Murder, She Wrote--A Date with Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “The picture,” I realized. “But why would that result in your . . . What did you call it?”

  “Being pinged.” Chad turned his gaze back on the screen, six different views of the man I now genuinely believed had murdered Hal Wirth. “And the answer is because somebody who knows who this guy really is must’ve caught wind of the fact that somebody else was trying to find out.”

  “Can he, or she, trace it back to you, your computer?”

  “No, Jessica, I’m safe there. At least, I think I am. I use the Dark Web. Tracing my intrusion would lead them there, and maybe to the general area of Cabot Cove, but not back to me. At least, I don’t think so. I’m safe.”

  “You mean you think you’re safe.”

  “Reasonably.”

  “Reasonably, Chad?”

  He shrugged his narrow shoulders. “This has never happened to me before, so it’s hard to know for certain.”

  I didn’t want to look at the screen, at the man. “But what would have alerted someone to what you were doing? Why would they have noticed you running our man through facial-recognition software?”

  “I have no idea. Could be somebody’s protecting him or maybe it’s his file and identity that are protected, as in classified, or flagged, at some governmental level.”

  I took a deep breath and settled back in my chair. “Can you erase all evidence of what you found and how you found it?”

  “If I wanted to.”

  I leaned forward and clamped a hand on his shoulder. “You want to, Chad. You most certainly want to.”

  “I’d need to dump the entire hard drive to be sure.”

  “Then do it. Or leave the laptop here.”

  “So if whoever did the pinging manages to trace its location . . .”

  “This is my fault. I’m the one who put you up to this.”

  “I can’t let anything happen to you, Jessica.”

  “Just as I can’t let anything happen to you.”

  “I wanted to help, and I want to keep on helping.” Chad eased the laptop closed. “It was worth it. If it gets you closer to whoever killed Alyssa’s father, it was worth it.”

  Chapter Twenty-one

  I can’t remember another time when I felt more unsettled. My heart was in my mouth as I watched Chad back out of the driveway, half-expecting an armada of big black SUVs to close in on him as he pulled away. But he edged up the street, picked up speed, and was gone.

  I realized I’d been holding my breath and quickly inhaled. Then I closed the door, locked it again, and paced the living room while I tried to plan my next move. I’d been overlooking the fact that nothing of substance had been found in the murdered Eugene Labine’s hotel room. Nothing besides clothes and toiletries. Not a briefcase, a satchel full of papers, nothing containing any documents at all. Labine had come to Cabot Cove for the express purpose of confronting Hal Wirth with his financial malfeasance. It stood to reason, then, that Labine would’ve brought proof in the form of documents to make his point.

  But there was nothing.

  What had I stumbled onto? What had Hal stumbled onto?

  I tried to settle my thoughts, compartmentalize them to make sense of everything. But my mind was racing too fast, the disparate pieces of the puzzle hanging before me like cobwebs.

  Hal registers on a dating service site, his entire profile made to disappear after a single date.

  Not long after that date takes place, he opens several lines of credit totaling more than ten million dollars, which has remained unaccounted for.

  He hides all that from Babs and his former business partner and is murdered at his annual Labor Day party.

  Then his business partner shows up in town and gets murdered, too, albeit in far less subtle fashion. A bullet to the head instead of a syringe jabbed . . . somewhere.

  Whom might Hal have owed money to? What had he gotten himself involved in that led to his murder and what did it have to do with LOVEISYOURS?

  That was as close as I could come to assembling the pieces, because I was still missing too many of them. But Chad had served up my next step on a silver platter, I thought, walking back into the kitchen, where he’d left the piece of paper listing the time and date stamps of all the cities in which Porcelain Man, as I’d come to think of Hal’s potential murderer, had shown up in the past eleven months.

  My phone rested next to it. I checked the screen and saw I’d missed a call from Mort while I’d been pacing the living room. Since he hadn’t bothered to leave a message, he must not have anything new to tell me. It was I who had something new to tell him.

  But I wasn’t ready yet.

  There was something else I needed to check first.

  * * *

  • • •

  Cabot Cove’s library was located on the other side of town from my house, not far from the Hill House, where Eugene Labine had been murdered. As the last of the day’s light burned from the sky, I wheeled the old bicycle I’d put out with the trash a thousand times but never got rid of, because of the memories it carried. It’s the one I used for bike rides with Frank, and though I’d discarded his bike long ago, I’d hung on to mine. A good thing, since I’d need it while my newer one was being repaired.

  The bike was wobbly, the tires low on air, conspiring to make the ride to the Cabot Cove Library miserable in all respects, even before rain dotted the air with the promise of a late summer storm. I reached the library just as the skies opened up, ushering in a premature night.

  I’d been a supporter of the library and member of the Friends group ever since I came to Cabot Cove. It’s a quaint old one-story building, surprisingly spacious for a town of our size and crammed with books from floor to ceiling, and in every nook and cranny where more could be squeezed. This in spite of the fact that at any given time a third of the entire inventory was checked out. Our librarian, Doris Ann, hated parting with any book, no matter the space requirements; she grew attached to them as if they were all her own children.

  I parked my bike beneath the overhang set directly before the entrance and leaned it up against the railing. I had forgotten to bring along a chain, which made me reflect fondly on the time when nobody in Cabot Cove would even think of using one, or of locking the front door at night, for that matter. All that has changed now, what with the influx of new people and development. Used to be you could walk along Main Street and know everyone you passed by name—or at least three out of every four. Now that ratio seems to have reversed amid demographic changes and an aging populace’s inability to afford the cost of living here. When I’m pedaling about our pristine village, there are days where it seems to have barely changed at all, and other days where I can barely recognize it. I neither bemoan nor lament the change, given that there’s nothing I can do about the likes of Deacon Westhausen altering the town’s nature, as well as its footprint.

  But I could do something about making sure Hal Wirth’s killer was brought to justice.

  Given the hour, and the old bike’s weathered condition, I wasn’t worried about leaving it unchained no matter how much Cabot Cove had changed. Doris Ann smiled at my approach from her lonely perch at the checkout desk.

  “Research for your next bestseller, Jessica?” she posed.

  “I guess you could say that,” I said, forcing a smile.

  I’d relied on the library for all my Web-based research for years, after stubbornly resisting switching from a typewriter to a computer. I’d been unwilling to give up the familiar and comforting clack of the typewriter keys hitting paper, and when I finally climbed out of the Stone Age, I wondered why I hadn’t done it sooner. That said, force of habit left me doing the bulk of my Web-based research on the library’s computers to this day. And it also gave me an excuse to get out of the house and clear my head.

  Amazing how much the space and the machines had evolved over the years. The comput
er area had once been a ratty old closet. Now the cubicled stations filled the library’s periodicals room. My Friends of the Library group had endowed the building fund with a special stipend to purchase new machines at regular intervals so as to never be caught behind the times, once a familiar refrain here in Cabot Cove until our tiny town became trendy and fashionable. “A Hamptons of the North,” Evelyn Phillips had recently proclaimed in the Gazette, a headline that made me cringe, loathing even the suggestion of such a thing, given what I knew about those fabled Hamptons. It was hard to stomach the thought of turning the town’s identity over to the likes of Deacon Westhausen.

  As expected, at this hour, and with the weather, I was the only one about in the periodicals room, as well as in the library itself. I sat down in the middle of three computers on the long table divided into cubicles, glad to see the machine was already on, saving me the bother of booting it up. I removed the sheet of paper Chad had printed out for me that contained the times and dates of all the cities where Porcelain Man had landed, in addition to Boston’s Logan Airport.

  I had a plan as to how I was going to proceed, but my expectations that it might actually yield anything of promise were low. My thinking, thanks to that overactive imagination of mine, was wildly speculative, but this was where the trail had brought me and I intended to follow it for as long and as far as I could. I figured I’d waste a few hours and would ultimately come up empty.

  I couldn’t have been more wrong.

  * * *

  • • •

  I started with Denver, making careful scrutiny of the obituary pages for the week following Porcelain Man’s visit. The fact that Chad had managed to find him present in at least these six other cities in approximately a one-year time frame suggested the possibility of a pattern that could fit with Hal Wirth’s murder. It was a long shot, especially given we still had no actionable evidence that Porcelain Man had killed Hal in the first place. The fact that he hadn’t worked for the Boston-based temp agency Cabot Cove Catering employed, coupled with his happening to be in the kitchen right around the time of Hal’s apparent heart attack, even pocketing what appeared to be a syringe, didn’t amount to very much from an evidentiary standpoint. Even though he had been identified on the grounds of Hill House the night of Eugene Labine’s murder, and that further strengthened his status as a suspect, there was still no firm proof.

  The Denver Post was one of the numerous papers that Doris Ann subscribed to, and its online obituary listings were voluminous. As I began perusing the listings, I made a mental check-off list of what I was looking for, based on Hal’s profile: successful, middle-aged men who’d died suddenly of a heart attack. I pulled a pen and pad from my bag and rested them on the table next to me on the other side of the computer mouse and added a few more items:

  RECENT FINANCIAL SCANDAL OR ISSUES

  DIVORCED OR WIDOWED

  DATING SERVICE?

  STRICKEN IN A PUBLIC PLACE

  Sure enough, on the third day following Porcelain Man’s arrival in the Denver area, a fifty-three-year-old successful real estate entrepreneur died unexpectedly while attending a retirement party for a friend. He’d collapsed after reportedly feeling ill.

  There were four other possibilities reported in the Denver Post obituary listings, but the real estate entrepreneur checked the most boxes, and I decided to Google him to see what I could find before proceeding on to the next city. And—wouldn’t you know it?—a headline immediately caught my eye:

  REAL ESTATE SCION ACCUSED OF FRAUD

  Details in the article were sketchy, but bore a remarkable resemblance to Hal’s financial plight. Specifically that the man had leveraged virtually his entire fortune to borrow millions of dollars that were unaccounted for at the time of his death.

  Just like Hal.

  The money, by all accounts, had disappeared without a trace.

  Again, just like Hal.

  I jotted down the man’s name and a few notes, then hit Print to make a copy of the article so I could show it to Mort to prove whatever case I was trying to make.

  I moved on to Houston, the Houston Chronicle specifically, and found on its obit pages a name that jumped out at me because of the boxes it checked. A recently divorced lawyer had suffered a heart attack while attending a Houston Rockets basketball game. I Googled his name as well and clicked through to an article in the same newspaper, featuring the headline LAWYER ARRESTED ON CLIENT CHARGES HE BILKED THEM OUT OF MILLIONS.

  I couldn’t help but lean forward to read the rest of the article, the bright screen seeming to flutter as I got close. The lawyer had died the day after Porcelain Man had been recorded by a security camera arriving at Houston’s Hobby Airport.

  So right now I was two for two, when I had initially expected to come away empty-handed. For all I knew, that was still the case. Maybe if I studied the obituary section of any daily big-city paper, I’d find someone recently deceased who fit Hal’s pattern perfectly, but who’d died without any nefarious means involved. Then again, it was getting to the point where the emerging pattern couldn’t be so easily dismissed.

  Miami was next on my list, where the profile that best fit the pattern belonged to a woman. I hadn’t been expecting that. But there it was, a victim who checked each and every one of my boxes, with the one glaring distinction that it was a she.

  Shelby Lynn Dietrich was actually a single woman who, the obituary made a point of saying, “died suddenly and unexpectedly.” It said nothing about a heart attack, but said plenty about her entrepreneurial successes and her obsession with feats like climbing the tallest mountains in the world and sailing the globe.

  Not what you’d expect from someone stricken so suddenly and unexpectedly.

  I imagine suicide might’ve been suspected by some, since, according to the Miami Herald, Shelby Lynn Dietrich had recently been arrested on charges of wire fraud and misappropriation of funds from a successful start-up she’d launched eighteen months before her death. In the article she wholeheartedly proclaimed her innocence and insisted she’d be exonerated.

  I looked at the phrase “misappropriation of funds” again and thought of Eugene Labine, Hal Wirth’s murdered former business partner, uncovering the fact that Hal had squandered a vast fortune in a remarkably fast period of time.

  Listening to the printer purr to life after receiving another article to spit out, I was convinced that I’d indeed locked onto an inexplicable pattern of potential murders and that Hal Wirth perfectly fit the mold. What I’d been intimating to myself and others had now been lifted from the shadows of pure speculation into the light of likelihood. I needed to share this with Mort. I needed to find out what else these other victims had in common with Hal. Might they have registered on the LOVEISYOURS matching site, too? Could this all be as simple as that?

  A difficult question to answer, given that their profiles had likely been wiped off the site, just as Hal’s had been.

  I rose, moved to the printer stand set against the wall, and had just retrieved the three printouts when all the lights in the library died.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  My first thought was Doris Ann had forgotten I was still in the library and had turned the lights off without alerting me. But my watch read only eight forty-five, still fifteen minutes until closing.

  “Doris Ann?” I called out. “Doris Ann.”

  I could hear my voice echoing through the cluttered stacks of books.

  “Doris Ann!” I called louder when no response followed.

  I couldn’t help but think of the brilliant Twilight Zone episode called “Time Enough at Last,” which starred Burgess Meredith in the role of a timid bank clerk who loves only to read. He has his ultimate wish fulfilled when the end of the world finds him aglow over the possibility of reading unencumbered for the rest of his life . . . until he breaks his glasses.

  No power outage had t
riggered the emergency lighting, meaning the lights had been manually turned off. The sole illumination came from what little light could sneak through the windows.

  I heard a soft clack, as if someone pawing through the library’s darkness had accidentally kicked something. I shuffled back to the table, lifted my bag from the floor to my chair. Then I fished my phone from my bag and hit 911. I buried it back deep inside my bag without waiting for my call to be answered, not wanting to speak even in a whisper to further advertise my presence. Then I switched the monitor off, plunging the periodicals room into almost complete darkness, and pressed my shoulders against the far wall.

  A slight scraping sound, like shoes dragging over the library’s original wood floor, found me, growing louder as it neared the periodicals room, set farthest back in the building. The three crank windows that looked out over a small garden were vertically aligned, much too narrow to squeeze through even for someone as slight as me. That left . . .

  Left what?

  In my books, when my characters got boxed into corners, they always found something to make use of, forging weapons from ordinary objects. With my heart pounding and no sirens screaming this way yet, I quickly catalogued what I recalled of the room in intricate detail.

  Clack.

  Whoever was coming had struck another obstacle, not nearly as familiar with these surroundings as I was. I’d often joked that I knew this place so well that I could walk about the stacks blind, a claim that was now being sorely tested. I longed for the days when heavy ashtrays abounded in places like this, making for the perfect weapon.

  Thud.

  Louder this time, the intruder almost to the entrance to the periodicals room. I glanced at the doorway as I backed up toward the magazine stacks, no shape or movement yet breaking the plane of my vision. I raised my hand to grab the end of the stacks for support, brushing against one of the sleeve bookends I’d personally donated, having amassed too many of them for my own book collection.