TWENTY-FIVE
What surprised Wolfie most was how cooperative, even pleasant, John Manning had been to them. When Wolfie had shown him the search warrant, the author had given him a gracious smile, stepped aside so that the policemen could enter, and said, “Please, come in. Search whatever and wherever you need. Be my guest.”
What surprised him less was that they found nothing.
No blood, no burned clothes, nothing.
The forensics team had descended as soon as Wolfie had called them, and they’d swept through the house, opening drawers and closets, looking in safes and locked compartments, sifting through the ashes in the fireplace, dusting for fingerprints, using X-ray technology and a bloodhound to search for even minuscule droplets of blood.
Nothing.
They found the girl’s fingerprints, but that didn’t mean anything. Everyone acknowledged that she had been there. But nothing was found to shed any light on how or why she had been killed.
As they searched, Manning kept up his smiling pretense, having Caleb make coffee for some of the detectives, though Wolfie declined a cup. Manning led them out into the back courtyard and let them poke through his writing casita as well. Wolfie noticed how extra charming Manning was to one of the female investigators, smiling at her, often directing his comments to her. The guy was really a womanizer, Wolfie thought.
The police detective stood off to the side, watching the forensics team work. He guessed he shouldn’t have been that surprised that they’d found nothing. It had been more than a week since the murder, after all. The goddamn judge had waited far too long in giving them the warrant; that had given Manning plenty of time to clean the place of any last scrap of evidence. Wolfie wondered if Manning’s millions had spoken; had he pulled strings somehow in the courts to delay the release of the warrant? Wolfie wouldn’t put it past him.
He didn’t trust John Manning. He believed he’d killed his wife. And now he believed he killed the German girl as well.
Wolfie watched how the esteemed author was doing his best to dazzle the policewoman. Diane Ballard was a hard-edged, tough-as-nails detective. Her head wasn’t easily turned. And yet, Wolfie noticed the small smile she gave Manning when he made some little witticism. He had to give it to Manning: he did have a way with women.
A way of killing women.
“Wolfie?”
The police detective was pulled out of his thoughts by Harry Knotts, coming up behind him. “What is it, Knotts?” Wolfie asked.
“I think you ought to come out to the casita,” Knotts whispered.
“You find something?”
Knotts held his gaze. “Just come take a look.”
The two men walked outside. They didn’t hurry. Wolfie was careful not to draw attention to their movements. He didn’t want Manning following them. At the moment, Manning was busy trying to make Detective Ballard smile again, but she was proving a hard sell. Keep him occupied, Diane, Wolfie sent out in a telepathic request.
There were several investigators going through drawers in the casita. Another was seated in front of Manning’s computer, his fingers on the keyboard, going through the author’s files. Manning had joked they could read anything they wanted, as long as they didn’t reveal the ending to his latest novel-in-progress.
“What do you have for me?” Wolfie asked as he entered the casita.
“Not sure, sir,” said Davidson, a young detective. “But Detective Knotts says this might be relevant in some way.”
Davidson was flipping through a spiral-bound notebook. There were about twenty leaves in the notebook, cellophane holders with newspaper articles, printed out from a computer, slipped inside each one. Wolfie bent down to read them, but realized he needed his glasses. He fumbled them from his front pocket and slipped them onto his face.
“Seems Manning is interested in another case we investigated out here six years ago,” Knotts said, coming up beside Wolfie.
Wolfie looked down at the notebook. The headline on the first sheet read:
MAN FOUND WITH THROAT SLIT IN PARKING LOT.
Wolfie flipped to the second page.
LOCAL WOMAN QUESTIONED ABOUT SLAYING.
The third page had two photographs: Screech Solek and Emil Deetz.
“Well, bust my buttons,” Wolfie murmured. “This is about Jessie Clarkson’s ex-boyfriend. Who, coincidentally enough, also sliced open someone’s throat.”
“Hardly seems a coincidence to me that Manning would have a notebook all about that case, when he hadn’t even been living in Sayer’s Brook at that time,” Knotts said.
Wolfie looked over at his partner. Knotts was a good detective but sometimes a little slow on the uptake when it came to irony or sarcasm. “I was speaking facetiously, Knotts,” Wolfie told him.
“Oh, right.”
In fact, it couldn’t be a coincidence. John Manning downloads all these newspaper articles about his next-door neighbor—and then, in his own backyard, a girl gets murdered in the exact way described in the articles? A razor swung nearly from ear to ear across the throat. But what connection could there be?
The rest of the notebook contained all the rest of the newspaper coverage. There were the reports about Jessie’s eyewitness testimony about the murder, and the revelation of Deetz’s drug and porn ring, and the search of the Clarkson property, and then the manhunt for Deetz that moved out from Sayer’s Brook and extended all across the country. Finally, the last pages of the notebook included the report that Deetz had been found in Mexico after his fatal shoot-out with police.
“When did he compile this?” Wolfie wanted to know. “If he did it after the killing of the German girl, it could just be morbid curiosity.”
“Nope,” Davidson said. “There are dates on the printouts. They’re from more than two years ago.”
“Ah, yes, I see.” He kept flipping through the notebook. At the very end was a short article that quoted Wolfie himself, saying that, with Deetz’s death in Mexico, he now considered the Solek case “closed.”
Maybe he’d been too hasty.
“Find anything interesting?”
The detectives turned around. Manning had walked into the casita.
Wolfie discreetly closed the notebook before turning around to face Manning.
“Just reading your novel on the computer, Mr. Manning,” Wolfie said, a smile playing on his face. “Have to admit it takes a lot of twists and turns.”
Manning smiled back at him. Neither smile was genuine, but that was the game they’d been playing all day.
“Well, you do know if you breathe a word of it,” the author said, “you’ll have to face the wrath of John Manning fans all around the world.”
“Believe me,” Wolfie said, “we wouldn’t want that.”
Manning held his eyes for several seconds He didn’t trust Wolfie, and Wolfie knew it. Manning wasn’t worried about police spoiling the ending of his novel. He was worried about something else, and Wolfie knew that, too.
The author gave a final little smile and left the casita.
“Why didn’t you ask him anything about the notebook?” Davidson wanted to know.
“Instinct,” Knotts answered for Wolfie. “We’ll ask him about it when we know more of why we’re asking.”
Wolfie smiled. “Indeed you are correct, Knotts. We need to first find out if Manning had any kind of relationship with Deetz. And we need to look into what kind of relationship, if any, he has with Jessie Clarkson.”
“Yes, sir,” Davidson said. “Shall I confiscate the notebook?”
“Just take photos of it, high resolution, every page, and dust it for fingerprints. I don’t want him to know yet that we’re interested in it.” Wolfie had moved to stand in the doorway of the casita. From there, he could see the upper deck where Millie Manning took that one last flying leap to her death.
But Wolfie was certain she had been pushed.