“He really thinks you can get him off?” Mort quizzed me, as I unfolded the tattered piece of paper on my lap to keep its contents from Mort.
“He thinks if I get to the bottom of this, he’ll be exonerated.”
“He’s a con man. He’s using you.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
I looked down as unobtrusively as I could at the scrap perched on my lap. It contained a series of numbers and letters that made no sense at all to me.
ME2006Y
Hmmmmmmm . . .
I assumed ME referred to Dax, or Sean Booker, himself. Given the presence of the Y, 2006 seemed to indicate a year.
So Larry Dax had done something in 2006 that somehow held clues to what I was facing today and who was behind it.
Hmmmmmmm . . .
“What’s that?” Mort asked suddenly.
“What’s what?”
“Whatever it is you’re reading.”
“Just a note I made to myself,” I said, pocketing the crumpled husk of paper I realized was a piece of commercial toilet tissue doubled over, as if Dax had written this note inside a bathroom. I knew if I told Mort the truth, he’d make us head back into the federal building, turn the note over to the investigators, and tell them everything Dax had told me. But I couldn’t let that happen, couldn’t let their investigation hamper my search for the truth behind Hal Wirth’s murder. They’d laugh me out of the office if I told them everything I knew—that is, if they didn’t arrest me instead, which meant I’d also be endangering Chad.
“Something that explains why Dax thinks you’re the only person who can help him? What exactly did he tell you?”
“I think you were right. He didn’t say much of anything really, other than to proclaim his innocence. But he’s scared, Mort. He told me somebody wiped the LOVEISYOURS server clean. I think he sees himself as a target.”
Mort shook his head. “When was it exactly that you became a magnet for this kind of thing?”
“I honestly can’t remember. But also I don’t remember somebody trying to kill me twice either. So maybe Dax has a point.”
“And maybe he really is in danger. Is that what you’re suggesting?”
“More like desperate.”
“Jessica Fletcher,” Mort said melodramatically. “Patron saint of lost souls.”
“I believe that’s already Saint Anthony’s job.”
“Well, you’re giving him a run for his money. And speaking of money, how exactly do you expect any of this to help get Babs’s back?”
“I haven’t thought that far ahead yet.”
“I should say not.” Mort took a deep breath and squeezed the steering wheel harder. “You don’t outline your books in advance, right?”
“You know I don’t.”
“Why?”
“You know that, too, Mort.”
“Refresh my memory.”
“Because I know the story will take me where it needs to go.”
He nodded, as if I’d made his point for him. “Well, here’s the thing, Jessica, and I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But life doesn’t always work that way. There are plenty of detours along the route and sometimes things just don’t work out.”
“You think you need to tell me that?”
“Apparently, I do,” Mort said, his tone remaining firm. “I’ve seen you use that magical mind of yours to solve plenty of real-life crimes, murder included, but this is different.”
“How?”
“You’ve never let it get to you this way before. You’ve never taken it so personally.”
I wanted to argue the point with him, but I couldn’t. I’d been involved in other cases that hit home. When my friend Martha was accused of killing her husband in Las Vegas, and I flew out to her aid, for example. Or when another friend’s death in her beloved retirement community turned out to be murder. Or when the foster son of my friends the Duffs, out in Arizona, was accused of killing a teammate on his minor-league baseball team. I’ve even helped my own charming but ne’er-do-well nephew, Grady, out of countless scrapes, including one in New York when he was making television commercials featuring celebrities. But Mort was right:
This was different.
It wasn’t so much about solving Hal’s murder as it was doing whatever I could to make sure Babs could keep her beloved home and Alyssa wouldn’t have to drop out of college. The fact that the basis of my resolve, that I could somehow recover Hal’s stolen fortune, was hardly rooted in reality swayed me not one little bit; after all, the number of victims swindled out of their money who ever get a dollar of it back can best be described as zero.
“Do I have to remind you why, Mort?” I asked him anyway, because if I wasn’t going to help Babs and Alyssa, then who was?
“No more than I have to remind you that someone tried to run you down on your bicycle and then attacked you in the library. And it wasn’t an unhappy member of the Friends group.”
“It wasn’t Ansell Hodges either.”
Mort nodded again. “My point exactly.”
“You want me to lay low.”
“I think I made that clear already.”
We stared at each other across the front seat, neither ready to give.
“I have to see this through, Mort,” I said, my tone as close to conciliatory as I could make it. “I have to.”
Mort settled back, sighing in what I took for resignation, but he wasn’t done with me yet.
I thought of the jagged scrap of paper I’d tucked into my pocket. “I need one more day, Mort. If I haven’t found a way to proceed, I’ll give up the hunt.”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Mort looked less than convinced. “Can I take you for your word on that?”
I nodded.
He continued to grouse. “Because there’s one murder you’ll never be able to solve, Jessica: your own.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
“Do you know what it is?” I asked Chad as he ran his eyes over the line of numbers and letters that Larry Dax had clandestinely passed me in the interrogation room. “Does anything about it strike a chord?”
ME2006Y
I’d phoned him as soon as Mort and I returned to Cabot Cove, eager to have Chad take a look at what I was certain would be a key clue to breaking the case.
He looked up at me, shaking his head, stymied for the first time since I’d met him. “Sorry, Jessica. I can’t help you with this one. Maybe I should do some digging around this Larry Dax guy, see what he was up to in 2006.”
“The Y could be throwing us off,” I suggested. “Maybe it doesn’t stand for ‘year’ at all.”
“That might help,” Chad said, hardly enthusiastic about the prospects.
“I shouldn’t have gotten my hopes up.”
“Don’t give up yet. I’m pretty good with this stuff. Just give me a day.”
Same thing I’d said to Mort, I remembered.
Chad stretched his hand forward and retrieved the scrap of paper from where I’d laid it on my kitchen table, once again our de facto office.
“Maybe 2-0-0-6 isn’t a year,” he said suddenly.
“Then what is it?”
“I don’t know yet, Jessica.”
Maybe I was being selfish and shortsighted by continuing to involve Chad, since I might be subjecting him to the same danger. But his fondness, if not love, for Alyssa was obvious, and I knew he wanted to help her as much as I did, and that he would continue doing so whether I enlisted his services again or not.
A bit of rationalization, I know, but as I said, time was running out. And the longer Hal’s fortune was missing without a trace, the higher the likelihood it would never be found again. Just like a kidnapping victim, only more so.
“It gets worse,” I told Chad. �
��He also told me somebody wiped the entire LOVEISYOURS site clean.”
“I noticed that.” Chad nodded.
He attempted to bring the site up on the laptop he’d already switched on, drawing the message Cannot find site.
“I guess whoever the man in our picture is working for is trying to cover their tracks, eliminating any potential links back to them.”
“Only through the front door, Jessica,” Chad said, flashing that mischievous grin of his that I’d already come to appreciate so much.
“Is there a back one in this case?”
“Not per se, as far as the LOVEISYOURS site is concerned, but I got to thinking.”
“Something that seems to always get me in trouble,” I told him.
“Anyway, I figured LOVEISYOURS wouldn’t necessarily be the only dating site the four victims we know of would have used.”
“You mean three,” I corrected.
“I was including Alyssa’s father,” Chad told me, and swallowed hard. “Turned out I was wrong about him, but right about the others. All three, the two men and one woman, still had their profiles up, each on other dating sites that are rivals of LOVEISYOURS.”
“And there must be some pattern in their profiles that led to them all being targeted,” I theorized.
“You think that’s the key to all this, to what happened to Hal Wirth?”
I shrugged. “All four victims suffered financial calamities of varying degrees before their deaths. And we know they were all successful entrepreneurs.”
“You’re reading my mind,” Chad said, “particularly the entrepreneur part, because all four victims worked for themselves.”
“Meaning they managed their own money. Larry Dax, the man I knew as Sean Booker when I met him for the first time, boasted about the advanced algorithms LOVEISYOURS employed.”
“All the sites use algorithms—it’s how they match people with each other, essentially looking for areas of commonality beyond simply favorite color and zodiac sign.”
“And those algorithms would key off certain elements in a profile that made Hal and these three other people targets.”
Chad nodded. “The killers, whoever the man who attacked you last night worked for, must’ve created their own algorithm to isolate profiles of potential victims.”
“Then what?”
“That’s what we don’t know.”
“But if we could figure out these same areas of commonality, then we’d know exactly what the killers were keying on.”
Chad flashed me a look, as if he thought he’d figured out where I was going with this. “You mean, so we could isolate other potential victims?”
“I was actually thinking so we could create a potential victim.”
“Who?”
“Me,” I told Chad.
Chapter Twenty-eight
I thought the lights might have flickered when I said that, but it was just the product of my imagination as I studied Chad’s expression for a reaction.
“Alyssa would kill me if I helped you do that,” he said after a pause.
“Somebody already killed her father, Chad. And this might be the only chance at all she and her mother have of getting their money back.”
“That is, if you can catch whoever was behind it before they vanish into thin air.”
“That’s the idea,” I said, nodding.
“You’re talking about a sting operation.”
“I suppose I am. Of sorts anyway.”
Chad looked at me, his expression drained of its typical confidence and swagger, his gaze one a stranger would give another, as if he were meeting me for the first time. Which, in one sense, I suppose he was.
“What do you think your friend the sheriff’s going to think of this?”
“We’re not going to tell him.”
“We’re not?”
I held the boy’s stare. “We’re not going to stage this in Cabot Cove. It wouldn’t work.” I let that sink in a bit before I continued. “Because the victims we’ve managed to identify all come from big cities. Even Hal had his single, disastrous date in Boston. And it just so happens I keep an apartment in New York.”
“Alyssa mentioned that.”
“So I’ll relocate there.”
“You mean, we will.”
“Once the die is cast, there’s no reason for you to miss any more school.”
“You really think we’d let you do this alone?”
“We?”
“Alyssa’s coming, too. That’s from her, not me. She told me to tell you she doesn’t want to be left out of this anymore, that she wants to learn from the master firsthand.”
“This has nothing to do with writing, Chad.”
“I guess she wants the total Jessica Fletcher experience.”
I hesitated. “I can’t accept putting either of you in any more danger. You were pinged, remember?” Whatever that means, I almost added.
“I’ve got it under control.”
His strident tone surprised me no end, the veneer of a boyish computer genius receding in the face of a mature young man. Even his hair looked shorter, probably a trick of that kitchen light I’d thought I’d just caught flickering.
“And there’s something else,” Chad said suddenly.
“Is this your last condition, or are there more?”
“Nope, this is the last one. Whether we tell the sheriff what we’re up to is your call. But I assume you know some New York City cops.”
“I do,” I said, thinking of Lieutenant Artie Gelber. “But what chance do you think we’ve got of convincing the NYPD to have our backs without being laughed out of One Police Plaza?”
“That never stopped you in your books, Jessica,” Chad said, the familiar gleam back in his eyes.
“Do I really need to explain the difference to you?”
“I was just kidding—about that, but not about trying to do this without professional backup. Alyssa and I are of one mind on that.”
“You haven’t even told her about this plan yet.”
“But I know how she thinks. We bring someone else into this, or it’s a no-go.”
“No problem.” I nodded. “I’ve already got someone in mind.”
* * *
• • •
Chad had managed to find the profiles of the Miami, Houston, and Denver victims on dating sites other than LOVEISYOURS. Not Hal Wirth’s profile, though, since apparently the midlife crisis he was experiencing extended only as far as Larry Dax’s now downed site.
While Chad toiled away at assembling a fake profile for me, based upon the traits that would hopefully lead to my being targeted just as at least four others had been, I went upstairs to my office and dialed a number from memory I hadn’t used in quite a while.
“You still owe me from the last time,” private investigator Harry McGraw greeted.
“How much is it?”
“A lot.”
“You’ll have to be more specific, Harry.”
“How about alimony for an ex-wife and tuition for a couple of kids I’m trying to put through college?”
“Help me with the latest case I’m working on and you’ll be well on your way to that.”
“Case or book?”
“Case. Since when do I consult you for books?”
“Meaning you must not trust my PI skills as much as you claim.”
“I called you, didn’t I?”
“Because, I’m guessing, I’m the only one you know will answer his phone.”
“You haven’t been working?”
“I used to charge for what pretty much anyone can get off the Internet these days, my dear Jessica. I quit drinking, by the way.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Yes,” Harry said from the other end of the line, “I am.�
�
“You still have your New York office?”
“I moved to a floor without a bathroom to save on the rent. But I’ve got a water view now.”
“In Manhattan?”
“Sewer construction for three new office towers going up around the dump I’m renting in. When I’m there, I have to wear earplugs, which doesn’t matter since nobody calls anyway.”
“I’m calling, Harry.”
“And to what do I owe the privilege?”
“That job I’ve got for you.”
“Doing what?”
“Watching my back.”
“Something I’m well versed in. Did I tell you I gave up drinking?”
“You tried.”
“Sorry. All that booze has given me memory problems.”
I chuckled. “Haven’t changed at all, have you, Harry?”
“No more than you, my dear Jessica. When trouble doesn’t find you, you’re bound to go looking for it.”
“Oh, it found me, all right; I’m just looking for more.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Your usual fee.”
“Sounds like an offer I can’t refuse.”
* * *
• • •
“You built a profile for me?” I said when Chad completed his work several hours later.
“Uh-huh. To post on the same sites used by the other three victims, besides Alyssa’s father. I’m glad he hadn’t posted on those other sites, since I wouldn’t have felt right about looking at him this way.”
“What way is that?”
“As an assemblage of data. You want to find the right match, you tell the truth in your profile. I’m not sure I’d want to see that for Hal Wirth. A lousy way to meet somebody, to say the least.”
“You never met him in person?”
“He wasn’t home the other time I came to visit. The point, Jessica, is that Alyssa would never want me to see that side of him.”
“A side she’d never seen herself, you mean.”
“Yeah,” Chad said, nodding, “exactly.”
“Now tell me more about my profile.”
“The good news is you fit a lot of the algorithm’s components without me needing to change a thing.”
Murder, She Wrote--A Date with Murder Page 18