Manuscript for Murder

by Jessica Fletcher

  “So you’re not taking my calls anymore,” he greeted me gruffly.

  “I’ve been kind of busy.”

  “How many bodies this time?”

  “One,” I told him, “with another in the wind.”

  Harry hesitated. “Wait, I was kidding. You’re not serious, are you?”

  “I’m standing twenty feet from the body right now.”

  “Hell of a week you’ve had, Jess.”

  “It’s not over yet, Harry. Still another couple days to go.”

  “Not at this rate,” he said dryly.

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re very welcome. You didn’t sign up for my sensitivity plan.”

  “Sensitivity plan?”

  “Costs more, my top rate. On account of the fact that it’s so out of character. Just ask my ex-wives and kids.”

  “Are they ex-kids, too, Harry?”

  “Except when they need money. Can you talk?”

  I looked around. None of the cops or just-arrived crime scene technicians in yellow windbreakers looked back.

  “Maybe they think I lost my dog or something,” I told Harry.

  “In other words, yes,” he said. “Which is good, because I’ve got something on Benjamin Tally.”

  * * *

  • • •

  “Fingerprints, dear lady.”

  “I’m all ears, Harry.”

  “Whose would you expect to find on the title page of that manuscript you gave me?” he asked me.

  “Lane Barfield’s for sure, and maybe his assistant, Zara’s.”

  “Right on both counts.”

  “Wait, how’d you match their fingerprints?”

  “You mean, because neither’s likely to be in the system, right? Simple: I lifted a pen from Barfield’s desk and a coffee mug from what’s-her-name’s.”

  “Zara. You mean you stole the pen and coffee mug.”

  “What are you, my moral arbiter now?”

  “Just keep talking, Harry.”

  “So, I get a contact in the NYPD’s intelligence unit to lift any prints he can from the title page and match them to Barfield’s and Zara’s.”

  “And?”

  “They found a ton of prints matching one or the other, as expected. There were four other sets they were able to lift as well, along with smudges and fragments from several more. Of all those, it turns out one set belonged to somebody in the system.”

  I realized I was pacing about, so anxious my mouth had gone bone-dry. “Who, Harry?”

  “That’s where I hit a wall. My contact got frozen out, couldn’t access our would-be author’s prints.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “I had the same thought. My contact said he was blocked because he didn’t have clearance to access the file.”

  “And we’re talking about an analyst in NYPD’s Intelligence Bureau?”

  “Last time I checked.”

  “You call Artie Gelber?”

  “He hates my guts.”

  “No, he doesn’t.”

  “The whole NYPD does. I lead all five boroughs in unpaid parking tickets. Over five figures, when the late fees are factored in.”

  “So pay them.”

  “If certain clients would pay their bills, maybe I would.”

  “You never send me any, Harry.”

  “I must’ve lost your address, and now your house burned down. Anyway, you need to contact Artie, because I don’t want to be the one explaining to him how we went behind his back.”

  “Good point.”

  “So, how are things down your way, Jess? Anybody try to kill you again lately?”

  “A little more than an hour ago.”

  “Fire again?”

  “Twelve-gauge.”

  His tone flattened. “Wait a minute, you’re not kidding.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I figured I’d call Lieutenant Artie Gelber later, maybe on the way back to Cabot Cove from Somerville after the dust settled here. The on-scene supervisor, whose name I forgot a moment after he introduced himself, finally got around to questioning me about my part in this, at which point I confirmed Mort’s story, leaving the man shaking his head.

  “And you’re not a detective or investigator of any kind?” he asked, still trying to process all of this.

  “No, I’m a mystery writer.”

  He looked at me skeptically. “Why haven’t I heard of you?”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah. Do you know James Patterson?”

  * * *

  • • •

  I gave Mort my take on things, once we were headed north on 93. He nodded through my analysis, having formed the same conclusions himself. Somerville police canvassed homes on both sides of the block, including the one we believed Tommy Halperin’s killer had emerged from. That was the only house where no one answered the door, and a uniformed officer was posted while they waited for a warrant to search it.

  We didn’t need to stick around to learn what they’d uncover at that point. I had already convinced myself that whoever lived in the house was long gone. Halperin had shown up in a panic at the home of his fellow in crime and the man had killed him in order to avoid whatever baggage Tommy was lugging along for the ride. Maybe he figured Tommy was sure to talk if caught and had killed him to curry favor with the employer he’d now rely on to help him disappear. We’d have to wait for an identity on the suspect before coming to any definitive conclusions.

  The fact that these two men were almost surely behind the attempt on my life, and likely the murders of Alicia Bond and the park ranger, didn’t mean they were the ones responsible for the deaths of Lane Barfield and Thomas Rudd. And they couldn’t be behind the murder of A. J. Falcone, all the way across the country, or Zara’s disappearance. That meant whoever was silencing all those with a connection to The Affair had a virtual army at their disposal.

  “I think we’re headed in the wrong direction,” I said to Mort suddenly.

  “Am I supposed to know what you’re talking about?”

  “The answer’s south, Mort, not north.”

  “New York?” he asked me.

  “No, Washington.”

  * * *

  • • •

  It wasn’t the first time I’d formed that thought, just the first time I’d verbalized it, and it left Mort shaking his head.

  “Know something?” he said after a pause. “If anybody’s ever going to solve the Kennedy assassination, it’ll be you.”

  “We’d have to drive to Dallas for that, Mort. And I was speaking figuratively about Washington, not literally.”

  “But that’s where you think this is headed, even if we’re not? Someone in the hallowed halls of power trying to keep some secret worth killing a whole bunch of people over.”

  I nodded, not bothering to add it was all over a manuscript, when Mort’s phone rang over his Bluetooth and he answered the call by pressing a button on his steering wheel. Too bad my new bicycle didn’t come with that.

  “Mort, it’s Dick Mann.” The voice of Cabot Cove’s fire chief resounded through all the SUV’s speakers. “Is Mrs. Fletcher with you?”

  “Isn’t she always?”

  “Your office told me the two of you were together. Means I can share some news with both of you at the same time.”

  “My house didn’t burn down again, did it, Dick?” I asked him.

  “No,” he replied. “But when I came into the station this morning, that manuscript of yours was gone.”

  Chapter Twenty

  “Missing from the freezer,” Dick added.

  I felt the air go out of me like I was a popped balloon. I’m not often at a loss for words, but this was one of those times.

  “I don’t k
now what to say,” Dick said apologetically.

  “What about security cameras?” I asked him, finding my voice.

  “We do have one but it’s been off-line for the past few months. Something else I dropped the ball on, Jessica.”

  “Dick, whoever did this wasn’t about to let themselves be seen anyway.”

  The fire chief of Cabot Cove chewed on that for a few moments. “I’m starting to get the feeling this manuscript was the reason you almost died the other night.”

  “Welcome to my world,” Mort interjected.

  Mort promised to stop by the fire station to investigate further as soon as we were back in town. I then told him about my conversation with Harry McGraw and the fact that Harry might have found the real author behind The Affair.

  “If you ran some fingerprints through the national database and you drew a blank because of some kind of flagging at some upper level, what would you think?”

  “That the owner of those prints was protected,” Mort said.

  “What does that mean exactly?”

  “It’s probably a bad choice of words. When a file is flagged, which is a very rare occurrence, it’s normally because the person is already a subject of another superseding investigation and that party doesn’t want any interference.”

  “So you’re talking FBI, something like that?”

  “If you’re lucky.” Mort frowned.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “It means that you might ultimately draw an explanation out of the Bureau. But if it’s NSA, CIA, DIA, Homeland Security, or straight military, forget it, because it likely means you’re looking into a person involved in something that has national security written all over it.”

  “Oh boy . . .”

  “Care to share a bit more about this book?”

  “Outrageous story utterly lacking in credibility that’s impossible to put down and stood an excellent chance of becoming a huge bestseller, until all trace of it disappeared.”

  I finally filled Mort in on everything from soup to nuts—starting with the murder of Thomas Rudd, followed by Lane Barfield’s suspected suicide, all evidence of the manuscript’s existence being wiped from the publisher’s database, and everything else right up until the events in Somerville.

  “This kind of stuff never happens in a J. B. Fletcher mystery, does it?” he noted at the end, referring to the name under which I published.

  “I’m starting to think J.B. is a lot smarter than me, Mort.”

  “Well, you did steal that neat trick with the nail polish from her,” he noted. “How’d you know it would work, by the way?”

  “I didn’t. Do you have any idea how often I tried it?”

  “I assumed that was the first time.”

  “Only the first time it ever actually came in handy.”

  He shook his head behind the wheel. “You must go through a whole lot of nail polish, Jessica.”

  * * *

  • • •

  With the manuscript no longer in my possession, through the course of the drive north I busied myself with a review, like a mental catalogue of its contents from the first page to the last one I’d read. I’m not talking about specific lines or incidents, so much as the subtext in the dialogue. In essence, I was searching my mind instead of the manuscript for something either Abby or Pace had said that might yield some clue as to what about The Affair made someone desperate enough to kill to make sure all evidence of its existence disappeared. Mort could tell I was deep in thought and kept the conversation to an absolute minimum, although he might as well have talked up a storm.

  Off the top of my head, there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that suggested some conspiracy or coming action some pseudonymous author had inadvertently stumbled upon. I wasn’t sure that even if I did find the real Benjamin Tally, he’d be able to tell me anything more. So I rewound further, not to content but to concept.

  A young man trained to be an assassin comes to the rescue of the first daughter, who overheard a conversation that marked her for death.

  Okay, that conversation was between her parents, the president and first lady, centering on the fact that she was someone else’s child and that she’d been kidnapped from the hospital by the same force behind Pace’s training. I could see why that made her a liability in commercial thriller fiction, but what might it have to do with real life? Could something as simple as the book’s concept be responsible for all that had transpired?

  I couldn’t see how. Our actual president and first lady, Robert and Stephanie Albright, had suffered a terrible tragedy when their daughter, an only child, died of an opiate overdose as a teenager, an event that ultimately defined him as a candidate climbing up the ranks all the way to the White House. Conservative polling estimates said the election had been tilted his way by a combination of the sympathy vote and the man’s passion for fighting the opioid crisis. In fact, his presidency could be traced back to a single, dramatic moment in the first debate among the candidates of his own party who were running, when he enjoyed a hopelessly low recognition rating.

  “I’m tired of losing young American lives on foreign battlefields,” a dovish rival who was the front-runner at the time had intoned. “I’m sick of the blood of our children being spilled toward no good end.”

  “Well,” the future president had responded, without waiting for the moderator to recognize him, “as the only parent up here who’s actually lost a child, I’d like to know what makes you qualified to tell anybody what end is ever good enough for their son or daughter to die for.”

  The crowd had exploded, leaping to its feet against all rules of debate protocol, launching Robert Albright to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. That remark, that debate, that signature issue, had become what defined the entire campaign. The American people seemed to like having this man in their homes, if only through the television. He spoke their language instead of Washington-speak. An online article covering the day of his daughter’s funeral went viral, helping to turn him into an everyman, that rare personality conjured by pop culture who actually had meat on his bones.

  There was no suggestion of anything like that in The Affair. Or, if there was, almost being burned alive had prevented me from getting to it. The third of the manuscript left unread might well have contained the answers I was seeking and would now likely never find. All I could use was what I’d read so far, and I continued to search for something beyond the tragedy that had turned a small-town congressman into the most powerful man in the world. Something in his presidency, or mired among current events in general, that The Affair suggested a salacious take on in true roman à clef fashion.

  For lack of a pad, and the fact that I got carsick when I tried to write or read while riding in a car, I made a mental list of what stood out the most to me about the manuscript, in no particular order:

  Infiltrating the White House through a secret underground tunnel . . .

  A powerful force ordering the president’s daughter killed because she’d learned of the existence of the Guardians . . .

  The fact that the president was actually doing this force’s bidding, was little more than a stooge for their efforts . . .

  The fact that this force, the Guardians by all indications, was moving to seize power in a way that would effectively erect a permanent government . . .

  I stopped my list there, too mentally exhausted to continue. I had the sense that I was missing something that was right in front of me, something hidden in plain sight. I could almost reach out and touch it, but every time I tried, it slipped from my grasp.

  * * *

  • • •

  Mort and I didn’t make it back to Cabot Cove until after dark. Mort insisted on doing a thorough check of my suite at Hill House before letting me inside.

  “I think I might send someone over to check this place for bugs,” he said.

&nb
sp; “Are you serious?”

  “Well, I know they’re not called bugs anymore, but besides that, you bet I am, Jessica. This isn’t the normal opposition you’re used to going up against.”

  “Which would be what exactly?”

  “Killers who lack a greater purpose.”

  “Mort,” I said, feigning shock, “you have been reading my books.”

  “I guess the secret’s out, then. Seems like the murders are always based on something personal.”

  “All the usual clichés, in other words.”

  “You said it, Jessica—I didn’t.”

  “I don’t have to tell you that the vast majority of murders are personal in nature, based almost exclusively on preexisting relationships. Strangers almost never kill each other—that’s the rule.”

  “The exception being that greater-purpose notion I just raised. It’s pretty obvious that Tommy Halperin and the partner who killed him this morning didn’t know Alicia Bond, that park ranger, or Jessica Fletcher.”

  I nodded, because I couldn’t think of a better way to respond. The Somerville police hadn’t shared with us the name of the likely suspect in Halperin’s murder, and I was sticking to my original assumption that it was someone else with a less-than-distinguished military background who’d hired himself out as a mercenary and was no stranger to killing, either.

  As today attested to.

  Similarly, I knew searching for any links between these men and the force behind all this would be a waste of time. There would be layers of insulation between them that made searching for any connection an exercise in futility. I was virtually certain that hired hands like Tommy Halperin, his partner, and whoever had arranged for A. J. Falcone’s death out west had no idea who they were really working for; you didn’t have to be a mystery writer to know that was the way things were done.

  Once Mort had departed, I found my thoughts returning to the current president. I had met him only once in person but I had come away very impressed by both his charm and his genuine nature. I knew the first lady far better, of course, since I’d participated in and helped coordinate all those fund-raisers carried out on behalf of efforts to promote literacy. . . . I actually had her personal cell phone number, though I hardly could imagine how I might broach with her a conversation regarding The Affair. This was an administration untouched by even the hint of scandal, and whatever in this manuscript had motivated a spate of murders seemed in no way connected to its inner workings.