Bound by Mystery Page 9

  Newly studied the monitor screen. “You smart bastard. How?”

  “Pajamas. What’s the preliminary M.E. report?”

  “A fall and then drowning. A blow to the head consistent with an impact on a river rock. It would have been over pretty quickly.”

  “Can we see his personal effects?”

  Newly laid out the rod and reel, the clothes, the wristwatch, and a leather case similar to the ones in the workshop.

  “You know anybody who’s an expert on fly fishing?” I asked.

  “I’ve got a friend at Curtis Wright Outfitters. Richard Witt knows everything there is to know.”

  “Show him the fly on the rod and this case.”

  “And?”

  “And see what he says. I want his opinion before I talk to Culpepper’s daughter.”

  “You want more from the M.E.”

  I smiled. “You’re with me now, aren’t you?”

  He nodded. “And I hope to stay that way.”

  ***

  Two days later, Newly, Ellen Culpepper, Nakayla, and I stood at the front door of Alexia Culpepper’s home. Newly rang the bell with his left hand and held a canvas satchel in his right. We heard chimes echoing through the house. They were still ringing when Alexia threw open the front door.

  “What is it?” Her annoyance changed to surprise when she saw us.

  “Sorry for the intrusion,” Newly said. “We have some new developments that we want to share in person.”

  Alexia composed herself and forced a smile. “Well, come in. I guess it’s important.”

  We followed her to the sunroom. Alexia sat on the love seat. Nakayla, Ellen, Newly, and I took chairs. Newly dropped the satchel at his feet.

  “What have you discovered?” Alexia asked.

  “It’s more a question of what we haven’t discovered,” I said. “Pajamas.”

  “Pajamas. What pajamas?”

  “Your husband’s. Either pajamas or a bathrobe. It was chilly at four in the morning. You said he changed in the garage, but changed out of what?”

  “Well, he slept in the nude. We both do.”

  “And went naked outside to the garage?”

  “No one would see him.”

  “Buck naked? Nothing on his feet?”

  “I guess so. Otherwise, you would have found them in the garage.”

  “Yes. Several things seem to have gone missing. He had a waterproof watch he wore while fishing.”

  “Ellen gave it to him for his fifty-fifth birthday.”

  “He was wearing it when we found his body. Left wrist.”

  “Yes.”

  “But when he waved to the guard a little before four-thirty, it wasn’t on his wrist.”

  A nervous twitch rippled at the corner of her mouth. “I guess he didn’t put it on till he got to the river.”

  “Maybe,” I conceded. “But there’s another possibility. That your husband was dead before he left this house. And that led me to think about the problem of logistics. How could a dead man drive through the gate, put on his watch, and walk down to the river? You would need at least two other people just to shuttle vehicles.”

  “This is preposterous. I’ve lost the man I love and now you’re accusing me of murder?”

  “You haven’t lost the man you love.”

  Newly reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “You can come in.”

  Alexia stood and turned around to stare toward the foyer. We heard the front door lock click. A few seconds later Detective Tuck Efird entered with Josh Noonan a few steps in front of him.

  Alexia turned around. Her face paled to bleached bone.

  “They’re making wild accusations,” Noonan shouted. “I haven’t said anything.”

  “Like I was saying,” I continued, “two people, you and Mr. Noonan here, for example. He parks his car out of view of the security camera. He can also exit the rear of the guardhouse without being seen. So, theoretically, you could drive down, stop before entering the camera’s view and take him back up to your house. If you haven’t already done it, he helps you kill your husband, and then loads him in the back of the Range Rover. You crouch down behind the front seats, and he wears your husband’s shirt and waves to the empty guardhouse. Then you take Noonan’s car for the return vehicle, and go to a more desolate spot to dress your husband including his watch and a box of flies.”

  Newly pulled the fly box and a photograph from the satchel. He handed them to Ellen. “Your stepmother says you’re the fly fishing expert. What can you tell us about these flies and the one in the photograph of your father’s rod?”

  Ellen Culpepper studied them for less than a minute. “None of these are hatching now. Thunderhead, Mr. Rapidan, Hazel Creek—these flies are all for the spring. The one on the rod is a Yallerhammer, which he’d definitely never use in September.”

  Newly nodded. “That’s what I was told by a fishing guide. You use whatever most resembles the current hatching population.” He turned to Alexia. “You and Noonan picked the wrong fly box.”

  “Who’s to say Aaron didn’t make the mistake?” she countered.

  “You’re right.” Newly turned to Ellen. “He could have met your stepdaughter and her boyfriend.”

  Ellen drew back like she’d been slapped.

  “Exactly,” Alexia said triumphantly.

  “Except for the medical examiner,” Newly said. “Sam’s suspicions prompted me to request he take another look. The water in his body contained traces of chlorine, chlorine consistent with amounts added to a swimming pool.” Newly looked over his shoulder. “That swimming pool.”

  Alexia Culpepper said nothing.

  Newly pulled a set of handcuffs from his pocket. “Mrs. Culpepper, I’m arresting you on suspicion of the murder of your husb—”

  “I had nothing to do with it,” Noonan yelled. “I know all about lures. She could’ve impersonated her husband and met someone else who helped her.”

  “Lures?” Newly questioned. “No fly fisherman calls them lures. Tuck, how’d you come in the front door?”

  Newly’s partner held up a ring of keys. “Courtesy of Mr. Noonan.”

  ***

  Nakayla and I were in the French Broad. Not the river. The French Broad Chocolate Lounge a few blocks from our office. I took the last bite of Mocha Stout Cake, thanks to Detective Newland. He had just a cup of coffee, in adherence to his wife’s prescribed diet.

  “So, the finger-pointing has begun,” Newly said. “Both claiming the other forced their participation.”

  “A plea deal?” Nakayla asked.

  “I don’t know what the D.A. will do. The case is solid.”

  “Were you surprised the M.E. didn’t pick up the chlorine the first time?” I asked.

  “Not really. We found the body in a river. Evidence suggested he hit his head and was unconscious. He would drown without taking in large quantities of water. The chlorine was more prevalent in the throat and nasal passages.”

  “Couldn’t that have been from swimming in the pool?” Nakayla asked.

  “Maybe. A nude four o’clock swim before taking the wrong flies to a fishing stream is a pretty desperate defense, especially since Noonan’s been forthcoming. He claims Aaron Culpepper was already dead and floating in the pool when he got to the house.”

  “And the motive?” I asked.

  “Two lures that attract a lot of murders. Sex and money.”

  “That’s what attracted me to Sam,” Nakayla said.

  Newly pushed his coffee cup away. “Too much information.” He stood.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “Diet be damned. I’m going for the lure of chocolate cake.”

  Quito

  J.M. Donellan

  My Australian publisher, Panter
a Press, had informed me that they’d had a very successful visit at the Frankfurt Book Fair and they’d had some “very exciting conversations.” I assumed this was general industry speak for ‘“we ate a lot of cheese and drank a lot of wine and gesticulated wildly at people.’’ Soon after, I was told that they’d had an offer from an American publisher for my book, Killing Adonis. I had to reread the e-mail several times to check it wasn’t a similar “offer” to the one I’d recently had from a Nigerian prince who needed me to help transfer funds into an offshore bank account. When it turned out to be a legitimate offer from the good folks at Poisoned Pen Press, I said yes and then engaged in the traditional Australian post-contract signing ritual of sacrificing a kangaroo to the moon god at midnight.*

  *I’m joking, obviously (we usually sacrifice a koala).

  —J.M.D.

  ***

  I stared at his serene, icicle-encrusted face. Tiny white stalagmites jutted from eyebrows, ears, and nostrils. His eyes were permanently closed, mouth frozen slightly open. I pressed my hand against the cold glass, breathed mist onto it, and drew a curly moustache superimposed over his face. I’d nicknamed this one The Big Chill; he was a portly Latino with curiously large ears and a bulbous nose. His head hung suspended in both the physical and neurological sense in the liquid nitrogen dewar, along with all the other poor saps who hadn’t been either rich or stupid enough to have their whole bodies frozen.

  The jokes “keep a cool head” and “this is the reason why we can’t have ice things” had been made innumerable times within these walls, not to mention endless references to “Netflix and chill” and every last one of Schwarzenegger’s puns from the abominable 1997 film Batman and Robin. The official term for the various heads and bodies stored in the dewars was “patients.” We were strictly forbidden from referring to them as dead bodies because, according to Cryotech, they weren’t dead, just “suspended,” as though they were delinquent high school students rather than corpses on ice. When the managers weren’t around, we called the patients “popsicles.”

  It had become a sacred ritual to draw straws to decide who would choose a nickname for each new arrival. Carlita tended to go for hip-hop names (Vanilla Ice, Ice-T, Ice Cube), Zoha favored pop culture references (Cool Hand Luke, Cool Runnings, Jon Snow), and the rest of us mostly went in for puns. I’d come up with Christopher Walken Freezer and Keanu Freeze and was happy with those, but Karen had produced Edward Snowedin, which was unquestionably the pick of the bunch.

  Working the graveyard shift had a smorgasbord of drawbacks: severely limiting my social life, messing with my circadian rhythm, fucking with my health, but I didn’t have any other options and at least it let me sleep in each morning. Most days I spent the first half of the afternoon procrastinating and the second looking for a new job. I’d originally told myself working at Cryotech would be a “stop-gap” job, but I’d been doing it for five years now. I told Zoha that I felt like one of the popsicles—suspended in a null state. I moaned about my intellect being wasted in such a boring job and all the money I’d spent on my worthless arts degree. He laughed and reminded me he’d spent six years working as a surgeon before he’d emigrated from Pakistan and I shut my mouth and never mentioned it again.

  At least you could do the job with headphones on; that was a pretty big perk. Most nights I’d flick between albums and podcasts as I worked, and if I listened intently and let myself fall into the muscle memory of each sweep of the mop, I could almost forget where I was. The main problem was that I carried the constant stench of industrial cleaner. No matter how long I showered and scrubbed I couldn’t rid myself of that vile, pungent scent. The label claimed it to be “Summer Lemon,” but I think a more accurate description would be “Robot Urine.”

  I waved good-bye to The Big Chill and finished mopping the floor with the sounds of Sigur Rós swelling and rising in my headphones. Icelandic music seemed appropriate; it was sort of a private musical pun. I walked past the frozen pets section—the saddest thing about this place. Once upon a time, you could conceal mortality from your kid by periodically replacing their mouse or goldfish; now you could have your treasured domestic vertebrate frozen with the perpetual deceit of resurrection.

  I slid the viewing window back and looked into the frozen face of White Fang. This was his actual name, not just my nickname for him. I knew this because the old man to whom he belonged used this name when he visited and talked to him. There was a strange and brutal irony to the fact that White Fang’s owner was clearly himself not long for this world. I wondered if he’d arranged to have himself suspended next to his beloved pet so the two of them could emerge victoriously into some bright, glorious future where we’d all eat food grown in labs, listen to music composed by algorithms, and wear shiny silver Lycra. Or, conversely, watch in dismay as robots took our jobs and made us all work as slaves. It’s probably what we’ll deserve.

  I shoved the mop back into the bucket, washed my hands, went into the kitchenette and scanned the fridge. There was a half-eaten tub of yogurt with a post-it reading Do not eat. JAN THIS MEANS YOU!!!!!!!!! I’d never met Jan or the author of the note, but, man, did I want to get in a room with the two of them. There’s always a good story behind that many exclamation marks.

  On the bottom shelf sat a promisingly large white cardboard box. “Please please please…” I murmured as I lifted it from the shelf and popped it open, then yelped excitedly as it revealed the most glorious of all foods known to humankind; a chocolate mud cake. The inscription read Hap__ Birt___ J__, the second half of each word truncated by consumption. I wondered if the cake belonged to the infamous Jan, and if it had temporarily assuaged her lust for illicit yogurt.

  I grabbed a fork from the drawer, sat on the bench, waved at the camera, and greedily tucked in. Cryotech had an elaborate array of cameras installed throughout the facility but the recordings were deleted every week and they were only reviewed if there was any kind of incident, which there never was. We kept no cash on site, our tech was all laser-engraved and catalogued, and even the bodies were too much effort to hold any appeal for your garden-variety necrophiliac.

  I hummed happily to myself as I shoveled the calorie-laden taste orgy into my mouth. I’d long thought that cake was the pinnacle of human achievements, something that should be enshrined alongside our greatest paintings, symphonies, and novels. I was halfway through what I’d told myself would be my last mouthful (but historical record indicated would most likely be one of a sequence of between twelve and twenty) when the sensor lights at the front entrance flickered spasmodically to life. I closed the lid, pulled my headphones off and hung them around my neck as I ran to the door.

  A young woman stood on the other side, her face and expression indistinguishable behind the frosted glass. She banged the glass door and waved frantically at me. Zoha would still be cleaning the bathrooms with his headphones on, so there was no way he’d hear anything. An avid jazz fan, he’d been using shitty no-name headphones for years until his kids had gifted him a beautiful pair of noise-cancelling Bose Qc25s. He’d demonstrated them to me with a proud grin; when he placed the luscious pads over my ears I felt like I had been transported back to Birdland in the 1930s. He was probably jamming out with Miles Davis and Charlie Parker right now, blissfully unaware of the world outside his eardrums.

  I approached the door and yelled, “We’re closed!”

  She froze, cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled back, “I know! It is an emergency!”

  Her voice was distant and muted on the other side of the glass, but her face spoke volumes of Tolstoy-esque length. She wore a ragged hiking backpack, the slender black auxiliary straps dangling around her like effete tentacles.

  “Please open the door! I have not much time!”

  I hit the security button, and the doors slid open with a smooth mechanical yawn. She rushed inside and gripped my shoulders with both arms. “I need you to listen to me, this
is extremely important I—ah, you have…a little something…” she pointed to my cheek and I wiped my face with the back of my hand, cursing Jan and her goddamn chocolate cake. “I know you don’t know me, but I am a client here. My name is Ava Zapata, you have my father Ernesto Zapata. You can check this on your database.” She pointed to the computer sitting behind the reception desk and looked at me expectantly.

  “I’m just a cleaner. I don’t have access to the system.”

  “Is there a security guard or manager or someone you can contact? It is urgent!”

  “Security doesn’t arrive onsite until the end of my shift, and my manager won’t answer his phone this late.”

  She grunted in frustration and flung her hands into her hair as she murmured a string of Spanish profanities. I barely passed high school Spanish, but like any teenage student of a foreign language, I’d learned all the curse words proficiently. “Please, there must be something you can do? Have you, aaaah, paper copies of your client list, something like this?”

  “Maybe, but they’d be in Brett’s filing cabinet and he takes the key home with him so—”

  Ava screamed, her voice was high and piercing and had a volume and strength that seemed incompatible with her diminutive size. She slammed her fists against the wall. I stood there awkwardly shuffling and wishing I’d never opened the door. Finally she seemed to calm down. When she turned to face me she had tears in her eyes. “Sorry, sorry. I just…you don’t know me. But I need your help. Do you understand?” I nodded. “You are a very calm person.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It was not a compliment.”

  She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them and said, “Ernesto Zapata, dewar number 173869-DJCN, to his left is Simon Wellington, and to his right Simone Leiter. I remember this, because it is funny, he is between Simon and Simone, you see? So now I have proved to you that I have been here before, I must be a client right?”

  “Well, anyone can arrange a public tour, so that doesn’t—”

  “He was admitted here three weeks ago, January 2nd.”