Murder, She Wrote--A Date with Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  He still hadn’t affirmed whether he could. “And what would I be looking for?”

  I slid in front of him the picture he’d given me of the man who hadn’t been hired by Cabot Cove Catering at all. “Can I trust you, Chad?”

  “You just asked me to commit a felony, Jessica,” he said, matter-of-factly.

  “I think this man may have killed Alyssa’s father.”

  He tried not to look surprised, but couldn’t hide it. He brushed the long hair from one side of his face, then the other, and looked at the picture with what passed for a snarl spreading across his soft features.

  “I won’t tell her. I promise.” His eyes met mine again as he tapped the picture. “You want to know if this man came into either airport on his way to Cabot Cove.”

  “Is it possible for you to find that out?”

  Chad thought for a moment. “Well, it would be easier if we knew the originating airport, as opposed to the destination one. Plenty of security cameras are focused on the security lines, where people are often standing still, providing the perfect opportunity for facial-recognition software to kick in. But security cameras are also trained on every single flight arriving at major airports. Trained on the exits to jetways.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Very few people do. I only know from swapping stories with hackers who’ve managed to penetrate Homeland Security’s firewall.”

  “Should I be hearing this?”

  “You knew what you were getting into when you posed your initial question.”

  “Then let me ask you another: Is Portland considered a major airport?”

  Chad drummed his fingers atop the face of the man who might have murdered Hal Wirth. “I don’t know. I’ve never had reason to find out.”

  “And now that you do?”

  “If you don’t hear back from me, it means I found nothing. I’ll only contact you if I find something you need to see.”

  “I understand,” I said, trying to convince myself I was doing the right thing here by asking an innocent young man to commit a crime.

  Then again, Chad wasn’t really so innocent, was he? He might never have used his hacking skills for truly nefarious means, but that didn’t mean his efforts sometimes didn’t come very close to crossing a dangerous line. And his clear affection for Alyssa told me he wanted to help her as much as I did, Babs, too.

  “And something else,” Chad said, tapping on the picture he’d enhanced to crystal clarity. “However this goes, I never saw this picture, because it never existed.”

  “What picture?”

  Chapter Nineteen

  I hated waiting. I’m exceedingly patient when it comes to my books, never rushing and making sure I get every detail correct. People who’ve been writing as long as I have may bemoan the changes in the industry and the way books are sold, but no one can dispute the magic of the Internet as a research tool. I’d spent countless hours during the formative years of my career, and well beyond, in the company of library shelving and card catalogs, searching for what was now a mere keystroke or two away. I’d like to tell you that I missed those days mired in the dusty stacks, but I don’t.

  Nostalgia carries only so far.

  I knew I was too distracted waiting to hear back from Chad to get any worthwhile writing done, so I busied myself instead with returning e-mails and other correspondence, and also managed to review the page proofs for an upcoming paperback reprint. As a writer, I’ve never tired of the feeling of seeing my name on the front cover. And I believe that having success come to me later in life has made me appreciate it all the more. I also don’t know what I would’ve done without my writing. It got me through Frank’s death and has provided the means to live as I wish, which now included upgrading my ruined bicycle.

  As I stared at my cell phone, hoping to receive a call from Chad, I also reviewed in my mind the meeting Mort and I had had the other day with Sean Booker at LOVEISYOURS down in Boston—well, Chestnut Hill. He had been helpful and cooperative to an extent, but something was nagging at me about our exchanges and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it. Had it been something he said? A gesture or a look maybe? Something was there all right, but I couldn’t identify what it was.

  Almost on cue, my phone rang with “Mort” lit up on the screen.

  “I was just thinking of you,” I greeted. “Sort of.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Our meeting with Sean Booker.”

  “I’ve been looking into him. As best I can.”

  “What’s that mean exactly?”

  “He founded LOVEISYOURS five years ago. Built it into one of the top sites of its kind, from what I’ve been able to learn.”

  “Okay. And before?”

  “That’s what I’m calling you about. There is no before.”

  “What do you mean, Mort?” I said, pressing the phone tighter against my ear.

  “I can’t find any trace of him prior to his establishing the company. Almost like Booker and LOVEISYOURS were both born the same day.”

  I tried to make some sense of that. “What’s your next move?”

  “I’m checking if the federal databases have anything on him in all those years prior and I have a call in to the Boston office of the FBI. You wouldn’t happen to have something with his fingerprints on it, would you?”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Because your suspicions have led you to do stranger things in the past.”

  “I had no reason to be suspicious of Mr. Booker.”

  “So nothing with a fingerprint?”

  “And that’s why you called, to ask me that?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Let me know if you find out anything more.”

  “Will do. And make sure you keep your doors and windows locked, Jessica.”

  “Mort?”

  I heard him ruffle through some pages on the other end of the line. “That man in the picture, the man who pretended to be a temp out of Boston for Cabot Cove Catering, is still out there.”

  I felt something like a feather slide up my spine. “Are you in your office?”

  “Where I always am when I’m not out fighting crime in our bucolic town.”

  “Can you pick me up? We need to pay a visit to Hill House.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll explain when you get over here. And bring a copy of that picture, Mort.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I climbed into his squad car ten minutes later, closed the door, and slid down the window.

  “Okay, what’s this about?” Mort asked me.

  “You bring the picture?” I asked, not about to display the even better one Chad had created for me.

  “Of course I did.”

  “We need to show it to the hotel staff, because what if—”

  “—the same man murdered Eugene Labine?” Mort completed the thought for me.

  * * *

  • • •

  Unfortunately, none of the staff on duty at Hill House at the time remembered seeing anyone who looked like the man in our picture. Neither the front desk manager nor the hotel’s general manager did either. The same held true for the housekeeping staff. Labine’s having been murdered at night meant far less staff were about at the time, and the absence of security cameras didn’t exactly help our cause either.

  “Hold on a sec,” I said to Mort after we’d given up and started to take our leave.

  He followed me back to the front desk, where the manager, Thomas (not Tom) Wilkerson, was still sorting through reservation cards of upcoming guests—Hill House was old-school that way.

  “Excuse me,” I said to rouse his attention. “Was anyone doing landscaping work here the day Eugene Labine was murdered?”

  “That would have been late Monday, Labor Day,
or early on Tuesday.”

  Wilkerson flipped open a day planner, perhaps to refresh his memory. “They normally cut the grass on Saturday. But the landscaping company is here right now, doing some pruning and trimming back the trees.”

  “Where can I find them?”

  * * *

  • • •

  “You think he was watching the place during the day?” Mort ventured, as we walked outside and around the oddly shaped building to the area where the bulk of the landscaping crew was concentrated.

  “For a while anyway. Long enough to familiarize himself with the surroundings, the logistics. Entrances and exits—that sort of thing. And the positioning of his target’s room.”

  “So he could plan the least visible way in and out.”

  “You’re learning.”

  “It comes with the job.”

  Mort’s uniform was all we needed to get the gardening staff to talk to us. The man in charge, Jesse, introduced himself as the brother of the company’s owner and professed to have never seen the man in our computer-enhanced picture. Neither did any of the members of his crew, until we came to the final man, who’d been up on a ladder cutting back an elm tree.

  “Sí,” he said, nodding when Mort showed him the picture.

  The worker didn’t speak English, but Jesse was more than happy to serve as translator for us.

  “He remembers seeing this man on the grounds?” Mort said.

  “Sí,” the worker said, without waiting for the translation.

  Then he spouted off some more Spanish, which Jesse translated. “He says it was Monday night.”

  Mort and I looked at each other.

  “It was nighttime,” Jesse continued. “He says his cousin drove him back to pick up some tools he left behind on Sunday; we mowed that day because it rained on Saturday. He thinks he saw this man standing by the woods over there, almost hidden by the trees.”

  “And this would’ve been Monday,” Mort followed, the same day that Hal had been murdered and I had run into Eugene Labine in Mara’s.

  “He’s almost positive,” Jesse said after an exchange with the worker.

  “What time would this have been?”

  The worker shrugged and responded again without waiting for a translation. “Eight o’clock maybe.”

  “Gracias,” Mort said to the man, drawing a polite smile.

  “I didn’t know you spoke Spanish,” I said as we walked away.

  “You just heard the extent of my vocabulary.”

  “The man in the picture was watching Labine around sunset. I ran into you and Labine at Mara’s near closing, at midnight.”

  “So we can assume the killer may have followed him there.”

  “And wherever else he went before ending up there,” I added.

  “The Sea Breeze bar,” Mort elaborated, “where he had several bourbons. On the rocks.”

  “You forget to mention that before?”

  “Must’ve slipped my mind,” Mort told me, “what with you running me ragged around town.”

  “Just so long as you’re not holding out on me.”

  He stopped in his tracks and shot me a stare. “You mean, like you’re holding out on me?”

  I felt something sink in my stomach. “Really, Mort?” was all I could think to say.

  “You want to tell me what else you’ve got on your mind?”

  “Why do you think there’s anything?”

  “You keep checking your watch and your phone.”

  “Maybe I’m waiting for a call from my publisher,” I said, not about to tell Mort the truth.

  “That’s not your waiting-for-a-call-from-my-publisher look.”

  “Got all my looks catalogued, do you?”

  “You’re an open book, Jessica,” he smirked, “no pun intended. You’d make a lousy detective.”

  “Really?” I said again, hoping Mort would let it go.

  “Why don’t I get you back home and you tell me whatever it is you’ve got brewing when you’re ready?”

  “Maybe I’m just working out a problem with a book.”

  “I thought you were waiting for a call from your publisher.”

  “I can do two things at once, you know.”

  He nodded, not bothering to argue the point further. “Like I said, Jessica, whenever you’re ready.”

  Which I hoped would be soon, thinking of Chad.

  Chapter Twenty

  When the doorbell rang just after Mort had dropped me off, I thought it must be him, having forgotten something. It wasn’t.

  It was Chad.

  I could see one of the Wirths’ cars, an SUV, in my driveway. Alyssa was nowhere to be found.

  “Chad,” I said, trying to make sense of his expression, which looked like a suit that didn’t fit right. Then I added lamely, “Where’s Alyssa?”

  “Can I come in, Jessica?” I noticed the laptop tucked under his arm. “There’s something I have to show you, something you need to see.”

  I felt my heart skip a beat and opened the door all the way so he could enter. Then I closed and locked it, remembering Mort’s advice.

  Letting Chad into the house left me wondering what my neighbors might make of me having such a handsome young visitor. I cringed at the thought of someone like Evelyn Phillips catching wind of what she might well proclaim to be some tawdry, illicit affair. We moved into the kitchen and took the same seats we’d occupied earlier in the day. I watched Chad fire up his laptop and then turn to look at me.

  “You think this man killed Alyssa’s father.” A statement.

  “Did you find something on those airport security cameras, Chad?” I asked him.

  “I’m getting to that. But I wanted to show you something else first,” he said, tilting the laptop’s screen so I could better see a blown-up shot of the man in question’s entire body from Eve’s original video, not just his face. “He’s putting something back into his pocket—that’s what the picture shows. I think it’s a syringe, Jessica. You can just make out the top of it. I know because I was always scared of needles as a kid.”

  He looked scared now, too.

  “That’s how he killed Alyssa’s father, isn’t it? Injected him with something that gave him a heart attack.”

  I nodded, because that’s all I could do. By then, the computer had come to life and Chad moved over to the chair next to mine, so we could watch the screen together. He hit a few keys, then clicked on the built-in track pad, and the picture of the man filled the screen, remarkably clear in comparison with what the sheriff’s station software had managed.

  Chad pointed at the man, his pants pocket. “You can see it here. The plunger of a syringe. I’m sure of it, Jessica.”

  Suddenly, Chad didn’t look so boyish anymore.

  “That accident Alyssa told me you had on your bike. You think this man was the one who caused it, don’t you?”

  I didn’t respond, so Chad picked up on the same thought.

  “Or someone else working for the same people.”

  “I never suggested there were other people involved.”

  I could tell Chad wasn’t buying it. “What does that dating site you asked me about, LOVEISYOURS, have to do with this?”

  “I don’t know. Not yet.”

  “But they’re involved. I mean, you wouldn’t have asked me to do this if you didn’t already have your suspicions, maybe a theory.”

  “Suspicions, yes, but no theory.”

  “Then maybe this will help.”

  Chad worked a finger agilely atop the track pad again. The man whose face looked like porcelain appeared in a different pose, a different setting, the world around him lost to a soft blur, while his torso and face were captured in a clarity comparable to that of the photo Chad had enhanced from the party.

  “
Logan Airport. This was taken just after six p.m. the Sunday before Labor Day. I was able to use footage from other security cameras to track him outside the terminal, but I lost him before determining where he went from there. But we know where he was the next day, don’t we?”

  “Yes.” I nodded. “We do.”

  “There’s something else I need to show you, Jessica,” Chad said, his voice cracking a bit.

  He worked a few keys, then the track pad again, and the laptop’s screen separated into six equal segments, each of them picturing the same man in different settings—all of them airports, I guess.

  “Denver, Houston, Miami, Charlotte, Tampa, and San Francisco. All of these were taken in the past ten months. So our guy’s been busy racking up the frequent-flier miles.”

  “Can you tell when these pictures were taken?”

  Chad nodded. “Yes, thanks to the time and date stamp. I wrote it all down for you. Jessica, do you think—”

  “Stop.”

  “But it’s possible this guy—”

  “I know what you’re suggesting. Stop,” I repeated.

  “I started reading another of your books last night. I know you’re thinking the same thing I am.”

  “Is that what’s got you frightened?”

  Chad shook his head. “No, I’m worried about something else. I think I was pinged,” he continued.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Something I did attracted the wrong kind of attention.”

  I felt my stomach flutter. What had I done—what had I been thinking, involving an innocent young man in all this? Not only had my single-mindedness subjected Chad to possible federal scrutiny; it might well have endangered his life.

  “I’m sorry,” I said lamely. “I need to fix this. I need to fix this somehow.”

  “There’s nothing to fix, Jessica. I did what I did because I wanted to, not because you asked me. I did it for Alyssa.”

  I felt myself nod. “But if hacking these airport security databases has made you a target or something . . .”

  “It wasn’t that, wasn’t the airports,” he said, leaving it there.