The Murder of Twelve

by Jessica Fletcher

  “Can I confess something I’ve never told anyone else before?”

  “Of course.”

  “I don’t believe he killed himself. I think he staged his own death so he could disappear.”

  I wonder if Lois Mulroy-Dodge noticed the rise her supposition produced in me. “What makes you think that?”

  “My uncle was a survivor, Mrs. Fletcher. He always believed there was a way out, even when there wasn’t. I heard him say things to that effect on multiple occasions.”

  The young woman was getting at a potential rationale for why Constance Mulroy had hired Loomis Winslow: to find the missing millions before her “late” husband could claim them, her intention being to return to the victims of Heath Mulroy’s fraud whatever she found.

  “I don’t have any proof, of course,” Lois resumed. “But . . .”

  “Go on,” Seamus McGilray urged, before I had a chance to.

  Lois responded with her gaze fastened on me. “It was Mark, the way he was acting after the suicide, after the funeral. I knew something was wrong, kind of off.”

  “But you never asked Mark about it.”

  She shook her head, eyes pitched downward almost like she felt guilty about that.

  I decided to get back to the task at hand. “Does anything unusual stick out in your memory about the minutes before Constance Mulroy’s collapse?”

  “Going back how long?”

  “To the time everyone was seated.”

  “You don’t consider me a suspect, do you?”

  “I consider everyone a suspect,” I told her, “and there are indications there may be someone else in our midst who hasn’t shown himself yet.”

  “That’s frightening.”

  “Murder always is, Ms. Dodge. We were speaking of what you may have noticed after everyone was seated at the table.”

  She considered my question before responding. “I remember a server filling our wineglasses, and then refilling them. I remember because he poured the rest of a bottle into an empty glass after my aunt covered her glass when he was about to top it off.”

  “This would have been shortly before the toast she rose to give then,” I said, excited by the first hard piece of the timeline of Connie’s attempted murder.

  “Probably. Maybe. I really don’t remember exactly.”

  “So that was your aunt’s first glass of wine.”

  Her eyes widened. “I just remembered something else!”

  I urged her on with a nod.

  “When her glass was first filled, my aunt noticed a crack in the stem and gave it to the server. He returned with a fresh glass that had already been filled.”

  “Where from?”

  “That I can’t tell you. I assumed the bar area.”

  “How much time passed before your aunt’s wine was replaced?”

  “Let me see. . . . I’d taken a few sips from my own glass, and I’m a slow drinker. Five minutes, maybe?”

  So the wineglass the server filled at the bar might have sat awaiting his return for between five and ten minutes. Ample opportunity for whoever had topped off the glass with poison to manage the deed, especially if he or she chose a time when the bartender was otherwise engaged. This was more than a minor breakthrough, since I now had a much clearer notion as to when Constance Mulroy’s drink had been poisoned. And it was a much clearer notion as to how the killer had escaped our detection after stabbing Doyle Castavette to death moments before our entry into the bedroom.

  “You can’t consider me a suspect, Mrs. Fletcher,” Lois Mulroy-Dodge insisted. “You know I was with you when my cousin Mark was killed.”

  “I know you knocked on your aunt’s door on the pretext of seeing him. But none of us know right now when, exactly, he was killed. The timing doesn’t absolve you.”

  “But . . .”

  “What absolves you, to a degree, for now is your witnessing the broken wineglass, something that can easily be checked even if it was tossed in the trash. I can’t believe a murderer would draw attention to their own method that way.”

  The young woman breathed a hefty sigh of relief. “Thank you, Mrs. Fletcher.”

  “Don’t thank me yet. Remember, I only said ‘for now.’”

  * * *

  * * *

  “Who’s next, Mrs. Fletcher?” Seamus McGilray asked me, after we’d adjourned to the hallway.

  “I think it’s time we had a talk with Ian and Faye. The rest of the wedding party barely knows who they are, and even that might be generous. Let’s find out why.”

  Before I could head down the hall with Seamus, my phone rang with a call from Harry McGraw.

  “What do you want first, the weird news or the strange news?” Harry asked me, after I answered.

  “Take your pick.”

  “Doesn’t matter anyway. It’s all weird and strange. These birth records were actually a snap to locate, Jess. You didn’t tell me this involved Heath Mulroy, known in these parts as ‘the Mini Madoff.’”

  “I thought I had—at least I gave you his wife’s name, the one who hired Loomis Winslow.”

  “You’re talking to the racehorse of private investigators, my dear. I only focus on what’s immediately in front of me, so I missed the connection.”

  “I didn’t think anything escaped the world’s greatest detective.”

  “It doesn’t,” Harry told me. “But you’re stuck with me, since Sherlock Holmes wasn’t available. Anyway, it wasn’t hard to track down the family history, including the day his children were born. I’m looking at digitized versions of three birth certificates on what passes for a computer right now. How did we ever get along without these things?”

  “Seems to me we did just fine, Harry,” I said, intrigued by something he’d just noted. “You said three birth certificates, not two?”

  “The births took place at St. Catherine’s, a small hospital acquired around the turn of the century from the Catholic Church by Mass General Hospital, and Massachusetts law requires a birth certificate to be issued, even in the case of a stillborn. In this case, the parents even named him: Owen Francis Mulroy, to go with his surviving brothers, Daniel Patrick and Mark Andrew.”

  “That’s the one,” I said, nodding to myself, while down the hall Seamus knocked on Ian and Faye’s door. “Anything strike you as strange about the birth certificates themselves or any of the other material you came across?”

  “Just the fact that the accompanying death certificate for Owen Francis wasn’t issued until the following day. But since the births took place at night, I’m thinking that’s a clerical issue.”

  “Still an anomaly, though.”

  “I guess, depending on how suspicious your suspicious nature wants to be. Mother and the now-twins remained in the hospital for four days prior to discharge. Nothing else of note to report.”

  “Okay,” I said after giving his words a chance to settle, “now tell me the truth.”

  “About what?”

  “About whatever’s bothering you. I can tell there’s something. And you did mention weird and strange.”

  “Well, here’s something you can definitely file under weird. I just brought a digitized copy of the original hospital records up on my screen, the discharge portion specifically.”

  “And what do you see there that’s so weird, Harry?”

  “Constance Mulroy was checked out of the hospital on April twenty-third at one thirty p.m.”

  “So?”

  “So there’s no record of the surviving twins being discharged from the nursery. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the woman left the hospital empty-handed and her two infants never left there at all.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Which, of course, made no sense, the mystery continuing to deepen with the mounting snow outside. The most obvious explanat
ion for Harry’s discovery was a simple clerical error, made perhaps when the hospital records from so many years ago were all digitized by Mass General, which hadn’t even owned St. Catherine’s at the time Constance Mulroy gave birth to two living babies and a single stillborn one. If it hadn’t been for the circumstances, I would have bought that and been done with it.

  But it felt to me like something else, another factor, was to blame here. The problem was that I didn’t know what, and I resolved to ask Seth Hazlitt when time allowed. He’d delivered more than his share of babies over the years, although he was always complaining, falsely, about how much he despised the company of children.

  “I’m going to keep checking,” Harry resumed, “see if there’s something in the records I’ve missed somehow.”

  “You never miss anything, Harry.”

  “You mean besides my ex-wives? Oh,” he added, seeming to think of something else, “I checked out that other thing for you, too.”

  “What other thing?”

  “Now who’s missing things?”

  “It’s been a long night,” I said.

  “You know, those other mass murders, on the plane and at that wilderness retreat or hunting lodge.”

  Harry was right; I had indeed forgotten I’d even asked him to look into those.

  “And?” I posed.

  “You’re not going to like this, my dear.”

  “Par for the course tonight, Harry.”

  “The FBI does indeed suspect the same killer was behind both.”

  I wasn’t surprised by that, and I knew Harry McGraw wouldn’t be either. That meant there was something else.

  “And?” I prompted.

  “Surprised you didn’t notice this yourself.”

  “Notice what, Harry?”

  “The plane was four years ago; the lodge was two years ago. Both occurred the same week. This week, Jess. Happy anniversary.”

  * * *

  * * *

  Our call ended and, still shaking off the shock from that revelation, I joined Seamus in front of Ian and Faye’s room. “You didn’t have to wait for me.”

  “I didn’t. I’ve knocked several times.”

  “Again?” I said, shaking my head. “I wonder if I could have them arrested for being so detestable.”

  “A moot point until Sheriff Metzger arrives,” Seamus noted, taking his trusty pass key card from his pocket and running it through the slot.

  This time the door clicked open without a need to summon Eugene from the head of the hall.

  A mildly sweet odor pushed into my nostrils as I followed Seamus inside and froze at the sight of Ian and Faye resting side by side on the double bed, faceup, their bodies touching and their eyes locked open.

  Dead.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Open the window!” I cried to Seamus, fearing the room’s air would still be thick with the most likely cause of the couple’s death, carbon monoxide. “Break it if you have to!”

  Before I’d gotten a single word out Seamus was already in motion, realizing the same thing that I had. Clearly not wanting to break anything in his beloved establishment, he opened the window as wide as it would go, and the sill was covered immediately with snow from a wind gust that blew it into the dead couple’s room. In spite of that, he fought forward and forced his head and shoulders through the window, daring the storm.

  The snow was already collecting all around Seamus when he yanked himself all the way back inside, dragging a torrent of frigid air and a fresh blanket of snow with him.

  “The heat vents are blocked!” he said through the layer of snow that had crusted over his face, leaving only his ample mustache exposed.

  “By snow?”

  “Rags, it looks like, maybe cut-up bathroom towels. I can’t reach them, so I can’t be sure.”

  I was checking both Ian and Faye for a pulse to confirm their deaths, but the pink pallor of their complexions told me all I needed to know.

  “Carbon monoxide poisoning,” Seamus was saying, brushing the snow from his clothes.

  “But what about that smell?” I asked, uncomfortable with the anomaly I couldn’t explain.

  “Five now,” Seamus muttered, instead of answering my question. “Five victims of the twelve.”

  “Four,” I corrected. “Constance Mulroy’s still alive. And carbon monoxide doesn’t have a smell.”

  He sniffed the air, discerning the smell I’d noticed before. “What the bloody . . .”

  I was starting to feel light-headed. “Seamus, quickly!” I called.

  He fell into step behind me, the effects of the lingering gas taking longer with him because he’d been breathing outside air for a time. Once back in the hallway, he slammed the door behind us. The hulking Eugene heard the commotion and started to rush toward us, but an upraised palm from Seamus sent him back to his post.

  I was already calling Seth Hazlitt.

  “Please tell me Mort made it there. I haven’t been able to reach him, and I’ve tried a hundred times.”

  “Not yet, Seth.”

  “Then what are . . . Not another murder!”

  “Two. A couple, the best man and maid of honor.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “They died in their room. We think it may have been carbon monoxide,” I reported, not able to shake the fact that Loomis Winslow had been killed the very same way, except while he’d been duct-taped to the driver’s seat of his car.

  “We?”

  “Seamus McGilray and I,” I told Seth.

  “The hotel manager? What does he know about any of this?”

  “He was a constable back in Ireland—”

  “Well, that surely explains it.”

  “—specializing in traffic.”

  “Perfect résumé for diagnosing a murder, Jess.”

  “I noticed a smell, Seth, kind of sweet, like something baking in the oven.”

  “Methylene chloride,” he said after a pause.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “It’s a solvent commonly found in paint and varnish removers, can break down into carbon monoxide when inhaled. Exposure to methylene chloride can cause carbon monoxide poisoning. Very dangerous when used in poorly ventilated areas, and deadly if, say, it was poured into the blower of a room heater.”

  “Would there be any lingering sign of it?”

  “You’re not still in the room, are you?” Seth asked with panic edging into his voice.

  “No.”

  “Well, it’s good to see this night hasn’t totally stripped you of your senses, Jess. And the answer’s no. No lingering sign besides that smell you detected, since methylene chloride, also known as dichloromethane, evaporates swiftly.”

  “Making it the perfect murder weapon,” I said.

  Seth hesitated. I heard something rattle on his end of the line. “Did you check the outside vents?”

  “They’re clogged.”

  “With snow?”

  “Towels or rags.”

  “No doubt soaked with the chemical that took the lives of these latest victims.” Another pause. “This killer of yours knows exactly what they’re doing, Jess.”

  “The ones I go up against always seem to. I have another question for you, Seth, on a totally unrelated subject.”

  “I could use that right now,” he told me.

  “Something’s come up, thanks to information uncovered by Harry McGraw.”

  “Good old Harry . . .”

  “Anyway, I asked him to look into the birth records of the Mulroy children after learning one of the original triplets was a stillborn. Harry was able to turn up all three birth certificates—”

  “Standard, even for a stillborn.”

  “—but according to hospital records, the surviving twins were never formally
discharged.”

  Silence followed, as Seth considered the anomaly.

  “How many years ago would this have been?”

  “Twenty-nine, I believe—approximately, anyway.”

  “Could have been as simple as this particular hospital’s administration at the time not requiring any formal record of the babies leaving the hospital.”

  “Makes sense.”

  I heard Seth go, “Hmm . . .”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, Jess, there is an alternative explanation.”

  “Isn’t there always?” I asked him.

  “Not necessarily nefarious, in this case. You say only two of the three infants survived birth?”

  “I don’t have any details beyond that.”

  “What was the hospital?”

  “St. Catherine’s outside Boston, before it was gobbled up by Mass General.”

  “I’m well acquainted with their obstetrics department and administrative policies, even back then. Wouldn’t happen to know the name of the doctor who handled the delivery, would you?”

  “No.”

  “Let me do some digging, see what I can come up with.”

  I could hear the edge in his voice. “What are you after, Seth?”

  “Not sure. That’s why I need to do some digging. But there may indeed be an explanation for the lack of formal discharge documents for the infants.”

  “Care to give me a hint?”

  “Not until I’ve got more of a notion of how to find what I’m after with the whole region shut down by this blasted storm. But hospitals stay open twenty-four hours no matter what, Jess, and I’m itching for something to keep me busy until Mort gets there. You’ve done me a great a favor.”

  “Hope you’re able to return it,” I told him.

  I ended the call and joined Seamus McGilray down the hall. Having confirmed the remaining guests were all present, accounted for, and safe, he was conferring with Eugene about something.

  The shock of finding two more bodies, bringing the total number to four, would have been greater had I known Ian and Faye better or held them in higher regard. I had begun to look at them as the most likely suspects here among the wedding party, and I wondered if the killer’s targeting them next had to do with that as much as anything else. That would indicate that the killer was toying with me, toying with us all. I was the one wild card here, the one factor he or she couldn’t possibly have expected or planned for. Yet the succession of interviews was leading me to consider more and more the possibility that we were indeed trapped in the clutches of the same serial mass murderer who’d struck at least two times before. If that were the case, all this was just a game to him, taking place exactly two years since the last time he’d played it, according to Harry McGraw.