“Sorry, guys,” I said, as I gently lifted the Poms off my lap. “Duty calls.”
Now that they were awake, the Pomeranians decided to follow me to the door. Tink lifted her head and watched us. Reassuring.
I was relieved when I peered out the peephole to see Minerva Burke standing on our doorstep. And when I opened the door, I found her grandson, Adam, was also with her.
“Come on in,” I said. “It’s like a deep freeze out there.”
“We can’t stay,” Minerva said. “We’re just dropping off presents and such. Adam—you want to give Ms. Meg those presents for Josh and Jamie?”
Adam proudly held up two wrapped packages. They both were around three feet long, thin, and straight except for one end, which went off at an obtuse angle.
“I wonder if I can guess what’s in that,” I said, as I relieved him of the packages. The Pomeranians were greeting him with delight.
“Yeah,” Adam said, over the heads of the swarming dogs. “I guess it’s kind of obvious. I figured since Grandpa probably wasn’t going to give Josh’s hockey stick back, it would be a good present for him, and then he’d have a new one and Jamie would have an old one, so I thought he might like one, too. I picked them out myself. Well, Grandpa helped.”
“And he’s very knowledgeable about sports equipment,” I said. “Want me to hide the packages so the boys won’t guess too soon what’s in them?”
Adam nodded vigorously.
“Give my best to your family,” Minerva said. “Hate to run, but we’ve got two more stops to make before choir practice.”
I had to pick up the sociable Pomeranians to keep them from following my guests out. I watched until Minerva and Adam were safely in their car before closing the door and setting down my wriggling armload of fur.
Later on I’d take Adam’s presents over to Aida’s house—we had a long-established tradition of hiding our outbound presents at each other’s houses—at least those destined for our kids or other family members prone to snooping, like our two mothers. But for now I could probably stash them out of sight at the back of the coat closet.
I was a little taken aback to find four gaily wrapped packages of nearly identical shape already hidden at the back of the closet. Not to mention two large, flat boxes that did a better job of hiding the fact that they contained hockey sticks. Which meant we already had more than enough hockey sticks to equip the six players a team was allowed to have on the ice at any given moment. And I suspected other thoughtful friends and relatives might be planning similar gifts.
So maybe we’d be fielding a hockey team. Or hosting a league. I’d worry about it later. I hid Adam’s presents with the rest and went out into the kitchen.
“My covert intelligence operatives down at Mutant Wizards have come up with a menu suggestion,” I told Nora. “Something the Canadians have been waxing nostalgic about.”
“Well?” Nora’s brusque tone might once have made me worry that I’d offended her. I’d come to realize that she had only so much attention to spare for mere humans when her mind was involved in delicate calculations involving yeast and flour, or internal philosophical debates about the optimal quantity of garlic.
“Poutine,” I said. “It’s—”
“Of course,” she said. “I should have thought of that. Let me check which of my poutine recipes would be the best option. Can you make another grocery store run if necessary?”
“Just say the word,” I assured her. Although I hoped she wouldn’t, given the way the weather was heading. Or that she’d come up with any missing ingredients soon, before the roads got bad. Still, I could probably cajole Osgood or Beau into letting me ride into town and back on the snowplow if conditions got really awful. I’d done it before.
I was curious to see how Nora kept her recipes—would she pull out a recipe card file or a binder of some kind? So I lingered long enough to rummage in the refrigerator for a soda.
To my surprise, she pulled out a laptop and a handful of external hard drives. After examining the labels of the hard drives, she selected one, attached it to her laptop, and booted up.
I was already impressed with Nora, but after finding out that her recipe collection probably ran to terabytes of data, I was beyond impressed. I decided I could rest easy, knowing that the Canadians’ poutine needs would soon be amply met.
“I’ll be in my office, waiting for the Shiffleys,” I said.
She nodded absently. I wasn’t sure she’d even heard me, so I detoured back to the front hall to make sure the door was locked. I didn’t want any more uninvited callers derailing the poutine project. Then I stuck the can of soda into my pocket and pulled on my gloves before heading out to my office.
An inch of snow had fallen by now, and it was coming down heavier. Or was that more heavily? And since my weather app predicted that the polar vortex—like my family and the Canadians—would probably be hanging around until well after the new year, it looked as if we would, indeed, be having a white Christmas.
The weather app had also changed, in the space of a few hours, from an 80 percent chance of snow to 100 percent, with a projected accumulation of four to six inches. When Janet and Fred Shiffley arrived I’d ask them what their family elders were predicting.
I was glad to get inside the barn. It wasn’t heated very well, but it was a lot better than outside in the snow. Lurk poked his sleek, black head out of one of the stalls, so I tossed him a treat. He grabbed it on the fly and disappeared. He and Skulk were probably spending most of their time hanging out in one of the two cat shelters we’d set up in the hayloft, complete with heated floor mats. The floor mats were powered by one of the solar panels Kevin had installed on the barn roof, with a large storage battery to serve as a backup in case of prolonged cloudy weather. Kevin still hadn’t followed through on his promise to install a similar system for the house. He hadn’t even hooked up the rest of the barn to the solar panels. In case of a snowstorm that took out the power, Lurk and Skulk would have a lot better odds of staying warm than we would in the house.
In my office I turned on the space heater and decided to leave my coat on until it had taken the chill out of the air. The cold soda could wait, too.
I booted up my laptop and opened up a browser window.
I started by doing another search for Cyrus Runk. Nothing to indicate he’d been captured or even spotted. I found a topographical map of Virginia and zoomed in on the southwest corner. As Vern had said, rough country. Lots of mountains. Not many towns. And my eye was drawn to the Daniel Boone National Forest, just across the state line in Kentucky. It was bigger than most counties in Virginia. A great place to get lost in.
“Here’s hoping Runk thinks the same thing,” I muttered.
My phone rang. I glanced down at the caller ID. The chief.
“Hello,” I said. “Should I apologize for overcrowding the jail or congratulate myself that I’ve assisted in the apprehension of so many potentially dangerous suspects?”
“Congratulate yourself,” he said. “Most definitely. Just one thing—remember that you told me about Ms. Koenigslutter’s lawyer showing up at your house earlier today?”
“Yes. Name of Alfred Sloan.”
“Can you describe him? Hang on—let me put you on speakerphone. Okay. Go ahead.”
Odd. Who else needed to hear my description of Sloan?
“He was tall—a little over six feet. Reasonably fit. Thirtyish. Blond hair, neatly cut. Gray pin-striped suit. Clean-shaven. Kind of on the pale side, as if he doesn’t spend much time outdoors.”
“Definitely not him,” a female voice said.
“Alfred M. Sloan, Esquire, Ms. Koenigslutter’s attorney, is short, round, in his sixties, and wears thick progressive lenses,” the chief said. “And he’s in Green Bay, Wisconsin, at the moment. I just spoke with him on the phone.”
“Then who the heck showed up at our door looking for Ian?” I asked.
“It’s Elias,” the voice said—presumably Ms. Koenigslutter. “It has to be.”
“Ms. Koenigslutter believes your visitor could be her half brother, Elias Boyd,” the chief said. “Who sometimes now goes by Elias Koenigslutter.”
“The nerve,” the female voice muttered.
Since Ms. Koenigslutter was obviously still listening, I refrained from saying that I’d have stuck with my original name instead of taking on one that was so much longer and more difficult to spell and pronounce.
“We don’t know if he’s still in town,” the chief said.
“He was staking out the Mutant Wizards parking lot a few hours ago,” I said.
“I’ll send someone to check,” he said. “If he shows up again, call nine-one-one immediately and don’t open the door to him.”
“And don’t listen to him, either,” Ms. Koenigslutter said. “He can talk anyone into anything, and if he can’t talk you into something he gets violent.”
“According to Mr. Sloan—the real Mr. Sloan—there is considerable evidence to support Ms. Koenigslutter’s assertions that her half brother is dangerous,” the chief said. “The pallor you noted comes from his recent incarceration for a variety of fraud and extortion offenses.”
“Maybe I should be glad Tinkerbell was with me when he dropped by earlier,” I said. “And I got the idea she wasn’t too keen on him.”
“Tinkerbell?” Ms. Koenigslutter sounded puzzled.
“An Irish wolfhound,” the chief explained. “Dogs have good instincts. I should go. I have a great deal more to discuss with the witnesses you helped us locate.”
“Not till my defense attorney shows up,” Ms. Koenigslutter said. “I’m not saying a word until I have proper legal representation. I know my rights. I don’t care if it takes from now until Christmas. If you—”
Ms. Koenigslutter’s voice continued, but suddenly got a lot less clear, and I deduced that the chief had taken his phone off speakerphone, which also seemed to switch its microphone range from wide to close.
“As you will note,” the chief said. “Ms. Koenigslutter is invoking her right to be silent.”
“Very noisily,” I said.
“Indeed.” He sounded as if he was suppressing laughter. “Anyway—be careful.”
“I will.”
With that we hung up.
I turned back to my computer and did some searches on Alfred Sloan and his firm’s name. Eventually I ran across a grip-and-grin shot of him accepting some kind of civic award from the mayor of Green Bay. Definitely not the man who’d given me his business card. Not that I doubted the chief. Maybe I just wanted to see if I could have unmasked the fake Sloan myself if I’d been less gullible.
And less busy. So since I now had a short space of time to fill while waiting for Fred and Janet Shiffley to show up. I should at least try to do something useful with it.
I spent a little time searching for combinations of words that would lead to pages that would have allowed Ms. Koenigslutter and her half brother to find their way to our house. I tried AcerGen and Caerphilly. AcerGen and Mutant Wizards. Ian Meredith with either Mutant Wizards or Caerphilly. Nothing. Which was probably what I should have expected. After all, Kevin had already taken a stab at this particular search and had cyber tools at his disposal that were a lot more powerful than ordinary search engines.
I decided to switch over to figuring out if CatLady517 was merely crazy or actually dangerous. Which required logging into the message boards Kevin had created for Virginia Crime Time fans. I’d done it once, a few months ago, when Kevin first created the message boards and needed a few volunteers to test them. But while I listened faithfully to their new shows every week, I hadn’t felt the need to discuss the cases with other listeners who might be more immersed in the show or in the larger world of true crime. Or who, like CatLady517, might be quite a few ants short of a picnic.
So I consulted the secret hiding place in which I kept track of all the passwords modern life seemed to require—over two hundred of them the last time I’d counted, which wasn’t all that recently. And I logged into the message board site, which Kevin had christened The Junkyard in what he’d had to explain was not an insult to the podcast’s fans but a tribute to The Three Investigators, one of his favorite childhood book series. Although lately he’d been wondering if the name had somehow jinxed it.
I began paging down the topic folders—dozens of them. No, hundreds. And according to the home page, the message board had more than three thousand users.
Maybe I should be glad that only one of them had showed up and tried to intimidate me into revealing Kevin’s and Casey’s whereabouts.
So far.
I began dipping into some of the topic folders. Folders about cases I’d heard of, like Lizzie Borden and the Lindbergh kidnapping. Cases I’d never heard of. Cases the podcast had covered. Cases people thought they should cover in future. I tried to limit myself to scanning the posters’ names, looking for CatLady517, but I kept stopping to read things. They had some extraordinarily thoughtful listeners … a lot of very enthusiastic ones … and a few real loons.
But I didn’t stumble on any posts by CatLady517 until I spotted a folder called “Who’s Hotter?”
Which turned out to be exactly what I thought it would be. Podcast listeners debating whether Kevin or Casey was hotter. Which was fairly amusing, since the debaters had never seen either of them and had only their voices to go by. Well, voices and their contribution to the content of the podcast.
CatLady517 was in the thick of it, and team Casey all the way. She’d be in for a shock if she ever met Casey, since he was an introverted Japanese American grad student and she was fantasizing him as a tall, redheaded Irish rogue. At least she had the tall part right.
And she used a little picture of a bouquet of red roses as her icon or avatar or whatever the current term was—the little picture that appeared beside all of her posts. No wonder she hadn’t bothered to leave a card with the roses—she assumed Casey would guess they were from her.
By reading all of her posts in the Who’s Hotter? folder, I picked up some clues to the cases and topics she was interested in. I looked up the folders on those cases, which revealed more posts from her. From what I could see, her approach to any case was to search out the wildest known conspiracy theory and then defend it doggedly against anyone who tried to argue from either evidence or common sense. I printed out some of her crazier posts. Were they enough to justify Casey getting a restraining order against her? Or would she need to have actually done something threatening in person?
And then I found a folder about the murder Cyrus Runk had committed. I hadn’t recognized it at first, because whoever had created it had called it the Mary Brown case, after the woman he’d killed. Which was a good thing, I reminded myself. We should be naming the victims, not the lowlifes who killed them. I made a promise that I’d read all the articles about her life. But later. For now, I wanted to see if the folder contained any information that might help law enforcement track down her killer and see justice done.
The last thing I wanted to do was learn any more about what Runk had actually done. So I tried to skim posts that dwelled on that. By the third page of posts I ran across the first mention of AcerGen. Not unexpected. The posters were divided, some praising AcerGen for helping catch a cold-blooded killer, others bashing it for invading Runk’s privacy.
About nine pages into the discussion, I came across an item that astounded me.
“No way AcerGen is getting out of the forensic DNA business,” it read. “In fact, I hear they’ve come to the US specifically to work with a software company called Mutant Wizards to build a website to make it easier for cops and others to access DNA information.”
The post was dead wrong, obviously. The site Mutant Wizards was building was supposed to make it easier for consumers to use DNA—to help them understand it and use it to make medical decisions or build their family trees by contacting DNA relatives. The ones who wanted to be contacted, of course.
But what if someone who already had a grudge against Ian and AcerGen read that? They could so easily look up where Mutant Wizards was located. And a little bit of eavesdropping around town would send them looking in one of two places for Ian—the Mutant Wizards office building, which had decent security, or our house.
I checked the date—the post had gone up two days ago. No wonder Kevin hadn’t seen it. But it still left plenty of time for anyone eager to confront Ian to make their way here. Not just CatLady517. Cyrus Runk, Katherine Anne Koenigslutter, even Elias Boyd.…
Another forum member pointed out that maybe the Virginia Crime Time team would have some inside scoop on the case, since everyone knew about their connection to Mutant Wizards. I wasn’t sure all that many people knew it before, but they certainly did now. Kevin and Casey’s time out of the limelight might be coming to an end.
I was reaching for my phone to call the chief and let him know when I heard a knock on my door. Presumably Janet and Fred.
“About time,” I muttered. And then, more loudly, I called out, “Come in!”
I shut my laptop and turned toward the door as I stood up. But it wasn’t Fred and Janet Shiffley standing in the doorway.
It was Cyrus Runk.