Voice Mail Murder by Patricia Rockwell Page B

She’s a remarkable young woman. She would do anything for her mother. You can’t say that about every young person.”
    “No, you can’t,” agreed Pamela, wondering just how far Elizabeth Croft was willing to go to protect her invalid mother . . . and her sister. Would she go as far as murder?
     
     

Chapter Thirteen
     
    The morning had progressed smoothly—for a Monday. After her classes and a relaxing lunch of sliced beef on Asiago cheese bread with a nice homemade vinaigrette sprinkled over the lettuce and tomato wedge, she tossed her lunch sack into her waste basket and sauntered over to her desk, still sipping her blackberry tea from her thermos. Her office hours had officially started and as no students were lined up at her door, she decided she might as well get started on the voice mail analysis.
    Repeating her actions of the previous week where she had studied the original recording, she opened the second CD container and placed it in her disk drive drawer. The original voice mail messages were already saved and numbered in her software program. As she brought up the second recording—the one Shoop had presented to her after the football game, the one of the sample segments from all of the suspects the police had interviewed regarding the Coach’s murder, she leaned back in her desk chair and reached for her earphones. She decided that she would listen to the entire recording first—to get a general overview of the number and type of voices—and to see if any of them jumped out at her as obvious matches to the three voice mail speakers.
    It took about two minutes to listen to the entire tape. Pamela noted that the police had done an efficient job of annotating the various speakers and selecting appropriate segments from each. At the beginning of each segment, a man’s voice announced the speaker’s number, and then the segment played. She soon realized that whoever had put the tape together understood how it would be used. The segments selected were innocuous and provided no indications as to each speaker’s identity. That is, she did not hear any of the speakers refer to themselves by name or by their relationship to the deceased (wife, daughter, secretary, colleague, etc.). The segments were truly drawn from the least incriminating sections of the interviews. Although each segment was mundane in content, the person who had created this master recording had done a fairly good job in selecting segments that demonstrated each speaker’s vocal features. Some speakers used a lot of pitch variety—going from highs to lows in the course of a few words. Others were more monotone. Some spoke with a slow, lugubrious drawl; others whipped along like they were being chased by a train. All of these features and more were evident in the short samples she had before her—because as short as these samples were—they were somewhat longer than the snippets that had been provided to her for the voice mail speakers. She began to believe that she might actually be able to accomplish her task.
    However and it was a big however, after listening to the interview recording several times, she had no sense that she had heard any of these voices on the voice mail recording. Maybe she was wrong. She had promised Shoop that she would conduct a thorough analysis and see if any of the people interviewed were identical to the three women who had left messages on Coach’s voice mail. She had to get to it.
    Step one. A quick mental calculation made her realize that she was in for a long afternoon. Just as she had done when she compared the seven messages on the original voice mail recording to determine that there were actually three speakers who had produced those seven messages, now she would have to repeat this process, comparing what turned out to be eight speakers on the interview recording to each of the three speakers on the voice mail recording. That would mean twenty-four separate analyses. Each voice mail speaker would