I laughed. “I’m almost tempted to take you up on it. What’s the soup today?”
“Roasted tomato. It’s terrific.”
“I’m sure it is if you say so. I’d love a bowl, and some bread, please.”
“Coming up. You, Doc?”
“I’ll have a short stack of the blueberry pancakes.”
“Seth, what happened to your diet?” I asked.
“Put the maple syrup on the side,” he said.
Mara took a black grease pencil from behind her ear and wrote our order down on her pad. “You folks go to that press conference this morning?”
“As a matter of fact, we did.”
“Anything exciting happen?”
“No. Go on. You don’t have time to chat with us.”
Friends stopped by our table while we waited for our order to be delivered. Despite the growth that Cabot Cove has experienced over the years, it still remains a close-knit community, particularly for those who have been there a while, including Seth and me. Jack Wilson, the town’s leading veterinarian, joined us for a few minutes; so did Susan Shevlin. It occurred to me as I chatted with them that I was in the unusual situation of not actively writing a book at the moment. I’d delivered my most recent novel to my publisher a month ago, and while I had a contract for two more, I was taking a break from writing. But I’d started to develop a plot for the next one and was thinking about that when Mara arrived with my soup and Seth’s pancakes. By that time, the crowd had thinned out a little, and she took a moment to sit and catch her breath.
“You would think it was high tourist season,” she said through a laugh. “Seems like there is no tourist season anymore. They show up every time of year, including the dead of winter.”
“Which is good for you, Mara.”
“Good for business, that’s for sure,” she said. “The problem is I’m never sure how to staff the place. When I think it might be slow, they come pouring through the door, and when I bring on extra people in anticipation of a big crush, it’s slow as molasses.”
“Where is that new young fellow you introduced me to?” I asked.
“Tommy? I don’t know. He didn’t show up today, which is unusual. He’s been as punctual as a Swiss watch until this morning. I hear there’s flu around.”
“Same as every winter,” Seth put in.
“He must’ve gotten sick and forgot to call in,” Mara said.
I sighed. “I’m sure that’s the toughest part of running a business, hiring the right people.”
“You’re right, Jessica. I try to be understanding with all my help, and people do get sick. I would’ve appreciated a phone call, that’s all.” She stood. “Enjoy your soup. Doc, are you sure you don’t want me to make that a long stack instead of a short one? Take me a minute to get you the extra pancake.”
“No, thanks, Mara. This is fine. I’m dieting.”
With an effort, I refrained from saying anything about Seth’s diet and did exactly as Mara had suggested—enjoyed my soup and the warm, crunchy bread from Sassi’s Bakery, where Mara buys most of her baked goods.
Mara put the check on the table upside down as she always does. “My treat,” I said to Seth, “as thanks for the ride.” I turned it over to see what I owed. “Oh, my.”
“What’s the matter?”
“What does this look like, Seth?”
“Mara’s usual scrawl. She could’ve been a doctor.”
“No, I mean the pencil she used. What does that look like?”
“Looks like a black crayon to me. Finish your soup. We have to be going.”
Charles Department Store was busy when we pushed through the front door. One of the clerks walked past us with a stack of shoe boxes in her arms. A shipment of Ecco ballet flats had arrived. Several women were trying on the new spring colors, even though it would be months before the ground was dry enough to wear them outside.
David waved at Seth. “Got your package ready for you, Dr. Hazlitt.”
“Great. Did you get in that wok you were telling me about?”
“We did, and I’ll be happy to show it to you. Would you also like to see Martin Yan’s latest cookbook?”
“Ayuh. I would,” Seth replied. “I won’t be but a minute, Jessica.”
“Go on,” I said. “We have a little time.”
I greeted Jim, who was packing up the holiday ornaments that had been on sale the previous week.
“Last chance to pick up one of these beauties, Jessica,” he said. “They won’t come out again until next September.”
“No, thanks, Jim. I have all I need.”
“Shame what happened down at the rink.”
“Yes, it was,” I said.
Jim lowered his voice. “You know I hate to speak ill of the dead, but Olshansky was a bit of a problem. A couple of these walked out of here with him, once or twice.” He indicated the ornaments.
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“We didn’t say anything. After all, he was a big skating star, kind of, and we wouldn’t want to tarnish his reputation, or set off an international incident. But I heard from some of the other merchants that he did it with them, too.”
“Did you let the sheriff know?”
“We don’t bother Mort with small stuff. He’s got enough on his plate right now.”
“You should let him know anyway.”
“Maybe we’ll do that when things calm down. By the way, he left something here to be repaired and I don’t know who to give it to.”
“Who? Alexei?”
“Yes. I’m not looking to be paid, understand? It only took our jeweler two minutes to fix his gold chain, but I don’t want to hold on to it. It may have sentimental value to his family. In any case, it’s not ours.”
“Why don’t you give it to the sheriff, Jim. He’s collecting Alexei’s belongings to ship home to his mother. And while you’re there, tell him about the shoplifting. He’ll want to know.”
“Good advice, Jessica. We’ll do that.”
Seth dropped me off at home at five minutes to noon, and I got to work reading and answering e-mail messages. I was in the midst of that when the phone rang.
“Jessica? John Molito.”
“Hello, John. How are things this fine day in San Francisco?”
“Splendid. Perfect weather. I see that you aren’t so fortunate. The weather channel shows another storm heading your way.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
“Jessica, I had a friend at the PD dig back into the stalking case that you mentioned. It did involve the skater, Ms. Allen.”
“How serious was it?”
“Evidently serious enough for Ms. Allen’s father to file a complaint with the department. A couple of detectives who work Internet cases tracked the stalker down. He wasn’t very good at concealing his identity or whereabouts. They traced his e-mails and cell phone calls pretty easily and picked him up at home. According to the lead detective, the kid was a congenital liar; you couldn’t believe anything he said. He denied knowing who Ms. Allen was, but his bedroom was plastered with photographs of her. He was sort of a computer nerd, heavy into fantasy video games and stuff like that. Anyway, they brought him in and called her father.”
“And he filed charges?”
“No, he didn’t. The detective I talked with said Mr. Allen declined to press charges but told him to put the fear of God in the kid.”
“Did it work?”
“Hard to say. The stalking stopped, so I suppose it did, at least for a while. They followed up on the kid. He was gone, had moved from the area.”
“Can you give me his name?”
“If you keep it between us. Since he wasn’t charged, his record is clean.”
“You have my word.”
“That’s good enough. His name is Thomas Mulvaney.”
“Do you know where he moved?”
“No. Once he was gone, and there were no additional complaints, the case was closed.”
; “What about his parents?”
“The investigating officer spoke with his mother. Nice, normal, middle-class family. Dad’s a dentist. Mom’s a schoolteacher. Who knows why some kids go kerflooey?”
“Well,” I said, “I really appreciate this information, John. Oh, did this Thomas Mulvaney ever stalk anyone else?”
“Not that we know of. He had sent a couple of nasty e-mails to a male skater Ms. Allen was training with, you know, telling him he wasn’t good enough for her, that sort of thing, nothing threatening.”
“I don’t suppose you have a description of him?”
Molito laughed. “I was waiting for that,” he said. “Again, between us, I have a picture taken of him when they brought him in, not an official mug shot—he was never formally charged—but they popped a few shots for the record while he was being interviewed. Want me to e-mail it to you?”
“That would be wonderful, John. I really appreciate this.”
“My pleasure. When are you heading out this way again?”
“Soon, I hope. You know how much I love San Francisco and the entire Bay Area.”
“Love to see you again, Jessica. Stay in touch.”
We ended the call and I turned to my computer, where I accessed my e-mail. There it was, a message from him with an attachment. I clicked on the small icon representing the attachment. The screen came to life, and I was staring into the face of Christine Allen’s San Francisco stalker, Thomas Mulvaney—aka Tommy Hunter, the young man who waited tables at Mara’s Luncheonette.
Chapter Twenty-one
Thomas Mulvaney, Mara’s new waiter, stared at me from the screen as I tried to gather my thoughts. When he hadn’t showed up for work that morning at the luncheonette, I’d entertained the question—but only fleetingly—that he might have been the person Mort had arrested as a suspect in previous incidents at the ice arena. Now the likelihood of that was significantly greater.
Had this fresh-faced young man come to Cabot Cove in order to continue stalking Christine Allen? Was he the one who’d drilled a hole in the wall of the women’s locker room and who had been seen lurking in that area on other occasions? These were logical conclusions to come to, and if true, Mort had identified the right person as being behind those incidents.
Molito had said that Christine’s stalker hadn’t been particularly clever in covering his tracks. By taking a job as a waiter at Mara’s—which placed him in the public eye on a daily basis—he’d continued his reckless behavior. I seemed to remember that Mara once mentioned that neither Christine nor her father had been to the luncheonette since arriving in Cabot Cove. Of course, they might not have recognized Tommy even if they had. Detective Molito had indicated that they’d never confronted the stalker, perhaps never even bothered to learn his identity. Mr. Allen had simply told the police to use the arrest to scare him into not doing it again. Obviously, this young man hadn’t been sufficiently frightened to stop his reprehensible acts.
Our sheriff was currently handicapped while questioning Tommy. He didn’t know anything about the young man’s previous life in San Francisco, and I was duty bound to pass along what I’d learned as quickly as possible.
I placed a call to headquarters but was informed that our sheriff was away on official business until later that afternoon. I didn’t know if he’d completed his questioning of Tommy and had released him, or if the young man was being held in one of the cells at headquarters. Either way, it couldn’t hurt to wait a few hours to alert Mort to what I’d learned about Tommy’s days in San Francisco. I wanted to tell him in person and not pass the information through a third party or leave it in a voice mail.
Several years ago, I attended a seminar in New York City, at which an expert on stalkers and stalking had made a presentation. It was part of a three-day conference hosted by the New York City Police Department for members of the media and writers of books in which law enforcement played a role. I’d been privileged to be invited and had brought home with me a number of papers and pamphlets on stalking, provided by the speaker, plus my own notes taken during the presentation. I looked for them now, riffling through a file drawer until I found the material, and quickly perused their contents. According to the presenter, almost ninety percent of stalkers were male; eighty percent of them were white, and about half were between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five. They were, for the most part, of above-average intelligence and shared characteristics such as jealousy, narcissism, obsessive-compulsiveness, and an inability to distinguish between fantasy and reality. Another common trait was the tendency to fall in love instantly with the object of their fanciful obsessions.
The material also contained a long list of things that stalkers tended to do, and I read it with great interest. Obviously, their focus is on the person they’re stalking—repeated phone calls, constantly showing up where the object of their obsession is, showering their target with unwanted expressions of their love, and a host of other upsetting activities. But as far as I knew, Tommy had not made direct contact with Christine since coming to Cabot Cove, although he had just missed seeing her and Alexei when Evelyn and I had encountered him at the rink. He could have been there at other times as well. Mr. Allen was still concerned about Chris’s e-mail messages, so Tommy “Hunter,” as he styled himself, may have been up to his old tricks.
Molito told me that while in San Francisco, Christine’s stalker had contacted a male skater with whom she was training, accusing him of not being worthy of partnering with her. Two similar notes had been written to Alexei, one while he was alive, the other after his death, the latter having been wrapped around a flower left in front of the ice arena. Both had been written with what looked like a black crayon. Mara and her staff used black grease pencils, often used as china markers—which on paper looked like crayon—to write down their customers’ orders. If Tommy Mulvaney was the writer of those notes, it said to me that he was more dangerous than the average stalker.
There was no doubt that anger, perhaps even rage, was behind the messages. Had Tommy’s obsession with Christine Allen shifted to a warped need to attack her skating partner? Could his anger have morphed into a desire to kill the man he viewed as his rival for her affections? Had Thomas Mulvaney murdered Alexei Olshansky? If so, not only did Mort have in custody the person who’d been behind the incidents at the arena; he also had Alexei’s killer in hand. It was a lot to think about.
I made myself a light lunch and was going through that day’s mail when the phone rang.
“Mrs. Fletcher? It’s Peter Valery.”
“Yes, Mr. Valery. Are you calling from Cabot Cove?”
“Yes. I’m only a few blocks away. I didn’t want to just arrive without calling first.”
“That was thoughtful of you. I’m here. Please come by.”
He was a nice-looking middle-aged man, prematurely balding and on the pudgy side. He wore a suit and tie, appropriate for his later business meeting, but hardly an outfit I would think comfortable when setting out on a long drive. I suggested that we sit at my kitchen table but gave him the choice of more comfortable seating in my living room. He opted for the kitchen, which made serving tea and a pineapple upside-down cake I’d picked up at Sassi’s Bakery easy.
“I think you’ve arrived just in time,” I said. “They’re forecasting snow for this evening.”
“I’d better not linger too long, then,” he said. “I’d like to get to Portland before the storm comes.”
“I promise not to prolong the questions I have. Let me get right to the point. You told me on the phone that Brian Devlin was in business with your father back in Colorado. I was hoping you could tell me how that came about.”
Valery sipped his tea and thought for a moment. “My dad and Devlin got involved because my father, as smart a guy as he was, was also incredibly naïve when it came to judging people. He’d gone to Las Vegas for a business meeting and was introduced to Devlin by some guy, Harry or Herbie-something.”
“Might it have bee
n Harvey? Harvey Gemell by any chance?”
“It sounds right, but I couldn’t swear to it.” He fell silent.
“I’m sorry I interrupted you. You were talking about Devlin.”
“Right. Brian Devlin bragged to my father about his skating successes, all his medals. The truth was that Devlin may have been successful as an amateur, but at the time he wasn’t much of a success as a professional. That came later. In Las Vegas, he was resting on his laurels, banking on his fame to open business doors.”
“Your father followed figure skating?” I asked.
“My father was a sports nut, Mrs. Fletcher. He bowed down to anyone involved in athletics, probably because he didn’t have an athletic bone in his body. If you live in Colorado Springs, it’s hard not to learn something about figure skating. So Dad knew a little about it, but not a lot. Devlin claimed to be wired in with a group in Las Vegas that had political connections. He told my father that there was a large tract of land just outside the city that was ripe for the picking if you knew how to handle the deal. The key was to make a valuable piece of property look less valuable, pick it up for a song, paying off the right people along the way, and develop it into a multimillion-dollar complex.”
I could see what was coming next. Peter’s father gave Devlin a large sum of money, allegedly to be used to pay off politicians in return for gaining access to this valuable piece of property. And, of course, the money never reached the politicians, instead finding its way into Devlin’s pocket and the pockets of others who might have been in on the scam. I was right; that’s exactly how Peter described what happened next.
“Didn’t it become evident to your father at some point that things weren’t going the way they were supposed to?” I asked.
“Sure. He sensed that things were going wrong but kept thinking that if he pumped more money into the project, it would eventually pay off. He started raising money in Colorado.” Valery shook his head. “Amazing how many people are willing to suspend disbelief when big money is at stake. Greed is a powerful motivator, Mrs. Fletcher, and it can blind even the smartest of us. My father was not an innocent here; too trusting maybe, but willing to stretch the law or circumvent it altogether. Even so, he didn’t deserve the hosing he got from Devlin and company. There’s lots of detail I could go into, but I don’t want to belabor it. The money my father put up, and raised from family, friends, and business associates, never got where it was supposed to go, nor did it result in the tract of land coming into my father’s hands. My grandmother’s retirement savings. My mother’s inheritance. My uncle’s business. When my dad went bust, all his investors lost everything they had put into the project. People stopped talking to him. A few of them sued, and when the state of Colorado decided to bring fraud charges against him, he lost all hope, became a broken man, a shell of himself. That’s why he took his life.”
Skating on Thin Ice Page 18