Chapter 80

CHAPTER 80

“ THERE! RIGHT THERE! ” Holmes pointed to Paul’s store sign as Poe pulled up to the curb. They’d both been talking to Virginia nonstop as she described what she’d uncovered inside the clock shop. Travel records going back two decades. Proof that Oliver Paul had been all over the country during the period of the mysterious deaths. The Charger was still rolling when Holmes unclipped his seat belt and jumped out. He raced across the sidewalk and yanked on the door.

Locked!

A second later, the buzzer sounded.

Poe was right behind him now. They burst through the door in quick succession.

“Virginia!” Holmes shouted.

“Back here!” she answered.

The interior was dim, but Holmes caught a flash of pink-hued hair behind the counter. He heard panting. He reached over and turned on a ceiling light. Virginia was bent over the glass, dressed in black from head to toe, with a magnifying glass in one hand. Baskerville was sitting on his haunches at the end of the counter.

“You broke in?” said Poe “How?”

Virginia held up a small, thin metal tool. “I watch, I learn, Mr. Poe.”

Spread out in front of her were thick piles of documents in an assortment of white and pastels. Holmes stepped around the counter and ran his fingers lightly over the paperwork. At a glance, he could pick out motel invoices and restaurant receipts running back to the early 2000s. From towns that linked up with his research.

To the side, Virginia had stacked handwritten tickets from two decades’ worth of purchases—antique clocks, jeweled watches, entire timepiece collections. There were piles of marked-up auction catalogues, estate listings, even circled classified ads and yard-sale flyers.

“Where did you find all this?” asked Holmes.

“If you cracked a safe,” said Poe, “we’ll have to promote you.”

“It was all back there,” said Virginia, “in his office files.”

Holmes turned and looked through the curtain that separated the office from the main floor of the shop. The office was tiny, with a grey metal desk and shelves overflowing with dismantled clocks and parts catalogues. A metal file cabinet sat in the corner, both drawers now open.

Had all this evidence been mere yards away the first time he visited the shop? Had it been here the whole time? Was Oliver Paul that careless? That bold? That insane ? Or had he purposefully left it here for Holmes to discover?

“Look!” said Poe. Holmes ducked out of the office. Poe was tapping one invoice after another. “Indiana, Minnesota, Vermont, Louisiana…”

“He was everywhere,” said Virginia.

“Hold on!” said Holmes, remembering something. He bent down behind the counter, feeling his way along the underside of the shelving unit. He slid open a compartment at the bottom and felt inside.

“It’s still here!” said Holmes.

He pulled out a cardboard bankers box and set it on the counter.

“What’s this?” asked Poe.

“Oliver Paul’s notes on the case. He offered to show them to me the first day I visited.”

“And…?” said Virginia.

“I turned him down.”

“You never looked?” asked Poe.

“I hadn’t committed to the case,” said Holmes. “And I considered him an amateur.”

He lifted the cover. Inside the box was a loose stack of eight-by-ten prints. Photo enlargements. Virginia and Poe leaned over to look as Holmes shuffled through them. Each print was a picture of a young woman.

“The victims,” said Virginia with a shiver.

Holmes started laying the photos out on top of the counter. Some shots looked like profile pictures, scanned from Facebook or Instagram pages. Some looked like blowups from driver’s licenses. Others looked like enlargements from snapshots. From the quality of the images and the hairstyles on the women, they seemed to be in chronological order, the most recent on top.

Holmes spread out the photos and counted. Twenty-three. He picked up the photo at the end of the line. The earliest one. It was a head-and-shoulders shot of a young woman in a colorful tracksuit.

The woman looked straight at the camera with a pleasant smile. But something was off. Unsettling. Holmes leaned in closer. Then he saw it. The pupil of her left eye was aimed just slightly off center.

His phone rang. Unknown caller.

“Brendan Holmes. Who’s this?”

“I knew you were weak, Sherlock. I just didn’t know how far you’d fallen.”

Oliver Paul’s voice.

Holmes felt his entire body tense. He put the call on speaker and set his phone on the counter. “So you’ve found my little collection,” Paul’s voice continued. “In the old days, you would have figured this out already, without any extra help.”

“Where are you?” asked Holmes, his jaw tight.

“Close enough that I could have killed young Virginia the moment she arrived. I would have made it look like an accident, of course. But as you know by now, she’s not my type.”

Virginia huddled closer to Poe. Holmes looked at the ceiling and into corners of the shop for cameras, then swept his gaze across the faces of the hundreds of clocks on display.

“Don’t embarrass yourself, Sherlock,” said Paul. “Don’t you think a master watchmaker would know where to hide a lens?”

Holmes pointed to the array of photos. “What do you have against all these innocent women?” asked Holmes. He picked up the last one in the line. “What did you have against your own mother? And if you did kill her, would you kill your wife too?”

“We all have our quirks,” said Paul. “Speaking of which, by midnight another mom will die.”

Then silence.