Nine Man's Murder (16 page)

J
onas turned Amanda’s
body over.

“Shot to death.”

Bryan confirmed the death with an examination of the blood-soaked bullet hole in Amanda’s blouse.

“Straight through the heart.”

Bryan stood up and looked around the room. No sign of a struggle. An opened, half-eaten can of tuna sat on the writing desk, beside a fork. The window latch was pushed in all the way, in the locked position. But they had found the bedroom door unlocked. Amanda, defiant until the end, seemed to have thumbed her nose at danger with an unlocked door.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Jonas said. “She wouldn’t have left her door unlocked, with a murderer on the loose.”

“Maybe she didn’t,” Bryan suggested. “Maybe she locked her door, and then later let someone into the room.”

“Knowing she could be letting in a killer?”

“Maybe it was someone she trusted.”

The two men continued to examine the room in silence.

“She fell close to the writing desk,” Bryan pointed out. “My guess is that she was standing there—with the door on the right side and window on the left—when her assailant shot her.” Bryan passed a cold eye over the lifeless figure lying in a crumpled heap. “The position of the body makes it impossible to say where her killer was standing when he fired the shot.”

“One thing we do know. She wasn’t shot at close range. No powder burns.”

“And then the killer simply waltzed out of the room, leaving the door unlocked.”

A shadow fell across the corpse. Jill stood in the doorway.

“What happened? Is she—?”

Jonas nodded. “Shot to death. I’m sorry, Jill.”

Jill sobbed. “But wouldn’t we have heard a gunshot?” she finally asked.

“Apparently our killer came equipped with a silencer.”

“Strange,” Bryan muttered. “This murder seems … different …from the others. Hasty. Not as well-planned.”

“What do you mean?”

“Someone is not just trying to kill us. He could have done so well before now. No, it’s all a game. He’s showing off his skill. But this is different. Too straightforward. Not ingenious, like the others. As if it had been improvised at the last moment.”

Jill disappeared down the stairs to inform the others, leaving Bryan and Jonas to add Amanda’s body to the frozen meat locker outside, beneath the newly fallen snow.

“So, who’s your prime suspect?” Bryan asked as they dug.

“Well, Gideon seems to be out of it. Amanda was murdered upstairs in her room, and Gideon couldn’t have gotten up the stairs. Nor could he have removed the guns from the furnace in the basement or attacked Amanda on the staircase last night. Or hidden Damien’s body in the upstairs closet.”

Bryan looked noncommittal. “What about Hatter?”

“A bit on the crazy side, but harmless enough, I think. Besides,” Jonas continued, “he was almost one of the victims.”

“I’m glad someone remembered that.” Hatter stood in the doorway of the inn. “You have to be a dedicated murderer to kill yourself along with your other victims. After all, I could have died.”

“But you didn’t,” Bryan observed meaningfully. “Interesting, isn’t it? Carter died. You didn’t. You’d think the killer would have given you both the same dose.”

Hatter’s eyes moved away from Bryan and Jonas toward the hole they had been digging. “What are you two doing out here?”

“Don’t you know?” They stepped aside to reveal Amanda’s body.

Hatter conducted his own postmortem. “Shot,” he noted. “Just like Reeve.”

Hatter lent a hand with the burial. Before returning inside, Bryan led the other two men in an apparently aimless circuit around the perimeter of the inn. Back inside the inn, the guests reassembled in the drawing room.

“I think the best approach is to try and reconstruct what happened,” Gideon suggested.

The last time they had seen Amanda alive was when she had come down for something to eat while they were in the parlor room. As she returned to her room, the others had watched the snow fall for a while before dispersing to various parts of the inn.

“I was in the library the entire time,” Hatter claimed.

“I can vouch for that,” Jonas said. “I was in the parlor room. The only way out of the library is to go back through the downstairs corridor into the parlor room, and from there out into the entry hall to the stairs. Hatter couldn’t have gone upstairs to Amanda’s room without passing me in the parlor room.”

Unless, Gideon suggested, the parlor room had been left vacant for a period of time. This Jonas vehemently denied, insisting that he had remained in the room as fixed as furniture, from the time Amanda had retired to her own room until just before he and Bryan discovered her body.

“What if Hatter went up to her room after you left the parlor room?” Gideon asked Jonas.

“He’d still have to have passed the billiard room,” Bryan replied. “And I’d have seen him.”

“Aren’t we forgetting something?” Jill pointed out. “The library windows.”

“They’re picture windows. They don’t open.”

“True. But if a pane can be removed, Hatter could have left through those.”

“We just checked outside,” Bryan said. “There were no footprints in the snow outside those windows, or any of the inn’s windows, for that matter. If Hatter had gone out a window, he’d have left footprints in the snow.”

“Unless those footprints were covered by falling snow.”

“It stopped snowing just before Hatter went into the library.”

“So that gives Hatter an alibi,” Jill concluded.

“It also gives you an alibi—of sorts—Jonas,” Gideon added, “if you never left the parlor room. But—forgive me—how do we know it’s true? How do we know you didn’t kill Amanda?”

“I can answer that,” Bryan interjected. Bryan had been in the billiard room the entire time, he said, with an eye fixed on the door to the entry hall. To get from the parlor room to the staircase, Jonas would have had to cross the entry hall past the billiard room—crossing Bryan’s line of sight, as well.

“It’s the same alibi,” Hatter told Bryan, “with the same objection. It depends on the truth of your claim that you never left the billiard room. But we’ve no way of ascertaining that.” A Hatter-like way of showing gratitude, rewarding Jonas’ support of Hatter’s alibi by undermining Jonas’. “Which means you could have murdered Amanda, Bryan. There’s no proof that you didn’t.”

“Isn’t there?” Jonas said. “From where I sat, I had a clear view of the door to the billiard room—a door Bryan had to go through to get to the staircase, if he wanted to murder Amanda. If he had left, I would have seen him. Besides, I could hear him playing billiards the entire time.”

Jill connected the dots. “Then according to your stories, none of you could have gotten upstairs undetected. None of you could have murdered Amanda.”

“Which leaves you and Gideon,” Hatter concluded. “Where were you during this time period?”

“We were talking together here in the drawing room,” Gideon answered quickly for the pair. “The entire time.”

Jill nodded mute agreement.

“So you two provide each other with an alibi,” Hatter reflected.

“All of us appear to have alibis,” Bryan noted.

“Could Amanda have committed suicide?” suggested Gideon. “We have to consider all possibilities.”

“Amanda was shot to death,” Bryan replied. “Yet we didn’t find a gun in her room—or outside. She was shot in the heart, and therefore died instantly. So how could she have gotten rid of the gun, if she was already dead? No, the shooter took that gun away with him. It wasn’t suicide. It was murder.”

“Not just murder,” Jonas said. “We appear to have on our hands a murder that could not have been committed.”

45

“A
n impossible murder,”
Hatter whispered, his face pale as moonlight. “I was right. It’s a ghost.”

“Remind me, Hatter,” Bryan said. “Which ghost is it that’s been killing us?”

“I’ve been giving that a lot of thought. With Amanda and Reeve’s connection to Capaldi, it could be the warehouse foreman who died in that fire. He may have had some connection to Carter and Damien, as well.”

“But the foreman had nothing to do with the rest of us.”

“True. There’s also that innocent bystander police shot in front of the psychic fair, who would certainly have a grudge against Bennett—and maybe you, too, Gideon, given your complicity in the theft. Apparently you, Bryan, and you, Jill, were there, too. But the spirit of the bystander would have no reason to go after the others. No, what we’re looking for is someone with a common connection to all of us.”

“And who would that be?”

“Damien.”

“Damien,” Jonas repeated. “We’re being murdered by Damien’s ghost?”

“Then who murdered Damien?” Bryan asked coyly.

Hatter shrugged. “Maybe one of us. Maybe not. That’s precisely the point. Damien doesn’t know who killed him. So he has to kill all of us, to cover his bases.”

“I hate to throw cold water on this séance,” Bryan interjected, “but isn’t there one person we’re forgetting?” His glance took in all of them. “Where’s Bennett?”

“Of course,” Jill said. “If none of us could have killed Amanda, it had to have been Bennett.”

“So it would seem,” Gideon agreed. “Yet I haven’t seen him around since this morning.”

Bryan and Jonas checked Bennett’s room. He was not there.

“When was the last time anyone saw him?” Jonas asked.

“I saw him leave the inn,” Jill replied. “But that was well before ten o’clock this morning.” She consulted her wristwatch. “It’s after four now.”

Bryan’s eyes narrowed. “He went outside?”

“It doesn’t make sense,” Gideon objected, “his disappearing like that. It’s as good as a confession.”

“Gideon has a point,” Jill said. “Why would Bennett tip his hand like that?”

“That’s something we’re going to have to let Bennett explain for himself,” Jonas replied. “After we find him. Wherever he is, he can’t stay hidden long. Anyone coming with me?”

“I’ll go.” Bryan turned to Hatter and Jill. “You three stay here. Jill, you and Hatter—”

“What, Bryan? Protect me?” Bitterness contorted Gideon’s face. “I may be confined to this wheelchair, but I assure you I can take care of myself.”

“Obviously,” Bryan said.

Gideon glared. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Well, I was just wondering. You were caught by police ‘assisting’ Bennett in his theft of Capaldi’s ledger. Surely you were locked up. Yet somehow you appear to have gotten yourself released.”

“Bennett bailed me out,” Gideon explained.

“Clearly, then, the police don’t know that Bennett was your accomplice,” Jonas reasoned. “Which means you’re protecting him for some reason—after he left you holding the bag. What is Bennett holding over your head?”

“Nothing,” Gideon insisted. “He just promised to help me.”

Bryan eyed him shrewdly. “I think he promised to help you find the person who put you in that wheelchair.”

“He said he had reason to believe it was one of the trainees,” Gideon confessed. “He promised, if I kept his secret, to come to the reunion and help me find out which one.”

“And you believed him?” Hatter asked.

“You don’t know what it’s like, any of you,” Gideon cried. “To never even know why. Or who …”

Gideon spun his chair around and wheeled himself powerfully from the drawing room.

“That was dramatic,” Bryan remarked. “However, I think Gideon’s not as vulnerable as he pretends to be.”

“Obviously,” Jill observed, “he feels vulnerable enough to be uncomfortable staying alone with two people, either of whom could be the murderer, while you two go off in search of Bennett. Clearly he feels safer locked in his room.”

“He won’t be safe there,” Hatter predicted.

Bryan and Jonas disappeared to retrieve heavy coats and gloves from their rooms, leaving Jill alone with Hatter.

“I overheard you and Bryan talking this morning,” Hatter said, “as well as Bryan talking to Gideon and Bennett. Apparently Bennett stole some evidence from the police and hid the key to the evidence locker in your daughter’s pocket. Tell me, Jill, what was a five-year-old girl doing wandering unattended in front of a psychic fair?”

“Not that it’s any business of yours,” Jill replied, “but the fair was held right next door to the police station and welfare office—”

“I know. I was a speaker there, remember?”

“I had a meeting at the welfare office. I left Imogen alone in the waiting room, just for a few minutes.”

“A protective parent.”

“Thanks, Hatter. Just what I needed to hear. But there were certain things I didn’t want her saying to the welfare people. I told her to stay put, but through the window she saw all of those people attending the fair in their exotic costumes, and the lure was too much for her. She wandered outside to see.”

“Just as Bennett was fleeing from the police station. Talk about bad timing.”