Chapter 10

In the morning Martha emailed the library to let them know she was taking a sick day, then she let Alan bring her breakfast in bed. After he had left the tray she listened to him move around downstairs, preparing to leave for the day. Now that she'd decided to make some calls she was nervous, but wanting to get a start on her research.

At last she heard the front door open and shut and then the faint sound of his car starting up. She quickly got out of bed, dressed in yoga pants and a sweatshirt, and went downstairs to the computer. They still had a landline in the house, and there was a desk phone next to the computer.

The first few conversations did not go well. Martha tried her best to sound like a jaded investigator, someone who expected to receive information. The first police detective she reached was in the Atlanta Police Department, a Detective Gunter, who had worked the Kelli Baldwin case. She was the only victim on Martha's list who had been identified in the press as a prostitute. She'd died from blunt-force trauma to the head late at night while returning to her apartment in north Atlanta, three miles from downtown where the convention was being held. Martha asked the detective if he had any leads, and he'd told her that she was a junkie and a prostitute, and it could have been anyone she knew.

"Did she work the convention hotels?" she asked.

"The convention hotels? Nope. She was a strung-out street hooker who worked over by Piedmont Park."

"But it's possible that someone from a downtown hotel might have cruised that area looking for a pick-up?"

"Anything's possible, lady. For all I know, it was some tourist from China who'd read about the hot hookers on the Ponce de Leon. I can't help you."

Her next call was to Chicago, and she was shuffled around from department to department for thirty minutes before being connected with an Officer Wood, who was able to take a look at the file on Bianca Muranos, found dead in an alleyway behind the DoubleTree Conference Center in Chicago. She had been killed by blunt-force trauma, as well. And, as in Atlanta, no weapon had been found.

Martha asked Officer Wood if Bianca had been a prostitute, and listened while he whistled to himself, flipping through the case file. "Not according to this. She worked as a receptionist at one of the big downtown office buildings."

"And there were no leads?"

More whistling. "Well, nothing that came to anything. You know, though, there's pictures of the body here in the file and she was out to party that night."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, it's possible that her skirt hiked up or something when she hit the ground, but even if it did, that skirt was shorter than my kids' attention span. She was either out clubbing or in the game."

The first informative conversation she managed to have was with Detective Melissa Cruz, who was in charge of the still-open murder of Nora Johnson in Fort Myers, Florida.

"We think the perpetrator was an attendee at a conference that was going on that weekend," the detective said, unprompted. Martha, who was taking notes, quickly scribbled that down.

"Why do you think that?"

"Because I've learned a lot about Nora Johnson in the last six months, and what I learned was that about eighty percent of her job was as a bartender, and the other twenty percent was running scams on married men attending conventions at the hotel she worked at. She worked with a parking attendant named Dyson Holmgren, and he was the one who found the body. She was parked in the employee section of the belowground garage, and he told us that he spotted her car there long past the time her shift ended, so he went to check it out."

"She was dead in the car, right?"

"Yes. But we got witness statements from everyone who came and went from that parking garage from the time Nora Johnson's shift ended at eleven to the time that Holmgren called in the body. And one of our witnesses was another employee, a woman on the front desk who said that when she was leaving the lot at twelve she saw Holmgren peering into Nora Johnson's car."

"What time did Holmgren call in the body?"

"Not until about three o'clock."

"So, you think he saw the body was there at midnight?"

"At the time we thought it was a possibility, but he claimed he didn't. Regardless, it put Holmgren at the scene of the crime around the time it was probably committed. And then it turned out that Holmgren was friends with Nora Johnson, that she was the one who got him the job at the hotel in the first place."

"And you arrested him?"

"And we arrested him. His prints were on Johnson's car door, but that was because he'd opened it when he spotted her sitting on the front seat, not moving. There were no other indications that he'd been in the car when she was strangled."

"Was there any forensic evidence?"

"There was and there wasn't. There were a couple of fibers from whatever it was that had strangled her. Some kind of synthetic rayon. But other than that, we found far too much evidence. Hairs from at least fifteen different people. Multiple fibers. We even found semen stains, but they were all at least twenty-four hours old."

"Wouldn't that be common in someone's car?"

"You have sex with a lot of people in your car? I know I don't."

"I didn't mean the semen so much as the fibers and hairs."

"I guess so. Depends on how many people you drive around. Or, in Nora's case, depends on how many men she brought to her car."

"A lot of them?" Martha said.

"Yes, a lot of them. When we brought in Holmgren, he panicked pretty fast when we told him he was going to prison for first-degree murder. So he told us why he'd been snooping around her car. He and Nora had a little scam going at the Anhinga Hotel, pretty much the oldest scam in the oldest book. She would get to know one of the visiting conventioneers, preferably a married man, and after her shift she'd either go to his room, or, more usually, she'd ask him to walk her to her car. Then she'd get him inside the car for some extramarital activity, and that was when Holmgren would come in, crashing the party."

"Oh wow," Martha said, then gritted her teeth, telling herself to talk more like a fellow investigator.

"He's a big muscular dude. Sometimes he'd pretend to be her pimp. The guy almost always ended up emptying his wallet to get out of the situation. If he didn't have money on him, Holmgren would confiscate his driver's license and ask for a thousand dollars or something before he left Florida or else he'd make his life miserable. It was all pretty small-potatoes. According to Holmgren they only did it about once or twice a month. Sometimes they got a thousand and sometimes it was a couple of hundred bucks. Oh, hold on a moment."

She could hear Detective Cruz talking to someone, her hand held over the phone. When she got back on, Martha said, "You still got time?"

"Yeah, a little."

"So what do you think happened the night that Nora Johnson was strangled?"

"Well, that's why I said I think one of the attendees at the conference did it. She picked up the wrong guy."

"Then why wasn't Holmgren on the scene to stop it?"

"He tried to get there right away, but he didn't always manage it, depending on what was happening with work. That night he got sent the text from Nora saying that she was bringing a man with her to her car. This was right around eleven forty-five. He claims it took him fifteen minutes to get to the car and she was already dead."

"Why didn't he call the body in then?"

"He said he panicked, that he didn't want to get involved. Et cetera, et cetera. And then, at three, his better nature won out, I guess."

"And you don't think it's him?"

"I don't. If you talked to some of my colleagues you'd get a different story. Holmgren is a scumbag, but he's not a murderer. She got killed by someone who was staying at the hotel."

"You've been through the list of the attendees of the conference?"

"About a hundred times."

"No names jumped out at you?"

"Not really."

"Did you look at a guy called Alan Peralta?" Saying his name out loud made Martha feel like all her muscles had simultaneously clenched a little.

"That name's a little familiar. He was at the conference?"

"He wasn't an attendee. He was working at the conference. He sold novelty teacher items from a booth."

"Got it. Yeah, he was a guest at the hotel. We did look at him, only because he spent some money at the hotel bar."

"On the night of Nora Johnson's death."

"On every night he was there, if I remember. Should I be looking at this guy?"

"Maybe. You'll be the first to know if I find out anything." Martha stumbled over the words, but the detective didn't seem to notice.

"I'll take any leads. This one feels pretty cold."

She muffled the phone again and Martha could hear a muted conversation. "Sorry," Detective Cruz said when she was back on. "I need to get going. We good here?"

The final person Martha managed to speak with that morning, a Linda Callahan, turned out to be as uninterested in speaking to her as the first two detectives had been. Detective Callahan had worked the suspicious death of Mikaela Sager, the massage therapist who had turned up washed ashore by the Imperial Beach Pier in the South Bay of San Diego.

"It looked like a drowning at first, but the coroner found a head contusion, so now it looks like someone walked her to the end of the pier, bopped her on the head, and dumped her."

"And there are no suspects?"

"Nope."

"She was a massage therapist."

"Yep."

"Any chance that her calling herself a massage therapist was a euphemism for some kind of sex work?"

"It's possible, I guess. She worked out of her home."

"What about the night she died?"

"What about it?"

"What was she doing? Was she out with friends, out on a date, working? How'd she end up at the pier? Did she drive there?"

"She drove there. We don't know what she was doing that night except getting herself killed. And before that, we know that she ate fried calamari and drank tequila. That's what her stomach contents showed us. Oh, and she hadn't had sex, at least not recently."

Martha paused slightly after she'd finished this answer and the detective quickly added, "We all good here?"

"One last question," Martha said. "What was she wearing when she was pulled out of the water?"

"Okay. Let me see. She was wearing jeans and a green cotton top. And she was wearing a white sweater, a cardigan. Nothing fancy or distinctive. Her shoes weren't found."

Martha decided to give up and said, "Detective Callahan, you've been remarkably helpful. Thanks for talking to me."

The detective's voice brightened a little and she said, without a touch of irony, "Hey, no problem. Being helpful is my job."

"Well..." Martha said, and then couldn't think what to say to finish the sentence.

"Oh, and she wore a pin," Detective Callahan said, as though she'd just remembered that particular fact.

"Who?"

"The victim. You asked me what clothes she was wearing. I'm looking at the file right now. She wore a pin on her sweater. Like a... like a brooch."

"What of?" Martha said, trying to keep her voice neutral.

"Ah, let me see. It's a woman's face. She has white hair. No, it's some kind of hat she's wearing."

"A photograph?"

"No, it's a brooch."

"Can you do me a big favor, Detective? Can I give you my cell phone number and can you text me a picture of that pin?"

"It'll be a picture of a picture."

"That's fine. I just really would like to see it."

After they hung up, Martha stared at her phone until the text arrived. It was a picture of a brooch, not a very good picture, but good enough so that Martha knew exactly what she was looking at. It was a Jane Austen brooch, her hair in a white bonnet, the kind of brooch you might sell to an English teacher.

She sent a text to Lily, five words: I think I found something.