeared, she tried to imagine exactly what might have caused it--experimenting with knocking her elbow against the carrel wall to recreate the bumping noise on the tape, dragging her fingernails down the acoustic wall panels to recreate the scraping sounds. She tried many different defensive behaviors within the booth that she guessed Charlotte might have tried that would have resulted in the sounds that she heard on the tape. In all, she believed she'd been able to recreate reasonable facsimiles of all the sounds and thus, account for all the sounds, with the exception of one.

One sound still seemed to have no apparent source within the booth--no source that Pamela felt could possibly have been made by Charlotte as she fought for her life. It was that strange double clicking noise. Click-click. Then a long pause. Then click-click again. Whatever it was, the two clicks seemed to belong together. Whatever prompted one click, also produced the second click.

Possibly, she hypothesized, the clicking noise was not created by something Charlotte did to protect herself. What if, just if, the clicking noise was created by the killer? Maybe not intentionally, but could it possibly be some noise the killer made inadvertently while he/she was in the midst of killing Charlotte Clark? If so, what might it be? What sound would a person make while killing someone? It was obviously mechanical, not human.

Pamela closed her eyes and imagined the killer coming up behind her. She envisioned the killer's hands on her neck, wrapping the power cord of the headphones around her neck and pulling it tight. She'd fight, she was sure. She'd struggle. At this point, Pamela tried to emulate the behavior that she thought Charlotte would have exhibited. Then, she imagined the killer struggling back, maybe pushing Charlotte down, maybe pulling her upwards. Their bodies might be in close proximity. What if? What if something on the killer's body made that noise--accidentally--when the killer pushed or pulled Charlotte against him or her while strangling her? Whatever the something was--could it have made such a clicking noise? Surely, the killer wouldn't stop strangling Charlotte to intentionally click this thing. Whatever it was, the clicking noise must have been produced accidentally. But what was it? She felt she was on the right track, but she just didn't know where to go next.

Believing she had exhausted all the possibilities of her laboratory mini-experiment, she popped out the disk and left the lab, waving good-bye to Kent. All of a sudden, she had another experiment in mind that she intended to try--tomorrow. With a few preparations at home, she'd be ready. Yes, tomorrow it was.