EQMM, July 2012

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The killings had sparked a mass of Facebook chats and texts. One of Ryan's classmates, a boy with statistical skills, had compiled a complete list of each dead teacher's class lists through the day. Then he cross-checked to see which students were common in the classes, looking for a pattern, to see if any of the students had been in all of the classes.

  Most were academic-subject teachers: Calculus, English, and Spanish. But Ms. McIntosh taught Metal Arts, an elective. Ryan showed Marty the lists.

  “That's amazing,” Marty said. “You guys put that information together already?”

  “It's easy, Dad,” Ryan said.

  “Does anyone make it onto all of the lists?”

  “One,” Ryan said. “Brad Wilson.” From the football team. “Not that many kids who take Advanced Calculus also take Metal Arts.”

  The kids had been freaking out about it, Ryan said. Brad had been complaining for a couple of weeks that opening day of deer season fell on a school day and he would have to wait until the weekend to go out hunting.

  The waves crashed. The clock ticked. Then for possibly the first time since he'd stopped drinking Marty was grateful for the strength of not having a hangover. He had the clear head of a sober person. The two of them looked at each other.

  “Does he have any other teachers?” Marty said.

  “He didn't do it, Dad. He was down at Central yesterday with his parents looking at the campus. They stayed overnight.”

  “He must have another teacher.”

  “I guess,” Ryan said. “I'll check.” Ryan typed a message. He turned to Marty. “Mr. Monroe. Civics.”

  Marty dialed Jenny at the hospital and thankfully she answered.

  “Tell the closest state trooper you see to look out for Mr. Monroe, the Civics teacher. He could be next.”

  “Why, Marty? How do you know?”

  “The kids found a pattern. I'll call nine-one-one but they're in a state of panic and might not pay attention to me. I think you've got better access.”

  “Okay,” Jenny said.

  When he clicked the phone closed he looked over at Ryan, who had stopped typing and was staring at him.

  “You're awesome, Dad,” he said, and Marty could see in his youngest son's eyes the honest expression of a true believer. Marty had been younger than Ryan was now the first time he got drunk. He remembered it distinctly for the wonderful way it smoothed out his teenage awkwardness and made anything seem possible. Now Marty was alarmed at the thought of Ryan experimenting with booze. There was no sign that it had happened already, but there was no reason to think it wouldn't happen eventually, if not soon. And for possibly the first time, Marty was awash with guilt at the example he'd set. Marty had never hidden his so-called social drinking. It was hard to imagine Ryan had failed to notice it had gone further, though right at this moment, together in the drafty cottage on the cusp of this local crisis, Marty could see nothing in his son's face that told him he'd been scarred by the past years. He just saw his son's bright enthusiasm for what life might hold. He saw Ryan's admiration for Marty taking charge at this moment. It was more than Marty felt he deserved.

  Through the window he could see a police helicopter over the bay heading toward town. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the clarity of his sight. He could see it was inappropriate to have been drunk at work. It was silly to think no one knew. Looking ahead, the winter would come and they would be reduced to living practically in one room, around the fireplace. He could see that it was possible that he and Jenny would not last through the strain of it. She would blame him and he would not be able to defend himself in any way.

  During the afternoon, Marty and Ryan found some ground beef in the refrigerator and made a pot of chili from the directions on the package of the spice mix. They ate it with crackers and grated cheese and watched the news, where much of the story was now complete. It was on the local news; it was on the national news. The enormity of it had been recognized. Acting on a tip, troopers had discovered a teenage girl, a junior at the high school, asleep in a pickup truck parked across the street from teacher George Monroe's house, waiting for him to come outside to pick up the newspaper in the driveway. But after Mr. Johnson was shot all teachers were warned to stay inside. The girl was Allie Lampinen. She had a high-powered deer rifle across her lap. She was wearing hunting camos.

  “Is that his girlfriend?” Marty asked.

  “Oh my God, that girl's a freak,” Ryan said. “She's Brad's stalker, the one I told you about. She probably wanted to kill all his teachers to give him, like, a little sign, like, ‘Hi! How do you like me now? You get the day off school like you wanted.'”

  Jenny called and said she had the okay to leave but a coworker would give her a ride. The weather over the bay was grey and heavy by the time she walked in to see the two of them on the couch in front of the TV, empty chili bowls on the coffee table. As if just noticing the mess, Ryan jumped up and carried the bowls into the kitchen.

  “Want some chili, Mom?” he said.

  “That sounds awesome,” Jenny said. She hung up her coat and disappeared into the bedroom, emerging in pajama pants and a T-shirt. She took the bowl of chili Ryan handed her with actual enthusiasm, the first Marty had seen from her in months and months. She ate like she was truly hungry and then put the bowl down and sighed with satisfaction.

  “That was good, you boys,” she said. Marty grabbed onto the fact he'd been included in the compliment. He took it as a thank-you.

  They switched back and forth between the news channels for the latest updates, catching sight of Allie in handcuffs being led into the jail. She was vaguely pretty and wore a look of annoyance. Ryan checked for updates on the news Web sites on his laptop. Before long, Jen was asleep where she sat on the couch between them. Out the window the day had turned fully into night. The waves crashed against the shore and Marty felt lulled and hopeful for the other things yet to be solved.

  Copyright © 2012 by Barbara Arno Modrack

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  Reviews: THE JURY BOX

  by Steve Steinbock

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  The Jury Box is crowded, but your foreman isn't complaining. This month I had the chance to discover some new authors and reacquaint myself with some old friends. Please be sure to read to the end where I share a number of new books and reprints by regular EQMM contributors.

  **** Ben Coes: Coup D'etat, St. Martin's, $24.99. While former Delta Force operative Dewey Andreas, living in Australia, tries to put his past behind him, his old enemies are orch-estrating a war between Pakistan and India that will likely lead the U.S. and China into a world war. The best strategy for averting the war is to send Andreas into the region to unseat a radical Islamist head-of-state. Coup D'etat is a tightly told, well-researched thriller with a quietly engaging hero.

  **** John Connolly: Burning Soul, Atria Books, $26.00. In his tenth book-length appearance, private investigator Charlie Parker is still uneasy receiving cryptic tips from his dead daughter. This time, Parker is called upon to help Randall Haight, who as a boy took part in the murder of a fourteen-year-old girl. Thirty years later, with Haight living in a quiet Maine village, another fourteen-year-old girl is missing, and someone is sending Haight threatening messages. The Boston underworld, local cops, and Parker and his crew collide in an adventure that is at once tender and breathtakingly chilling.

  **** Kate Flora: Redemption, Five Star, $25.95. Detective Joe Burgess's plans for a picnic with his girlfriend are put on hold when two boys spot a body off the pier in Portland, Maine. The case takes a sharp personal turn when the body turns out to be that of an old high-school and Vietnam War friend who has fallen on hard times. With its authentically masculine voice, the Joe Burgess series (of which Redemption is the third) has a distinctly different flavor from Flora's Thea Kozak novels. But it still showcases Flora's ability to tell a profoundly sensitive story and her eye for complex family dynamics.

>   **** Elizabeth Zelvin, Death Will Extend Your Vacation, Five Star, $25.95. Psychotherapist Zelvin is another female writer who has mastered the male voice in a series that doesn't shy away from serious interpersonal issues. Narrator Bruce Kohler is enjoying a carefree summer in the Hamptons with a group of his fellow recovering alcoholics when the tide washes up the body of one of their housemates, a beautiful and provocative investigative journalist. Zelvin, who weaves a classical cozy plot into a contemporary setting, has a natural ear for efficiently melodic prose, something that readers have seen in her previous Bruce Kohler novels and short stories, as well as in her historical mystery stories and poetry.

  *** Vilmos Kondor: Budapest Noir, Harper, $13.99. Set in Hungary on the eve of World War II, Budapest Noir is the first of four novels, and the only one thus far to be published in English, featuring crime reporter Zsigmond Gordon. When the body of a beautiful girl is found in Budapest's red-light district, nothing in her purse besides a Hebrew prayer book, Gordon draws a connection to some pornographic photographs he'd seen in a police inspector's drawer. His dogged desire to solve the murder lands him in the midst of a clash of local, global, and family politics.

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  Several exciting critical/biographical works have come across my desk. Volume two of John Curran's award- winning analysis of Agatha Christie's secret notebooks, Murder in the Making: More Stories and Secrets from Her Notebooks (Harper, $25.99) spans the Grand Dame's entire career and includes a lost early Miss Marple short story, “The Case of the Caretaker's Wife.” Agatha Christie: An Autobiog-raphy (Harper, $29.99) is a newly reissued edition of Christie's 1977 autobiography with an enclosed audio CD containing Christie's voice recordings. Of particular interest is Joseph Goodrich's Blood Relations: The Selected Letters of Ellery Queen 1947-1950 (Perfect Crime Books, $14.95), which contains correspondence between Ellery Queen creators Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee written during the period when they produced arguably their best works, including Ten Day's Wonder, Cat of Many Tails, and The Origin of Evil. The letters, with Goodrich's commentary, provide insight into the creative process behind the novels, as well as the complex relationship between the novelists. My only regret is that, at 140 pages, this book ends far too quickly.

  Magic and detective fiction are a natural pairing. Mystery writer and former EQMM managing editor Clayton Rawson was an accomplished and well-known magician. John Dickson Carr was a lover of magic, as are Daniel Stashower and William Link. Now Las Vegas stage magician Mac King has teamed up with R.G. Wyatt (Richard Prosch) to conjure up Magic in a Minute Mysteries, available only as an ebook for Kindle and Nook (Lohman Hills Creative, $4.99). Fully illustrated by Bill King, this ten- chapter novel is suitable for readers grades five through eight. In it, a magician named Mac King and his pet monkey team up with a pair of young human sidekicks to solve a series of mysteries and scams. In the process, Mac teaches an entertaining array of magical stunts. The writing is funny, the illustrations are engaging. More information can be found at www.magici naminutemysteries.com.

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  Many of the authors familiar to EQMM and AHMM readers have been productive of late. Last fall Overlook Press published EQMM Readers Award winner Dave Zeltserman's A Killer's Essence (Overlook Press, $23.95). Gary Alexander's Interlock (Five Star, $25.95) features the Pacific Northwest comedian Buster Hightower. Family Way by Michael Z. Lewin (Five Star, $25.95) is Lewin's third book to feature the Bath-based Lunghi family and their family-owned detective agency. Another UK-based author who —like Lewin—takes his humor seriously is Simon Brett, whose twelfth Fethering mystery, Bones Under the Beach Hut (Five Star, $25.95) brings a summer of murder to the fictional south-coast village, and his Blotto, Twinks and the Dead Dowager Duchess (Felony and Mayhem, $14.95) is the second outing for his mismatched brother-sister crime-solving team.

  During its first go-around in 1997, Kenneth (K.j.a.) Wishnia's debut novel, 23 Shades of Black, was nominated for two awards, the Edgar and the Anthony, and made Booklist's Best First Mysteries of the Year, but didn't receive the commercial success it deserved. PM Press has released a new edition with an introduction by Barbara D'Amato ($17.95). Another mainstay of EQMM, biographer and short-story writer Francis M. Nevins, saw two of his Milo Turner caper novels, The 120 Hour Clock (Perfect Crime Books, $8.00) and The Ninety Million Dollar Mouse (Perfect Crime Books, $8.00) republished. Despite being printed in painfully small type, these novels are a witty treat. Nevins is also the editor of Love and Night (Perfect Crime Books, $12.00), which collects fifteen early and largely unknown short stories by Cornell Woolrich.

  Copyright © 2012 by Steve Steinbock

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  Fiction: DIAGNOSIS DEATH

  by N. J. Cooper

  Natasha Cooper worked in publishing before beginning to write fiction full time, and had several historical novels published under another name before turning to crime fiction. Her latest novel, as N.J. Cooper, is Face of the Devil (S&S/July 2011). The Literary Review said of the book, “well-described setting . . . and Cooper's sensitive understanding of human behaviour lend conviction to an intriguing, enjoyable puzzle."

  “If there's anything you've always wanted to do, I'd do it now,” the oncologist said in her efficient, friendly voice.

  “How long?” I asked, as though asking about the arrival of a plumber.

  “Weeks. At most.”

  I wasn't ill enough for news like this. It wasn't even as if there'd been any lump for me to feel; just the tiniest breathlessness.

  Outside, a taxi driver answered my wave, jerking to a halt by the pavement. I leaned into the open window and asked him to take my briefcase to the office.

  He nodded and grumbled off towards Oxford Circus, while I walked up Harley Street to the crossroads. Turning right, I made my way between the high cream buildings until the view dwindled and reddened and turned into the semi-squalour of Goodge Street. Another crossroads took me into the mews and the cobbled street outside my old studio.

  Some stubbornness had made me hang on to it and believe that I would paint again. I still had the key on my key ring.

  The once-familiar smell of paint, dust, turps, size, and canvas ripped off my shell, and my knees gave way. Tears covered my cheeks, hot and wet and salty. I didn't howl. I'd long since lost the ability to make a fuss anyone else might hear, but this was private. I wasn't mourning my imminent death; only the long-ago loss of the one kind of life I'd wanted.

  Having qualified as a lawyer to please my parents and worked for five long dull years, I'd risked all my savings to take a sabbatical to see if I could paint, in spite of all their doubts. Amazingly my first big canvas had excited a young dealer, who had sold it for more money than I'd earned in all those years. I'd bought the freehold of the studio then, believing everything he told me: “You'll be a real star, Margot; you've really got it, Margot. Paint as much as you can. I can sell it all.”

  He'd made me accept, after all and in spite of everything, that I was worth something. Me. Myself.

  And then he'd found someone he liked better and taken it all away, forcing me back to the law. Nothing that had happened since—none of the success, the partnership, the money—had helped.

  “If there's anything you've always wanted to do, now's the time,” I repeated to myself as I locked the studio.

  The ironmongers round the corner still sold kitchen equipment. I chose a thin, flexible fileting knife.

  As I walked to the bus stop, I felt my hips loosening, and my knees too, until I began to walk with something of the old swing. Soon the bus was snaking its way towards Knightsbridge. I left it at the stop outside Harvey Nicks and found another freedom in kicking off my painful, expensive shoes. A little rain had made the pavement sticky. How fabulous to enjoy feeling your feet sticky and unconfined.

  A left turn brought me to his gallery and the latest masterpiece by my old rival. I pushed open the heavy glass door and walked fast past the rec
eptionist to get to his private lair. He was there, as I'd always seen him, sitting at his desk, frowning. This time his target was a laptop. In the old days it would have been glossy prints of some poor sap's cherished work he was about to rip apart.

  He looked up and the frown tightened for a second, then cleared.

  “Margot,” he said in the smug voice that had always set my teeth on edge. “Margot Anderson. Goodness me. They told me you'd done well, and I can see it's true. Great suit. MaxMara?”

  I couldn't speak, which would have surprised my partners.

  “I did you a favour, you know,” he said, betraying the first hint of conscience.

  “You destroyed me.”

  “You always were a drama queen,” he said, but he couldn't stop me now.

  I held up my hand, palm inwards, and ticked off his sins finger by finger: “You deliberately sabotaged that last exhibition and made sure my failure was so total, so public, that I would never sell another canvas to anyone who mattered.”

  He examined his nails, stretching out his fingers like a woman with a new manicure. “Face facts, Margot,” he said, twisting his features into something that was supposed to be a cheery grin. “You've done far better as a lawyer than you ever would as a second-rate painter.” He sounded so reasonable that I had to tighten my hand on my fileting knife to remind myself why I'd come.

  “You bastard! All those ‘You're near genius, Margot darling; you and I can really go places’ were so much hogwash, I suppose.”

  He shrugged again and looked at the ugly great signet ring on his little finger, twisting it, stroking the soft metal.

  “I needed a woman painter and you were the best I could get at the time. Your bad luck I found someone better so soon. Hadn't you better answer that phone? Big international lawyer like you can't leave her clients waiting.”