“Is the task force taking a lot of heat yet?” Reid asked.
Their food came, interrupting the conversation. Chimichangas and enchiladas for Reid and Simpson and salad in a tortilla shell for Sheila. Simpson waited till the server had moved off before he answered.
“It’s not so bad yet. But God forbid, if somebody else gets whacked …” His voice trailed off.
Reid bent toward his plate to ingest a forkful of refried beans but kept his gaze on Simpson. “Something’s bothering you,” he said a moment later.
The agent’s dark eyes rose. “We’re working on something. But I don’t like it.”
“What?”
Simpson took a few more mouthfuls. “This is off-the-record, Gardner.”
“Sure.” That was the category into which a lot of information was first filed. A confirmation or two later, it was fair game for the program. Those were the rules and Reid knew both he and Simpson understood them.
“Okay.” Simpson set down his fork and leaned back, crossing his arms over his chest. “One of the mystery writers was in all three locations. Quite a few were at the LA conference and Maggie Boswell’s party, obviously. But this one was also in the New York metropolitan area over the weekend when Elizabeth Wimble got killed.”
“Does he have an alibi?”
“No. And that’s another thing. It’s a she.”
“A woman?” Sheila’s voice rose in surprise. “A woman serial killer? I don’t think so.”
“That’s one of the things I don’t like about it. But there are a few particulars that make this case unusual. This woman got into an altercation with Seamus O’Neill at the conference where he got killed. And she’s been arrested a few times, for protesting. Her parents have records as long as your arm, real anti-establishment folks.”
Reid leaned his elbows on the table. “The gap between that and committing murder is huge.”
“There’s also a timing issue. She’s at a critical juncture in her career, the sort of thing that comes around only once. She’s got this new series and it’s going gangbusters. Extra printings, the whole deal. The publisher’s pushing her like never before—print ads, radio, huge co-op buys.” He waved his hand. “Don’t ask me what those are. The point is this woman could be going from obscurity to stardom, like right now.”
“I don’t get it,” Reid said. “That sounds like a good time not to start killing people.”
“But,” Sheila said, “you could make the argument that if some of the competition is out of the way, she has a bigger opportunity to become a bestseller. Because all those people who want to buy mysteries would have to buy hers.”
“Exactly,” Simpson said.
“That’s a stretch,” Reid said. “Besides, aren’t the big sellers now the books by O’Neill and Wimble and Boswell?”
“Right now, sure,” Simpson agreed. “But not for long. And those authors are never going to have any new books out, are they?”
There was only one answer to that question. Reid’s mind worked as he watched the quartet from the stools throw a few bucks on the bar and file out the taqueria door, stealing glances at him the entire way.
“There’s another thing,” Simpson said. “She knew which poison killed Boswell.”
“Curare, right?” Reid asked.
Simpson seemed taken aback. “Where’d you hear that?”
Sheila stepped in. “We interviewed a toxicologist for the show. He was 99 percent sure it was curare, given what he’d heard about the case.”
“Well, evidently it is pretty obvious. There’s something else, too, though. Her prints are on the blowgun that shot the dart that killed Boswell.”
Sheila’s eyes widened. “Really?”
Simpson raised his hands as if to ward off any quick conclusions. “Hers aren’t the only ones. Apparently the party guests were handling all these collector’s items that Boswell had at her estate and the blowgun was one of them. And the other thing is, when Boswell actually took the hit, this woman wasn’t in the room. She left shortly before.”
Sheila nodded. “So you’re thinking she might have been in the garden, where no one could see her. Shooting the dart through the French doors.”
“Who is this author, anyway?” Reid asked.
“Her name’s Annette Rowell.”
Reid leaned across the table toward Simpson. “Annette Rowell?”
“I got you one of her books.” Sheila pointed at him. “You read part of it on the plane.”
And a whole lot more of it last night.
Simpson’s eyes were on him. “You know her?”
“I met her at the funeral.” And again afterward, when I chased her to her car.
“I didn’t know that.” Now Sheila’s eyes were on him, too. “Did you get her on camera?”
“No. She refused to be interviewed.”
“Did you think that was strange?” Simpson’s gaze didn’t waver. “Most people want to go on camera, right?”
“Most do.” He shrugged, though in truth he wasn’t feeling nonchalant. “Not everybody.”
“I wish we had her on camera.” Sheila slapped the table, her bangles clinking. “Do you still have the book? Do you remember if her photo is in it?”
In fact, Reid had a very clear recollection of the photo. He slid out of the booth to pull the book out of his briefcase and hand it to Sheila. She flipped to the back cover and held the book open so both she and Simpson could see. “She’s attractive,” Sheila said, her eyes already off the photo and on Reid.
Reid kept his voice neutral. “She is.”
Simpson swiped his napkin across his mouth, then tossed it on the table. “Higuchi’s down in your neck of the woods right now talking to her ex.”
“She was married?” That popped out before Reid could make sure it sounded casual. He wasn’t sure it had, given the appraising expression on Sheila’s face.
“For seven years,” Simpson said. “She put the guy through his medical training and then he dumped her. Ain’t that a cliché.” He threw a twenty on the table. “Sorry, gotta go. By the way, anything new on Bigelow?” He slid out of the booth.
“Nothing yet.”
Simpson nodded, slapped Reid on the arm. “Keep me posted.”
“You do the same.”
Simpson exited, the bell on the door jangling noisily behind him. Sheila raised her index finger to summon the check but kept her dark eyes fixed on Reid. “Interesting new development.”
“I guess so.” Reid busied himself with studying the check, though with only three food entries and three drinks it wasn’t hard to add up.
“It’s quite a circumstantial case they’re building against this Annette Rowell,” Sheila went on.
“But as Simpson said, he doesn’t like it.” Reid handed the server a credit card and finally was forced to meet Sheila’s gaze.
Her eyes were clear. “I don’t think you do, either.”
*
Five days later, past midnight, the broadcast long over, Sheila Banerjee sat in her office, one of several glass-walled cubicles on the west side of Crimewatch’s darkened studio. The building was empty; Reid, everybody was gone. Overhead, fluorescent lights buzzed like cicadas. Through her contact lenses, gummy after so many hours of use, Sheila could see her reflection in the glass that surrounded her. She didn’t like what she saw: a workaholic getting old before her time.
She sighed. Only a dozen more tipsheets to review before she could call it a night. Then she wouldn’t have to think about Crimewatch again until Monday. And all weekend she’d have the satisfaction of knowing it had been a good show that had produced a good haul of tips. The phone banks had lit up.
She rested her cheek on her hand and skimmed the top tipsheet on the pile. It had to do with the segment on the writer murders. It was anonymous, though the phone-bank staffer had noted that the caller was male. The no-name tips were always suspicious, as most callers liked to take credit for their purported sightings. But every once in a wh
ile one turned out to be accurate.
The staffer had been typing fast, apparently; the tipsheet was littered with misspellings and typos. But Sheila got the gist.
CHECK OUT THE MISTERY WRITER ANNETT ROWELL. I SAW HER BURY SOMETHING IN HER BACKYARD IN BODAYGA BAY. IT SEEMED SUSPICIOUS.
She stared at the page. Her mind turned to Reid. Somehow … somehow she hadn’t liked the look on his face when Annette Rowell’s name had come up at their lunch with Lionel Simpson.
Sheila rolled her chair back from her desk and slid open the shallow center drawer where she stored pens and paper clips and other small office supplies. Way in the rear—where no one would accidentally find it—was a photo. Her hand closed on it and drew it out. It was creased and its edges were soft from handling.
She smiled. The picture had been taken at the Santa Monica pier several years before, on a glorious Southern California Saturday. For a change, Reid wasn’t wearing his leather jacket. He had on a blue plaid Madras shirt, which she’d given him. He was grinning and his arm was flung around her shoulders. She was grinning, too; in fact, she looked delirious. Even now she remembered very clearly the wonderful warmth of his body next to hers. It had been in that brief, oh so brief window of time when she’d thought that something might finally happen between them. But nothing had. The chance had caved in on itself, become nothing more than a celluloid hope.
What had stopped him? So many times she’d asked herself that question. They’d had a few heart-pounding weeks of more-than-friends, gotten tantalizingly close to sleeping together, and then he’d just shut down. He’d made some lame excuse; she didn’t even remember what it was, it was so clearly not the real reason. To this day she didn’t know what the truth was. Too much familiarity, because they worked together? Their different cultures? The fact that, because they worked together, he couldn’t love her and leave her like he did everybody else? She envied those other women, sometimes. In some ways they had more of him than she did. She was his friend. Always his friend. Which was so much and yet so much less than what she longed for.
Reluctantly she returned the photo to its hiding place. It was important to find the person who was killing those writers, she told herself. The crimes were heinous. Who knew when the murderer might strike again? Innocent lives were at risk. She had a responsibility to do the right thing, make sure this tip made its way swiftly to the right hands.
She checked her cell. Yes, she had Lionel Simpson among her contacts. And tomorrow, first thing, she would call him.
*
She couldn’t get away from it. Not here, not anywhere.
Annie looked out at her writing students, massed as usual on a Saturday afternoon at the Cookies and Cozies Bookstore in Berkeley, not far from her parents’ home. Keeping her appointment to teach the class, as though everything in her life were just hunky-dory, was part of the Annette Rowell All-Discipline, All-the-Time Program. She’d embarked on it after the divorce and was still at it. And why? It worked. In the beginning it had gotten her through heartache. Now it was getting her through being both a murder suspect and a potential murder victim.
"Sorry, guys,” she told her students. “I can’t tell you anything more about the murders than you’ve read in the papers.” She didn’t know how she managed to say that and sound truthful. Another trick she’d learned somehow.
She was met with a sea of incredulous, doubting, and disappointed faces.
"I can't believe you don’t have inside information." That, snidely, from a dark-haired pseudo-intellectual type whose prose was as lazy as his posture. "I mean, you were at Maggie Boswell’s party, right? And you write this murder mystery shit all the time. Didn’t you get, like, a vibe from somebody?"
The only vibe she was getting was that she should expend less effort teaching her future competition. Sometimes the goal of “giving back” seemed too noble by half. How had Michael done it all those years?
A gorgeous redhead with major pretensions of literary stardom piped up from the rear. "Have you been questioned by the police? Were your prints taken?"
“I have been questioned by the police,” she allowed, which roused everyone’s attention. Butts shifted in chairs, heads rose from laptop keyboards, and even Wanda Kilter's knitting needles stopped clacking. “Of course, everybody who attended Maggie Boswell’s party was questioned. And no, my prints weren’t taken.” Not then, anyway.
Disgruntled sighs all around. Except from one keen-eyed woman in her late fifties who, as always, sat in the front row on the far left. She sported out-of-date oversized glasses, a tie-dyed tee shirt, and khaki cargo pants, and it looked as if her long gray hair rarely encountered a comb, let alone a pair of scissors.
Annie’s mom.
“All right,” Annie went on, “moving on. We’ve got only half an hour left so let’s break up into the same four-person groups as last week and do more of the plotting exercise.” Noisy jockeying for position ensued. Annie raised her voice and kept talking. “Remember, you need six elements. Three main characters, a crime, a motive, and a solution.”
Her mom didn’t join a group but remained in place, Michael’s latest paperback abandoned in her lap. Her worried eyes were fixed on her daughter, reading her—Annie knew—like a book.
It’ll be okay, she communicated wordlessly to her mother. This too shall pass. She’d stayed over at her parents’ house the prior night and told them about the FBI’s visit to her own home the weekend before. They’d hit the roof, charging harassment and corruption and who knew what else. Her new fear was that they’d mount a protest and get five hundred of their best friends to converge on San Francisco’s Civic Center.
Annie retreated to her own chair and picked up the pile of student first chapters she hadn’t yet skimmed. One of the blessings of her divorce was that she wasn’t estranged from her parents anymore. For years she’d been caught in the middle between them and Philip. The fights they’d had! Her parents had cast Philip as part of the "medical establishment," which in their view committed such atrocities as withholding the cure for cancer so doctors like him, and the corrupt drug companies with which he was clearly in cahoots, could keep getting rich. When Philip stopped fuming, he’d accuse them of being straggle-haired hippies who didn’t understand the real world and failed to grasp that the 1960s weren’t a paradigm of political action but a pot-smoking sex fest.
Annie’s reaction was to distance herself from her parents. She regretted that now. They’d been right about Philip in so many ways. They were right when they said he always put himself first. They were right when they said she was subsuming her goals and personality to please him. And they were right when they said love didn’t work that way, that it wasn’t love if that’s what was required.
“Ms. Rowell?”
She glanced up, startled. She hadn’t been aware that someone had approached. “Yes, Kevin? Have you finished the exercise?”
“Not yet. But I wanted to give you this.” He handed her a small box, the size that might hold a piece of jewelry. And it was a very distinctive, instantly recognizable box, in a particular shade of eggshell blue, tied with a white satin ribbon.
She wasn’t sure what to say. She raised her head to look at him. He was neatly turned out as always, clean-shaven, light brown hair trimmed, hazel eyes shining. He was as fastidious a 21-year-old male as she’d ever met. “Kevin, you bought something for me from Tiffany?”
“Well, I thought this was a special time for you and all.” He spoke quickly and looked nervous, both typical for him. “You know, the book’s doing really well. Which of course you totally deserve. Oh, and I wanted to tell you something, too. I’ve been writing reviews of Devil’s Cradle for you on every web site I can find. Five star, of course. Not that you need them.” He shifted from one foot to the other. “You’re getting really good reviews from everybody. Just tons of them. Of course the book is fantastic. I already told you that, though.” He paused and took a deep breath, as if he were gearing himself up. “Of course
, you already know what I think of you. And of everything you write. It’s always just …” He bobbed his head a few times. “I don’t know how to say it. Everything you do is just always so … so fantastic.”
“That’s really sweet, Kevin, and thank you, but I can’t accept this.” She held the box toward him but he stepped backward and raised his hands.
“No, no, I really want to give it to you. I saved up, I can afford it, don’t worry. But don’t open it here, though,” he added, then glanced around as if he were concerned someone might have heard him. “I’d rather you opened it—” He looked at the floor and shuffled his feet again. “—in private.”
She feared she was the object of a schoolboy crush. But Kevin was too old to be a schoolboy and she was too preoccupied to know how to deal with it. So she caved. “Well, thank you. I appreciate it. It’s very generous.”
His face lit up, then he shuffled backward and returned to his seat. Annie slipped the box in her carryall and exchanged glances with her mom, who now sported a wry smile.
Kevin Zeering was more groupie than student, really. He showed up at many of her speeches and book signings, even the ones out of town. And though he’d been taking her classes forever, he never made progress. Annie had decided he was the literary equivalent of tone deaf.
Mercifully the minutes ticked past and she was finally able to dismiss the class. They trudged out of the bookstore disappointed in her, she knew. It was ironic how much more excited they’d be if they knew she was a suspect.
Her mother approached and helped her gather her papers. Annie was overcome by a surge of affection that brought tears to her eyes. “Thanks for coming today, Mom.”
Her mother rubbed her arm. “Oh, sweetie. I enjoy your classes, you know that.”
It amazed Annie how many of her classes her mother attended. Either she was genuinely interested or she was just showing support. Either way, it was awfully nice.
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