“I’m sure.”
“Can I start breathing again now?” Doris Ann joked.
Seth backed away and she fanned her hair back into place.
“What was the name of that television show where a doctor solves crimes? I think it was Dick Van Dyke?” he asked me.
“Diagnosis: Murder,” I told him. “Why?”
“Because it’s time I helped you solve a crime. You hear that, Mort?” he continued, his gaze shifting.
“I heard it, Dr. Watson. Now tell Mrs. Sherlock Holmes here what’s on your mind.”
Seth chimed right in. “A common treatment for post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation is hydroquinone, which is a skin-bleaching agent meant to counter discoloration and lighten skin’s overall appearance, but hydroquinone comes with an extremely high toxicity level. That means it can cause severe damage to the skin, including blistering, burn marks, new discoloration, and extreme tightness. Hydroquinone is available over the counter, but because of its side effects dermatologists have begun prescribing some new prescription creams and pills that have achieved comparable results without the risks.”
“So,” I said, thinking out loud, “if I’m right about the attacker from last night suffering from the same condition as Doris Ann, then he could be using one of these prescription medications.”
Seth nodded. “Very likely so.”
“I stick with the cream,” Doris Ann interjected. “Don’t like taking pills unless I absolutely have to.”
“Could be your attacker is taking both,” Seth elaborated, “especially given how pronounced your description of his post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation was.”
I looked toward Mort. “Any way we can get a list of all patients prescribed these particular drugs?”
He frowned, clearly not enamored with the prospects of that. “Well, I’d have to call in the FBI, which would require some additional explanation. But since they’re investigating those two murders in Acadia, I imagine they’d be most receptive to the request.”
“Doesn’t mean that they’ll share their findings with you, Mort.”
He didn’t look particularly bothered by my comment. “I’ve got a friend I can call.”
“Someone you served with in Vietnam?” I said, as if to remind him of the rather large piece of his personal history I’d learned of only the other day.
“As a matter of fact . . .”
“Wait,” Seth said to Mort, our exchange just seeming to register with him, “you were in Vietnam?”
* * *
• • •
Cooperation or not, it would take some time for the FBI to assemble such a list. Given that the murders, and the attack on me, had all occurred in the Northeast, Mort said he’d ask the Bureau to start their search with this region, since it was slightly more likely than not that my attacker was from someplace reasonably close by.
Seth had to jet off to check on some of his patients at the hospital but insisted on dropping me off at Hill House first. Once inside my suite, I sat down with phone in hand, prepared to call Harry McGraw, when I saw I had six missed calls from him. No texts, since Harry hadn’t quite mastered that skill yet.
“Where have you been?” he snapped, answering before even the first ring was complete.
“We might have caught a bit of a break in the case from this end.”
“Good, because there’s nothing on this end, and I mean nothing.”
I felt that same flutter in my stomach; it was rapidly becoming familiar. “Zara?”
“She didn’t come into work today. Never called anyone to explain why or say what was wrong.”
I didn’t bother commenting on that. “What about her apartment? Did you check that?”
“Am I a detective?” Harry asked, making himself sound irritated.
“Last time I checked.”
“Then of course I checked her apartment. Give me some credit. And give me more for actually getting inside.”
“Don’t tell me you picked the lock.”
“I could tell you, Jess, but it would be a bald-faced lie. I can barely get my key to work in my own building, never mind picking a lock. But I am pretty good at selling building superintendents a bill of goods. A long-practiced skill us private eyes pride ourselves on.”
“What’d you find, Harry?” I asked him, dreading the answer.
“Same thing I found in the office: nothing. No sign of Zara. No note, no sign of forced entry. A closet packed with clothes and more jewelry than my four ex-wives combined.”
“You only have three ex-wives,” I reminded him.
“I like to plan ahead. The way I’m seeing this is that Zara took the day off. Maybe spent it at the movies. Maybe she headed off to the Hamptons to walk the beach or Atlantic City to check out the boardwalk, houses destroyed by a hurricane nobody else remembers, and the only casinos in history to ever lose money.”
“You finished?”
“With my report, yeah.”
But I wasn’t ready to let him go yet. “What about Benjamin Tally? You said you were making some progress.”
“And that’s all I’m willing to say for now.”
“Don’t do this to me, Harry.”
“What?”
“Hold something back.”
“I don’t have anything to hold back, Jess. When I have something to hold back, you’ll be the first to know because I won’t tell you. But here’s some advice I won’t charge you for: Get out of town. Don’t tell anyone where you’re going, and just drive someplace.”
“I don’t drive, remember?”
“Call Uber. No, don’t call Uber, because then they could find you.”
“I’m at Hill House, which is safer than anywhere else I could go.”
“I’m sure you felt that way about being home last night, and look how that worked out.”
“Tell me when you’re close to finding Benjamin Tally.”
“I am close, Jess, just not close enough. I need another day.”
“Nice work, Harry.”
“That’s what you’re paying for, little lady.”
* * *
• • •
I tried Zara’s cell number again, resolved to calling every fifteen or so minutes until she answered. That left me wondering what she’d make of having dozens of missed calls from me when she emerged from the movies or wherever she was. But I should have called her yesterday, as soon as I was back in Cabot Cove after Mort and I had found Alicia Bond’s body. I should have called to warn her that she, too, might be in danger. Maybe if I had, she’d be safe now. That possibility would haunt me for the rest of my days, if the worst came to pass, even though I had no way of knowing whether my failure to reach out to Zara yesterday had made any difference at all.
While clinging to the hope that Zara would ultimately answer her phone, I called Chief Dick Mann at home. For years, our full-time firefighters had been supplemented by a volunteer force. As Cabot Cove grew, though, the town budget added funds to allow for an exclusively full-time force, the brilliance of which I’d now witnessed firsthand. I’d known Dick for more than twenty years now. He’d come to Cabot Cove after retiring as Boston’s fire chief for two decades. The fire at my house had already allowed him to display his considerable experience as an arson investigator as well. He enjoyed a national reputation and had been called to many other locales to consult when arson was suspected. He might have come here seeking a quieter lifestyle, but he always seemed to be attending workshops and seminars to keep up with the latest thinking and technology.
“Jessica,” he greeted me, “are you all right? Is there anything to do?”
“I’m fine, Dick, and thanks to you my house will be again soon, too.”
“Just doing our job,” he said modestly. “By the way, these may have been the worst arsonists I’ve ever encountere
d. They made no effort at all to disguise what they were doing.”
“They didn’t care,” I told him. “This wasn’t about insurance or vengeance; it was about murder. And I’m guessing they expected a local-yokel fire chief instead of the great Dick Mann.”
“I’m blushing, Jessica. I’m blushing.”
I finally got to the real point of my call. “I wanted to talk to you about the parts of that manuscript you recovered that were salvageable.”
“Of course. I picked them up at the sheriff’s station and have them on ice.”
Dick’s remark might’ve seemed flippant, but I’d learned over the years that the recovery process for documents damaged by a combination of fire and water was varied and complex. One of the tried-and-true methods often employed was freezer drying in a frost-free or blast freezer. This had the effect of removing any remaining moisture, while preventing the decay that was common when air-drying was used as the initial strategy. Air-drying worked fine for water damage alone, but add to the mix charred pages that had been drained of their own moisture content, and the result could well be to destroy what little structural integrity remained. You might even end up with a pile of nothing more than pulp. Vacuum freeze-drying would’ve been the quickest and surest means to achieve recovery, but no such machine existed in Cabot Cove, and truth be told, I couldn’t even advise Dick where the nearest one could be found, short of Langley or the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington.
Of course, the real challenge here lay in the fact that most recovery strategies involved bound books, not loose manuscript pages. Outside of any number of water disasters at libraries where precious historical documents had suffered damage, I was unaware of a single effort ever being mounted to save actual paper; the most prevalent approach was to simply dump the seemingly ruined pages in the trash. Fortunately, Mort was all in, thanks to his knowledge of the manuscript’s deadly history and our experience in Acadia National Park, and that was good enough for Dick Mann without further explanation.
“Any notion as to whether the print is still legible?” I asked Dick.
“I didn’t dare try separating the pages to find out,” he explained. “I imagine with the help of an electron microscope or some such, you might be able to make sense of the contents. And you did make plain to me this manuscript held significant value to you.”
“It does, Dick. Not necessarily monetary, but you might even say it’s vital.”
“Sounds like a mystery.”
“You have no idea.”
“Well, what I do have is knowledge that someone tried to kill you last night, and if this manuscript has any part in that, I’d recommend getting it to the FBI’s document lab in Quantico as soon as it’s safe to transport.”
I’d forgotten all about the document lab. They would have the kind of professional dehumidification and vacuum freeze-drying equipment that offered the highest probability for success. The problem was, such a request would have to come through the likes of Mort or Artie Gelber, in which case the Bureau would obviously want to know exactly what they were trying to restore and why.
“Where’s the manuscript now?”
“We made some room between the steaks and chicken down at the station.”
Dick must’ve seen my jaw drop through the phone, because he continued immediately.
“Just kidding, Jessica. We have a freezer dedicated to the preservation of evidence. Your pages are safe and sound. We even turned up the fan to aid the drying process.”
“You may want to add an armed guard,” I recommended, and imagined watching his jaw drop. “Just kidding, Dick. But I’ll let Mort know.”
“Good thing we can wave at each other through our office windows.”
“One of the advantages of living in a small town.”
Our call finished, I began to think again of all I’d read of The Affair before the fire, but I still couldn’t come up with a single clue within the manuscript’s content to explain why five, and very nearly six, people might have been murdered because of it. It was a pulp novel, a commercial thriller, not a political exposé. And if it was indeed some kind of roman à clef, it was beyond me to figure out what true story the author was endeavoring to tell.
Might I have this all wrong? Was I missing something that was right before my eyes?
I was stumped, to say the least, so I started asking myself what my characters, my alter egos, would do if they found themselves in a similar predicament.
I turned on the news with a hotel memo pad in my lap, in case something struck me that I had to write down. That’s one of the things about getting older: You learn to write down anything you deem important for fear of losing it forever.
A commercial came on—I think for a laxative, adult diapers, or something like that—featuring a woman about my age pedaling about on a bicycle to show off the fact that she was still in the prime of life. I hated these commercials, as much as I did the ones for reverse mortgages, burial insurance policies, and walk-in bathtubs. The aging of the baby-boomer generation had given birth to a flood of exploitive advertising aimed at our specific demographic, airing almost exclusively from early morning through early evening, for obvious reasons. The only positive thing about this particular commercial was that it reminded me that, except for minor scoring of the roof, my detached garage had been spared any damage. The garage held my brand-new bicycle, which I resolved to pick up tomorrow, once I’d found a spot at Hill House to store it, to enable me to better get around while my house was under renovation. I started to wonder if I might want to take advantage of the opportunity to do some remodeling, add some fresh touches to the old house, a thought I dismissed almost as quickly as I formed it.
I ordered dinner from room service and made sure to check the peephole before answering. Then I flipped through the channels, jotting down occasional notes to myself that amounted to pretty much nothing, before nodding off in the chair.
I woke up to my cell phone vibrating on the table set next to the chair; it hadn’t rung because I’d forgotten to turn the ringer back on. I recognized Mort’s office number, the time on my phone just past midnight, a political commentary show blaring before me until I muted the television.
“What happened to your beauty sleep?” I asked him, clearing the grogginess from my throat.
“You ruined it, as usual. Sorry to wake you, Mrs. Fletcher.”
I sat up straighter. “What is it?”
“I’m picking you up at eight in the morning sharp. I think we may have found your attacker.”
Chapter Eighteen
True to his word, Mort pulled up to the Hill House entrance in his SUV at eight the next morning. I’d e-mailed and left a message for the insurance adjuster, saying I couldn’t meet him at my house as planned and asking whether we could possibly postpone his visit until tomorrow.
I’d been down in the lobby for a half hour, on the chance that Mort arrived early, so eager to hear what he’d learned from the FBI about my attacker that I’d barely slept.
“Ever been to Somerville?” he asked, after I’d climbed into the seat and closed the door behind me.
“Near Boston?”
Mort nodded. “Home of the Irish Mob. The original Winter Hill Gang, later taken over by the infamous Whitey Bulger. Come on, Jess—you’re a mystery writer.”
“If you’d been keeping up with my books, Mort, you’d know I don’t write about gangsters very much.”
“I’m only saying.” He shrugged.
“Why don’t you say why we we’re heading to Somerville instead?”
“Because of Tommy Halperin.”
“And what’s so special about Tommy Halperin?”
“He’s on one of those new prescriptions to treat that condition, the one Doris Ann and the man who attacked you the other night have.”
“Post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation,” I said, re
calling Seth’s words. “But what makes you think Tommy Halperin of Somerville might be my attacker?”
Mort pulled out his trusty memo pad, the one that was a virtual twin of the pad Lieutenant Artie Gelber of the NYPD kept tucked in his pocket. “Military background in the Special Forces until he received a dishonorable discharge for unspecified reasons. Later did a stint with the private security company then called Blackwater, and worked as a mercenary for a firm known for building private armies. Last known whereabouts, Sudan.”
“So, what’s it matter if Halperin suffers from post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation if he’s in Sudan?”
Mort flipped his memo pad closed. “Because he filled a prescription for that new drug three weeks ago.”
* * *
• • •
I held the picture of Tommy Halperin in my lap for much of the drive south from Cabot Cove, Mort picking up Route 93, which would take us straight into Somerville. The shot showed Tommy in military uniform above his vital statistics. He was five feet eleven inches tall, which seemed right for the attacker who’d grabbed me from behind, the one whose glove I’d bitten through. His weight was listed as 185 pounds, and even through the uniform, his frame looked rock hard and chiseled. It was an older picture, of course, and there was no telling if Halperin had remained in this kind of shape, as my attacker from the night before last plainly was.
For some reason, I had the strange thought that a suspected killer shouldn’t go by “Tommy.” That was a boy’s name, not a man’s, and I never understood why men went by names better fit for their ten-year-old selves. Then again, the gangster world was full of such juvenile labeling. Mikey, Frankie, Billy, Johnny, Matty, Bobby, Davey—I’d heard them all on the news or seen them in the paper all the time, often followed by a colorful nickname. The nicknames had pretty much gone away, but the childish monikers remained, as if all gangsters possessed some kind of regressive gene that left them prisoners to their ids the same way kids are.
According to the Department of Veterans Affairs, Tommy Halperin had fought on the wrong side of the ongoing civil war in the Sudan. A supplemental report detailed his suspected complicity in the massacre of an entire village; he was accused by a well-known human rights group with enough supporting evidence for the American Justice Department to open an investigation of the firm that had employed him as a mercenary. Apparently, such behavior wasn’t all that uncommon in this world.
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