The phone rang, startling us both. It was barely 6:00 a.m. Denise unfolded herself from the couch and went to grab her cordless phone at the kitchen island. “Yes?” She listened for a moment and then handed me the phone.
It was Steve. “I tried your cellphone, but you weren’t picking up so I chanced waking you both up.” I had plugged my phone into its charger after depleting most of its reserves taking photos.
“That’s okay, we were awake.”
“Well, you may be off the hook and out of purdah soon.”
“Why, what’s happened?”
“Cars were called to Kieran Frayne’s house an hour ago. Apparently there was a break-in. I’ll let you know as soon as I know anything more. I’m not sure whether it was Frayne who called it in, or his house-sitter, or what.”
“Uh …”
“What? Randy, I don’t like the sound of that.”
“What sort of a break-in are we talking about?”
“Side door smashed in, main floor trashed, some things probably stolen, but it’s unclear, because of the mess. You know the drill. Why?”
“I think you need to come over here.”
“Why?”
“It’s something I’d rather not say on the phone.” Steve muttered a few choice words, but I chose to ignore them. He would be even angrier when he heard what we had to say.
“Okay, I can be there in an hour. Put on the coffee.”
I pressed the red button on Denise’s phone and handed it back to her.
“We’re in so much trouble. Kieran’s house was broken into tonight. Maybe while we were in the shed.”
Denise paled. “They’re going to think it was us, aren’t they?”
“I am not sure what will happen. We have to tell Steve we were there. But since we didn’t see anything happening in the house, we’re not much good as witnesses. So, we just have to figure out how not to be fingered for the break-in. Why did someone break into his house tonight of all nights? We have been sitting here on ice for four days and nothing has happened out there. The one night we do something stupid, and bam.” I looked at Denise and she looked at me.
“Someone is watching us,” we said in unison and looked out into the sunrise-lit, tree-filled window. Out there, someone knew exactly what we were up to and how to manipulate the information to our detriment.
True to his word, Steve was there within the hour. I had changed from my sweats into clothing a little more armour-clad: a tee-shirt, cardigan, and jeans. I needed to feel my strongest, because I had a feeling this was going to be a dressing-down like I’d never seen before.
Denise volunteered to start. She told the story, stressing how it had been her idea, and that I had gone along only to help and protect her. Steve’s eyebrows arched almost into his hairline as she explained the drive through two sets of back alleys to get out of the neighbourhood, and he put his head in his hands as she described sneaking into Kieran’s back garden and rifling through his sports equipment shed.
“It never occurred to you that this is exactly why I asked you to stay locked away?” he said finally. “Whoever is using you as the scapegoat for his or her crimes obviously has you under surveillance. You were just playing into their hands.”
“But how could we know they would be robbing Kieran’s house at the same time?”
“I doubt if they planned to. Your being there was all the opportunity they needed. We’ll probably discover there was nothing stolen from Frayne’s house at all. It was just done to implicate you once more.”
“That’s going to an awful lot of trouble, though.”
“Murder is an awful lot of trouble.”
“But Kieran wasn’t murdered, right?”
“Lucky for you. What the heck were you looking for, anyhow?”
I opened up my laptop. “We have pictures.”
“I don’t think I want to see them. I shouldn’t even know about them.” Steve still sounded mad, angrier than I’d ever heard him.
“Look, we’re not going to lie about going over there, so you might as well see the pictures, right?” I opened up the file I’d emailed to myself from my phone. Steve sat down heavily beside me on the couch. I wiggled closer to him to let Denise sit on the other side of me, and felt him solid and resistant against me. I wondered if I’d pushed him too far this time.
“Here is the shed.” I pointed to the screen.
“Which wasn’t locked,” Denise interjected.
“Right, so even if we ‘entered,’ we didn’t actually ‘break,’” I said. “I hope you can persuade Keller of that finer point.” I clicked through to the next photo. “Denise had a flashlight and these are taken with the camera flash, so it looks really bright, but you know, as sheds go, you could eat off the floor. Kieran is compulsively neat about his stuff. I hope they didn’t do too much damage to the inside of his house. I have a feeling that untidiness hurts him.”
“Maybe whoever did it knew that.” Denise nodded. “Going for the worst they could do to him.”
Steve looked skeptical. “Someone who has been murdering folks suddenly starts punishing others by disarranging their houses? It doesn’t totally compute.”
I continued to click through the pictures, which were amazingly good for having been taken by a phone camera under less than perfect conditions.
“And that is his gear for ice climbing.” Denise was narrating the photos to Steve as I clicked through.
I stared at the photo of Kieran’s climbing gear sans ropes. I had captured a bit of Denise’s feet as well. Her shoes were tidy in the shot, lined up evenly, just like Kieran’s would be.
“Hang on,” I said, and clicked backward to the beginning of the file. There was his bike and his skateboard and his snowshoes and his skis, but where were any boots or shoes for these sports? “His shoes and boots are missing, too.”
“What do you mean?” they asked in unison, and then laughed a bit across my head. I was too caught up in my discovery to care.
“See? All the equipment except the shoes or the ropes or a sleeping bag or anything fabric. I bet you his ropes weren’t used on any of the victims. I’ll bet you they’re inside the house, somewhere a mouse couldn’t chew on them. That may be why this shed is so preternaturally clean. Kieran might have had an infestation of mice.” I sat back, proud of my deductions.
Steve smiled at me for the first time since he got there. “Not bad, Nancy Drew, but you’re forgetting one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“The house has been ransacked, so unless we find climbing ropes hanging neatly above a whole shelf of sports shoes, we’re not going to be able to prove your theory. And if the ropes are gone, this break-in will only serve to cloud whoever might have used them last. I’m not totally sure you can determine ownership from a rope, no matter how great your forensic team is.”
“I think the worst thing here is that someone is watching and following us,” said Denise, as we veered off from what for her was the real topic. “Do you think they are sitting out there right now, listening in to our conversation with one of those spy microphones? Or have they bugged my condo?”
All the talk of bugs and mice was beginning to make my skin crawl.
“It could be even easier than that.” Steve shrugged. “They could be monitoring the GPS on your phone and just watching when you made a move.”
“So I drove down all those back alleys for nothing?”
“I wouldn’t call it nothing,” Steve said drily. “You did manage to avoid the police drive-through from calling in anything of interest. But yeah, it’s way easier to keep track of someone these days. Everything is potentially programmed to connect and communicate with everything else. Your phone could talk to your fridge to determine whether you need to stop and get milk on your way home. Your GPS that helps you find your destination transforms you into a flashing blip on the great map of the electronic world. It just depends who is keeping track of that map.”
“Who do you think it is?” I asked.
“Well, I know we have the capacity. I’m just wondering if someone else does, too.”
Even with all the coffee we’d been ingesting, I was suddenly wildly sleepy. I gave an enormous yawn and Steve laughed. “Right on time. The adrenalin is wearing off. I predict the two of you are going to need a nap for a few hours right about now. Should I come back later?” Denise, who had been politely hiding her yawns behind her hand, smiled and nodded.
Steve promised to increase the number of drive-by patrols, then left to report our having been at the crime scene without being involved. We agreed that he would call around 7:00 p.m. to make sure we’d woken up in good time. I didn’t want to lose an entire day or sleep too long and then throw off my rhythms entirely.
Even with everything going on, I didn’t recall any crazy dreams when I woke up, spot on at 6:00 p.m. All I knew was that I was ravenously hungry. I pulled on the jeans I had left at the end of the bed and shuffled to the guest bathroom to splash water on my face and run my toothbrush over my tongue. I then headed downstairs to her kitchen area.
Denise was already there, cracking eggs for an omelette. “Breakfast for supper okay?”
I nodded happily and went to man the toast station. Soon we were digging into a hearty meal. We tried to keep the conversation light until we were smearing jam on our last bits of toast, with general comments on how weird it was to have a long nap in the middle of the day, but a full sleep seemed proper, and how circadian rhythms could affect one’s mental capabilities, and whether we liked apple butter more than ginger marmalade.
We couldn’t keep off the topic forever, though. It was like when your tongue can’t help going back to explore the sore tooth.
“Who do you think could be tracking us?”
“Tracking me, you mean. Randy, I am so sorry I got you into this.”
“Don’t be. You’re my friend. Of course I am in it.”
“I wonder if things are ever going to feel ordinary again, once this is all over.”
“I’m betting they’ll sort themselves out once the killer is caught.”
“You don’t suppose they’ll get away with it, do you?”
I shook my head. “Steve and Iain are so committed to their task. They’re like bloodhounds who never give up the trail.”
“The trouble is the trail keeps leading back to me.” Denise moaned a little.
This was the closest she’d come to self-pity throughout this whole ordeal, so I knew things were getting to her. Heck, they’d be getting to me by now, too. She really was amazing, sailing through all this with grace and dignity, if you could overlook her scrabbling through a shed in the dark, though even that she had done with a certain decorum.
It occurred to me that the ordeal really had been hard on Denise, with the police suspecting her and the murderer seeming to frame her deliberately. I stared into the far upper corner of Denise’s kitchen where the ash cupboards met the wall.
“Randy? What is it?”
“What is what?”
“You’ve got that look, where you’re cooking something up.”
I refocused on her face across the table.
“I was just thinking, what if we’ve got this all wrong? What if the murders haven’t been about getting the Chautauqua job, except maybe incidentally? What if it’s all been about targeting and discrediting you?”
Denise stared at me.
“Think about it. Right from the start, you’ve been set up as the prime suspect. Someone had to be doing that deliberately. It couldn’t be a complete coincidence.”
“It is hard to believe that someone has a vendetta against me. And I have no idea why someone would hate me that much, either.”
“Maybe they don’t hate you, but they want you out of the way.”
“Why not just kill me instead of Eleanor and Christian, then?”
“I guess because they needed Eleanor and Christian dead anyhow. But a big part of the plan is to destroy your career or get you out of the way for some reason. The trick is to figuring out what the reason would be.”
“Yes, that would help enormously. Or we could just hope for the police to catch a crazed killer and give me my life back.”
“We could figure this out by a process of elimination. After all, we have some parameters. It has to be someone who knows you. For something to be this personal, I would say it was a person you knew, too, not just a disgruntled student from a few years back.”
“Someone I know. You need me to make a list of all the people I know? Hell, Randy, I teach more than a hundred students a term. Where do we start?”
“We start with the people here in town, the ones who want something you have.”
“What do I have that anyone would want?”
“Well, you have this gorgeous condo, and you have a great job, and you had a cool boyfriend.”
“Who is now conveniently Sarah’s boyfriend.”
“Think about that.”
“Sarah? You think Sarah killed everyone just so that she would break up Kieran and me? Why didn’t she just go after him right away, when we were at that party last spring?”
“I don’t know! I’m not a psychologist, sorting out the impulses that impel people to do what they do. I am just trying to figure out the patterns that make sense and come to a logical conclusion. Sarah is a contender, you have to admit.”
“So if we think Sarah wanted to deliberately frame me, what about everyone else we’ve been suspecting? Like Kieran himself? And Taryn; you can’t tell me you haven’t been suspecting her. I could tell when we ran into her at the Safeway.”
“Well you have to admit, she’d be a great director for Chautauqua.”
“That doesn’t mean she’d kill to get there.”
“No, but you have to consider the possibilities.”
“Okay, so we have people who hate me, people who climb for sport, people who know their way around a backstage, and people who dislike actors. Who else should we put on the list?”
“I think there is someone who is on all those lists, or most of them, and when we figure out who that is, we’ll know who our killer is.”