Alex smiled. "You are having an enjoyable day, aren't you?"
"It's definitely better now than it was when it started out this morning, I'll say that. What time is it?"
"Mr. McCrae should be arriving in approximately ninety minutes, if that's what you mean."
"It is. That gives us time to eat something, and I want to shower and change. There are still leftover lunch meats and salad from last night. Do you think Sterling wants some?"
"Sterling, as a matter of fact, is out celebrating with George and Vernon and two new friends, having spent an enjoyable afternoon of their own performing good deeds."
"Oh. So the Santas for Silver thing is going all right for him? I told you I checked it out on the Internet. And you were worried. Sometimes, Alex, you're like a mother hen with one chick when it comes to Sterling. Not that I don't think it's sweet."
"Well, actually—ah, Felicity. I hear you're leaving us. Maggie and I are, of course, devastated."
"Yeah, right. I may cry myself to sleep tonight," Maggie grumbled.
"You think you're being sarcastic, Maggie, but you really do love me," Felicity said, kissing Maggie's cheek. "I know what you did, honey, opening your home to me out of your concern for me, and I mean it when I say thank you. Friends forever, remember? We made that vow."
Maggie felt her spine melting, as usual. They had been really good friends, once. "Yeah, okay, Faith. Friends forever."
"Good," Felicity said, slipping into her fur. "In that case, let me remind you that you still owe me a house-warming present—a big one, because that's a top-of-the-line treadmill over there. Now, gather up Brock for me and call for the doorman to help with these bags. I don't want to keep Noreen waiting."
"Sucker," Maggie groused under her breath as she went hunting for the mutt. "I never learn. I've got a great big S frigging tattooed on my forehead."
But ninety minutes later Felicity was already well on her way to Stowe, Maggie had had that shower and a huge rare roast beef sandwich on rye, and she was more than ready for Bruce to show up and watch Alex—help Alex—with one of his famous Viscount Saint Just denouement scenes.
"Good cop or bad cop?" Alex asked her as Socks, who'd remained on duty just for this purpose, buzzed twice, then twice again, signaling that both Bruce McCrae and J.P. Boxer were on their way upstairs.
"I'll follow your lead," she told him. "But I do need to get a couple of licks in, if you don't mind. If we're right about all of this, it could have been me, you know, and not poor Francis. All set, Steve?"
"Here they go, Dumb and Dumber ride again. I should have my head examined—except that you guys always seem to make it work. Get him talking, get him to say something incriminating. But make it fast, okay?" Lieutenant Steve Wendell, who really did owe Maggie one, picked up his can of soda and retired to the kitchen, out of sight but not out of earshot while Alex opened the door for their company.
"Where's Bernie?" Bruce asked as he shrugged out of his coat—one of those ridiculous khaki raincoat things with epaulettes on the shoulders, flaps and pockets everywhere, and cinched by a wide belt. Talk about looking like Secret Squirrel. Jeez.
"She was unavoidably detained at the office," Alex said smoothly, then offered their guests drinks.
Okay, Maggie was nervous now. She'd been excited, but now Bruce was here, sitting directly across from her. The killer.
"Um, Bruce? Bernie told me. You know, about your manuscript? Gosh, I'm sorry. She rained all over my last manuscript, too. I don't know what's wrong with her. She used to be more understanding."
Bruce sat forward on the couch, his fingers laced together, as J.P. began rubbing his back. "I know. That call I got this morning? It was like a slam to the solar plexus, you know? I worked so hard on that book. I love that book—sweated blood over it. I just don't understand her problem. That's why I was glad she invited me over here tonight." He accepted a glass of wine from Alex, looking up at him. "Bernie said it was your idea that she move in here with Maggie and Felicity. So you really think this Nevus guy could be after Bernie, too?"
"In point of fact, no," Alex said, and then inclined his head to Maggie, who took it from there. How nice for Bruce to provide their segue for them. And how smart of Alex to have gone back to Valentino and Bryon with just one more question.
"Not Nevus, Bruce. Nexus. You know—to bind, to connect. A connected group—like all of the authors connected to No Secret Anymore. Rat Boy, well, Rat Boys, they said they'd run a spell-checker before printing out all those copies of the poem for everyone, but since nevus is a word, the spell-checker didn't pick up the typo. Neither, obviously, did our Rat Boys. Isn't that something? We were never going to connect anything that way, huh?"
Now J.P. sat up straighter. "You found him—them? You found out who sent the rats?"
Maggie nodded. "Tell them, Alex."
Alex stood at the end of the couch where Maggie sat, looking at Bruce as he spoke. "Certainly, Maggie. Yes, J.P., we unearthed them, and they didn't kill Francis or Jonathan. They're merely fairly harmless idiots who, unfortunately, innocently provided the real killer with a most timely bit of assistance as well as helping to muddy the waters so that the killer could not only kill but perpetrate a fraud."
"That's a lot of big words and bigger accusations you're tossing around, English," J.P. said, figuratively donning her criminal defense attorney hat. "You have a suspect for all this murder and fraud business?"
"As a matter of fact, yes, we do, and thank you, J.P., for so quickly bringing us to the nub of the matter. Mr. McCrae, would you care to confess, or shall we have to deal with a tedious point-by-point breakdown of your motive and opportunity?"
"Me?" Bruce smiled as he looked at each one of them in turn. The kind of smile, Maggie thought, that you could see on football players, basketball players, anyone who knew damn full well they'd committed a foul, but were trying to act as if the referee had just made a big joke at their expense. The kind of smile that was just a little too wide, while the eyes remained a little too nervous, even cagey. "You're accusing me? Are you nuts?"
"Yes, Maggie, are you nuts?" J.P. seconded the question. "Bruce never killed anyone. We had a long talk this afternoon, because I was pretty sure you were thinking that way this morning. Don't ever play poker, Maggie—when I dropped that left-handed bomb, you jumped on it way too fast, then backed off even faster. Jonathan West and Francis Oakes were Bruce's friends. Look—I'd given him this, to protect himself when I wasn't around, and he gave it back to me this afternoon. See?" she concluded, unzipping her large pocketbook and holding up the Glock as evidence.
"Cripes, J.P., put that away before you drop it and it goes off. Besides, I have an idea," Maggie said, now that the idea had surfaced with Bruce's fake smile. "Let's do a play-by-play, J.P., a sort of non-video review, shall we, and then you decide? I'll start."
She got to her feet and began pacing behind the couch. "To begin, let's all remember that Bruce, like me, is a mystery writer. I know something about mystery writers, about the process. We set up a situation, we put in a bunch of what-ifs and suspects, we toss in a couple of red herrings to put the reader off the scent, and then we sit back and look for holes in our plot. Question ourselves, question each point, address that plot from every angle so that there are no more holes except the sneaky ones we want there so the reader can look back later and say, wow, there it was, but I missed it. That's how it works—hopefully. In other words, we think in terms of what can go wrong with our premise, how our killer can screw up."
"Marvelous," Bruce said, sitting back and crossing his arms over his broad chest. "Maggie's giving us a workshop for beginners."
"Shut up, Bruce," J.P. said, moving slightly away from him. "I know her longer than I know you, remember? Let her have her say, then you can try to tear apart her testimony on cross."
"Ouuu, the lawyer speaks. Fine, but I want a drink first—or don't you think I know you're trying to set me up for a fall here," Bruce said sarcastically, getting
to his feet. "Go on, Maggie. I can wait to sue you until tomorrow."
Maggie looked at Alex, who nodded his head once more, encouraging her to continue laying out her reasons for believing Bruce guilty.
But she didn't know where to start, which was still the problem.
Okay ... she'd lay it out the way she did a synopsis. She'd tell Bernie a story—except Bernie wasn't here, this wasn't really a synopsis, and she really wished Bruce and his muscles would sit down again.
"Bruce, let's do the crimes first, all right? We'll get into the particulars of how you screwed up later, if you still insist in saying you're not guilty."
"Fine. Maybe I should take notes? I mean, a Cleo Dooley plot? That has to be worth something. Maybe we could collaborate on a book? No, never mind. That didn't work all that well the first time, did it?"
"Gratified as you must be, McCrae, listening to the drone of your own voice," Alex said tightly, "we'd like you to sit down now and allow Maggie to speak. If you can prove her wrong—prove us wrong—it will save you an interview with Left –tenant Wendell, as he will be our next audience."
Maggie swallowed down hard on her nervousness. She knew that Bruce could leave at any time, just walk away, and there'd be no way to stop him, not unless Alex was in the mood to play hero, and she hoped he'd remember that Steve was in the kitchen, listening, and that unsheathing his sword stick probably wouldn't be a good idea.
So it was definitely time to cut to the chase, hit Bruce in a way that would force him to stay, and mentioning Steve seemed to do the trick. In fact, Bruce suddenly looked eager to match wits with them. Yeah, well, she'd soon put an end to that!
"You ripped off Jonathan's new manuscript and passed it off as your own," Maggie said, and then waited, letting out her breath slowly as Bruce looked at her for a long moment, and then sat down.
"A masterstroke, my dear," Alex said, leaning down to speak into her ear. "As good as an anchor strapped to his ankle. Now move quickly."
Maggie nodded, cleared her throat. She had it together now, she knew where to start, where to go with this synopsis.
"You stayed friends with Francis and Jonathan after No Secret Anymore. You said so. You visited them, the whole nine yards. And while Francis sort of faded away, and Jonathan had all but dropped off the map, your career kept growing very nicely. Except, wow, now you were having trouble, too. Like Francis, like Jonathan, something had gone wrong. You'd lost something, some edge, and you couldn't write. You'd hit a wall, you were already past your deadline, and you were desperate. We all get blocked once in a while, we all get desperate. But you were scared, and getting more frightened every day you sat at that computer and looked at that blank screen, that blinking cursor."
Oh, yeah, she was getting into it now. Bruce was her character now, and she was telling his story, laying out his fears, his motivations.
"Maybe you weren't really a writer. Maybe you'd been faking it all these years, and now you just couldn't fake it anymore. The world would realize you couldn't write, not really. We all think that, every time we sit down to start another book. First book, twentieth book, hundredth book. It doesn't matter. The same fears come back. But it was worse for you this time. You saw Francis, his despair, his small apartment, the way he'd hidden himself away, frightened of the world that had disregarded his books. And you saw Jonathan West. Who'd been bigger than Jonathan West? Man, if he could fall, how could you not fall? You could be him, you could be Francis. We all could be them, we're all just one book away from being them, aren't we?"
"You always did have a flair for the melodramatic, Maggie," Bruce told her, lifting a tumbler of scotch to his mouth. "I'm talented. I don't have crises of confidence and I never have. That's for lesser talents. Like you. You even failed at romance, and that's formulaic drivel anyone can write."
The urge to say bite me rose and was quickly batted down again, along with her ready defense of the romance genre, as Maggie pushed on, doing her best to stay on point as Bruce tried to steer her away from it, and into personal attack. Hey, she'd spent five years listening to Dr. Bob's advice on how to argue effectively with her family—she recognized that sort of underhanded tactic now.
"Then, one fine day, you stopped in to visit Jonathan and learned that he was writing again. Not only was he writing, but he was willing to show you, his good friend, what he'd written. And you were blown away. It was good. It was very good. And you couldn't write a coherent grocery list, could you? You went home, and stewed, and then an idea hit you. The sort of idea a good mystery writer jumps on immediately. And you are a good mystery writer, Bruce, you really are. You just didn't want to wait out the dry spell, or work your way through it. You visited Jonathan again, and you somehow made a copy of his manuscript on a blank disk while he was in the bathroom or passed out drunk, and took it home with you, put your name on it, and sent it off to Bernie. After all, Jonathan had said he'd never publish it, and he was a drunk, a recluse. He'd never even know you'd ripped him off."
J.P. raised her hand as if she was in class. "You're saying Bruce thought he could get away with something like that?"
"No, not really. I think he was desperate, and he didn't think the whole thing completely through before he acted," Maggie told her honestly, because this part was still a little murky to her. "What I think was that he needed something to give to Bernie because he was so overdue on his deadline and, even though Bernie is a terrific woman, she's also a tough businesswoman, a lot tougher than Kirk used to be. Now that Kirk's dead and she's in charge, she's going pretty heavy with the hammer, even demanding that some authors hand back their advance money if they're too far over deadline. Bruce just wanted to shut her up, that's all—at least at first. But, once he'd done it, sent in Jonathan's manuscript as his own, he had to know—quickly—if she liked it, if she'd publish it, or if he'd just bought himself a little more time to write his own book. Because, wow, he had a problem, didn't he? He'd acted, and then realized he'd taken a pretty big risk in doing what he did, if the manuscript was as good as he thought it was."
"This is ridiculous. You're saying Bruce was that desperate—desperate enough to steal another writer's work?"
"Oh, J.P., it's not like he'd be the first person to do it. Or the first to get away with it. Plagiarism happens all the time, and always because the thieves—and they are thieves, damn it, raping our brains—think they'll never be caught. Bruce just took it a step further and stole from Jonathan's imagination before the book was in print. Anyway, when Bernie called him, told him she loved the manuscript so far—that's when he realized he'd have to get rid of Jonathan before the book came out. It was too dangerous to just believe that Jonathan would never know. And, hey, who knew if Jonathan might someday decide he did want to see if he could be published again with this new manuscript. Any way you looked at it, Bruce, Jonathan had to go. You had months to plan the how of it before the book came out, work up a foolproof plan, but then Jonathan offered you a gift, didn't he, Bruce?"
"Me? You're asking me? Please, this is your pipe dream. I'm just sitting here, wondering how much I can sue you for. That last contract Bernie handed you, Maggie? Didn't PW report that as a four-book, mid-seven-figure deal? I always forget—one's libel, one's defamation. J.P., honey, you'll have to help me sort that part out, okay?"
Alex sat down beside Maggie and patted her hand reassuringly. "He's only blustering, but I'll take over now, I believe. Where were we? Oh, yes, Jonathan West offered you a gift, McCrae, unwittingly of course. He told you about these two overly zealous fans of his who had just sent out dead rats and threatening poems to the authors who'd worked with him on No Secret Anymore. He was upset, had banished these fans from his sight, but wanted you to be aware—you, his dear friend—of what they'd done. And that day or the next, a dead rat did in fact appear in your mailbox. And, with that rat, an idea. A way to salvation, a plan meant to solve all your problems."
"Exactly," Maggie said, happy to see that Bruce's smile might still be there
, but it was still as false as the guy who'd just clotheslined an opposing player and then turned to protest to the ref, "Who? Me? You're blaming me?"
"It was a very good plan," Alex went on, swinging his quizzing glass from its black riband as he spoke. "Jonathan, odd character that he was, would receive this horrendous threat and commit suicide. Of course, these zealous fans would not have sent a rat to Jonathan, but that was no matter. After all, you already had one in your possession, didn't you? All you had to do was remove the outer packaging and replace it, with Jonathan's address on the new envelope. That business of having taken the box to the police and then throwing it in the trash was merely a hum meant to establish you as a potential victim. A clever ruse, actually."
"Right," Maggie broke in eagerly. "But there were still plot holes. One murder tricked out as a suicide? No, that was a little chancy. Because Jonathan was famous once, even if he wasn't now. The police would make a very thorough investigation. Much better to have Jonathan be just one of several murders with pretty much the same MO, right? You called Sylvia Piedmonte and ... oh yeah, and Freddie Brandyce, but they both took off, so you couldn't use them as part of your plan. Oh, and Garth Ransom—Buzz—he was off shooting rhinos or something."
"I don't believe hunters are allowed to shoot rhinos anymore, my dear. Let's just say he was in Africa, for clarity, you understand."
"Picky, picky, Alex. And don't interrupt, I'm really moving now. So, Bruce, who else was out there? Oh, wait, how about good old reclusive Francis Oakes? Little guy, he wouldn't put up much of a struggle. Nobody'd miss him, and he'd have his own dead rat there, you wouldn't even have to go find one of your own. So, first Francis, and then Jonathan—the police said Jonathan had been dead for a while, so you probably made the murders a real one-two punch, huh? Except nobody was looking for Jonathan, nobody knew he was dead, so you came knocking on my door. Maggie Kelly, the woman who's already known for ... well, for stumbling over bodies. And now, wow, we've got a serial killer here, and Jonathan is just one of two victims so far—just tossed into the mix with the other victims. Who was next, Bruce? Me, right? I was here, local, couldn't really put up much of a fight against a great big guy like you. I was going to be number three, wasn't I? I knew you. I'd let you in the door. And you'd kill me. Bastard!"
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