Bad Things Happen Read online

  “We’ve kept it from the public. I don’t think even Laura Kristoll knows. Suppose you were in Tom’s office and you needed to fake a suicide note. Fast. How would you do it?”

  He rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “You’d probably type it,” he said. “You could open a file on Tom’s computer and peck something out. Use the end of a pencil on the keys, not your fingers. Keep it short, keep it general. You wouldn’t need to print it, just leave it on the screen.”

  “That’s one way to do it, but not if you wanted to be cute,” Elizabeth said. “If you wanted to be cute, you’d leave a book open on the desk. Say, Shakespeare’s Collected Works. You’d mark a particular line. Would you care to guess which one?”

  “Lines from Shakespeare—that’s a big field,” said Hideaway.

  “Remember, it has to suggest suicide.”

  “Maybe something from the end of Romeo and Juliet ?”

  “Try Hamlet. ”

  “Let’s see. Ophelia drowned herself, but I don’t think she left a note.”

  “No,” said Elizabeth. “The line the killer chose was from the last scene, when Hamlet is dying and Horatio wants to die with him. ‘I am more an antique Roman than a Dane.’ It’s what Horatio says when he reaches for the poisoned cup.”

  Hideaway let out a long breath. “Cute. Now I see why you’ve been talking to writers.”

  “Do you?”

  “Whoever killed Tom must have given some thought to the suicide note beforehand.”

  “Yes,” Elizabeth said.

  “Suppose he didn’t go there with the intention of killing Tom. That means he would have had to improvise quickly. So he was drawing on something he had already thought about.”

  “Yes.”

  “He must have come across that line in Hamlet—‘I am more an antique b a d t h i n g s h a p p e n

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  Roman’—and he must have thought, That would make a good suicide note. Then he finds himself in Tom’s office. Tom is on the floor unconscious, or he’s already out the window. The killer is in a hurry. Now is not the time to cast around for ideas. He already has the idea. And there’s the book. He opens it to the right page, leaves it on the desk, and gets out of there.”

  Nathan Hideaway turned to face Elizabeth. “So even if he didn’t plan the crime in advance, he must have thought about the scenario in advance. He must have thought about suicides and suicide notes. At the very least, that makes him someone with an active imagination. Odds are, it makes him a writer.”

  Chapter 20

  Carter Shan spent his weekend talking to night owls and insomniacs.

  At midday on Saturday, he spoke to a tractor salesman who lived in a refurbished farmhouse about a mile from the narrow lane where Adrian Tully had died. The salesman had been up playing solitaire in the small hours of Saturday morning. At quarter to one he had heard what sounded like a rifle shot. Though the surrounding woods and fields were posted against hunting, he was used to hearing the occasional rifle shot, though not usually at one in the morning. The first shot, he said, had been followed by a second shot a few minutes later.

  On Saturday afternoon, Shan spoke to a retired seamstress who had been up tending to a sick cat. She lived three-quarters of a mile from the site of Tully’s death. She was certain there had been no gunshots. On Saturday evening, Shan spoke to a paramedic who had returned home from his shift after midnight. He’d had time to fix a sandwich and carry it into the living room before he heard the shot. He swore there had been only one.

  Early Sunday afternoon, Shan spoke to a teenage girl, an amateur photographer, who had stayed up late on Friday night to take pictures of the moon. She had kept a pad and pen with her to record f-stops and exposure times. She had written down the time of the first gunshot: 12:41 a.m. The second, she noted, had come at 12:44. The third, at 12:50. The fourth, at 12:53.

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  On Sunday evening, a group of detectives met at City Hall in the offi ce of Chief Owen McCaleb. Shan was among them, and Elizabeth too, fresh from her visit with Nathan Hideaway.

  McCaleb perched on the corner of his desk. The others arranged themselves in a rough semicircle. Shan summarized his findings first, and came in for some gentle ribbing from his colleagues.

  “You should have stopped after the first witness, Carter,” said Harvey Mitchum, a jovial black man who had twenty years with the department.

  “Two shots fired. That’s the answer we wanted. The rest of them just confuse things.”

  Mitchum made his report next. He and Ron Wintergreen had organized the search of the scene of Adrian Tully’s death. Tully’s car had been removed from the road, but its position had been carefully marked. Mitchum and Wintergreen had blocked out a search area that extended over the fields on either side of the road and into the woods beyond. A team of patrolmen and academy cadets, equipped with metal detectors borrowed from the university’s archaeology and geology departments, had worked in shifts to cover the area systematically over the course of Sunday afternoon.

  “We were looking for two bullets,” Mitchum noted. “One that killed Tully and punched a hole through the driver’s window. And the other—the hypothetical second bullet—that Tully’s killer could have fi red in order to get gunshot residue on Tully’s hand. Ron found the first bullet early on, in the field on the driver’s side.”

  Ron Wintergreen, a gangly thirty-year-old with pale blond hair, looked uncomfortable at the mention of his name. Leaning against a wall, he gazed down at the laces of his hiking boots.

  “Unfortunately,” Mitchum added, “we had no luck after that. The second bullet, if there was one, could have gone through the same hole in the driver’s window, though it would have been a tricky shot. More likely, the killer rolled down the passenger window and fired it that way. We looked on both sides, but couldn’t find it.”

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  Kim Reyes spoke next. One of the youngest detectives in the department, she had been given the task of interviewing Adrian Tully’s friends and classmates from the university. They tended to describe Tully as shy and moody, she said. None went so far as to call him depressed or suicidal. And none of them had ever seen a gun in his possession, or heard him talk about owning one. Reyes had also been assigned to the search of Tully’s car. Everything in the vehicle had been catalogued, she reported, down to the soda cans and fast-food wrappers that littered the backseat. Every item that might hold a fingerprint would eventually be dusted.

  “I found something interesting under the passenger seat,” she said. “It was stuck in one of the tracks that allow the seat to slide forward and back.”

  Casually, she took a manila envelope from under her arm and drew out a plastic evidence bag. Inside was a small triangle of paper. One of the edges was rough, as if the scrap had been torn from a larger piece. There were fragments of type on the paper. Elizabeth leaned in for a closer look. She could make out the words oxford universi—

  “It’s part of a book jacket,” Reyes said. “It set bells off when I found it, because the book on Tom Kristoll’s desk was missing a dust jacket. Shakespeare’s Collected Works. I wanted to compare it, so I stopped into Borders to see if they had a copy.”

  She drew an intact dust jacket from the envelope. Elizabeth glimpsed the publisher’s name on the rear flap: oxford university press.

  “Cute,” she said, half to herself.

  “They’re a match,” Reyes said.

  Owen McCaleb reached for the evidence bag and examined the small triangle within.

  “You think it’s a plant?” he said to Elizabeth.

  She was noncommittal. “I don’t suppose there’s a print on it.”

  “It’s clean,” said Reyes. “No prints.”

  Carter Shan had retired to a chair by the window, but now he got up.

  “If it’s a plant, then it confirms what we’ve been thinking anyway
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  Kristoll’s killer used the book to knock him out, then took the dust jacket because it had his fingerprints on it. Later he decided to kill Tully and frame him for Kristoll’s murder. He tore this scrap from the jacket, wiped it clean, and left it in Tully’s car.”

  Elizabeth added, “It’s clever, leaving just a scrap. Subtle. The alternative would be to leave the entire jacket, but then you’d have to wipe the whole thing down. And then we’d see that it had been wiped down, and we’d wonder why. The jacket connects Tully to the crime. Why would he go to the trouble of wiping it down and then not get rid of it altogether?

  “This way we can imagine Tully fleeing the scene of Kristoll’s murder. He shoves the jacket under the seat as he drives away. Later, he stops somewhere and pulls the jacket out again to throw it away or burn it or whatever he’s going to do. Part of it is caught in the track under the seat and tears off, but he doesn’t notice.”

  McCaleb drummed his fingers on the edge of his desk. “Why couldn’t it have happened that way? Tully kills Kristoll, hides the dust jacket under the car seat. Later he burns it—except for the corner that got torn off. The corner stays under the seat until Tully shoots himself, and then we fi nd it. Why not?”

  “There’s the witness who heard two shots,” Shan said.

  “And the witnesses who heard one, or four, or none,” said McCaleb. Kim Reyes broke in. “There’s another possibility. Suppose Tully did kill Kristoll and that’s how the scrap ended up under his car seat. But then someone—a partner, an accomplice—lured Tully out to the cornfield and shot him to keep him quiet.”

  Harvey Mitchum chuckled. “Aw, don’t say that, Kim. It’s complicated enough as it is. I’d hate to have to sort it out for a jury.”

  Reyes started to reply, but McCaleb interrupted her. “Let’s move on,” he said. “We still need to hear from Elizabeth.”

  Elizabeth took a breath and then began to outline her conversations with Bridget Shellcross, Casimir Hifflyn, and Nathan Hideaway. The fi ngers of her right hand went automatically to the string of beads at her neck as she 1 4

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  spoke. When she was through, McCaleb asked for her analysis. Did she think any of the three could have been involved in Kristoll’s death—or Tully’s?

  “Hifflyn and Hideaway are both living alone,” she said. “Hideaway’s wife died six years ago. Hifflyn says his wife is in Europe, though I haven’t confirmed that yet. I intend to. I don’t want to find out later that she’s buried under the flagstones in the backyard.”

  Her fingers twisted the beads. “So neither one has an alibi for the night of Kristoll’s murder, or the night of Tully’s. Bridget Shellcross lives with a woman named Rachel Kent and claims to have been home with her on both nights.

  “Shellcross is a small woman, and the image of her lifting a body through a window is comical, but the two of them together could have done it, and I think Rachel could have managed it on her own. Cass Hifflyn claims that Shellcross was once involved with Tom Kristoll. That raises the possibility that Shellcross got back together with Kristoll recently. If she did, and if Rachel found out—well, I can see Rachel helping Kristoll out a window.

  “Hifflyn also admits to having been involved with Laura Kristoll in college, and says that Tom Kristoll stole her away from him. That gives him a motive for doing Kristoll in—a twenty-year-old motive. If he killed Kristoll for revenge, it may have been the most deliberate, patient act of revenge in history.

  “Hideaway had no motive that I can see. Kristoll was his benefactor. For the record, Hideaway is sixty years old, but he’s a vigorous sixty. He keeps in shape. I would say he’s capable of lifting a body through a window.”

  She rolled the beads against her skin. “All three of them—Shellcross, Hifflyn, and Hideaway—knew Adrian Tully. Any of them, I think, could have come up with a story to convince him to drive out to a meeting on a lonely road at night.”

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  There was more discussion before the meeting wound down. Owen McCaleb wanted to know if there were others who might have been able to lure Tully out to a lonely road. Laura Kristoll’s name was added to the list. She would need to be questioned. Other avenues would need to be pursued: the possibility of a recent affair between Tom Kristoll and Bridget Shellcross, or between Laura Kristoll and Casimir Hifflyn. Inquiries would be made; photographs would be shown to hotel clerks.

  It was well after seven when Elizabeth left City Hall. The sky was blueblack and clear and there was a cool wind. As she turned onto her street a shower of rain began to fall. From a distance she saw her house, the porch light on. Sarah was there in the light, and another figure with her, leaning on the railing. Elizabeth thought at first that it was Sarah’s friend from school, Billy Rydell, but Billy, though tall, was very thin. He had dark, unruly hair. The man on the porch was broader in the shoulders. Sarah was talking to him animatedly, her arms gesturing. His hair, when he bent forward into the light, was copper-colored. It was David Loogan.

  Elizabeth left the car and came up the walk. Now she could see the meaning of Sarah’s gestures. Her daughter was juggling. Three oranges traced their arcs through the air. Sarah saw her and waved reflexively and the pattern was lost and the oranges went bouncing over the floor of the porch. One rolled down the steps and Elizabeth caught it at her feet. Loogan bent to retrieve the others and then turned to fl ash Elizabeth a smile. “Hello, Detective.”

  “Hello. What’s this?”

  “David’s a juggler,” Sarah said. “He’s been teaching me.”

  “She’s a natural,” said Loogan.

  “I’m learning. It doesn’t feel natural yet. It feels like a parlor trick.”

  “It is a parlor trick,” said Loogan.

  Elizabeth joined them on the porch. “Let’s see it again.”

  Sarah took the oranges once more and arranged them in her hands. She made practice movements as if to remind herself and then let them fl y. 1

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  She kept the pattern going for five seconds, for ten. Elizabeth saw the moment when she lost control. Loogan saw it too. He snatched an errant orange from the air, and the next thing Elizabeth knew he had all three. He sent them up to brush the ceiling of the porch, then froze suddenly with two in his right hand and one in his left. He offered them back to Sarah.

  “That was good,” he said.

  Elizabeth smiled. “I’m impressed.”

  Sarah tossed an orange in the air and caught it. “I’ve invited David to stay for supper.”

  “You have, have you?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t stay,” Loogan said.

  “He doesn’t want to impose,” said Sarah. “You’ll have to work on him.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m going in,” Sarah said. With the screen door open, she turned back.

  “What do you think about oranges in the salad?”

  Elizabeth considered the question. “I think three may be too many.”

  “I’ll see how one looks.”

  As the screen door clapped shut, Loogan said in a low voice, “I hope it was all right for me to come here.” He seemed deliberately casual. Stubble on his chin, darker than the copper of his hair. Weathered coat, flannel shirt, denim, sturdy hiking boots. But his eyes glinted, his mouth was a long ironic line.

  “It’s all right,” Elizabeth said.

  “Your address is in the phone book,” he said.

  “That’s practically an invitation.”

  “Your daughter is charming.”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not going to ask me why I’m here.”

  Elizabeth leaned her back against a column and listened to the rain fall ing on the porch roof. “Sometimes I find that if I don’t say anything, people will tell me what
they want to tell me, all on their own.”

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  “I heard about Adrian Tully,” Loogan said. “I wondered what the story was.”

  “Is that right?”

  “I suppose I shouldn’t show too much interest. You’ll start thinking I’m guilty of something.”

  Elizabeth put a hand out to feel the rain. “We had a meeting today to consider who might be guilty of killing Adrian Tully. Your name didn’t come up.”

  “That’s good.”

  “It should have. Did you know we were looking at Tully as a suspect in the murder of Tom Kristoll?”

  “No,” Loogan said. “Is that true?”

  “It’s true. We believe Tully was the one who vandalized your car. He knew about your affair with Laura Kristoll. It’s possible he went to tell Tom and they got into an argument about it. You haven’t heard any of this? Laura didn’t tell you?”

  “No. You’re saying she knew?”

  “At the very least, she knew Tully was a suspect. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you.”

  “She didn’t.”

  “If she did—if you believed that Tully killed Tom Kristoll—it would have given you a motive. Tom was your friend. You wanted his killer caught. If this were a story in Gray Streets, you’d catch him yourself. Isn’t that what you told me?”

  “It is.”

  “You’ve even been playing detective,” Elizabeth said. “Have you found Michael Beccanti yet?”

  Loogan showed her his palms. “I haven’t been looking for him.”

  “If this were a story in Gray Streets, ” she said, “you might want to do more than catch Tom’s killer. You might want to punish him. Have you ever been to a gun show, Mr. Loogan?”

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  He looked puzzled. “No. Why?”

  “Have you ever owned a gun?”

  “No.”

  “I’m sorry to be so abrupt,” Elizabeth said. “It’s been a long day and sometimes I get tired of dealing with this nonsense. Did you lure Adrian Tully out to a cornfield and blow his brains out?”

  Quietly, firmly, he said, “No.”