A realization struck me and I eased one of them free, and then another. Each weighed a pound at least. I recognized these to be the brass lion set that had once resided in my office. I took one of the lions in my right hand and the other in my left, concealed in the darkness of the stacks when a glint of motion flashed in the doorway.
With no time to aim, I threw one of the lions and then the other. I heard a loud thud, as one of them struck a wall, but the second drew an uggghhhhhh, followed by an audible gasp.
I lurched out from the stacks without waiting to ascertain the level of damage the strike had done. I moved swiftly and as quietly as I could, glad riding a bike kept me in sneakers as opposed to more formal shoes that would’ve rendered movement like this impossible. I felt a hand grab for my shoulder, grazing it and coming away with the light sweater I relinquished to make a mad dash for the library’s main door.
All I remember was the sound of my sneakers against the wood, no echo when it seemed there should be. Then that sound was buried by the louder thumping of feet pounding my way, drawing closer.
I had no choice but to bypass the door for the main stacks of books in the library’s single large reading room, angling for one of two emergency exits, their red signs glowing in the near total darkness. Our library’s stacks were a labyrinth of warrens and aisles, battling for space with the nooks and crannies where books waited on wheeled carts to be reshelved.
I couldn’t hear the steps at my rear anymore as I wove my way amid the stacks, the scent of the pages and glued bindings heavy in my nostrils. But I could hear the sound of a siren, distant but growing louder by the moment, evidence that the Cabot Cove Sheriff’s Department had managed to trace the origins of my 911 call.
Still slicing an irregular path through the stacks, I let myself hope the intruder had heard the siren, too, and might even have fled. But I soon realized that he’d anticipated my move and was positioned to intercept me when I essentially stormed right into him.
I backpedaled and grazed one of the wheeled, book-laden carts. I ground my feet to a halt, squeaking against the hard wood. I couldn’t see the intruder coming at me through the darkness, but I knew he was, all the same.
I worked myself in behind the cart and shoved it into motion, gathering as much speed as I could manage as I was swept into the utter blackness. A dizzying impact rattled my bones and jammed the cart painfully against my pelvis. I heard a loud gasp and a whooooooshhhhh of air that could only have meant I’d hit my target.
But I kept the cart going, books flying everywhere, until the wheels caught on something and sent it toppling over, scattering the rest of the books in all directions. They partially blocked my way and I tried to surge past them, convinced the wheels had caught on the intruder’s frame after he’d gone down. The siren was really screaming and I detected the faint glow of revolving lights through a window overlooking the library’s front.
I could practically reach out and touch them, almost safe when I felt a hand with an iron grip clutch at my ankle, tightening like a vise. I tried to kick free and then grabbed hold of an end of metal shelving for leverage. That section teetered ever so slightly and instinct almost made me release my grip, until judgment won the day.
As a second hand joined the first trying to yank me downward, I grabbed hold of the shelving with both hands, and pulled with all my strength. It rocked, but didn’t fall, so I pulled harder.
And harder.
Then harder still, as I felt my leg starting to slide and give, the rest of me soon to succumb to my assailant’s violent tugging, when the shelf finally began to topple over. Books sprayed everywhere, a few volumes striking my cheeks, nose, and head. But they must’ve distracted my assailant enough for me to pull free of his grasp and lurch away just before the entire shelf came tumbling down.
I caught a fleeting glimpse of a shiny, bald pate before I looped around the refuse and angled for the main entrance, heaving for breath, my path lit dimly by the revolving lights now spilling through all the nearest windows, like landing lights illuminating a runway. I reached the door to the sound of my own panicked wheezing and threw it open.
To the sight of Mort Metzger and one of his deputies.
Chapter Twenty-three
I recognized Deputy Andy before I registered the gun in his hand. I saw it from Mort’s arms, into which I’d collapsed.
“He’s inside!” I managed to rasp. “He’s inside!”
Deputy Andy charged into the library, pistol in one hand and flashlight in the other. The beam carved up the darkness, turned every chair and floor plant into monstrous shadows cast against the walls.
I realized in that moment I’d just thrown the door open, meaning it hadn’t been locked, meaning . . .
Doris Ann!
I pulled from Mort’s grasp and scurried back inside, hearing him yell, “Hey!” after me. He rushed inside in my wake, his flashlight beam illuminating me as I ran to look behind the circulation and checkout desk. The beam reflected off Doris Ann’s glasses, which rested on the floor alongside her downed form. She looked pale, seemed to be breathing fitfully, but was, thankfully, alive.
“Call an ambulance!” I cried out.
I heard the approach of a fresh siren in the next instant.
“I wasn’t born yesterday, you know,” Mort said. “It pays to play it safe.”
“You thought I was hurt.”
“We get a nine-one-one call from your number at this location with no further information. What did you expect me to think?”
Deputy Andy approached from the area where I’d spilled a section of shelving atop my assailant, his flashlight beam seeming to duel Mort’s in the darkness.
“Nothing,” the deputy reported, holstering his pistol. “He’s gone. Emergency exit door is still open.”
Mort addressed me as he moved to tend to Doris Ann. “Did you recognize him, Jessica?”
I shook my head. “Not in the darkness. He was big, though. And bald. I remember he was bald.”
“The man pictured at the Wirths’ barbecue had a full head of hair.” He eased Doris Ann up to a seated position, leaned her gently back against some drawers so she could breathe better. “But Ansell Hodges is bald.”
“This wasn’t Ansell Hodges,” I insisted, referring to a local homeless veteran Cabot Cove did its best to take care of.
“He might have snuck into the library to avoid the storm that’s coming.”
“And attacked Doris Ann? Then me?”
“Thunder does that to him, thanks to all the post-traumatic stress he suffers from. I’ve let him sleep in one of our cells a few times when a storm blows in.”
“It wasn’t Ansell Hodges,” I repeated.
“You said you didn’t get a good look at him.”
“Maybe not good enough to see who it was, but plenty good enough to see who it wasn’t.”
Mort didn’t look convinced, as he continued checking Doris Ann’s vital signs. His flashlight illuminated a nasty bruise to the side of her throat.
“Someone must’ve squeezed off her air,” he surmised.
“Sound like Ansell Hodges to you?”
“The man was a Green Beret or something, Jessica,” Mort said, climbing back to his feet to greet the just-arriving Cabot Cove rescue squad. “You tell me.”
“I think it was the same man who tried to run me over, Mort.”
“You said you didn’t get a good look at him either.”
“It’s the same man. I’d bet anything on it.”
Mort held the door for the paramedics, who wheeled a gurney past him toward Doris Ann. “You want to tell me what brought you here?” His gaze through the open door found the old bike I’d pedaled over on. “On that old thing, with a storm in the forecast? You want to tell me what was so important?”
“Research.”
“For a book?”
“Not exactly.”
“What’s that mean?”
I swallowed hard. “I was following a new lead about Hal’s death.”
“Without telling me?”
“There was nothing to tell. That’s why I was here, to find something.”
“And did you?”
“I’m not . . . sure.”
“Not sure you found something or not sure you were going to tell me about it?”
My mouth was bone-dry, but I wasn’t thirsty. I wasn’t anything but scared and realized I was still shaking.
“I think Hal Wirth was murdered, Mort.”
“We both do.”
“But there’s a pattern.”
“Pattern?”
“I think there were other victims. I think we may be onto something much bigger here.”
* * *
• • •
Additional deputies arrived to search the library more thoroughly. The same crime scene techs who’d scoured Eugene Labine’s room in Hill House were en route as well, to check the library for the man’s fingerprints and perhaps DNA, too. I’d already alerted Mort to the presence of my bag in the periodicals room and asked him to make sure a deputy fetched the last pages spit out by the nearby printer as well.
Doris Ann, meanwhile, had regained consciousness while the paramedics were tending to her and asked them groggily what had happened. She told Mort her last memory was checking in some of the books deposited through a wall slot. Then finding herself on the floor between two able-bodied young men poking and prodding at her.
“Maybe I should pass out more often,” she said, smiling at them, as the paramedics eased her atop the gurney for transport to Cabot Cove Hospital to be given the once-over.
“You don’t remember anyone choking you?” Mort asked her in the last moment before the paramedics hoisted her gurney into the back of their rescue vehicle.
“Choking me? Certainly not. One minute I was checking in books and the next I was waking up on the floor.”
I followed Mort to his car and climbed into the passenger seat, while he took the driver’s. He switched on his windshield wipers to better view the comings and goings of his deputies. As soon as they swiped the rain away, more drops collected to obscure his vision again.
“Tell me more about this lead you were following,” he said, “this pattern you think you’ve found.”
I sketched out the broad strokes for him, leaving out any mention of Chad’s involvement.
“So you were following one of your hunches.”
“That’s right.”
“And this particular hunch just happened to lead you to these recently deceased who fit the same general profile as Hal Wirth. Notice I said ‘deceased,’ and not ‘murdered.’”
“I noticed. And I also noticed that these potential victims were mostly recently divorced or separated. Hal and Babs were sorting through some problems, but it fits the same pattern.”
“What pattern is that?”
“Vulnerability, which made them more susceptible to not realizing they were being taking advantage of. Like Hal, they were all very successful entrepreneurs who became embroiled in financial scandals shortly before their deaths.”
“Thank you for not saying ‘murders,’” Mort groused, and turned the windshield wipers up another notch.
“Also like Hal, by all accounts they squandered vast sums of money in a short period of time. Went from the front of the line to financial ruin virtually overnight.”
Mort eyed me skeptically. “And you just happened to pick these cities and time periods.”
“A writer never reveals her sources.”
“I thought you said this wasn’t for a book.”
“Perhaps I was mistaken.”
Mort shook his head, his gaze scorning me. “How am I supposed to protect you if you won’t tell me everything?”
“Protect me from me what? Ansell Hodges? He’s mostly harmless, remember?”
“Jessica . . .”
“Mort.”
He gazed toward my bag, which was lying on the squad car’s passenger-seat floor between my legs, those pages his deputies had retrieved from the printer poking out from the top. “What say you let me take a run at those?”
“I say we can make copies when you get me home. There were others, Mort,” I told him, thinking of the three cities Chad had provided that I hadn’t had the opportunity to look into yet. “As many as six possible victims at the very least, and the man pictured outside the kitchen where Hal died was in each of the cities around the time of their deaths.”
Mort’s brow furrowed. “That’s what you were following up on?”
“Yup.”
“And you found a pattern in their deaths that fits Hal’s profile, too?”
“Like a glove.”
“But you’re not going to tell me how you came by this information.”
“Nope.” I paused. “But it wasn’t Ansell Hodges.”
“That’s not funny, Jessica.”
“No more than him being the man who attacked me.”
Mort started the engine. “I better get you back home. I’ll have one of my guys drop off your bike in the morning.”
“I’m fast running out of transportation.”
“Well, you do have your pilot’s license. . . .”
“Not much room for parking planes in Cabot Cove.”
Mort jammed his squad car into reverse. “But plenty of room for murder.”
Chapter Twenty-four
I didn’t want to make copies for him of the printouts I’d made at the library, but I knew I had no choice when Mort insisted on coming inside to make sure my house was safe. I almost joked about the possibility of finding Ansell Hodges asleep in my bed, but then opted against it.
I didn’t think Mort would be able to do much more with the printouts covering the stories of the victims from Denver, Houston, and Miami than I had already done. Discerning whether any of the three potential victims I’d managed to trace had had occasion to use the LOVEISYOURS dating site would be difficult at best and likely impossible, if truly nefarious ends were behind this and their profiles had been wiped completely clean, as had been the case with Hal’s.
What I knew, what sentenced me to a fitful sleep that night amid the storm that finally arrived, was that someone would kill to protect whatever it was I’d uncovered, which meant I had to get him before he got me.
Mort had gotten no further with the background of Sean Booker, owner of LOVEISYOURS, of whom no record seemed to exist prior to his establishing the site. And he agreed with my supposition that Eugene Labine would never have come to Cabot Cove empty-handed, that whatever documents he’d brought with him to support his claims about Hal Wirth, his former business partner, must have been scooped up by his killer.
I tossed and turned through the night, my mind refusing to quiet, finally nodding off, only to oversleep yet again. I was roused by a determined knocking on my front door after ringing the bell must not have claimed my attention. I fetched my cell phone from the night table as I sat on the bedside and saw what looked like a dozen missed calls and texts from Babs. I climbed into my bathrobe and held fast to the railing while descending the stairs to avoid any more calamities. I threw open the door to find Babs standing there, Alyssa and Chad standing sheepishly behind her.
“What were you thinking, Jessica?” She glared at me. “Involving my daughter and her boyfriend in this.”
“Why don’t you come inside, Babs?”
She did so after hesitating briefly, seeming to forget Alyssa and Chad were even there until they followed her through the door, each casting me a shrug.
“Don’t look at them,” Babs snapped. “They haven’t uttered a word, other than to say I needed to hear it from you. So, Jessica, should I be blaming them f
or your being attacked last night or you?”
“Me, Babs. It’s all on me.”
“I knew you’d say that.”
“Because it’s the truth. Alyssa and Chad helped me because I insisted.”
“No,” Alyssa broke in, “we helped because we wanted to. Because this was my father.”
But Babs’s attention was still rooted on me. “Why didn’t you share this with me, Jessica? Why didn’t you talk to me?”
“Because I wasn’t sure.”
“About what?”
“Hal.”
“That you suspect he might have been murdered?”
“There’s . . . more,” I managed to utter, not feeling like going into the whole dating site business, which smacked of cheating.
Babs didn’t need to hear that about her late husband. A friend would never tell her such a thing.
Alyssa positioned herself physically between us. “Chad and I volunteered our help, Mom.”
“And your help almost got as good a friend as I’ve got in the world killed. I’m not fragile. I don’t break so easy. I could’ve handled whatever you have to say.”
I found my voice again. “This is about Hal, Babs. This is about finding out what brought Eugene Labine to Cabot Cove,” I continued, “and what led to both of them being killed.”
“And you don’t trust the professionals to do that?”
“Mort’s been working with me every step of the way.”
“You’re a writer, Jessica, not a real detective. If you want to keep playing one on the side, dabbling in these real-life mysteries you keep stumbling upon, go right ahead—so long as they don’t put my family in danger.”
“Your family’s already in danger, Babs. What they did to Hal,” I went on, trying not to say too much, “maybe I can fix it. Maybe I can help.”
I guess I had said too much, because Alyssa’s reaction was to get face-to-face with her mother, no longer the little girl in a young woman’s body. “The house, the bills, my school—what are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t think your father lost all his money, Alyssa,” I said when Babs was stymied for an answer. “I think it was stolen somehow. I think maybe somebody was threatening him, or the two of you. I think he paid them everything he had to make them go away. Because he was scared.”
Murder, She Wrote--A Date with Murder Page 16