I still wasn’t entirely sure of what I’d seen, so I wiped the sweat from my eyes and climbed out of Mort’s cruiser, careful to close the door quietly behind myself. All I could picture was Porcelain Man descending on Mort and his deputies, catching them unaware.
Even if I was overreacting, I had to find Mort, had to alert him.
But I couldn’t spot him anywhere amid the shroud of fog and darkness and hadn’t caught any further glimpse of what I’d thought was a man’s shape since I’d stepped out of the car. I moved a few steps to my left toward the general direction of where all the new construction was happening and found a fissure through the fog, a clear path carved by a cooling breeze coming off the water. I glimpsed the dark shape again, wondering if I should cry out a warning, when the figure stooped as the cat he must’ve been looking for leaped into his arms.
Phew! I breathed an audible sigh of relief and started back toward Mort’s cruiser.
That’s when a dank, sweaty, soiled hand closed over my mouth.
Chapter Thirty-seven
I knew it was him, Porcelain Man, from a smell I’d detected rising off him in the library. Something more stale than odorous, a man whose lifestyle didn’t always include good habits of hygiene.
“Make a sound and I’ll kill you,” he said, his voice slightly above a whisper.
I felt something poking at my back—a gun barrel, I thought at first, but a sharp sting as it ripped into my blouse told me it was a knife instead. He pushed me past the row of cars still in the parking lot, heading toward all the unfinished construction, and I caught enough of his reflection in window glass to recognize him all too well: It was Porcelain Man, all right, though with what must’ve been a wig of thick hair restored.
“What a pain in the ass,” I heard him huff out in more of a rasp, uncertain that his words were directed at me, until he repeated them. “What a pain in the ass you are.”
The way he was cupping my mouth, so my head was cocked backward from pressure beneath my chin, kept me not only from crying out but also from biting into him. Not that I would have done so given the chance, not with that knife poking at my spine. The best I could do was hope Mort or one of his deputies spotted us—unlikely, given their focus on the boat in Slip 41. I guessed the man had been hiding out there when not killing, or trying to kill, residents of Cabot Cove.
I could see he was pushing me toward the unfinished Westhausen Garden. We were weaving in and out of the labyrinth created by piles of lumber layered amid construction equipment and vehicles. I could hear the currents lapping gently against the shoreline, caught glimpses of the docks bobbing lightly up and down under their force. As soon as we reached the unfinished structure, currently with tarpaulins flapping where the finished roof would eventually reside, I knew he was going to kill me, because that’s what he did. To Hal Wirth and Eugene Labine in Cabot Cove, not to mention who knew how many people in cities across the country.
I cursed myself for involving Chad and Alyssa in this whole sordid episode, realizing with choking fear that I had endangered their lives, too. It was a safe bet Porcelain Man knew of their involvement, and once he finished with me, he’d be going for them next.
That meant I had to find a way to overcome my assailant. If I didn’t survive, then neither would they.
Porcelain Man pushed me past a myriad of construction vehicles en route to the future Westhausen Garden, and my eyes searched for anything I could use as a weapon. I caught sight of something beneath the fog, an object resting on the soft ground near where construction workers had begun to lay a stamped concrete walkway that would lead from the area of the docks to the sprawling new structure. I recognized from a book I’d once researched the rakelike tool that was used to smooth out the concrete prior to the stamping process. The object I had glimpsed had to be that—this thought unfolding in two seconds, maybe, three at most. I’d have to time my move perfectly and hope fortune was on my side, but what choice did I have? If I died, then likely Alyssa and Chad would, too, and probably Babs. I’d go from musing about becoming their savior to causing them to follow Hal Wirth from this world.
Unacceptable, I thought, just a step away from the smoothing rake.
My next awkward, lunging step brought my soft shoe down on its head, launching the rake’s broom-handle-like base into the air. It whistled past me as I twisted sideways, the move having the added benefit of distracting Porcelain Man from the handle making a beeline for his face.
I heard the crack of impact against his cheek and nose, and chose that moment to pull from his grasp, relieved he was wielding a knife instead of a gun, which he would’ve otherwise used to shoot me, as I scampered away deeper into the labyrinth of construction vehicles and neat stacks of lumber. Weaving my way in and out of the rows, I was afraid to cry out for help for fear of alerting Porcelain Man to my position. My intention at that point was to work my way circuitously back toward the general area of the docks where Mort and his deputies were concentrated.
Bang!
A gunshot split the night and a section of lumber just over my head showered wood splinters into the air, some lodging in my hair. I gave up trying to work my way to Mort’s position; surely he and his deputies had heard the gunshot and would be working their way toward me instead. In the meantime, I had to keep moving, out of Porcelain Man’s sight line and aim.
I emerged from the mazelike confines to find the unfinished Westhausen Garden straight ahead. I charged through ground littered with refuse that had been torn up by the heavy construction vehicles. I nearly tripped when another bullet whistled past me, a miss only because I was doubled over.
There were no stairs leading up to the shell of the future Westhausen Garden, so I tried to leap the meager rise, only to find it much steeper than my first glance had revealed. I didn’t make it and had to hoist myself through the eventual multidoored entry, pulling myself across the floorboards as another two bullets whizzed over my head.
A powerful odor burned my mouth and filled my lungs, nearly overcoming me. I recognized it as varnish or stain, not from research but from work I’d tried to do around the house to hardly favorable results. The walls looked shiny under the glow of numerous heat lamps set up to make the stain dry faster to prevent construction on the amphitheater from falling further behind schedule.
I reclaimed my feet and launched back into motion, but then tripped on a thick orange extension cord rigged to one of the heat lamps and I went down hard. As I pushed up to rise again, I felt a hand close on my hair and yank me painfully upright, jerking my head back enough so that I could glimpse Porcelain Man just before he closed his free hand over my throat. I flailed wildly, desperately, anything to free myself from his grasp. I sucked in as deep a breath as I could while we wheeled across the floor, banging into one of the heat lamps, which teetered and then toppled over.
I heard the crackle of its bulb exploding and felt Porcelain Man’s grasp slacken enough for me to use the nearest weapon I had at my disposal: my teeth. I sank them into the back of his hand as hard and deep as I could, and he gasped and jerked his hand away. Stumbling a bit as he groped for me again, he banged into a wheelbarrow piled high with rags soaked in the same stain that coated the drying walls. The wheelbarrow toppled over, the pile of rags covering the fallen heat lamp like a blanket.
I’d already twisted around to run away by then, hearing Porcelain Man’s feet thud after me across the wood flooring just before a poof! sounded. I felt an intense surge of heat blast by me and I swung back to find the pile of rags had erupted into an inferno that overtook Porcelain Man. The amphitheater’s darkened interior was suddenly awash in a brilliant flash of flame that swallowed him from head to toe, turning him to little more than an indiscernible shape trapped behind a fiery curtain.
Then I heard the screams, high-pitched, deafening wails that made my ears ring. Porcelain Man had vanished altogether inside a blanket of orange
crusted with a reddish hue. I’d never heard, nor could I have imagined, anything like the screams that continued to split the sudden wash of heat through the night air. Porcelain Man was now a fiery shape rushing in a blur from the unfinished structure out into the night. Moments later, I heard what sounded like a splash, indicating he’d jumped into the water to douse the flames that had consumed him.
The way into the amphitheater had been utterly blocked by the flames feeding off the formaldehyde soaked into the wood. I lost my breath at the thought I was trapped, before swinging in the other direction through the shorter flames that had begun to sprout in that section of the structure as well.
I caught sight of a door, a dark chasm alight in the glow from the fire, and rushed toward it, doing my best to dodge the rising flames. I tumbled through a future emergency exit out of the structure to the ground, into a night that felt cool by comparison despite the fetid humidity. I back-crawled from there, aware now that the wall timbers were catching fast, the entire structure an inferno coughing fluttering embers into the night. As I watched the embers lighting the darkness and chasing away the fog, arms fastened tight around me and dragged me farther away from the heat of the flames.
I looked up and recognized Deputy Andy and one of his fellow deputies, as Mort rounded a corner between a front loader and a backhoe and dropped his hands to his knees to catch his breath. Before he could, though, headlights blazed through the night, seeming to stop when they hit the flaming shell of the building.
Men spilled from what looked like a dozen vehicles, big dark SUVs mostly, all wearing tactical vests and wielding automatic weapons.
“Dejong!” I heard one of them near the front bellow in Mort’s direction. “Dejong! Where is he?”
Mort had his hands in the air, didn’t respond, the speaker and the rest of the armed-to-the-teeth SWAT-like squad holding their positions, lit by the shroud of flames increasing their hold on the night.
“The water!” I cried out, realizing who Dejong must be, though not who these men were or what they were doing there. “He jumped into the water!”
The men surged past me, their heavy boots thumping over even the volume of the crackling flames and the crumbling wood frame of what would’ve been the Westhausen Garden. I could feel the whoosh of air as they charged past me, a single black wave silhouetted by an orange tint from the glow of the flames, rushing in the general direction of where Porcelain Man had disappeared into the night and the water.
“Well, you’ve really gone and done it this time, Jessica,” Mort Metzger said, crouching over me, still trying to catch his breath. “Wait until the mayor and selectmen hear about this.”
I watched the flames consuming what remained of the building’s shell, wondering what was transpiring in the waters beyond them.
“They can bill me,” I told Mort.
Chapter Thirty-eight
The battle-garbed commandos, it turned out, were FBI, CIA, or something similar—I never found out for sure. They’d been drawn to Cabot Cove after Chad had hacked databases in search of Porcelain Man’s true identity. The ping he’d detected had been the product of someone recognizing his clearly serious interest in a much-wanted fugitive. Armand Dejong, it turned out, was a private contractor who’d left a trail of bodies both during his special ops military career, which had ended dishonorably, and after, when his deadly services became available to the highest bidder.
The special ops team had followed the trail to Chad’s computer at the Wirth home, where Harry McGraw had put up a fuss for all of three seconds before telling Chad he’d better come to the door right away. One of them, Harry probably, had told the team where they could find me and, thus, hopefully Dejong. Harry had guessed he must have been hiding out on that cabin cruiser with the registration ME2006Y.
Two mornings later, a fully recovered Mort took me and Seth Hazlitt to breakfast at Mara’s Luncheonette, toasting me with his coffee mug.
“To Jessica, who cracked yet another case and brought yet another murderer to justice.”
I didn’t raise my tea. “The body of that murderer still hasn’t been recovered, and I haven’t cracked anything.”
“Uh-oh,” I heard Seth mutter.
“Whoever hired Dejong to do their bidding is still out there.”
Mort looked toward Seth. “What do you think the chances are of her giving up the ghost?”
“Not very good, ayuh.”
“Oh, man,” Mort followed, turning his gaze on me. “I’m guessing you’ve got an idea of where to go next.”
“As a matter of fact,” I told him, “I do.”
* * *
• • •
The wheelchair-bound man I’d known as Richard Fass when we’d dined in New York lived in a fancy Chelsea apartment that featured a wonderful view of the iconic Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue. His real name was Mark Falco and he answered the knock on his door from a pair of NYPD detectives who’d accompanied Mort and me there. Only this time, Mark Falco was standing on two feet instead of sitting in a wheelchair.
Falco’s gaze drifted past the detectives and settled upon me. “I thought I recognized you.”
“I’d like to say I get that a lot, but I really don’t.”
He shook his head in bemused fashion, the detectives holding their ground on either side of him, stopping just short of drawing their guns. “Done in by a paperback pulp writer who makes shit up for a living.”
“Actually, Mark, my books are published in hardcover as well. E-book, too.”
“How’d you figure it out?”
“It started with your sneakers,” I said, looking down to see he was wearing the very same ones. “I looked them up online. Turns out they cost almost three hundred dollars per pair. You want to tell me what kind of man bound to a wheelchair spends three hundred dollars on sneakers?”
He shrugged, waiting for me to continue.
“Then there was the wheelchair. Once I drew my conclusions from the sneakers, I asked myself, why bother with such a ruse? I’m guessing because it was the perfect way to hide the machines that lifted all the data from my cell phone. Tell me, were they built into the chair’s arms?”
“How’d you know?”
“Just a guess, actually. Sometimes it pays to be lucky instead of smart.”
“I thought the phrase was ‘lucky instead of good,’” Falco said, watching the detectives draw closer on either side of him.
“That, too. You can still help yourself out here, Mark.”
“Do I have to go out on another date with you?”
“I was thinking more like telling us everything you know here and now. I count a whole bunch of New York judges among my most ardent fans. Who knows? You might draw one of them and I’d be happy to put in a good word for you, even include the name of the judge’s favorite grandkid in my next book.”
“I can’t help you, because I don’t know anything. I do the deed, transfer the data, and get paid. Bing, bang, boom. Nothing else and nothing more.”
“Why don’t you tell me about the bing, the bang, and the boom and let me be the judge of that?”
* * *
• • •
I found Deacon Westhausen on the beautiful oceanfront property he’d purchased to build his lavish mansion and estate after the town had agreed to rezone a stretch of protected wetlands. That in return for his financial support of the marina expansion project, along with construction of the now incinerated Westhausen Garden.
In my mind, all thirty thousand square feet and four floors of the seaside mansion was an abomination from any perspective, a portrait in opulent decadence totally out of character in the rustic world of Cabot Cove. It was meant to be palatial, but its curves, angles, and notches, coupled with gilded doors and lavish marble accoutrements, made for a portrait in excess. It was more extravagant than exceptional, offering a window into the heart
and soul of the man who’d built it. Had the mansion been located on a hill, instead of on the water, it might well be likened to Dracula’s castle, the appropriateness of the comparison hardly lost on me, given the purpose of my visit.
“Jessica Fletcher!” Deacon Westhausen beamed when he saw me. “What brings Cabot Cove’s second-most-famous resident to my soon-to-be humble abode? Maybe to give me a check for destroying my arena.”
“You mean the former Westhausen Garden?”
“Almost as good as having my name on the top of a book jacket.”
“Well, Deacon, you do have quite a story to tell.”
He was dressed casually, mingling with the workmen toiling through the last of the construction on the sprawling home, which hadn’t been ready in time for summer due to delays caused by lingering battles with the EPA and the state Department of Environmental Management. I guess Westhausen hadn’t been able to buy off everyone.
“Starting with how you made a sizable portion of your fortune draining the assets of others,” I continued. “Tell me, how many victims were there? How many people did you rob and send Armand Dejong, or men like him, to kill so there’d be no trail? How many fake heart attacks and accidents did you cause?”
Westhausen showed no reaction to my accusation at all, not even breaking a sweat. The only thing he broke into was a wide smile.
“Sounds like a great plot for a book, Jessica.”
I shook my head. “Lacks credibility. Nobody would believe it.”
“Really?”
“Really. We’re probably talking about dozens of murders all over the country, maybe even the world. A high-tech crime spree I’m guessing has been going on for years with no signs of stopping. Until now.”
Murder, She Wrote--A Date with Murder Page 23
