The Murder of Twelve

by Jessica Fletcher

  “No.”

  “Of course, because you probably figure you’re my only client. Since you don’t pay your bills, I have to make a living somewhere.”

  “Harry—”

  “Anyway, my clients actually came before the bust that set the finance world on fire. They all suspected Bernie the bastard was up to something, but they had nothing to go on.”

  I measured my thoughts on what Harry had just told me. “Since when is that kind of forensic investigation your specialty?”

  “I’ve got a lot of specialties, little lady. When somebody’s about to ask me if I can handle something, my pat response is, ‘The answer’s yes. What’s the question?’ If I’m not an expert on something, I can learn fast.”

  Having seen him in action enough times, I knew there was no disputing that. I’d learned long ago Harry could handle pretty much anything, and nobody could educate himself on a particular area of interest quicker than he. It was as if he could scroll through an entire voluminous document and seize upon only the information with which he needed to acquaint himself. It was almost like his eyes and brain were connected on some kind of intuitive level.

  “So, what’d you learn about Loomis Winslow?” I asked him.

  “I’m getting to that. First, back to Madoff. I was able to gain access to that famous floor in the building even his sons couldn’t get onto.”

  “You impersonate someone from the SEC or something?”

  “Close. Try the New York City Health Department.”

  “Come again, Harry?”

  “You heard me. I knew the figurative front door would be locked, but you’d be surprised at how responsive people are when you show up at a side door telling them there are ditzem bugs running rampant through the walls, breeding up a storm and ready to break free.”

  “What’s a ditzem bug?”

  “Nothing. Doesn’t exist. I made it up. But I came complete with pictures of a particularly nasty bug species native to South America that looked like something out of a fifties horror movie. I was dressed for the part, with ID badge, hazmat suit, and sprayer. You’ve never seen people run out of an office so fast, all three of them at the same time, so fast one of them left their computer on.”

  “Bingo.”

  “Well, not exactly, but close. The contents of the computer I cloned onto a thumb drive was enough to reveal plenty of shady doings, but nothing directly related to my clients. Before I could dive any deeper, the feds stormed in and the whole thing blew up.”

  “Is that how a detective like Loomis Winslow would have handled things?”

  “A guy like Loomis works paper to find where the bodies are buried. From what I can tell, he was pretty much a one-man shop. Deliberate and thorough. The kind of guy you hear about through word of mouth, not the yellow pages.”

  “I’m not sure the yellow pages even exist anymore, Harry.”

  “Then why do I keep re-upping my ad? No wonder business is down. Good thing you’re there, Jess. I wouldn’t be able to pay the bills without you. Speaking of which, I’m caught up on almost everything—only three months behind now.”

  “Get back to Loomis Winslow. I assume you have no idea of what brought him to Cabot Cove.”

  “No, but it’s a safe bet money had everything to do with it. Somebody stealing, hiding, embezzling, extorting, or cheating somebody out of what they believed was rightfully theirs. All done under the radar to keep things in the family—that’s literally, in many cases. You go where the trail takes you.”

  “That’s it?”

  “It’s only been a couple hours, Jess.”

  “I’ve come to expect miracles from you, Harry.”

  “Miracles cost more. I’ll get back to you when I find one.”

  * * *

  * * *

  The snow was really picking up again by the time I rejoined Mort by the Lexus SUV. In the half hour or so we’d been there, only a single car had gone by, indicating that people were heeding the warnings not to venture out unless there was an emergency.

  “Glove compartment’s empty, Mrs. F.,” he reported. “Somebody didn’t want to make it easy for us to figure out who owns the car.” He rotated his gaze about, as if sniffing the air. “Challenge being, how exactly am I supposed to process the vehicle in this, going on the assumption it’s a potential crime scene? I’m not going to be able to get a State Police crime scene unit out here with this storm bearing down on us.”

  “Closing the doors and having the car hauled away will still leave any prints on the steering wheel, seats, insides of the doors, and dashboard intact, won’t it?”

  “A good lawyer might be able to argue about a contaminated chain of evidence, but we’re a long way from that right now. I’ll go for a wrecker right now and we can follow it to the impound lot to secure the scene.”

  I smiled, trying to picture Mort’s predecessor Amos Tupper saying something like that. The temperature was dropping as the storm drew closer, and the bite of the wind felt like sheets of frigid water slamming against my face.

  “Why don’t you wait in the car, Mrs. F.?” Mort offered, dangling the keys this time so I could switch on the engine to warm up.

  * * *

  * * *

  Mort joined me in the sheriff’s SUV a few minutes later to wait for the wrecker, activating the laptop computer attached to his dashboard to run the plates of the Lexus SUV. It booted right up, but Mort got nowhere when he tried to log on to a site that would normally have allowed him to identify the owner of the Lexus.

  Mort tapped the machine a few times, as if that might help jar the site to life, before finally giving up and leaning back in his seat with a sigh.

  “Must be the storm,” I noted. “Too many people inside their homes overloading the Internet.”

  “You can overload the Internet?”

  I nodded. “When too many try to log on at once, often in a time of crisis, absolutely.”

  “Well, whoever they are, we’ve got two people, maybe three, missing in a storm that’s going to kill anything it doesn’t bury. Otherwise, I might have called in a search party to scour those woods. Do that now and all we’ll end up with are more missing persons we may not find until the snow melts in the spring. Of course—”

  Whatever Mort was going to say next was interrupted by the crackle of the dispatcher’s voice over the radio.

  “Dispatch to Sheriff Metzger.”

  He unclasped the mic and raised it to his lips. “Go for Mort.”

  “Sheriff, patrol just brought in Hank Weathers to keep him from freezing in the storm.”

  “So put him in a cell and let him sleep it off, Marge.”

  “He says he witnessed a murder last night, Sheriff. Out at the old Cabot Company factory.”

  Chapter Five

  Mort drove back to the station as fast as he dared, careful especially to slow down well before we came to any intersections. Traffic was virtually nonexistent, and so far Ethan Cragg’s plows were keeping up with the storm, which had dropped somewhere between three and four inches of snow at just past three o’clock in the afternoon, with the main event still hours away.

  “That’s our luck, Mrs. F.,” Mort said as he eased the car to a halt in his reserved space, before it could slip into a skid. “We get a witness who drinks Jack Daniel’s the way most of us drink water.”

  I climbed out of the SUV just ahead of him and pulled up my hood. “Let’s hear what he has to say, Mort. You never know.”

  “You ever know Hank Weathers to get anything straight?”

  “Well . . .”

  “My point exactly.” Mort’s face grew somber. “Look, he’s a fellow vet, Iraq as well as Afghanistan. I look at him and I think I could just as easily be looking at myself.”

  I nodded, already feeling the chill in the open air. You think you know people so well, the
re’s nothing new you can learn about them. But Mort had just expressed compassion for the local town drunk whom no one else took seriously. I knew he was thinking that maybe this was the time Hank Weathers would get something right, something that might even help him regain his self-respect.

  Mort pushed open the door, holding it against the stiff wind that threatened to slam it up against the station wall, and I trailed him inside. In a chair at a desk vacated by a deputy currently out on patrol, Hank Weathers was seated with a blanket wrapped around his thin, knobby shoulders. He was a fixture in Cabot Cove, known for doing odd jobs to make ends meet, although he was prone more to pouring liquor down his throat than to putting food on his table. He had a rough, ruddy complexion, his face spotted by too much exposure to the sun back when he’d worked for fishermen who needed an extra hand at the docks after he received a medical discharge from the army. He was sipping from a steaming Styrofoam cup no doubt filled with coffee from the single-serve machine Mort had recycled here after his wife, Adele, had purchased an upgrade.

  Instead of taking Hank into his office, Mort spun a spare chair around and sat down facing him with me standing just to his right.

  “How’s the coffee, Hank?”

  “What’s she doing here?” he asked, crinkled face tilted in my direction.

  “Just getting out of the storm, like you.”

  “That woman stiffed me on a job. A lot of people in this town stiffed me on jobs. I file reports but you don’t do nothing about it.”

  Seth had warned me to stay clear of Hank Weathers because of his occasionally violent tendencies, a symptom of the PTSD that had followed him home from combat.

  “You looking for a job, Hank?” Mort asked him.

  “You hiring?”

  “Depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On what you saw at the old mill last night.”

  “I bunk there sometimes.”

  Mort nodded. “So I’ve heard.”

  “Cold last night. Couldn’t get warm. Figured I’d try my luck somewhere else. That’s when I saw him hurt that man.”

  “You saw who hurt what man?”

  Hank Weathers looked genuinely scared. “He was big, Sheriff—I mean really big,” he added with a hand raised well over his head. “A giant.”

  “And you saw this giant attack this man inside the old mill.”

  Hank nodded. “Hurt him bad.”

  “What did you see, exactly?”

  “I hid behind one of those big plank posts when I heard the noise. The man came in and was standing in a spot I’d cleared out to bed down. Then I peeked around the post and saw the big man pounce on him, swallow him up.”

  “Swallow him up,” Mort repeated.

  “I got scared and ducked back behind the post. Didn’t want him to hurt me, too. When I peeked next, the giant was dragging the man’s body across the floor.”

  I looked toward Mort; much of what we’d gleaned at the Cabot Manufacturing Company was potentially confirmed.

  “Did you get a good look at this giant?” I asked Hank Weathers.

  Hank hedged. “Er, no. But I saw the man he hurt being dragged around the corner. Who else could it have been?” His gaze tightened, as if he was seeing me for the first time. “Did I ever thank you for that book, Mrs. Fletcher?”

  I’d almost forgotten Hank stopping by the last Cabot Cove Library book sale I ran as chair of the Friends of the Library group. He was eyeballing a big coffee table book detailing every known breed of dog. He didn’t have any money, but I let him have it for free.

  “Yes, you did, Hank. What happened next?”

  He looked confused. “Next?”

  “After you saw the body being dragged across the floor.”

  “I was scared.”

  “I don’t blame you.”

  “I went out through the back, a broken window, in case the giant was still there. Didn’t want him to hurt me, too, because I realized who he was.”

  “Who?” Mort and I asked in unison.

  Hank Weathers turned his gaze about to make sure no one else was in earshot.

  “Bigfoot,” he whispered.

  * * *

  * * *

  Mort drove me back to Hill House through winds that rattled his SUV the whole way, threatening its precarious perch on the slick roads.

  “So, what do you think about our star witness, Mrs. F.?”

  “Well, he must have seen something.”

  Mort seemed to be enjoying himself at my expense. “But not Bigfoot.”

  “No, not Bigfoot.”

  He sighed. “I should have retired to a big city instead of a small town. I hate small towns.”

  “You left a big city.”

  “Well, maybe I should have stayed in New York.”

  “But then you never would have met me,” I reminded him.

  Mort dropped me off at the curb fronting Hill House and insisted on seeing me up the walk to make sure I didn’t slip, with the storm really starting to intensify. The wind was practically lifting me off my feet, which left me glad I’d opted for my lace-up winter boots that morning.

  “I’m going back to the station to do some more digging on Loomis Winslow before the storm gets really bad.”

  We were both kicking the snow from our path, feeling the snap of the biting wind we fought the whole way to the main entrance of the Hill House hotel. “What do you call this, Mort?”

  * * *

  * * *

  I’d barely shaken my arms out of my bulky parka when I spotted a woman rising from one of the lobby’s beautiful antique armchairs.

  “It’s true, then,” she said, beaming. “You really do live here.”

  I glanced about to make sure she wasn’t referring to someone else, then forced a smile. The woman had a casual elegance about her, expertly dressed and wearing fashionable heels in spite of the weather. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she was dressed this way in expectation of making my acquaintance since, when I’d first spotted her upon passing through the entrance, she looked as if she was waiting for someone.

  “Will you sign my book, Mrs. Fletcher?” the woman asked, extending a copy of my latest hardcover along with a pen.

  I could tell by the bend of the spine that my fan had already read it.

  “Nothing I enjoy more than signing a book after the fact,” I said, smiling genuinely.

  “I’ve read them all, each and every one. Some twice, a few even more times. When we scheduled the wedding up here in Cabot Cove, I swear I had no idea. Call it a fortunate coincidence.” The woman’s gaze drifted out the windows facing the front of the building. “Although this storm is proving to be anything but fortunate.”

  Then I remembered hearing Hill House had been rented out for a wedding currently scheduled for Saturday at the Cabot Cove Country Club. I say “currently” because this was Thursday, and given the severity of the storm, there was no guarantee the club would even be able to open forty-eight hours from now. We Mainers might be a hardy bunch, but three feet of snow was certain to test even our mettle.

  I stowed my wet parka over the back of another nearby chair, feeling instantly guilty for dampening the fabric. Pen and book in hand, I gazed down at the woman, who was several inches shorter than my five feet eight inches, even in her heels. She looked to be in her early to mid-sixties, though she boasted the platinum blond hair color of a woman half that age. The color looked natural on her and the designer clothes that I suspected were her normal garb, and not donned to impress me, fit her petite frame like a second skin. She had the look of money about her, balanced by a warm demeanor and pleasant smile.

  “Who should I make it out to?” I asked her.

  “Oh, of course. Listen to me, chatting away I’m so nervous. Constance Mulroy. Make it out to Constance, please. No, make that C
onnie, because that’s what my friends call me.”

  I read the inscription out loud, since my penmanship suffered as a result of composing it while standing. “For Connie—Too bad you didn’t save this for the storm. Here’s hoping for better weather when my next book comes out! Keep reading! J. B. Fletcher.”

  She smiled from ear to ear as I handed her book back to her. “You just made all this worthwhile, even if the wedding has to be rescheduled. My son and future daughter-in-law,” she added.

  “I’d heard a wedding party had rented the place out, save for my suite, of course.”

  “I can’t wait to tell the rest of the board of the library as soon as I’m home.”

  “Seems we have something in common, Mrs. Mulroy.”

  “Please, call me Connie.”

  “Well, Connie, I happen to chair the local Friends of the Library group here in Cabot Cove.”

  She grinned again. “And I’m vice-chair of the Library Advisory Council at Brown University. I must check to see if your first editions are housed in our collections at the John Hay Library.”

  I felt a bit smaller than I had just a few moments ago. “If not, I’m sure we could do something about that, and make sure they’re all signed to boot.”

  “Really? You’d make me a star.” She reached out and squeezed my shoulder with her free hand, the other clutching her signed book protectively against her side. “Thank you, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “It’s Jessica. And inscribing your book was my pleasure—believe me.”