Harry Dolan

by Bad Things Happen

  “The relationship turned physical after Beccanti got out,” he said. “That’s clear from the e-mails. But gradually it went sour. Sandy began to suspect that Beccanti was seeing other women. He denied it at first, but she kept after him. Finally he confessed. He was seeing a woman named Karen, and it was serious. He broke things off with Sandy.”

  Loogan brought his hand out of his coat pocket and rested it on the tabletop—the flashdrive and the pepper spray beneath his cupped palm.

  “She took it hard,” he said. “She was especially angry when she found out that Karen was a much younger woman—and that Beccanti had gotten her pregnant. Sandy felt betrayed. She wrote him a long note about that. The language was telling. ‘You wounded me,’ she said. ‘You might as well have stabbed me with a knife.’ ”

  Bridget Shellcross shot him a skeptical look. “And that’s your proof? That’s why you think she stabbed him?”

  “If anyone has a better explanation, I’m eager to hear it.”

  “Come now, Mr. Loogan,” said Hideaway. “Sandy’s not exactly a trained assassin. She’s a secretary.”

  “She’s a secretary now,” Loogan acknowledged. “Who knows what she might have been before? A Navy SEAL, or a Hollywood stuntwoman. What do any of us really know about her past?”

  Hifflyn sat back in his chair with his arms crossed. “Even if she had a motive for killing Beccanti,” he said, “why would she kill Tom, or Adrian Tully?”

  “That’s the ingenious part,” Loogan said. “I think she planned this very carefully. She had been discreet about her affair with Beccanti. But she couldn’t be sure who Beccanti might have told. Someone might be able to connect them. If he turned up dead, she might be a suspect. So she found a way to disguise his murder—to make it look like part of a series.”

  Loogan reached for a saltshaker and stood it on the table in front of him. He stood the flashdrive beside it, and then the canister of pepper spray.

  He pointed to each item in turn. “Tom was first,” he said. “Then Tully. She had no motive to kill either of them, and no one suspected her. Then it was safe to go after her real target—Beccanti. No one would suspect her of that either.”

  He paused and looked at the pepper spray as if noticing it for the first time. He picked it up and a sheepish grin passed across his face.

  “I brought this along in case one of you decided you had a duty to call the police and turn me in. But you’re such a well-mannered bunch. I should have known I wouldn’t need it.”

  He slipped the canister back into his coat pocket. Then he picked up the flashdrive.

  “This is something Beccanti found in Sean Wrentmore’s condo. I still don’t know what’s on it—it’s password protected. Doesn’t matter. It’s a red herring.” The drive went into his pocket. “Like I said, Wrentmore’s death has nothing to do with the other three.”

  Laura stared at him from across the table. “David, do you really expect us to believe this—this wild theory of yours?”

  He looked off at the autumn colors beyond the windows. “I’ve done what I came for: I’ve warned you,” he said. “You can believe what you like. But if you think the killing is over, maybe you should think twice. If Sandy Vogel committed a series of murders in order to disguise her murder of Michael Beccanti, then who’s to say she’s finished?”

  He pushed his chair back slowly and stood. “I’m not worried about myself. I’m going to walk out of here, and that’ll be the end of it for me. I’ve been staying in a place where no one’s thought to look yet, and tomorrow I’ll be gone. But the rest of you are vulnerable. She knows where to find you.”

  He took a last look around the table. None of them had risen with him.

  “Maybe I’m wrong,” he said. “But if I’m not, one of you may be next.”

  When Elizabeth dropped by the squad room on Saturday afternoon, she found Sean Wrentmore’s mail in an orderly pile on her desk. At the top of the pile was a cryptic note from Alice Marrowicz: Looking into Wrentmore—Art Studio.

  She tossed her coat onto a filing cabinet and sat down. Beside Wrentmore’s mail she found a copy of a report that Shan had written up for the file on David Loogan. It told her something she already knew: Loogan’s cell phone company had traced his Friday-night call to an area south of Lansing. Loogan had left the phone turned on when he ended the call, and after a long search the Lansing police had recovered it from a movie-theater parking lot. They’d been unsuccessful in locating Loogan himself.

  Beneath Shan’s report, she found a note from Harvey Mitchum, telling her that the sneaker from the Nichols Arboretum wasn’t likely to lead anywhere. Mitchum had left it at the county lab for testing, and the technician he had spoken with thought the stain looked more like motor oil than blood.

  As she was reading Mitchum’s note, Alice Marrowicz came in. She seemed reluctant to approach until Elizabeth waved her over.

  “Alice. Sit down. Tell me what you’ve been up to.”

  Alice slipped into Shan’s chair. “I’ve done some investigating. Maybe I shouldn’t have. You only asked me to look at Sean Wrentmore’s mail.”

  “It’s all right,” said Elizabeth. “What did you find?”

  “A charge on his MasterCard bill—from the Art Studio. You may have missed it.”

  “No, I remember that. I assumed he bought something to hang on his wall. He had a fondness for arty black-and-white photographs.”

  “The Art Studio is a tattoo parlor on Cross Street in Ypsilanti.”

  Ypsilanti bordered Ann Arbor on the east—the city’s rougher cousin. Elizabeth felt mild surprise at the thought that Alice was familiar with tattoo parlors there. Then she considered the woman’s penchant for long sleeves and sweaters and high-necked dresses, and realized how little she knew about what might lie underneath.

  She put the thought aside. “Wrentmore had a tattoo on his wrist,” she said. “A series of interlocking rings.”

  “He had another one besides,” said Alice. “He got it in September. I called the Art Studio last night, but the guy I talked to wasn’t the one who worked on Wrentmore. And they’re not big on record-keeping, so he couldn’t tell me anything. I tried again today, and Wrentmore’s artist was there, but he was reluctant to answer questions on the phone.

  “Tattoo artists are like shrinks, I guess. They believe in confidentiality. Only they’re not so strict about it, because when I drove out there he agreed to talk to me. I guess I look like a trustworthy person.”

  “What did he tell you?” Elizabeth asked.

  “Sean Wrentmore got a freehand. That means a unique design, not some standard thing you pick off the wall. It was two words in black ink, on his left arm just below the shoulder. But the words were reversed, so you could read them in a mirror. That made it tricky, having to write backwards.”

  “I imagine it did,” said Elizabeth. “Were the two words ‘Adrian Tully’?”

  Alice looked momentarily confused. “No. Why would you say that?”

  “Because that’s supposed to be who killed him. It would be clever if he had the name of his killer tattooed on his arm.”

  Alice considered the idea solemnly. “No, it wasn’t that,” she said, and then went quiet, seemingly lost in thought. As the silence drew itself out, Elizabeth had to smile.

  “What were the words, Alice?”

  Chapter 34

  THE HEADSTONE OF TOM KRISTOLL’S GRAVE WAS A SLAB OF GRANITE, rough-hewn at the edges. But its face had been polished smooth and his name and dates engraved there. A clutch of roses lay before it on the grass, their petals dark and withered. And on a lip of granite at the base of the stone was another offering: a small bottle of Glenfiddich Scotch. David Loogan’s work, Elizabeth thought.

  The late-afternoon sun sent the headstone’s shadow long across the grass. Elizabeth looked up and saw Carter Shan lingering a dozen yards away, studying an inscription above the door of a mausoleum. She saw a pair of cars winding their way along the cemetery road and w
atched their progress until they reached the spot where she had left her car. Rex Chatterjee was the first to emerge. He took up a position at the edge of the road and folded his arms, and a breeze mussed his thick gray hair.

  Casimir Hifflyn got out of the second car, stopped for a few words with Chatterjee, and then began to make his way across the grass. He wore a suit of black wool and the wind caught the open front of his jacket. He wore a pale gray shirt underneath with no tie.

  He grinned shyly as he got close, and bowed his head, but when he stood before Elizabeth he met her eyes. “Hello, Detective.”

  “Mr. Hifflyn. Thanks for coming.” She looked past him at Chatterjee. “Your lawyer can come closer, if you want him. You don’t have to leave him way over there.”

  “He’d rather I didn’t talk to you at all, but we worked out an agreement. If it gets to the point where you read me my rights, I have to call him over here.”

  “Then I’ll try not to read you your rights,” Elizabeth said.

  “This is better. Talking one-on-one. It’s more dramatic.” Hifflyn looked down at the roses on the ground. “You must have a sense of drama, or you wouldn’t have asked me to meet you at a cemetery—at the site of my friend’s grave, no less—without explaining why.”

  He looked up again and his smile made crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes. “Well, now I’m here. What will we talk about?”

  “Kendel’s Fortune,” Elizabeth said.

  He nodded thoughtfully. “That’s a dramatic subject.”

  “Kendel’s Fortune is the title of your latest book. It comes out in hard-cover at the end of the month.”

  “Just in time for holiday shoppers.”

  “Last month Sean Wrentmore had the words ‘Kendel’s Fortune’ tattooed on his left arm,” Elizabeth said. “Why do you suppose he would do that?”

  Hifflyn smoothed the palm of his right hand over his close-cropped beard.

  “I imagine you won’t be satisfied if I tell you he was a really big fan.”

  “No.”

  “Then the alternative is obvious,” he said. “Sean Wrentmore was a writer.”

  Elizabeth nodded. “He was an obscure writer with an unexplained source of income. And you’re a famous writer with a demanding schedule. Book signings, speaking engagements, and you’re expected to crank out at least one new novel every year. And that’s what you’ve done—eighteen books over the last seventeen years. Ten stand-alone novels and eight Kendel mysteries. How many of those did Sean Wrentmore write?”

  “Just three,” Hifflyn said, with a little lift of his shoulders. “The last three Kendel books.”

  “How much did you pay him?”

  “We split the money, half-and-half. Maybe he deserved more—he put the words on the pages. But I created the character, and my name on the cover sold the books. I think he was happy with what he got. It was more money than he had ever seen.”

  “But he never got any recognition.”

  The wind sent stray leaves tumbling over the grass. Hifflyn followed them with his eyes.

  “I’m not sure he wanted it. Sean was a classic introvert. I think he would have been out of his element at a reading or a book signing.”

  “Still, it must have bothered him,” said Elizabeth. “He wrote novels that made the best-seller lists, and he couldn’t tell anyone. That was part of the deal, right?”

  “Of course.”

  “All he had was empty gestures—like tattooing the title of his novel on his arm. Did you know about that?”

  Hifflyn looked up from watching the leaves. “No.”

  “He had it put on backwards. It was something for him to look at in the mirror. That reveals something about his character, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose it does.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong, when you say he didn’t want recognition. I think he wanted it—even if he felt ambivalent about it.”

  “That may be true.”

  “I think we both know it’s true,” Elizabeth said. “And it’s the reason Tom Kristoll died.”

  She studied his reaction. He looked away, at the grave. She thought she saw one of his eyelids flutter—a sign of tension, but hardly enough to convict a man on. When he looked back to her, his features were composed. His mouth set itself in a pleasant line. He asked, “Am I going to need my lawyer?”

  “That’s up to you,” she said. “I haven’t read you your rights. I’m not going to ask you questions. I’m going to spin you a tale. All you have to do is listen.”

  He spread his arms. “Go ahead.”

  Elizabeth’s fingers touched the beaded necklace at her throat. “Some of this is speculation,” she said. “Suppose Sean Wrentmore did care about recognition. He was the author of three Kendel books, and he wanted it to be known. But he liked the money he was earning, the deal he had made. He wanted it to go on, and that meant keeping quiet. But Wrentmore thought of himself as a serious writer. Serious writers take a long view. At some point—whether at the end of his life, or after his death—the deal wouldn’t matter anymore. Then he would want people to know who he was.

  “How could he make that happen? First he would need proof. Suppose he kept the original manuscripts of his Kendel novels—the working copies, with his own handwritten edits. Suppose he sealed them in envelopes and sent them to himself by registered mail. That would fix the dates. It would prove he hadn’t copied them from published sources. It wasn’t a hoax; he was the real author.

  “Then he would need to keep the manuscripts in a safe place. He decided not to keep them in his condo—I can only guess about the reason. If he died, his family would control access to his condo, and he wasn’t close to his family. Maybe he didn’t want to trust them with his secret.

  “The hiding place he settled on was a fireproof box in unit 401 of a place called Self-Storage USA. Now he needed an accomplice, someone to carry out his wishes after he was gone. In the end, he chose two accomplices. Neither one knew about the other. He gave them each a key to the storage unit, asked them each to go there if anything ever happened to him. They would know what to do when they got there, because he had left instructions in the box with the manuscripts. It’s easy enough to guess what the instructions were: Alert the press. Call Publishers Weekly, or whoever you’d call to report that the real author of the most recent Kendel books was Sean Wrentmore.”

  Hifflyn smiled at that, but said nothing.

  Elizabeth continued. “So his accomplices take the keys and agree to Wrentmore’s request. Maybe they’re curious, but they’re not curious enough to actually drive out to Self-Storage USA and see what’s there. Sean has his strange ways, and it does no harm to indulge him. Nothing’s going to happen to him anyway.

  “But something does happen. Wrentmore’s got this manuscript—this ungainly thing he’s been working on for years. Liars, Thieves, and Innocent Men. He shows it to Tom Kristoll and Tom tries to do him a favor. He edits the novel down to a realistic length. Adrian Tully helps him. But Wrentmore doesn’t take well to being edited. It’s a matter of pride—and he’s earned some pride, hasn’t he? He’s the author of two published novels, with a third one coming out soon. Tom’s editing—all these drastic cuts—it ticks him off. There’s an argument, and it goes farther than anyone could have predicted. Wrentmore ends up dead.

  “But his death is kept secret. Tom covers it up. Adrian Tully knows about it, because he’s the one who knocked Wrentmore over the head with the Scotch bottle. Laura Kristoll knows because Tom tells her. David Loogan doesn’t know—even though he helps Tom dispose of the body. Tom decides to keep him in the dark.”

  Elizabeth paused. She watched Carter Shan strolling along behind a row of headstones. Rex Chatterjee slouching against the fender of his car.

  She returned her gaze to Hifflyn. “So that’s three people who knew, not counting Loogan,” she said. “But that’s not all. Tom told you, didn’t he?”

  “Yes,” Hifflyn said.

  “Because he
knew about your arrangement with Sean Wrentmore.”

  “Tom’s the one who brought us together,” Hifflyn said. “It was his idea to get Sean to take over the Kendel series.”

  “How did you react when he told you Sean was dead?”

  Hifflyn put his hands in the pockets of his black wool jacket, drew his chin down to the collar as if to escape a chill.

  “I thought it was horrible, naturally,” he said. “But I’m afraid I reacted less than honorably. Tom had made the decision to conceal Sean’s death. It was done. I thought reversing that decision could only make things worse. I told him I didn’t want to hear anything more about it. I didn’t want to discuss Sean Wrentmore ever again.”

  “But that wasn’t the end of it,” said Elizabeth.

  “No.”

  “Because Wrentmore still had his two accomplices. His death was a secret, but one of them found out.”

  Hifflyn cocked his head to the side. “You might as well say her name—Valerie Calnero.”

  “All right.”

  “I don’t know why you’d want to hide her identity from me, unless you think I intend to do her harm.”

  “Well, she’s given you reason to wish her harm, hasn’t she?”

  Hifflyn shrugged the question away.

  Elizabeth went on. “Wrentmore made a bad judgment when he chose Valerie. David Loogan thinks he chose her because he wanted to get close to her. But whatever affection he may have had for her, it only went one way. Wrentmore had everything planned, he knew what he wanted, but Valerie didn’t follow the plan. She found out he had been killed—I imagine she found out from Adrian Tully. He would have needed someone to confess to.

  “She heard his confession and then remembered the key Wrentmore had given her. She drove to his storage unit and found his Kendel manuscripts and his instructions, but she didn’t call the newspaper or Publishers Weekly. From what I can gather, she was unhappy at the university. She may have been looking for a way out. Now she had one. She knew Tom Kristoll had covered up Wrentmore’s death. He might pay to keep her quiet. And she knew Sean had been writing your Kendel novels—and she was sure you’d pay to keep that quiet.”