‘And I have an alibi, Lieutenant. At the time of Martin’s murder I was with Jake Cummings.’
‘I’ve made a note of that.’
‘Are we done here, then?’ I asked, rising to my feet.
‘We’re done. For now.’
‘Is there anything else I can do for you Lieutenant? Sergeant?’
Cook slid the printout into a black plastic folder and smiled. ‘We’ll be sure to let you know.’
I escaped into the hallway before she could think of something else to ask me.
Just outside the door, I leaned against the wall, trying to decide what to do. Talking with my sister had just jumped to first place on my to-do list, which was already full.
It was nearly one o’clock in Annapolis but I hoped I would reach Ruth during her lunch hour, often eaten in the office at the back of her shop while Cornelia Gibbs, our father’s steady girlfriend, filled in at the cash register.
Conference attendees to’d and fro’d around me, indicating that the morning coffee break had already begun, so I nipped up to my room, plopped down on the bed and tapped in my sister’s number.
Ruth answered right away, recognizing my caller ID. ‘Hannah! What’s up?’
I decided to leap in with both feet. ‘Tell me about Martin Radcliffe.’
Ruth was silent for a moment, then chuckled. ‘He has a nice tan. Orange is my favorite color.’
‘Had a nice tan,’ I corrected. ‘Don’t you watch the news? Radcliffe was murdered yesterday.’
Ruth gasped. ‘Gosh, no! Where did it happen? In Oregon?’
‘How did you know I was in Oregon?’
‘Emily told me you went there on some boondoggle with an old college friend.’
‘Not exactly a boondoggle,’ I told her. ‘I’m working a Bigfoot convention. Lots of craziness going on even before someone decided to bump off Martin Radcliffe.’
‘Can’t say that I’m sorry,’ Ruth said. ‘Radcliffe’s a third-rate talent. Was, I mean. Worst series on TV.’
‘Ruth, be serious. The police investigating his death called me in this morning to ask about you. About your Twitter exchanges.’
‘That?’ She puffed air into the receiver. ‘Nobody takes Twitter wars seriously these days. Besides, he started it.’
‘Ruth!’
‘Well, he did. Have you ever watched his show?’
‘Once or twice,’ I admitted. ‘The one on ghostbusters was kind of interesting.’
‘A fluke,’ Ruth snorted. ‘Did you see the one on feng shui?’ Before I could answer, she rattled on. ‘Total garbage!’
Ruth was a feng shui practitioner. She sold all kinds of feng shui accessories in her shop. After my cancer diagnosis, she’d feng shuied my house up one side and down the other, installing (among other things) a mirror over my stove and a big, leafy ficus plant in the living room to help revive my chi. That I remained cancer-free since certainly earned my sister points.
‘In what way was it garbage?’ I asked.
‘His shows are up on Netflix so you can judge for yourself, but because I love you, I’ll save you the trouble. Radcliffe invited three feng shui consultants one at a time into a house and he totally set them up,’ Ruth said. ‘Just because they all came up with different ways to rearrange the furniture, he claimed they were phonies. Feng shui isn’t a science, for Pete’s sake! It’s an art. It goes back thousands and thousands of years!’ She took a deep breath. ‘So I Tweeted Radcliffe and told him he was an idiot.’
‘Sounds like you started it, Ruth.’
‘Well, I never expected he’d get back to me. Who am I, after all? Just some pissant viewer. But he Tweeted right back. Said something like, “Don’t let your mind wander. It’s too small to be out on its own.”’
‘Nice,’ I said.
‘Well, yeah! So I Tweeted back, “Your insults need work, but don’t feel bad. A lot of people lack talent.”’
‘Ruth!’
‘You sounded just like Mom there for a moment.’
‘You’re giving me a massive headache.’
‘Seriously, why would anyone listen to this loser? He’s a total puppet of the network. He’ll say anything just for the ratings. They pay him ridiculous amounts of money, too. He gets a hundred and fifty thousand an episode for this crap. I Tweeted about that too, and Radcliffe replied, “She forgot to mention my phenomenal Neilsen ratings. 7.8 percent for that show, with over eleven million households.”’
I sighed. ‘So who’s reading all this stuff?’
‘Everybody following hashtag dontyoubelieveit.’
‘Tens, hundreds, thousands?’
‘Who knows? Everybody in the Twitterverse for all I know. And we were getting re-Tweeted left, right and center.’
‘So, I have to ask. Where were you yesterday morning?’
Ruth laughed. ‘Right here, minding my own business.’
Of course she was.
I told Ruth I had to get back to the conference, promised I’d keep her up to date on what was happening and wound up to say goodbye.
‘Hannah?’
‘Yes?’
‘I’m sorry that Radcliffe is dead, I really am. But if it means his terrible show will go off the air, well …’ She paused. ‘Always look on the bright side!’
I decided to skip lunch.
I wandered over to the desk, sat down and opened my laptop. Following Ruth’s advice, I logged on to Netflix and quickly learned that Don’t You Believe It! had been running for six seasons, ten episodes each. Sixty shows. I felt defeated just browsing through the listings.
Martin Radcliffe and his accomplices had set up elaborate stings to unmask fake psychics, embarrass chiropractors and humiliate both reflexology and reiki practitioners, lumping such tricksters in with street-corner performance artists.
He’d debunked the ‘science’ of feng shui, homeopathic medicine, dietary supplements and acupuncture, an episode (I found out later) that had set Ruth off on another Twitter rant.
If you were a believer in the 9/11 or JFK assassination conspiracies, in UFOs or in Area 51, Radcliffe was out to rain on your parade. He dared to tackle faith healers, creationism and even the Church of Scientology, but when he presumed to question the historical accuracy of the Holy Bible, the fur really began to fly. Faith groups on the far right organized boycotts of his sponsors – a car manufacturer and a popular soft drink – but the entertainer remained unfazed. With a minimum of fanfare, the network signed up other advertisers and the show chugged on to ever higher ratings.
But it was Radcliffe’s expose on cryptozoology that really caught my eye. While everyone else was in the dining room of the lodge noshing down on Mexican food with all the trimmings, I clicked play and watched Cryptozoology: The Monster Files all the way through. Five minutes into the thirty-minute episode, I saw the first person I recognized: Monique Deschamps, stoically taking a licking from the head of the US Department of Interior over her broad interpretation of the Endangered Species Act. After the second ad, Randall Frazier appeared. The explorer’s Bigfoot research, Radcliffe snidely reported, had been published in such well-respected scientific journals as The National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid. In a short, four-minute segment near the end, Cecelia Cloughly, who, as a scientist, should have been on Radcliffe’s A-List, was ridiculed for ‘only’ having a degree in zoology, and for sitting on her butt in a classroom when she should have been out in the field getting her hands dirty. Cecelia, dressed in a white lab coat and surrounded by test tubes, centrifuges and neatly packaged samples of scat stared morosely into the camera lens, apparently on the verge of tears.
I sat back, my gears spinning as Radcliffe wrapped up with a preview of the following week’s episode. ‘We are awash in the pseudosciences,’ Radcliffe was saying as I reached for the phone-side notepad and pen. ‘Astrology, biorhythms, divining, graphology, numerology, phrenology … the list goes on and on.’
I, too, was making a list.
‘Pseudoscience is like
pornography, my friends,’ Radcliffe continued, but I was only half listening as I jotted down Monique, Cecelia and Randall’s names, all three of whom I’d just watched be humiliated on national TV.
Jake and I, thank goodness, were no longer suspects, but I couldn’t say the same for Jim and Athena. I added them to my list. While I stared out the window, considering their motives, I listened to Radcliffe tell his audience, ‘We cannot define it, but we know it when we see it. Voodoo science! Grab your tin foil hats and join me next week for “Good Science, Bad Science and Just Plain Bunk” on Don’t You Believe It!’
The video faded to black. ‘Long-standing rival?’ I wrote after the Davises’ names. Thinking about the affair of the mangy bear, I added, ‘Revenge?’
I got up from my chair to stretch my legs, grab a glass of water and use the bathroom. When I returned to my desk the next episode in the queue, Radcliffe’s promised take on the pseudosciences, had automatically begun playing.
‘I’ve had enough of your vitriol,’ I snarled at Radcliffe’s smirking image. I grabbed my mouse, prepared to click him off in mid-bombast, then froze.
The face of Prairie Flower filled my computer screen.
It was like watching a train wreck. Prairie Flower had agreed to appear on Radcliffe’s show thinking he would showcase her unique talent. Instead, the loathsome entertainer used a series of trick questions to convince his viewers that pendulum divination was hogwash. Then, as if disparagement weren’t enough, he stabbed Prairie Flower in the back. He twisted the knife. Although she had steeped herself in Indian customs and lore, Radcliffe informed the nation, Prairie Flower’s real name was Wendy Walker, she came from Calgary and had not a single drop of Native American blood.
Poor Prairie Flower. I felt like weeping.
As I added Prairie Flower’s name to my suspects list, it occurred to me that Radcliffe’s show was a Who’s Who of the Flat Rock Sasquatch Sesquicentennial, and none of the participants were there to pick up one of those coveted Emmy statuettes.
Was there anybody in the world who didn’t wish Martin Radcliffe dead? After watching only two episodes, I wanted to kill him myself.
NINETEEN
Sandy Point, Texas, September 20, 1889. ‘Some twenty months ago a woman living on the banks of the Brazos missed her 8-month-old baby from the pallet where she had left it lying during an absence of a few minutes … [N]o trace of it could be discovered … until a few days ago when [a riding party of gentlemen] were … startled by seeing a strange object run across the road … They could see that it had a human face, though the brown body was covered with long, tangled hair, and the nails of the feet and hands so long and curved as to be claws … [It was finally] lassoed and half dragged, half led home with the lariat about its neck, howling and yelping like a wolf … It is kept tied up in [his mother’s] cabin, suffering no one to lay hands upon it, and is fed on raw meat as it refused to touch any other food. The woman has hopes that she may yet reawaken the human in it, but in the meantime she is reaping a harvest from the crowds who come daily from all parts of the country to inspect the strange creature.’
The Decatur Daily Dispatch (Decatur, IL), September 20, 1889
I telephoned Jake and, by some miracle, he actually answered his prehistoric clam shell. He and Harley were sharing a taco platter in the dining room, he told me, while seated at a table with Jim and Athena Davis. I summarized what I’d learned from the Netflix videos, and we agreed to meet in fifteen minutes on the patio.
In the meantime, I went looking for Brad.
After Martin Radcliffe’s body had been hauled away in the long, white Taurus, Brad Johnson appeared to have evaporated, too. While I was accustomed to seeing him and his camera on the periphery of the room, so ubiquitous that we didn’t even notice him any more, it took me a while to realize that he might actually be gone.
I checked with the reception desk and learned that he hadn’t checked out. The maid pushing a hospitality cart on the second floor assured me that Brad had slept in his bed the night before. He’d even left a note wrapped around a two-dollar tip requesting extra bottles of the lodge’s signature body scrub. When I asked Tina about it, and learned he hadn’t showed up for lunch either, I grew seriously worried. Brad was Martin Radcliffe’s protégé. They worked closely together. Did Brad know something that had put his life in danger, too?
I needn’t have worried.
When I hit the patio, Jake was waiting for me, sitting on the smooth rock ledge of one of the fire pits. Harley lay at his feet, muzzle on paws. Brad Johnson sat poolside at a round table, deep in conversation with two men. Brad was dressed in his signature black but both of his companions wore khakis and polo shirts as if heading out shortly for a round of golf. The three seemed to be enjoying club sandwiches and French fries washed down by Rainier long necks.
I whispered to Jake, ‘That guy in the yellow shirt? I recognize him. He’s Martin Radcliffe’s lawyer. I saw him on the news yesterday, coming out of the medical examiner’s office with Martin’s wife.’ I scowled. ‘Martin’s body’s not even cold, and …’
‘Yes, it is,’ Jake interrupted.
I gave him a withering look. ‘You know what I mean.’ I grabbed Jake firmly by the elbow and dragged him to a table not too far away from the trio.
I pulled out a chair and sat down on it. ‘Sit,’ I said.
He grinned. ‘Me or Harley?’
‘Who’s the other guy, the one in green?’ Jake asked once we’d gotten settled.
I shrugged. ‘Don’t know.’
I’d missed lunch, so no wonder the smell of salty, hot French fries wafting downwind was driving me mad. When the server came to check on the men, Jake waved her over and ordered nachos and a couple of beers for the two of us.
While we waited for our order, I strained my ears, managing to pick up only snatches of their conversation. Hoping that Jake’s hearing might be better than mine, I whispered, ‘What are they saying?’
He held up a hand. ‘Shhhh.’ His ears, too, were on scan.
At first, the men kept their voices low. I could make out every third word – options, pilot, green light, credits.
The server brought our nachos and beer, and more beer for the gentlemen. She was an efficient soul, dammit, promptly whisking away their empties, so I couldn’t keep count. I suspected that was at least their third round, however, when I heard raised voices.
‘Davis is on board,’ Brad said, speaking to the guy I didn’t know. ‘He’s signed a release.’
I shot Jake a look, but he wagged his head and tapped a finger against his lips.
On board. Release. That could only mean that Jim Davis had licensed Brad to use his Bigfoot tape in some way. I wondered, vaguely, how much someone would pay me for Jake’s photographs. They were still floating around, as far as I knew, in the iCloud ether.
‘How many shows are in the can?’ Brad wanted to know.
‘Two,’ the green shirt said. ‘We’ll air them and lead in with reruns.’
Brad, it soon became apparent, was taking the lemon life had handed Martin Radcliffe and making lemonade out of it. I missed a few sentences but then Brad sat up straight, gestured with his beer and crowed, ‘Think of it! All his life insisting that they didn’t exist then he gets knocked off by one of them!’
The attorney – what was his name? – brought Brad up short. ‘That’s not what the police think.’
Brad snorted. ‘What does it matter what the police think, Gordie? The audience can watch the video and judge for themselves.’
Ah. Gordon Parker, that was the attorney’s name, and Brad was already on a first-name basis with the guy.
The man in the green shirt shook his head. ‘What makes you think you can just step into Martin’s shoes, Johnson? You think the network rubber stamps everything I propose?’
‘Leo, Leo, Leo. Look at me. I was Martin’s protégé. I’ve been working with him for a while. I know where he’s coming from.’
‘You’ll
need to pitch it to me in writing,’ Leo said.
‘No problem. It’ll be on your desk by Friday.’
‘No guarantees.’
Guarantees or not, Brad’s grin signaled he’d scored a point. ‘None expected.’
Brad leaned back, propped a white New Balance tennis shoe up on the table and adjusted the shoelace, a neon shade of blue. ‘So,’ he drawled after he’d tied it off. ‘What’s the latest from the cops, Gordie?’
Gordie polished off his beer and wiped his lips with a cocktail napkin. ‘They’ve eliminated the possibility that it was a bear and they don’t believe in Sasquatch.’
Brad frowned. ‘So?’
‘So, we all better be dusting off our alibis, Johnson.’
I kept my head low then whispered in an aside to Jake, ‘What do you bet Brad killed Martin in order to take over his TV show?’
Jake sucked air through his teeth. ‘Too much of a long shot. Johnson’s young, a total unknown. He’s naïve if he thinks he can break into the business this early in his career.’
‘But he is, what’s the term? Mediagenic? Good looking in a Tom Cruise sort of way.’ I paused. ‘Not to my taste, but what do I know?’
Jake grunted. ‘He’s just an opportunistic son of a bitch.’
‘If not Brad, then who?’ I scrabbled in my handbag for the list I’d begun up in my room and smoothed it out on the glass tabletop. ‘Do you have a pen?’
Jake produced a Bic from his pocket and handed it over.
‘I’ve started a list,’ I said. ‘I’d appreciate your two-cents.’
‘Could be any one of the folks he skewered on Don’t You Believe It!,’ Jake said.
‘You just had lunch with Jim and Athena, right?’
Jake nodded.
‘Jim was visibly upset over the mangy bear video on Friday night,’ I said. ‘Do you think he was mad enough about it to kill the guy?’
‘Frankly, no. Both Jim and Athena were hell-bent on capturing Bigfoot on video, on making “that ass hat” – Jim’s words, not mine – eat his words. For maximum embarrassment, the Davises needed Radcliffe alive, not dead. They wanted to watch the man squirm.’
Footprints to Murder Page 15