-- Written by Anne
This is a pretty long story, meant to
function in about the same way as a two part cliffhanger episode. If you want to experience it fully, I
recommend reading part one, then waiting a day or so before reading the rest –
because half of the fun of a cliffhanger is that delicious anticipation you
feel wondering what’s going to happen in part two!
The story takes place in the spring of
the eleventh season, or thereabouts.
Many of the places mentioned really exist in Portland – you can stay at
the Eastland Hotel, visit the old observatory, and have lunch in Post Office
Park … but beyond using the names of the places and their descriptions,
everyone and everything else is made up.
Thanks for reading!
-
Thomas VanDower sat at
ease behind his massive
mahogany desk, and considered the situation before him. He had been thinking about retiring for the
evening with a good book and a cup of soothing tea, but these thoughts had been
interrupted, as they so often were, by business.
His henchmen stood on either side of their
prize, obviously nowhere near aware as he of her importance, or her value. Still, theirs was a job well done, and they
would be rewarded for their vigilance later.
He casually waved them away. "Wait outside," he said, and
without another word they withdrew, leaving their employer alone with his
prisoner.
VanDower studied his captive closely; a
pair of defiant grey eyes blazed back at him.
"Well, well," he said at length.
"Jessica Fletcher. I suppose I should be honored. One could not wish to overcome a more worthy
adversary."
Jessica, her hands bound before her at the
wrists, said nothing.
"I know what brought you here,"
he went on. "I had heard rumors to
the effect that you were endeavoring to reopen the Bernard Patterson murder
case. A pity that your investigations
led you to stumble across the merchandise in my warehouse."
"Across crates of semi-automatic
weapons being smuggled into the country, you mean," she said.
" 'Smuggling' is such an ugly
word," VanDower said lightly.
"I prefer the term 'expedient importation.' But I am curious as to what led you to that
warehouse in the first place."
"Bernard Patterson's murder,"
she replied simply. "He was found
dead there, ten years ago. The fact that
I discovered your gun smuggling operation only heightens my suspicions of your
involvement in his death."
"I fail to see what one has to do
with the other," VanDower said.
"Don't you believe in coincidence?
No, I suppose you don't, do you.
Well, it doesn't much matter now, I suppose. You have uncovered my activities, and that
alone makes you a very dangerous liability to me and my organization. Surely you must realize that, even without
any solid evidence linking me to Patterson's death. In light of that, you cannot be permitted to
leave this house alive. Does this come
as a surprise to you?"
"It was hardly unexpected."
"Good, I'm glad we understand each
other. I'm sorry that I cannot offer you
my hospitality for a greater length of time, but I am very tired, and I will
rest easier once I know you have been dealt with."
Jessica clenched her hands, hoping to keep
them from shaking with the very real fear she felt.
VanDower rose from behind his desk with an
air of finality, but as he came around towards her he paused in mid-stride, and
frowned in thought.
"Unless ..." he said, and looked
hard at her as she continued to stand impassively before him in her bedraggled
trenchcoat. He seemed to come to a
decision then, and perched informally on the corner of his desk.
"There have been a series of
accidents around here," he began, "if you can call them
accidents. First a stone cornice came
loose from the exterior of the townhouse and nearly fell on me, then it was the
car that nearly ran me down as I was walking home a few nights later, and then
it was the frayed electrical cord in my bathroom. In short, I have reason to believe that
someone within the organization is trying to kill me. Now, your reputation as a detective is
well-known and well-deserved. Find out
who is behind these 'accidents,' and I may spare your life."
Jessica turned on him angrily. "Mr. VanDower, my talents are not the
sort of thing that can be commanded at your whim," she said.
"Ordinarily, I would agree with
you," VanDower said mildly.
"But these are hardly ordinary circumstances. Your situation is this: you can either take me up on my offer, or you
can die tonight."
And so Jessica reluctantly agreed, having
no choice. "But if I am to do this,
I need to know everything that goes
on around here," she said.
"You will know everything that I
consider relevant," he said.
"But it is too late tonight to start. You shall be given a room, and may begin
first thing in the morning. I suggest
you rest while you can; the security system in the townhouse makes it
impossible for anyone to come in or go out without my knowledge, so any effort
at escape would be worthless."
He opened the doors of the office,
allowing his hired goons to come back in. One of them took her by the arm, and
led her out into the foyer.
She was taken to the third floor, which
was largely unused, and pushed into a room.
The door was closed behind her with a click of the lock, and she was
left alone in the darkness.
The only light came from the streetlamps
outside, and as her eyes became used to the dim light, she was able to look
around at her surroundings. Not that
there was much to see; the room was quite bare.
The wooden floor was scuffed and marked, and a small table badly in need
of varnish stood next to a cot with a mattress and a tattered blanket. Aside from a couple of straight backed chairs
and some empty filing cabinets stacked against one wall for storage, that was the
extent of the furnishings. A small washroom
adjoined it; the floortiles were cracked and the plumbing looked ancient, but
at least it still seemed to have running water.
Jessica pulled one of the chairs over to
the window and gazed out at the quiet street.
She was terribly unhappy, and couldn't help but blame herself for being
so careless on the waterfront. She took
stock of her situation, and found that at the moment the only positive thing
she could see in it was that she was still alive.
"I'm scared," she admitted
softly to herself, "and alone … and more than anything else I wish I were
back home."
*******
Seth Hazlitt came to the Sheriff's Office
just as Mort Metzger himself was arriving first thing in the morning.
"Morning, Doc," the Sheriff
greeted him as he unlocked his office in the converted farmhouse. "You're here awfully early."
"Mmph. I have a feeling it's going to be a busy
day."
"Coffee?"
"Please."
As Mort handed him the paper cup, he took
a closer look at his friend. Seth seemed
unusually subdued this morning, and it worried him.
"Is everything okay, Doc?" he
asked.
Seth rubbed his eyes. "Didn't sleep well last night," he
said. "Have you heard from
Jess?"
"Nope. I expect she's got her hands full researching
that old murder down in
Deputy Andy picked it up. "Sheriff's Office ... Just a
moment. Sheriff," he said, holding
a hand over the receiver, "it's a Detective McGray from the Portland
PD."
Mort went around his desk and picked up
his phone. "Metzger."
"Sheriff," said Harrison McGray,
a fiftyish man with graying hair and a quick grin. "I'm sorry to bother you at such an
early hour. I'm a friend of Jessica
Fletcher's."
"No problem," Mort said. "What can I do for you?"
"Well, I was wondering if you had
heard from her either last night or this morning."
Mort took a sidelong glance at Seth, who
was sitting as still as a statue.
"Uh, no, we haven't, Mr. McGray.
Why?"
A sigh on the other end. "She was staying with me and my wife
while she was here doing her research in the city," he said, "but
last night she never came in. I didn't
think anything of it when I went to bed because we turned in early, but when it
was clear her bed hadn't been slept in ... well, we were wondering if perhaps
something had come up and she'd returned home unexpectedly."
Mort threw a questioning look at Seth, who
shook his head. "No, she hasn't
come back to Cabot Cove," he said.
"Well, then, Sheriff," McGray
said, "it appears we may have a problem on her hands."
*******
"Ours is a tightly run
operation," VanDower told Jessica next morning when he had her brought
down to his office. Jessica was seated
in a chair in front of his desk, feeling as trapped there as if she had been
tied into it. "We have only six
employees - the two gentlemen you met last evening, and four others who are
involved in more, shall we say, administrative work. Ken LeMasters is our accountant; he manages
the money coming in and going out as we handle the various shipments. Ryan Longwell is our contact man; he directs
when shipments are to be brought in and where they are to go from here. Rick Collins oversees the movement of the
merchandise from ship to shore, and Kim Harris handles the day to day
operations - maintaining our front, doing the paperwork, and so on.
"It's really quite simple," he
went on, getting up from his desk and wandering over to a window to look out at
the morning. "We are what you could
call middle-men. We handle the
merchandise when it first enters the country, and then move it out of state,
covering everyone's tracks as we go.
"We usually receive shipments from
Chinese freighters that dock in
"But you don't actually own that
warehouse," Jessica pointed out.
"No, we don't. An out-of-state firm owns it, and they're
currently looking for renters. In the
meantime, the place isn't being used, so we just help ourselves and are very
careful to leave things just as we found them.
"The merchandise is usually stored
there for only a day; any longer and we might attract someone's
suspicions. That was how you came to
stumble upon our little secret; usually our clients ship the crates out by
truck under the cover of darkness within a day, but this time our contact met
with an unexpected delay, and couldn't make the pick up until the day after he
was supposed to be here."
"And where do the guns go from
here?" Jessica asked.
VanDower waved his hand in the air. "Oh, all over," he said. "Out of state, usually out of the
Northeast. Many of them end up in the
"Fascinating," said Jessica
dryly. "If things are going so
well, why would anyone want to kill you?"
"There are any number of
reasons," VanDower said. "One
might be that someone in the organization aspires to take my place. The chance to call the shots, to inherit a
well-run gun smuggling operation established by someone else's work - the
prospect undoubtedly opens up temptations.
Then too, it is possible that one of my employees is in fact a traitor,
and hopes to bring down the organization by cutting off its head. I find this very unlikely, still, it is
possible."
"Is there any chance that an outsider
might be behind this?"
"Not a chance," he replied. "The fact that the attempts have
happened on or near the grounds rules that out.
No one comes or goes here without my knowledge."
"Unless, of course, there is a
traitor in your midst, in which case someone could be easily smuggled inside
you gate."
"An intriguing thought,"
VanDower admitted. "At any rate,
that's up to you to find out. You are at
liberty to speak with my employees; they are already aware of your presence and
your function here, and I have instructed them to be as open with you as
possible. Fair enough?"
"I suppose it will have to be,"
sighed Jessica, and VanDower gave her leave to go.
*******
Seth and Mort left for
McGray stood, his hand extended. "Sheriff Metzger ... I didn't expect you
to come all this way, but I'm not sorry you did."
"Well, under the circumstances, there
really wasn't much choice," Mort said.
"This is Dr. Seth Hazlitt."
"Doctor," McGray said, shaking
Seth's hand in turn. Then he turned to
introduce the other man: "This is
Peter Holland, a reporter for Channel 8, the ABC affiliate here in
Portland. He has been working with us closely
on this case, and may be able to provide us with some information."
Seth and Mort greeted the young reporter,
and then they were all seated.
"Now, where to start," McGray
mused.
"The beginning seems as good a place
as any," said Seth dryly.
"Right. Okay, as you probably know, about two weeks
ago Mrs. Fletcher contacted me and told me that she was interested in looking
into an old crime, the ten-year-old unsolved murder of Bernard Patterson, a
Portland dockworker. His death was
significant because at the time he was working undercover for the Portland
police, trying to gather information on an organization suspected of smuggling
guns into the U.S. by way of Portland harbor.
"I was the detective on that case;
Patterson was supposed to have touched base with me that night, but he never
showed up. The next morning we found him
in a warehouse, lying face down on the floor with his head bashed in from a
blow with a heavy pipe or some other blunt object. Here's a copy of the coroner's report,"
he said, and handed Seth a folder.
Seth looked it over. "Mmm ... blunt trauma to the left
occipital lobe, they must have come up from behind so he never saw it
coming."
"We searched the warehouse, and it
was empty," McGray went on.
"The building had been for lease for about seven months, and the
current owner was trying to unload it from Oregon. To make a long story short, we never found
any evidence linking any one particular person to his murder. We figured that the gun runners were behind
it, but Patterson died before he was able to give us any concrete information
about their movements or membership.
"We kept an eye on that warehouse for
several weeks, hoping to come up with some leads, but the smugglers had gone to
ground and become virtually invisible.
Since then we've known that guns are still coming in through the harbor,
and we've even made a couple of busts, but the core organization, the
professionals running the show - they have remained out of reach."
"So you have no idea who might be
behind the operation," Mort said.
McGray shook his head. "At the moment, no. Rumors we've had; most of them had no
foundation."
"I've been keeping my ear to the
ground on this case ever since the beginning," Holland said. "I've got contacts all over the city,
and when they hear anything, they pass it on to me. That was how we were able to get any leads on
the activity at all."
"And it's those contacts that we're
going to need to talk to now," McGray said. "Jessica's disappearance is both a
serious liability and a windfall."
"Serious liability I
understand," said Mort. "You
need to find a bunch of smugglers that have eluded you for ten years within a
few days. But a windfall ...?"
"Yes, strange as that may seem,"
said Holland. "Kidnapping Mrs.
Fletcher may have been a necessity once she stumbled on something vitally
important, but it was a serious detriment to the preservation of their low
profile. You cannot take a well-known
mystery writer and hide her away without attracting some attention. It's my belief that her disappearance will
send out ripples of rumor that my contacts should be able to pick up."
"Then we follow the ripples back to
their source," Detective McGray said, "and hope that we aren't too
late."
*******
Jessica felt at loose ends; more than
anything she wanted to bolt from this house and run, and put as much distance
between her and these people as she could.
But escape was impossible; the windows were painted shut, the doors
locked from the inside with keys she did not have, and the whole of the grounds
was surrounded by an iron fence topped with nasty looking spikes. And everywhere she went she was shadowed by
at least one of the two men who had captured her the night before; since then
she had found that the stocky one was Sydney Morse, and the tall one with the
blond hair was Jeffrey Flanders.
The first person she came upon was Kim
Harris, who was standing at the center island in the kitchen with a carton of
coffee creamer in her right hand, pouring it into her coffee. She barely glanced up at Jessica, then picked
up a spoon and started stirring her coffee with a scowl on her face.
"I know who you are," she said
before Jessica had a chance to speak, "and I think it's really insulting
that Thomas should bring in an outsider to interrogate his own people."
"Well, for what it's worth, I'm not
exactly delighted to have the assignment," said Jessica.
"No, I'd imagine not."
"You seem to think that Mr.
VanDower's suspicions are unfounded."
"No; I think someone is out to get him, but it's ridiculous
to think that it's one of us," Harris said, turning to face her for the
first time. "I've been here since
the beginning; I went from a two-bit drug running operation in New York to
this, and I haven't looked back. The
reason this organization works is that VanDower's got the contacts - lose him,
and half our business goes up in smoke.
Everyone who works here knows that."
"Surely he's not irreplaceable."
"Nobody's irreplaceable, or so I've
been told," Harris said. "But
we've got the closest thing yet with Thomas."
"Ah," said Jessica, who could
think of nothing better to say at the moment.
"Do you know where I might find Mr. Collins?"
"Sure, he's in his office. Down the hall, third door on the left."
*******
Jessica knocked on Collins's open door and
looked in tentatively. Rick looked up
from a messy pile of papers covering his desk and waved her in with his left
hand while he wrote.
"Come in, Mrs. Fletcher," he
said. "Just let me finish this
up." He made some notes on a calendar
with red pen, then set it aside.
"The dates of your next incoming
shipments?" Jessica asked.
"Yes, yes, it seems that no sooner do
I coordinate one then there's another coming down the pipeline," he said,
seemingly much more willing to talk than Kim had been. "I suppose you're here to find out about
these 'attempts' on VanDower's life."
"It would help," she said,
"if someone who was here could explain to me what's been happening."
"If you ask me, Thomas is imagining
the whole thing," Collins said, leaning back in his chair. "No one actually saw any of the incidents. I
saw the broken stonework lying on the path, sure, but I didn't see any evidence
that it had fallen on purpose. Of
course, who can tell from a bunch of rock fragments?"
"But what about the car he said tried
to run him down?"
"It was getting dark, he didn't look
before crossing the street, whatever," Rick said dismissively. "No one saw that either. Coincidences, that's all I think it is. Thomas is becoming a little paranoid in his
old age, I suppose."
"I would imagine that two accidents
coming so close together in time might make anyone suspicious," said
Jessica.
"Well, VanDower didn't get where he
is today by being trusting," admitted Rick. "When I brought Ryan Longwell into the
organization, VanDower did everything short of sending his fingerprints to the
FBI to confirm that he was who he claimed to be."
"This Ryan Longwell," Jessica
said. "Is he around here?"
"No, he works down on the
waterfront," Collins said. "He
only comes up here for meetings and assignments, and to find out when the next
shipments are coming in so he can have the warehouse ready. He has a profile to maintain. Now you'll have to excuse me, but I really
have to get these dates coordinated."
"Yes, of course," Jessica said,
and turned to leave. "One more
thing," she asked at the door.
"Did Mr. Longwell know Bernard Patterson, the dockworker who was
murdered?"
Collins paused before answering. "Yes, I imagine he did," he said at
last.
*******
It was shortly before noon; Exchange
Street was beginning to fill up with people for the lunch hour. It was a nice day, a warm wind blowing in off
the Sea, and a number of people were eating lunch in a little cobblestoned Post
Office Park on boulders shaded by the young green leaves of Spring.
Peter Holland stopped in front of a
shopfront proclaiming itself as Fran’s Delicatessen and looked inside. "This is the place," he told Seth
and Mort, and they went inside.
Seth had not been in a place quite like
this before. It was bright, and full of
colour. A cooler filled with a dizzying
variety of new-age fruit drinks stood on one side of the room, and a rack of
off beat wines stood across from it. A
ceiling fan spun from the ornate tin ceiling, creating a fresh breeze. Tables with crisp checkered tablecloths
crowded together against a booth that ran the length of the wall and under the
front window, looking out on the street.
In the back a glass deli counter displayed some of the place's
specialties, including locally raised hams and turkeys, and, Seth noticed
especially, a number of complicated looking desserts that were homemade on the
premises.
Seth nearly bumped into a stand holding
organically grown potato chips while he tried to take this all in. But Mort looked completely within his
element. He scanned the menu posted on
boards behind the counter with an expert eye, and seemed to come to a decision
without thinking.
"Can I help you?" a young woman
in a white apron asked him.
"Yeah, I'll have your New York rare
roast beef sandwich on rye, with tomatoes, lettuce, mayo, no mustard, easy on
the onions, hold the sprouts, and make that a dill pickle on the side,
please," he said with practiced ease.
The waitress nodded, noting the order on a
slip of paper, and then turned to Seth.
"And you, sir?"
Seth was caught somewhat off guard. "Um, ah ... I guess I'll have ham,"
he said, peering up at the board and feeling bewildered by the number of
choices before him.
"Baked Virginia or honey mustard
ham?" the woman asked.
"Um, baked Virginia."
"On white, whole wheat, rye,
pumpernickel, or roll?"
Seth glanced at Mort, who mouthed the word
"rye" at him encouragingly.
"I'll take whole wheat," Seth
said. Mort rolled his eyes in
exasperation.
"Tomato, lettuce, onions,
sprouts?"
"Ah, no thanks."
"Mustard or mayonnaise?"
"Mustard, I believe."
"Sweet or dill pickle?"
Seth considered. "I guess I'll take the sweet
pickle," he said at last.
The waitress finished jotting down his
order with a slight smile on her lips, and then turned to the reporter. "And you?"
"I'll have the cold turkey
club," he said, and gave her a significant look.
The waitress's pen paused over the order
slip, and she returned his gaze.
"Sweet or dill?" she asked him.
"Dill," Holland replied quietly.
Tight lipped, the woman ripped the order
slip off her pad. "You can sit down
and make yourselves comfortable," she said. "Someone will bring your order out in a few
minutes." And she disappeared into
the back.
The three men turned and found an empty
corner table that afforded them a view of both the restaurant and the sidewalk
outside.
"What was that all about?" Mort
asked Holland. "There was no turkey
club up on the board."
"They'll know what I'm talking
about," Peter replied placidly, and sat back to glance over the
complimentary Portland Press Herald
that was sitting out on their table.
Seth and Mort exchanged glances.
Holland had only just reached the regional
news section when a blonde woman in her mid-thirties, also dressed in a white
apron, came up to their table with their lunch.
But instead of simply depositing the tray and going back to the kitchen,
she pulled a chair from a neighboring table, turned it around, and sat down in
it, her arms folded across the back.
"Okay, Peter," she said, "I
know it's dill, but just how dill is it?"
"What are you talking about?"
Mort asked, looking confused.
"It's part of the code we've got
worked out," Holland explained.
"When I come in here and order a cold turkey club, Fran here knows
it's me and that I need to talk to her as soon as she can tear herself away
from her kitchen."
"Yeah, and whether he asks for a
sweet or dill pickle tells me how serious the news is," the woman
said. She extended her hand. "Francine Marino. I run Fran’s Deli."
"Mort Metzger, Cabot Cove
Sheriff," Mort said, taking it.
"This is Doctor Hazlitt."
"Pleased. So, Peter, you didn't answer my question -
how bad is it this time?"
"Pretty damn bad," Holland
said. "Jessica Fletcher was in town
looking into the old Patterson murder for a book she was writing. She was making good headway, and then all of
a sudden she disappeared into thin air.
My guess is that she got on to something big, and that certain
interested parties put a hold on her investigation before it could go
anywhere."
Francine pushed back a stray strand of
hair. "Peter, the guys involved in
that murder were pretty heavy hitters," she said. "Professionals. Not the sort you'd want to mess around
with."
"Well, it's a little late for
that," Holland said. "If
they're the ones who took her we really don't have a whole lot of choice, do
we."
"How can you be sure she's even still
alive?"
"How can we be sure she’s not?”
Holland countered.
"Heavy hitters," said Mort. "You mean the gun smugglers."
"Yes," said Francine. "They are powerful, and elusive. The Portland chief of police has been working
on trying to eradicate them ever since he took the job, but they're highly
organized, and nearly impossible to track down.
That your Jessica was able to get close enough to them to attract their
attention is not a good thing."
"What will they do to her?" Seth
asked hoarsely.
"They will kill her," she answered.
"If they haven't already, then they will."
"Then we haven't got a lot of
time," Holland said. "Fran,
Harrison McGray over at Portland PD headquarters is throwing as many resources
at this as he's got, but he's going to need some … unofficial help."
"I figured as much," she
said. "I know the drill. Look, when I hear something I'll contact you,
okay?"
"Fine," said Holland.
"I've got to get back to the
kitchen," Francine said, rising and swinging the chair back under its
table. "Nice to meet you, Sheriff,
Doctor."
"Well, now we wait," Holland
said after she had gone. "In the
meantime, I think you'll find these to be the best deli sandwiches you'll find
north of Boston."
*******
They walked along Exchange Street after
lunch, looking at all the shops that crowded the street in the Old Port
district. They went past a shop called,
very simply, Books, Etc., when Mort stopped suddenly and turned back.
"I don't know why I didn't think of
that sooner," he said, and disappeared inside. A few minutes later he re-emerged with a
paperback edition of one of Jessica's books.
"A little photo ID?" he said,
showing them her picture on the back.
"Might come in handy."
Jessica had thoroughly inspected the first
floor of the house without finding anything important, at least nothing
important that had been left out. There
were many locked drawers and closets that she would liked to have gotten into,
but Morse and Flanders claimed not to have the keys, and she had no choice but
to believe them.
That afternoon she wandered up to the
second floor, and in the course of poking around the mostly empty rooms came
upon one used for file storage, its walls lined with metal filing cabinets and
shelves filled with binders.
A man was in the room searching through
some folders; when he heard her step behind him he slammed the drawer of the
cabinet shut with extreme haste and swung around to face her. From the relief that passed across his
features upon seeing her, Jessica had the strong impression that he had
expected someone else.
"Excuse me," said Jessica. "Are you Mr. LeMasters?"
"Yes," he replied. "I've seen you wandering around; for
what it's worth, I don't like what Thomas is doing to you, making you ferret
out our dirty laundry for him, ask the questions he doesn't want to ask
himself."
"Thank you," said Jessica with a
slight bow of her head. "I am
afraid that under the circumstances I was given very little choice."
"Yes; I doubt I would have chosen
differently in your place with the only alternative being immediate
execution."
"May I ask what you were working on
just now?" she asked.
LeMasters hesitated. "Oh, it's nothing, really," he
said, scratching his left ear with his pen.
"Just checking up on some old accounts. I keep track of the payments, no easy task,
you may imagine, when the money's being laundered every step of the way."
"No doubt," said Jessica.
"Someone has to keep track of
things," LeMasters went on.
"There's too many opportunities for things to slip by. All Ryan Longwell has to do is sign the
papers left handed to disguise his handwriting on the payment stubs and he's in
the clear, but I have to make sure what he sends back to me actually reaches
the bank accounts, I have to make sure the very people we're dealing with
aren't robbing us blind right under our noses.
It's a difficult job."
"No doubt," Jessica said again.
"I really would like to explain it
further to you, Mrs. Fletcher, but I do have many things on my agenda to do
this afternoon, so please excuse me."
He left the room with a stack of
envelopes, and Jessica, having nothing further to do at the moment, returned to
her room to think over everything she had heard.
*******
Jessica was not given much latitude after
dark, but instead was confined to her room not long after sunset. A tray of food was brought to her for dinner,
and she picked at it absently while she watched dusk settle over the city of
Portland.
She was startled out of her thoughts by a
shout from the hallway. A few minutes
passed, and then Thomas VanDower himself unlocked her door and looked in.
"You're going to want to see
this," he said.
Jessica nodded and followed him out,
motivated as much by her own curiosity as she was by fear.
VanDower escorted her down to the second
floor, where the two henchmen and Rick Collins stood clustered around the
doorway to a room furnished largely with filing cabinets, shelves, and a metal
desk. Taking her by the arm, he led her
through the spectators inside, where she stopped short in surprise at the sight
of a man, Ken LeMasters, slumped over the open drawer of a file cabinet, a
knife handle sticking out of his back.
Jessica took a step forward with the
intention of looking for a pulse, but VanDower held out his hand and stopped
her.
"Don't bother," he said. "We already checked."
She took a couple of steps forward
nonetheless to get a closer look, then turned to the others.
"Who found him?" she demanded.
"I did," said Collins. "I came up here to file the shipping
forms from our latest delivery. The room
was dark, but when the lights came on I saw him just like that, dead."
"Did you touch anything?" she
asked.
Collins shook his head. "No," he said, "my primary
concern was to get the hell out of this room."
Jessica brushed her hand against the dead
man's cheek and shivered. "He
hasn't been dead for very long," she said.
"Fifteen, maybe twenty minutes.
The coroner will be able to tell better."
"He would," VanDower said,
standing off to the side with his arms crossed, "if he were
notified."
"But ..."
"This is an internal affair,"
VanDower said firmly. "There will
be no police investigation, everything will be taken care of quietly without
any outside interference. And that means
that if his killer is to be found, it falls to you, Mrs. Fletcher, to find
him." The tone of his voice made it
clear that argument would be useless.
To Flanders and Morse he said, "We're
going to need to make arrangements to dispose of him."
The henchmen nodded and went off without
comment.
"Well, if you don't need me, I think
I'll be taking off," Collins said when they had gone. "This gives me the creeps."
"Yes, yes, Rick, go do whatever you
need to do," VanDower said, and Collins left with an obvious air of
relief.
"Well," said VanDower. "It would seem that one of those
'accidents' finally hit home."
"Perhaps," said Jessica.
"Perhaps? A man stabbed in the back in a darkened room,
it's obvious that the killer mistook LeMasters for me in the darkness!"
"But we don't really know that it was a mistake,"
Jessica said. "Your 'accidents' and
his murder could be totally unrelated.
It's possible that someone specifically intended to kill Mr. LeMasters,
and succeeded."
VanDower waved this aside. "I find that highly unlikely," he
said. "LeMasters was an
inconspicuous sort of man of minimal importance to this organization. I can't think of a single reason why anyone
would want to kill him."
"Well, someone may have come up with
at least one."
"Ah, how refreshing," he said,
chuckling. "A mind that stubbornly
persists in being open. It is getting
late, and I am too tired to argue with you.
You may consider this overnight, and we can discuss it further
tomorrow."
Jessica took one more swift glance around
the room, froze the image of the dead man in her mind, and reluctantly returned
to her room to be locked in for the night.
*******
"Doc," Mort said wearily,
"are you going to pace all night, or are you going to go to bed?"
Seth paused in midstep, and looked at the
Sheriff, who was already in his bed and trying to fall asleep. "Sorry, Mort," he said, "I
just don't seem to be tired."
"After the day we've had, Doc, you
should be exhausted," said Mort.
"I know, I know. I'm just ... worried, is all."
Mort sat up and sighed. "Look, I understand," he said. "I know how you feel, I'm worried sick
too. But you won't be helping Mrs. F any
by pacing all night and wearing yourself down."
"I know that," Seth sighed. "But I feel better doing something.”
"Yes, but Mrs. F would be the first
person to smack you around if she saw what you were doing to yourself,” Mort
pointed out. “Now, are you going to go
to bed, or do I have to call Tipper Henderson and have her come down here with
her tranquilizer gun?"
Seth actually smiled a little at
this. "I would sooner get hit over
the head with a two-by-four."
"Well, then."
Seth climbed into bed and stared at the
ceiling for quite some time, watching the lights of car headlights from the
street below move across the wall. Mort
was right; there was nothing to be gained by pacing all night.
Eventually he drifted off to sleep.
*******
Mort Metzger looked doubtfully at the
morning light reflecting off the windows of the establishment at 212 Danforth
Street.
"What is this place?" he asked
Seth.
"This is Danforth’s," Seth
answered promptly. "Absolutely the
best breakfasts in the West End, or all of Portland for that matter. The food is good, it's cheap, and there's
lots of it. I always make it a point to
come here whenever I'm in the city."
"It looks like a bar," said the
Sheriff.
"That's because it is a bar, Mort," said Seth. "One of the last authentic neighborhood
bars left in these parts. I told McGray
we'd meet him here - ah, here he is now."
McGray came around the corner, a copy of
the Portland Press Herald in his
hand.
"Morning, Sheriff, Doctor," he
said. "Shall we go in?"
Mort didn't think he could ever have
adequately prepared himself for the sight that greeted him when he walked in
the door. Danforth’s was unpretentious,
but despite the functional decor the place positively leaked atmosphere from
every pore. The walls were covered with
barnboards, which in turn were covered with a motley assortment of
Portland-themed posters, beer advertisements, and dart boards. A pair of dry-erase boards sporting that
week's menu and featured Beer of the Week was illuminated by some dim overhead
track lights; narrow horizontal blinds muted the outside light filtering
through the windows. At the wooden bar
there sat a varied assortment of people eating breakfast and drinking coffee, a
few tourists mixed in with locals.
Behind the bar's ceiling racks of glasses a neon sign for Samuel Adams
beer announced that today was Walter Miller's twenty-fifth anniversary.
McGray led Seth and Mort to a corner table
near the dart board display case.
"Is there any news yet?" Mort
asked him.
The Portland detective shook his
head. "No," he said. "We're chasing down every lead that
looks even faintly promising, and there's nothing yet. We busted that warehouse we think they've
been using last night, and the place was cleaned out."
"Surely they must have left some
little thing behind," said Seth.
"You'd think so, but I'm telling you,
you could have eaten off the floor of this place."
Mort pointed to the newspaper and asked,
"Has anything turned up in there?"
"Mercifully, no," said
McGray. "Peter Holland seems to be
the only member of the Fourth Estate who's tracking this so far. We've been particularly tight-lipped about
it; I can't think of anything that would make these people go to ground faster
than having their suspected activities splashed across page one and leading off
the local news at six."
"So what do we do next?" asked
Mort.
"We wait, we keep following what
leads we have, we hope Holland's contacts can dig something up,” McGray
answered. “This morning we're going to
start going through our collection of seized weapons, and try to trace back the
particularly interesting ones as far as we can."
"If I were in this business, I think
I'd be sending all my ill-gotten booty out of state," said Seth. "Do you really think they'd let any of
their stuff float around Portland?"
"Probably not, but hey, we might just
get lucky," McGray said. "We
have to try something. If nothing else,
maybe we can eliminate some possibilities.
I certainly hope so, at least; the chief’s really breathing down my back
on this one. Not only is illegal
firearms his real pet peeve, I know for a fact that he stays up nights reading
Jessica's books. This whole thing has
not made him happy."
"Well, if we're going to make a
productive day of this, we can at least start off with a good breakfast,"
Seth said. "I recommend their apple
pancakes with a side of sausage ..."
*******
"Kim!" Rick Collins said,
catching up with Kim Harris as she went down the hall past his office. "Has VanDower said anything about Ken's
murder?"
"Not since I got in this
morning," Harris answered coolly.
"And frankly, I'm not sure I feel comfortable talking about it with
you."
"Why?
Because I was the one who found him?"
"Because you were the one who happened to be there first," Kim
said. "Awfully convenient that you
picked last night to work late."
Collins took a step back. "Now wait a moment, do you think that I
..."
"I just wonder how come the person
who has discounted the 'accidents' around her the longest and loudest just happened to be on hand when someone
finally got killed," Harris said.
"What's that line from Hamlet
– ‘the lady doth protest too much'?"
"You're getting as paranoid as
VanDower," Collins said. "I'd
like to remind you that it didn't have to be me; Morse and Flanders were also
here last night, and no one's heard from Longwell for two days."
"Well, he'll be here tomorrow when
Thomas outlines the next shipment transfer," Kim said coolly. "We can ask him where he was then - and
then we'll know, won't we?"
*******
Peter Holland gazed idly out the window of
his office at Channel 8's headquarters, watching the foot traffic pass below
him on Congress Street. It was nearly
eleven-thirty, and so far it had been a slow news day, which he supposed was
good in that it allowed him the freedom to mull over the much larger, unreported
case at hand. However, with no new
leads, there wasn't much that bore
thinking about, only the same problems chasing each other around inside his
head. McGray hadn't called, nor had Dr.
Hazlitt or Sheriff Metzger, and without some input from somewhere, he was
effectively stalled.
A knock on the door of his office woke him
from his unproductive reverie.
"That sandwich you ordered from
Della's, Mr. Holland," Will, one of the junior reporters, said, leaning
inside.
Holland looked up, confused. "I didn't order any ... oh, that sandwich," he then amended,
catching on. "Ah, yes, I'd almost
forgotten. Thanks, Will."
He took the brown paper bag the junior
reporter handed him, and returned with it to his desk. Inside he found a corned beef sandwich on
rye, easy on the mayo, just the way he liked it, wrapped up in waxed
paper. He unwrapped the sandwich and its
pickle, then read the message that had been included with them, written on a
napkin in black marker:
"Fletcher
was seen speaking with Matthew Jacobs," it read. "35 Wharf Street."
Holland wadded up the napkin with a
satisfied grin and tossed it into his wastebasket, banking it off a file
cabinet for style points. Good old
Fran. Now maybe they were getting
somewhere.
He only hoped that they wouldn't be too
late ...
[ TO BE CONTINUED ]