The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries

by Ashley, Mike;

  The aural spectrography report was three days coming through. It arrived one day too late to do any good.

  Bob Knuckles was checking with the Richmond hotel that had hosted the TIRV class the week before. He thanked someone and hung up.

  “That’s the last staffer,” he said. “They all confirm that Mrs G. arrived with her husband and departed with him six days later. But no one can verify her whereabouts in between.”

  “So she could have flown home any time in that six-day period. Or taken a train.”

  “Very possible. Boston and Richmond are at opposite ends of the Northeast corridor.”

  “And the fingerprint bureau says that every print taken off that steamer trunk matches up with the people known to have handled it.”

  “So Mr G’s hands are clean, after all.”

  “Too clean. John Doom’s prints are not to be found, either. That old trunk was almost forensically pristine. All prints are post check-in.”

  “And so another perfect crime unravels owing to excessive prep.”

  “We’ll see,” Murex said.

  The first news reports of the Manchester to Los Angeles airliner making an emergency landing due to a passenger emergency made no immediate impression on either Detectives Murex or Knuckles. The followup, reporting that a female passenger had been taken off dead, also passed by unremarked on. The passenger’s name was being withheld pending notification of next of kin. But when the morning papers reported that Efthemia Grandmaison had been found dead in seat 23C on the overnight flight to Los Angeles, Bob Knuckles exploded out of his chair.

  “He did it! I know he did!”

  “Calm down. Let’s go at this the right way.”

  “Son of a bitch killed Doom, and then took out his wife because she knew he did it!”

  “Doesn’t fit.”

  “What do you mean, doesn’t fit? Of course it fits. It fits perfectly.”

  “A wife can’t be made to testify against her spouse. There’s more to it.”

  Murex reached out to Los Angeles police department and asked for the detective in charge of the case to contact him ASAP. A detective John Burks returned the call. After Murex explained his interest, Burks gave him what he had:

  “The deceased and her husband, this Grandmaison, take the red eye and upon their arrival at LAX, the husband attempts to awaken his wife. She was nonresponsive. EMT’s are called to the plane. Wife was pronounced dead at the scene. The husband is telling a crazy story.”

  “How crazy?”

  “Claims he was with some secret project during the Cold War that employed mental powers to spy on the Russians. He and the wife teach this Remote Viewing. The wife, he says, was remote viewing something while the husband slept in the adjoining seat. He says this is not the first time someone expired while doing these experiments

  “Is there an audio tape of the session?” Murex explained. “Usually, they record the experience.”

  “Yeah, we do have a cassette. But we haven’t listened to it yet.”

  “You might want to call me back after you do.”

  “Why don’t I just play it this minute and we’ll both listen?”

  Moments later, a hushed voice came over the line.

  “2004 8547 January 31st. 2004 8547 . . . I am in a dark room. I can see a door, but it is closed. Something is stirring above the door, where the wall joins the ceiling. Ominous. Black. A cloud. I see eyes . . . It’s speaking, ‘Death is coming for you!’ It’s moving toward me. Trey! Trey! Wake up! Ahhhh . . .”

  “Sounds like she was having a nightmare,” Burks suggested.

  Murex snapped, “I don’t buy it.”

  “You say you’re investigating a death tied to the Grandmaisons,” Burks prompted.

  “Right.” Murex gave him the investigation thusfar.

  “Seems to me like these people were poking their noses into places human noses don’t belong,” Burks opined.

  “Can we get a copy of that tape for voiceprint comparison?”

  “Consider it done.”

  “Thanks. What are you going to do with Trey Grandmaison?”

  “Depends on what the ME says. But he’s being very cooperative.”

  “We’d like to be informed either way.”

  LAPD got back to them the next morning.

  “ME says natural causes,” Burks reported. “Heart failure. Probably as a result of night terrors, also known as sleep paralysis.”

  “I’m not familiar with that one,” Murex admitted.

  “It’s a documented medical condition. According to the ME, when you dream at night, your body shuts down so you don’t act out your dreams by kicking and flailing around. Sometimes nightmares wake people up in the middle of it, and they find that they can’t move for a minute or two. It’s apparently a frightening experience when it happens.”

  “So how does the ME know that’s what really happened?”

  “Because it happened to him once. Says he was having a nightmare just like the one the woman recorded. A black cloud came at him, threatening to kill him. It roosted on his chest and he discovered he couldn’t breathe. Shock woke him up. Found he couldn’t move a muscle. But the cloud was gone. The experience scared him so much he talked to his doctor about it. The doc told him about sleep paralysis. End of story.”

  “Are you satisfied with that explanation?” Murex asked.

  “Not especially. But the death technically took place over some other state’s jurisdiction. ME says she was dead before she reached California airpace. So we’re dropping the matter. The ME will release the body to the husband tomorrow.”

  “I’ll let you know what the voiceprint analysis says.”

  “Don’t run up too big a phone bill on our account,” Burks said dryly.

  The aural-spectrography report was succinct. Murex frowned as he read it.

  “Not the same voice, huh?” Knuckles said.

  “The contrary. Perfect match. Effie Grandmaison made Doom’s tape. But what good does that do us now? She’s dead and can’t be questioned.”

  “Okay. Let’s think this through. We’re not at rope’s end. Yet. Effie Grandmaison slips home during the time her hubby is teaching that RV class down in Virgina, probably by Amtrak.”

  “Right. While she’s home, she snuffs Doom. Leaves him in the cellar gray room where he’ll keep for a few days, and returns to Richmond. Later, she accompanies Grandmaison home, where he hatches an elaborate hoax to make it look like Doom died elsewhere. All seems well.”

  “Until we start digging and making Mrs G nervous. Mr G decides the wife is a growing inconvenience, and somehow snuffs her during the flight to LA while crew and passengers are sound asleep.”

  “This time, he concocts a more plausible version of the original perfect crime. One that will stand up in court, provided an expert in sleep paralysis is called in to testify.”

  “Obviously, he recorded the tape.”

  “Let’s see what the Effie tape tells us.”

  The FedEx package from LAPD arrived later that afternoon. Murex and Knuckles rushed it over to the lab, twisting arms until a technician agreed to look at it over his lunch break. He came back with a fast answer: “Not the same voice at all. Guaranteed.”

  Murex took Knuckles aside and said, “That leaves only one voice possible: Trey Grandmaison. After he takes out the wife, he makes the tape in the toilet of the plane. Plants it and he’s home free, thinking no one is going to see through to the truth.”

  “Thinking wrong. But how do we prove otherwise? He’s off the hook and walking free under the perfect alibi: asleep beside her the entire time.”

  Murex said, “I don’t buy this sleep paralysis stuff.”

  “It’s ironclad, according to that ME. It happened to him, didn’t it?”

  Murex went to an idle PC and and started a search. He found several websites devoted to sleep paralysis. One read: Sleep paralysis is an REM sleep parasomnia, and a symptom of narcolepsy, although it can affect about 40 p
er cent of the general population. It’s characterized by frighteningly vivid hypnogogic hallucinations and accompanied by acute respiratory distress. First-time sufferers often assume that they are dying.

  Murex snorted, “I don’t buy this at all.”

  “Says it’s a legit medical condition,” Knuckles pointed out.

  “Not that. The black clouds. Almost every account here says the same thing. Subject is sleeping and has the same nightmare. A malignant black cloud comes into the bedroom, starts threatening them, and lands on their chest. Subject can’t breathe. Panic sets in. Fear of death wakes them up. They find they’re paralyzed until their body goes back to normal. Ridiculous.”

  “Maybe it’s the opposite of the tunnel of light some people report during the near-death experience,” Knuckles suggested. “A trick of the brain.”

  “Show me where in mythology or literature there are legends of evil black clouds and I’ll—” Murex froze at the screen.

  “You what?”

  “I just found the hole in Trey Grandmaison’s alibi.”

  “Big?”

  “Big enough for a black cloud to come in through. Let’s find out when Mrs Grandmaison is coming home.”

  They called every Nashua New Hampshire funeral home until they found the one responsible for waking Effie Grandmaison.

  Knuckles hung up. “The body is coming in on a 7 p.m. flight. Odds are Mr G is accompanying said body.”

  “Let’s go meet the grieving spouse.”

  Trey Grandmaison looked appropriately startled to see Detectives Murex and Knuckles patiently waiting for him at his Manchester Airport gate.

  “We’re very sorry to hear about your wife,” said Ray Murex.

  “A true tragedy,” added Bob Knuckles.

  “We’d like to clear up a few things. The airport has allowed us to use one of their offices.”

  Trey Grandmaison followed them willingly, but pensively.

  “Let me start with what we know for certain,” Murex told him after they took seats. “We know that John Doom died in your gray room while you were in Richmond, and was left there for several days while you were presumably absent. We also know that your wife did not expire as a result of sleep paralysis.”

  Trey Grandmaison looked at both men by turns. “Sleep paralysis is a medical condition my wife had for years,” he said gravely. “This time, it killed her.”

  “It did not kill her. Therefore, you did.”

  “I did not! Look, Effie developed narcolepsy. Probably from too much RVing in altered brainwave states. Her doctor can produce the medical records proving it.”

  “The reason we know sleep paralysis did not kill your wife is that tape she made.”

  A vein pulsed in Grandmaison’s forehead. “Tape?”

  “The one recorded in-flight,” Knuckles put in. “You didn’t think we knew about that, did you?”

  “I discarded that tape in LA.” The vein continued pulsing.

  “Not surprising. Loving husband that you are. Of course you’d throw out your wife’s last recorded words-except she didn’t record them. You did.”

  Trey Grandmaison almost cracked a grin. He turned it into a grimace. “I wish now I had saved that tape. We could disprove your theory electronically.”

  “Yeah,” Murex went on. “Too bad. But let me continue. The reason we know your wife did not die of sleep paralysis any more than she or John Doom died while remote viewing something that frightened them to death is that if Mrs Grandmaison had been suffering sleep paralysis at the time, she would not have been able to record her experience. Sleep paralysis doesn’t just freeze the major muscles in the body, but the vocal cords as well. A person suffering from SP can’t speak. If they can’t speak, they can’t describe menacing black clouds threatening to murder them. Can they, Mr Grandmaison?”

  Trey Grandmaison said nothing. But that vein pulsed more strongly.

  “You didn’t think it through very thoroughly, did you?” Knuckles pressed. “You knew you couldn’t pull that remote viewing Hell smokescreen twice. So you had to top it. But plausibly. Maybe Mrs G. did suffer from SP. But we all know she didn’t die of it.”

  Gray eyes opaque, Grandmaison said, “No one knows that.”

  “I know what you’re thinking. If a person dies of fright as result of sleep paralysis, only they and God would know the truth.”

  Trey Grandmaison threw up his hands. “I wish I had saved that tape. It would resolve everything.”

  “Fortunately for us, but unfortunately for you, LAPD made a dupe. And here it is.” Knuckles slid a microcassette recorder across the table. He hit play.

  “2004 8547 January 31st. 2004 8547 . . . I am in a dark room. I can see a door, but it is closed. Something is stirring above the door, where the wall joins the ceiling. Ominous. Black. A cloud . . .”

  Murex stopped the tape. “Fair job of masking your voice. How hard do you think it will be to match your voiceprint to that recording?”

  Trey Grandmaison turned pale and then flushed. He lunged for the recorder, fumbled it open and almost got the minicassette into his mouth before Murex and Knuckles fought it out of his hands.

  After they had cuffed him, and his rights were read, Bob Knuckles asked, “Would you say that we’ve got your number, or your coordinates?”

  Ray Murex said, “You can tell us about it, if you’d like.”

  Grandmaison surprised them. He did exactly that.

  “John Doom was a student of mine. One of my earliest students. He kept taking my courses and then he started teaching RV under another name. Using my coordinates. It was getting out of hand. He’d steal my students from my own classes. Charge half what I did. Between him and the sagging economy, I was having a hard time. Something had to be done.”

  “So you decided to do away with him?” Murex prompted.

  “That was Effie’s idea. She came home from Richmond on the pretext of giving Doom some private training and while he was insession, she sat on his chest, holding a pillow over his face until he suffocated. I showed her how to hold his arms down with padded knees so he wouldn’t bruise.”

  “In other words,” Knuckles said, “she burked him.”

  Murex looked blank. “Burked?”

  Grandmaison nodded sullenly. “An old assassination technique. Leaves no marks. Looks just like natural causes. Effie had him fast for four days beforehand, promising that it would improve his session work. That was so his bowels wouldn’t empty and create a sanitary problem while the body cooled in my gray room.”

  “Except the body was flipped over after telltale pinpoint haemorrhages appeared in the whites of the eyeballs,” said Murex. “Either his eye capillaries burst while he was smothered, or gravity did it. Either way, the position of the body gave the show away. You can skip the part about how you staged the death scene in the hotel room. We figured that out. Why did you do your wife?”

  “She was starting to become unglued. Guilt. Fear. I don’t know. But I knew she couldn’t hold it in forever. So while everyone was asleep on the plane, I did the same thing to her she did to Doom.”

  “What goes around, comes around,” clucked Knuckles.

  The throbbing vein in Trey Grandmaison’s forehead became still. “It was easy. I booked seats in the last row. There was no one for six or seven rows around of us. And they were dead to the world.”

  “You’re kind of a control freak, aren’t you?” Knuckles pressed. “That’s why you staged the death scene using TIRV class materials, isn’t it? To baffle us and provide you the opportunity to send us off on wild-goose chases?”

  Grandmaison shrugged. “It’s elementary psychological warfare. What kind of murderer would leave a trail leading directly to his front door?”

  “One who was drummed out of the Army for reasons of mental instability. You were so wound up in your Stargate razzle-dazzle, you didn’t think we’d look beyond it. You were dead wrong.”

  Murex frowned. “So you killed this rival Doom because he was
stealing your coordinates.”

  “They’re worth thousands of dollars,” he said leadenly. “And they’re my livelihood.”

  “But they’re only numbers. You told me so yourself.”

  Trey Grandmaison’s composed face wavered, recovered, then fell completely apart. His voice broke.

  “It’s all I salvaged from my military career,” he sobbed. “My business was everything I had. You don’t know remote viewing, so you wouldn’t understand.”

  Ray Murex stood up.

  “Maybe not. But I understand observable justice. Let’s go.”

  On the Rocks

  J. A. Konrath

  J.A. (Joe) Konrath (b. 1970) is the author of Whiskey Sour (2004) and its sequels which feature forty-something Chicago police detective Jacqueline (“Jack”) Daniels. She also features in several short stories including the following. Although he has only been writing professionally for three years, Konrath has already been nominated for several awards and won the Derringer Award in 2005 for his short story “The Big Guys”. Konrath has also had stints as a stand-up improv comedian, and you can see some of that living-on-your-wits in the way Daniels has to think fast yet stay sane in this, her first locked-room mystery.

  “She sure bled a lot.”

  I ignored Officer Coursey, my attention focused on the dead woman’s arm. The cut had almost severed her left wrist, a flash of pink bone peeking through. Her right hand was curled around the handle of a utility knife.

  I’d been in Homicide for more than ten years, and still felt an emotional punch whenever I saw a body. The day I wasn’t affected was the day I hung up my badge.

  I wore disposable plastic booties over my flats because the shag carpet oozed blood like a sponge wherever I stepped. The apartment’s air conditioning was set on freeze, so the decomposition wasn’t as bad as it might have been after a week – but it was still pretty bad. I got down on my haunches and swatted away some blowflies.

  On her upper arm, six inches above the wound, was a bruise.

  “What’s so interesting, Lieut? It’s just a suicide.”

  In my blazer pocket I had some latex gloves. I snapped them on.