James caught my eye, and we stood up. “Harby, if you think of anything else, please let me or Marty know, will you?” James said.
“I will. She said she’d come back tomorrow to help me. I think I’ll just have one of my dinners and watch a little TV. You’ll come to the funeral, won’t you, Jimmy?”
“Of course I will, Harby. I’ll see you soon. Don’t get up, we’ll find our way out.”
On the porch James paused a moment, looking out over the rolling expanse of lawn, seeing nothing.
“Will he be all right by himself?” I asked softly.
“What? Oh, I think so. He’s fine as long as he does what he’s familiar with. Edith was always smarter than him—she took care of things like the bills and getting the lawn mown. He may need some assistance going forward—I’m not sure he even knows where the supermarket is.”
“Poor man. Did you accomplish what you wanted to there?”
“Yes. I needed to talk to Harby as soon as possible. You’ve seen him—would you trust his memory for more than a day? And I wanted to check the crime scene, except there isn’t one. Damn. Are you hungry?”
I thought about what I had in my larder: not much. “Do you know the hotel in the center of Wayne? We could get dinner there.”
“Fine,” he said absently. “Just give me directions.”
I took his arm. “First you get in the car . . .”
CHAPTER 13
The restaurant in the old but nicely refurbished hotel in the center of Wayne proved a good choice: there were enough people there to make it sound successful, but not enough that it felt crowded or loud. The crowd was moderately upscale. An author years ago had labeled those who lived in Wayne “Bobos”—bourgeois bohemians—and the label fit. The restaurant offered some light dishes, and that was all we were in the mood for. We sat at a small table in a corner and ordered, and started with a glass of wine each.
I settled more comfortably in my chair and looked at James. He looked . . . tired, distracted, frustrated. “Anything I can do?” I asked.
He finally wrenched his attention back to me. “Sorry, I’m not very good company, am I? I’m just trying to work out a way to get involved with this officially. If there is a killer at work here, he’s very good.”
“Do you think there’s a chance it’s an ‘if’?”
“No, I don’t. There are four people dead. Heck, there may be more, if I go through that list of yours.”
“I can ask Shelby to cross-reference the names with obituaries. These people are clearly the type to have had detailed obituaries. That is, if you want more bad news?”
“Comes with the job, unfortunately. I hate to ask for it, but I need to know. But as I started to say, if these people were deliberately killed, our killer knew something about the targets. There have been no signs of violence. All the victims were found in their homes, and either the killer is a brilliant lock-picker or the victims all let him or her in.”
“Do you think this teacup thing is important?”
“Maybe. Both Edith and Harby were—or are—very set in their ways. Edith always insisted on a cup of tea in the late afternoon. Always black Indian tea, and always with a splash of milk.”
“James, how much time did you spend with her?”
He looked at me and smiled. “You mean, how do I know details like this? Within the family Edith was famous for her insistence on social rituals, never mind that she was the only one left who followed them. If you were in her home at four o’clock, by God you were going to have a cup of tea. I was always terrified that I’d break a glass or drop the sugar bowl.”
“You’re scarred for life.” I took another sip of wine. “But if Harby, who may spend most of his time on another planet, noticed the wrong cup, which Edith would never have chosen for herself, then it must mean that the, uh, guest was there around four and grabbed the wrong one.”
James nodded. “Yes. A guest who took the time to fix her a cup of tea. It could have been a man or a woman—clearly these hypothetical crimes don’t take a lot of physical strength. So she had her tea, said good-bye to her guest, washed the teacup, started feeling woozy and lay down for a nap, and never woke up. Of course, we’ll never know what was in the tea, though, because either Edith or her visitor washed the cup.”
“Whatever Edith was dosed with, she was already out before Harby came home,” I said.
“I’ll check back with the ME and see if he can narrow the time of death.”
The waiter arrived with our food, and I wondered what he would make of our rather odd conversation. He retreated quickly; good server manners, or had he overheard too much? I tasted my food: very nice. James looked down as if surprised to find a plate in front of him. “Try the veal. It’s excellent,” I told him.
We devoted a few minutes to eating, which impeded talking. I think we both needed a little time to wrap our minds around what we’d learned from Harby and what we could infer from it. Did this case really hinge on an out-of-place teacup? How many other small details like that had been overlooked in the earlier deaths?
Both James and I accepted the waiter’s offer of coffee, and while we waited for it, I said, “You told me that our hypothetical killer used drugs that had been prescribed for each victim. Have I got that right?”
“Yes, that’s right. We already checked whether the amounts of the drugs on hand were about right, given when the prescriptions had been filled. The quantities matched up, except in Adeline’s case. Which suggests that the killer knew something about the drugs people in that age group were likely to use.”
We both fell silent as the waiter appeared with coffees, sugar, cream, and spoons and set each out.
“Where would he get the medications?” I asked when the waiter had finally left.
“It wouldn’t be difficult. On the street, or if he had some medical connection. Most of the time he could have used what he found in the house but the snafu with Adeline’s prescription suggests that he may have brought the drugs with him. Maybe he was getting cocky since no one had noticed. But then, he never expected anyone to look too closely at the manner of death.”
The poor waiter appeared at that moment to offer a dessert menu. James and I turned in unison to bark “No” at him, and he fled. I laughed. “We’ll have to leave him a nice tip. What must he think of us?”
“That either we’re plotting murder or we’re law enforcement officials. Which at least I am. Seriously, Nell, you raise some good points. At a minimum we can say that this killer is careful and methodical. There’s only been that one slip. These aren’t random victims, as you’ve already figured out. There seems to be a plan. The problem is, we don’t know what the plan is.”
“I know. Is there anything else I can do?”
“You’ve done a lot already. Just keep thinking—and watch yourself.”
“Maybe I’m safe. Whoever it is hasn’t gone after any administrators,” I said.
“Yet. Are you ready to go?”
“I suppose.”
We drove along Route 30 back to my tiny Bryn Mawr home. When he’d pulled into the very small space behind my car, I turned to him and said, “Nightcap?”
He hesitated. “I should get home.”
“Why? So you can pace around your apartment and worry? You can worry here. We can worry together. Two heads are better than one.”
He smiled. “You’ve convinced me.”
I smiled back. “Good. I hate to think alone—always gets me into trouble.”
Inside, I opened some windows for air, then turned to James. “Coffee? Liqueur? Some combination of the two?”
“I’ll go for the last one—maybe they’ll cancel each other out.”
“Coming up.” I retreated to my definitely one-person kitchen and set a kettle on to boil for coffee.
James came up and leaned in the doorway. “How is it that you keep getting involved in my cases?” he asked.
“Karma? I bet you never knew there was so much crime in the c
ultural community until you met me.”
“No, I didn’t. I still don’t understand it. It seems like there’s so little at stake. I mean, nobody is getting rich, and there’s not much power to go around. Most people in the city walk by the museums and libraries around here without even noticing. And if they do go in, they complain because you charge too much, especially for a stuffy old place that’s probably filled with mold.”
“All too true,” I said, measuring ground coffee into my French press. “I know there are courses and even degrees in arts administration, but I’m not sure what they’re good for. I understand that if you want to stay solvent, you have to operate your institution as a business, with budgets and all that. But there are so many variables and so many unknowns. How do you place a financial value on three hundred years of history? What do you do when the roof collapses because you’ve deferred maintenance for a couple of decades?”
The kettle boiled, and I poured water into the coffee press before going on. “At least you know that your job won’t go away—there will always be crime, and we’ll need someone to track down the villains and see that they’re prosecuted. With a museum, if it goes belly-up, a few people will say, oh, what a shame, and go on with their lives.”
“But you love it,” James said.
“I do. At least, most of it. I feel like a guardian, fending off the enemies wielding budget axes. I believe that what we do at the Society matters.” I turned to pull cups from the upper shelf of my cabinet; James came up behind me and kissed the back of my neck. I managed not to drop the cups, but set them carefully on the countertop before pivoting to face him. “So we make a good team, right?”
“We do.” We stopped talking for a while, but managed to peel ourselves apart before the coffee was entirely cool. Heck, it was summer: who needed hot coffee? I filled two cups, handed one to James, and led the way to the living room, which was indistinguishable from the dining room—all one big room. I pointed to the antique secretary—an inheritance from a grandmother—and said, “The liqueurs are in there, in the top part.”
Once we were comfortably settled, side by side, I asked, “If you have no physical evidence, does that make motive more important?”
“In a way. Sometimes if you know the why, you can figure out the how. Sometimes it works the other way around.”
“That’s not helpful. We know the how: prescription drugs, coupled with access to the victims, all of whom were elderly and apparently offered no resistance. We don’t have a clue about the why.”
“What does the ‘how’ tell us?” James prompted, looking like he was enjoying himself, leaning back, tie askew.
I thought for a moment. “The killer is intelligent and educated. He either knows something about pharmacology or knows enough to learn what he needs. Right?”
James nodded. “Go on.”
I swatted his arm. “Hey, don’t I pay tax dollars so you can do this? All right, I’ll call your bluff. He has access: he can gain entry to a variety of people’s homes without force, and without raising suspicion. He must be presentable, nicely dressed. Well-spoken.”
“Good. Maybe you have a future as a profiler.”
“Maybe I already am. You have to know people in order to ask them for money successfully.” I thought again. “I keep saying ‘he,’ but as you noted earlier, there’s nothing so far that a woman couldn’t do. In fact, a woman might have a better chance of not raising the victim’s suspicions. And they say poison is a woman’s weapon.”
“You’re right. Anything else?”
An idea was beginning to grow inside me—one I didn’t like. Unless James and my diligent crew had missed a huge subset of deaths, this killer of ours had targeted a very specific community. Leaving aside the “why” for a moment, how had he—or she—known who to go after? And where to find them? If we knew that, it might get us a step closer to that elusive “why.” I turned to James and said flatly, “He’s one of us.”
“Us?” James replied, startled.
“He’s got to be connected to a museum or a cultural institution, or to fundraising somehow. You agree that he’s targeting members of various nonprofit boards? If he’s an outsider, why would he even know boards exist and how they work and who is likely to be on them? I’m not saying an outsider wouldn’t be able to collect the information over time, but he’d have to know where to start and what to look for. I think our killer already has a connection. He’s got to be a museum professional of some sort.”
James looked at me, and I could almost see his thoughts spinning around like a roulette wheel, slowing, slowing, until the ball dropped in a single slot. “I think you may be right,” he said with something like wonder. “Why didn’t I see that? Let’s walk through it again. All the people who have been killed are members of local cultural institutions. As far as we know, they have no other links other than general social status.”
“Right,” I said cautiously. “And the four we’re talking about overlapped at only a few of those institutions, and of those, the most likely one is the Forrest Trust. For reasons we don’t understand.”
“So we focus on the Forrest Trust, at least for now. What kind of assets does it have? Who controls it? Who are the other board members? And you’re in the perfect position to do just that, because you and the Society benefit from the trust.”
“I am,” I said with more confidence.
He grabbed me and planted a kiss on me, which more or less put an end to our brainstorming.
CHAPTER 14
Being stuck in a car with someone in early rush-hour traffic on the Schuylkill is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, the other person is a captive audience and can’t go anywhere, so you can hash out whatever you want; on the other hand, if murder is on your mind, and you have no idea who the killer was, there’s only so much dissecting of the evidence you can do. We didn’t have enough evidence to point a finger. Maybe a whole hand, which ended up pointing in five directions.
“Any brilliant insights by light of day?” I asked James once we were on the road.
“I think your conclusion that the killer is connected to some sort of cultural institution holds up,” he said, keeping his eyes on the road and his speed a conservative three miles over the posted speed limit, except when our progress could be measured in feet per minute, which was normal for the Schuylkill at rush hour.
“Great. That limits the suspects to a few hundred,” I said, frustration creeping into my voice. “I keep coming back to the question, why? What have these nice older people done to anyone that would inspire murder? How the heck do we figure that out?”
“Look at it as a data analysis problem. You’ve got four data points, potentially. Isn’t it the theory that it takes only two to draw a line? Maybe you should be looking harder and deeper into the points you have, rather than trying to find more points to fine-tune your line. Am I making sense?”
“You mean, shift to digging into the individuals, rather than looking for more possible victims?”
“Exactly. Of course, if I could point to additional murders, I’d have a better chance of making a case to be allowed to participate officially, but that might not give us your ‘why.’”
I thought for a moment. “How about this: I ask Shelby to go through the obits, to see if she can find anyone else who fits the victim profile, and Marty and I’ll do the deeper digging on the ones we have.”
“That could work. At least it’s a plan.”
I turned toward him, as far as my seat belt would allow. “James, I can’t stand waiting around to see who’s next. I don’t want anyone else to die. And I don’t want to think that anyone I know could do something like this.”
“I know. I don’t want that any more than you do, Nell. Just keep digging, and I’ll keep the pressure up from my end. That’s all we can do for now.”
We were still moving at a snail’s pace. I decided to look at things from a different point of view. “Tell me more about the FBI’s view of serial killers
. Why do these people do it?”
“There’s no simple answer to that, because there are a lot of factors that may play a role. But the most important is that the serial killer makes the decision to kill and kill again.”
“Well, duh. So this person is not acting on behalf of someone else? Like a hit man? Or what about if he’s hearing voices that tell him to kill X, Y, and Z?”
“That’s a different category.”
“So there’s no single profile that fits all serial killers—not even gender or age?”
“Nope.”
“Shoot, why do we even need the FBI?”
“Don’t be so quick to dismiss us,” James said, giving me a quick smile. “The behavioral people earn their salaries. There is consensus about the characteristics of a serial killer. For example, they feel a need for control. They can also be glib, and charming, they lie easily, and enjoy manipulating people. They tend to lack remorse or guilt for their crimes. Most fall under the heading of psychopathy, but not all serial killers are psychopaths—they just share some of the traits. And they like to think they’re smarter than the rest of us. But a lot of those same traits are shared by successful businesspeople—heck, most executives on Wall Street. And they’re not all American Psychos.”
“Great, now I can’t even eliminate anyone I know. But again, do you guys know why these people kill?”
“We admit that motive is the hardest thing to determine. A single killer might have multiple motivations, or they may evolve over the series of murders. For example, a second murder might be committed to cover up the first, and so forth. And you won’t like to hear it, but the experts caution us against working to identify motive rather than looking for the killer.”
“Yes, but in this case there’s no evidence to work with.”
“Nell, there’s never no evidence. We’re limited in physical evidence here, but we could pursue how and where the killer obtained drugs, for example, and how he knew what drugs his victims took. That’s tangible and something that can be investigated. And you’re looking at demonstrable connections between the victims. In many cases of serial killings, that might not exist, but I’ll agree that there’s a common thread here—if we’re right about all or any of what we’ve deduced.”
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