“I’m not sure it was due to jealousy but I can tell you that Seamus wasn’t popular.”
“Why is that?”
“He was a crusty old bastard. He carried a gun around and showed it off all the time, like the protagonist in his books. He was very opinionated and liked to pick fights.”
Simpson eyed her. “Speaking of which, I gather the two of you got into an altercation at that conference.”
Annie stilled at the word altercation. Surely it was her imagination running away with her, because suddenly she was getting the distinct impression that Simpson was questioning her as a suspect. On what possible basis could he think that?
She began to choose her words even more carefully. “He and I were on a panel together. I don’t even know why he was on it because the topic was women mystery writers. But he sat there and said women had no business writing mysteries, that they were ruining the genre with their female sleuths. He claimed that advances were going down because of us.” Annie watched Higuchi scribble in his notebook. “Afterward a number of people thanked me for standing up to him,” she added.
“You stayed for the awards ceremony Saturday night?” Simpson asked.
“Yes. I flew home late Sunday.”
“By which point O’Neill was dead,” he murmured.
Annie said nothing. She remembered going down to the hotel lobby to check out and finding her fellow writers huddled in groups wearing shocked expressions. Because one of their own had been shot to death in his luxury suite.
She glanced at her watch. It was past four and now she had the idea that her unexpected visitors would be staying for some time.
“Are you on deadline, Ms. Rowell?” That question came from Higuchi.
“No, my next manuscript isn’t due for two months.” She rose, her stomach growling so loudly she was sure all four men could hear it. “I’d like to eat something if you don’t mind.” What she really wanted was time alone to think. “I missed lunch. May I offer anybody anything? Coffee? A soda?”
From the sofa Pincus raised his head. “I’ll take coffee. Cream and sugar, please.”
It felt like an escape going into the kitchen. She took her time brewing the coffee and making a ham and swiss sandwich, then decided to grill her late lunch just so she’d have another minute or two alone.
She put the sandwich in the toaster oven and watched the radiant bars heat to an incandescent orange. What could Simpson possibly think he had on her? There was nothing to have.
By the time she trotted back into the living room, tray in hand, she’d assured herself that this was a fishing expedition and nothing more. She’d be cautious in how she answered Simpson’s questions and that would be the end of it.
She gave Pincus his coffee and returned to her chair, eating her sandwich while Higuchi wrapped up a cell phone call and Simpson reviewed his notes.
Finally Simpson looked up from his notebook. “Let’s move on to Elizabeth Wimble.”
Annie set her plate aside. “I never met her but I heard her speak at a conference several years ago. She received a Lifetime Achievement Award and I recall people saying that it was a rare appearance for her, that she was getting quite frail and almost never left her home anymore. How old was she when she died?”
“82,” Higuchi answered. “What did you think of her?”
“I really admired her. She wrote what are called ‘cozy’ mysteries and I loved them. So did lots of people. She had legions of fans. I think Maggie Boswell wanted to be the grande dame of the mystery writers but Elizabeth Wimble actually was. She seemed very gracious …” Annie’s voice trailed off. “I was horrified when I heard what happened to her.”
It was unspeakable. A crochet hook plunged into the old woman’s throat while she dozed in an easy chair in her Connecticut home. No sign of forced entry; nary a fingerprint. Her housekeeper found her on a Monday morning, when the beloved author had been dead for two and a half days.
Simpson spoke. “And how did you hear of the murder, Ms. Rowell?”
“I read it in the newspaper.”
“Were you in California at the time?”
“No. I was in Manhattan. At the wedding of one of my college roommates.” Silence fell. Annie spoke again into the void. “When it comes to Maggie Boswell, I don’t know what more I can tell you than I told the police over the phone.”
Higuchi chose that moment to sit down, claiming an ottoman he’d moved away from the wing chair. “And why was it that you spoke to investigators over the phone and not in person?”
“Because I left the party before Maggie was killed. I only heard about it the next morning on TV. Then a detective called me that afternoon.”
Higuchi and Simpson glanced at one another, then Simpson spoke. “Can you explain, Ms. Rowell, how your fingerprints came to be on the blowgun that was found at the crime scene?”
“My fingerprints were on the blowgun?” For a moment she was puzzled. Then her synapses began to fire and her heart picked up its pace, as if she were running uphill. The blowgun we were looking at was the same one used to kill Maggie. It was the murder weapon. This is what Simpson thought he had on her. “I’d forgotten all about that,” she said, thinking fast. “I mean, I knew she was poisoned by a dart fired by a blowgun but I never put two and two together.”
Simpson frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Well, before this it never occurred to me that it was the blowgun we were all looking at. Though now that I think about it, it’s so obvious.”
She rose to stare out the window. Her eyes focused on the white clapboard house across the street, the resident cocker spaniel leashed to the oak tree in the front yard as it was every sunny afternoon. In her mind she saw not the dog, but the scene at the signing party.
“Maggie Boswell has what you might call a prop room off the study in her home. It’s like a library with bookshelves and glass cases filled with items she’s collected over the years as she’s researched her books. She wrote historical mysteries so there was a lot of interesting stuff. People were filing through there all night.”
She spun around, faced them. Four pairs of eyes were on her. Pincus set down his mug.
“The cases were open and people were taking things out and looking at them. At the time I was surprised because I figured some of those items had to be fairly valuable. But people were having drinks and hors d’oeuvres and handling them. And one of the items was a blowgun. I’d never seen one before. It was a long hollow tube made of some kind of metal. Michael and I were looking at it.”
“Michael?” Higuchi prompted.
“Michael Ellsworth. You must know the name.”
Higuchi nodded.
“In one of Maggie’s novels, a character was murdered with a dart dipped in poison. Delivered by a blowgun.” Annie shivered as if a winter draft were blowing through the old Victorian in late April. She met Simpson’s stare. “Was it curare that killed Maggie? It had to have been.”
He didn’t blink. “Why do you say that?”
“Because it was used in the novel. Plus, few other poisons work so fast.”
“How do you know so much about curare?”
“We all do. You can’t be a mystery writer for long and not know about poisons. I’ve used them myself. Strychnine in my case, in my third book.” She returned to her chair, aware how strange that sounded but how typical it was for authors who wrote crime fiction. “And from what people described who were there and saw what happened, it’s pretty obvious it was curare. How Maggie froze in place, she couldn’t breathe, she turned blue …”
Not that there were many good ways, but that was a horrendous way to die. Within seconds of injection, the muscles begin to paralyze. The pulse drops; the diaphragm and lungs seize. And most appalling, the victim is completely conscious throughout. They’re excruciatingly aware they’re about to suffocate but can do nothing to avoid their fate. They cannot call out; they cannot gesture. Death is the only gruesome relief.
For a
time no one spoke, as if they were giving Maggie Boswell a moment of silence for the petrifying ordeal she had endured. Then a new thought wormed its way into Annie’s brain. “No one took my fingerprints.” She looked at Simpson. “How do you know they’re on the blowgun?”
Higuchi spoke. “Your prints are on file.”
“You’ve been arrested, Ms. Rowell.” Simpson didn’t need to consult his notebook to rattle off the details. “Three times in the state of California.”
“That’s right.” She returned to her chair. She had forgotten.
The incidents were so long ago, it was almost as if they were from another life. Other parents might be upset that their child had an arrest record, but given the nature of the transgressions, Annie’s wore it like a badge of honor. One arrest was for a Berkeley sit-in; another for lying down in front of bulldozers to protect an historic Santa Cruz building. She couldn’t remember why she got hauled in the third time. She wondered how many arrests her parents had on their records. Probably a few dozen between them.
“You don’t seem embarrassed by your rap sheet.” That from Simpson.
Annie glanced at him and decided that her best course was to continue telling the truth. “I’m not.”
“Even though it gives you a history of resisting authority?”
“If you knew my parents, you’d know they raised me to do exactly that.”
Higuchi pushed his wire frames higher up his nose. “Ms. Rowell, what did you do on the Saturday night of the LA conference after the awards ceremony?”
“Michael and I went to the bar in the hotel and had a few drinks. Then we called it a night.”
“So you went upstairs to your room.”
“That’s right.”
“And when is the next time you left your room?”
“Not until …” She tried to think. “Not until I went downstairs on Sunday to check out. It was around eleven thirty. I had room service for breakfast and I was working all morning. Writing. I’d brought my laptop with me.”
Simpson spoke. “And when you were in Manhattan for your friend’s wedding, did you have cause to travel to Connecticut?”
Connecticut. Where Elizabeth Wimble was murdered. In her home in the picturesque town of Greenwich.
It was as if a sinister presence had come inside Annie’s shabby living room and made itself at home.
Annie rose and walked to the front window to collect her thoughts. The cocker spaniel from across the street had been freed from the oak tree by its mistress. It bounded toward its porch, all joy and energy.
Annie tried to regain the cool she’d felt in the kitchen. “No, I never went to Connecticut. The wedding was in Manhattan, as was the reception. I was in Manhattan the entire time.”
Simpson consulted his notebook. “When did you arrive in the New York area?”
“On the Thursday before the wedding. I arrived in the evening and went straight to my hotel.”
“Did you attend any events related to the wedding on Friday?”
“I saw my friend in the morning at her apartment and then had lunch with my editor. Both in the city.”
“And after lunch, what did you do?”
“I went back to the hotel and worked. Wrote.”
“All evening?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t go out to dinner?”
“No. I skipped dinner. Lunch was pretty filling so I just had snacks from the mini bar.” Chardonnay and M&Ms, as she recalled. The next morning she made up for the indulgence on the treadmill.
Higuchi spoke up. “At the time your deadline was three months away, right?”
“Yes.”
“Yet on a free evening in Manhattan, you chose to stay in your hotel and write?”
“Authors don’t write only when they’re on deadline, Mr. Higuchi. Otherwise they’d never meet their deadlines.”
Simpson eyed her. “Did anyone see you on that Friday evening, Ms. Rowell?”
“No.” So I don’t have an alibi.
“Ms. Rowell,” Simpson went on, “we have taken note that you were in the vicinity of every one of these murders when they occurred.”
It was as if she were standing on an Alaskan glacier. She was that cold. “There has to be somebody else who was in all those places at all those times.”
“We haven’t found anybody else.”
“You will. It’s only coincidence in my case.” And extraordinarily bad luck.
“Then you’ve got nothing to be concerned about.” Simpson rose and walked to her front door. That, apparently, was that. Come in, put her in a panic, and leave.
“Have a good day, Ms. Rowell,” Higuchi said as he brushed past.
The men let themselves out into the picture-perfect California afternoon. Yet even in the unseasonable heat, all Annie could do was shiver. She sank onto the sofa Helms and Pincus had just vacated and rocked back and forth, shaking.
Before this afternoon, her worst nightmare had been that she could be the killer’s next target. Now a horrifying new possibility had presented itself.
She could be a suspect, too.
CHAPTER FOUR
In a red vinyl booth in a taqueria south of San Francisco, Reid watched Sheila raise her left arm to glance at her watch. The motion caused a half dozen silver bangles to shimmy down her olive-colored skin, jingling all the way. She tapped her nail on the tabletop. “Simpson better get here soon. We have to leave for the airport in 45 minutes.”
“He’ll be here.”
“Is he always this late?”
Reid nodded. He’d known Lionel Simpson for years, from when Reid was a cop. Since Reid had been hosting Crimewatch they’d intersected more often, what with tips from the show leading to one perp or another getting nailed. The show helped the feds, the feds helped the show; it was a symbiotic relationship.
Reid didn’t know what it was—his LAPD tenure, the show, maybe the fact that he was third-generation law enforcement—but lots of his friends wore badges. Probably it was the shared experience, the we’ve-been-in-the-trenches mentality of people who regularly witnessed horror. Sometimes Reid felt separated from everybody who didn’t. He envied them. He just wasn’t one of them anymore.
He inhaled the tantalizing aroma of pork frying in fat and dipped another tortilla chip into the best salsa he’d had in some time. Given that he lived in LA, home of primo Mexican food, that was saying something. He nudged the basket closer to Sheila. “Try some. It’s great.”
She shook her head. “How can you just sit there and eat?”
“I leave it to my producer to get nervous. She does it enough for both of us.”
“At least we’ve got everything we need for the piece in the can.”
They’d spent the last 24 hours in San Francisco collecting elements for the novelist-murder story, but Reid could still think of some he wished they had. In particular, an interview with Annette Rowell. He’d stayed up later than he should have reading Devil’s Cradle and was looking forward to delving into it again on the flight home. He wasn’t a big fiction reader but the mystery had pulled him in.
The author had lingered in his mind as well. As wide-ranging as his acquaintance, he’d never met a published novelist before. He wasn’t clear what his preconceived notion had been but this woman didn’t fit it. She seemed too healthy and vibrant to spend her days in front of a computer, living in her imagination. Was she trying to escape something? Or was that another off-base preconception?
He drained his Coke and instantly a bus boy materialized to refill his glass. He could tell he was getting the best service in the house. From the moment he and Sheila had shown up, a quartet of Hispanic men eating at the bar had pivoted on their stools to stare. They wore the rapt expressions he often saw on viewers who ran into REID GARDNER, CRIMEWATCH HOST! in the flesh.
A bell jangled on the taqueria’s door, heralding a new arrival. Lionel Simpson appeared at their table, wiping a handkerchief across his forehead. Apart from mild perspira
tion, probably prompted by sprinting to the restaurant from his car, he looked as spit-and-polished as ever. Even though it was a Sunday, he was dressed in a suit, with a crisp white dress shirt and striped tie. Reid knew that only the Secret Service was spiffier than the FBI. Sheila slid toward the window and motioned for Simpson to claim the spot beside her.
“Sorry to be so late. What with this writer-murder investigation, this morning was …” He waved a hand in disgust. “You don’t want to hear it.”
“It sounds like one of ours,” Reid said mildly. “You know Sheila Banerjee, right, Lionel?”
“We’ve met before. Good to see you.”
Ordering was swiftly accomplished and the tortilla chips just as quickly replenished. Simpson dove in with the enthusiasm of a ravenous man. Then he grinned at Reid. “Okay. You show me yours and I’ll show you mine.”
Reid laughed and spread his hands wide. “I got nothin’.”
Simpson groaned. “That’s not like you.”
“I’m stymied on this one. Sheila and I went to Maggie Boswell’s funeral lunch and spoke to a bunch of people, put some on camera …” He shook his head. “Nothing new came out of it. Can’t get past the prevailing view that it’s some wacko who hates mystery writers or thinks he’s God’s gift to writing and the publishing industry just can’t see it. Imagine the Unabomber with a dozen unpublished mysteries piled up in his shack.”
Sheila spoke. “Tell me, Lionel, what have you gotten out of Quantico by way of a profile?”
Reid knew that one of the first steps Simpson would have taken was to consult the agency’s violent crime analysis team back in Quantico, Virginia. Using behavioral science and computer models, they generated reams of data that their own agents and local law enforcement could use to pinpoint a killer. Simpson excelled at serial-killer investigations, which is why he’d been brought in on this one.
“The profile detailed a lot of what Reid mentioned,” Simpson said. “We’re looking for someone with above-average intelligence. A capable, skilled individual who maintains a great deal of control during the commission of the crime. Like Ted Kaczynski, with an ax to grind. But unlike him, not necessarily a loner, and very mobile.”
Chasing Venus Page 4