Nine Lives(26)

Jack turned back to the kitchen table and surveyed the two piles of mail he’d made. He remembered the FBI agent, and decided to go hunt down her phone number. He’d give her a call later that afternoon, or maybe he’d call her on Monday. Whatever it was, it could probably wait.





8





SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 17, 4:04 P.M.


Detective Sam Hamilton had worked with Mary Parkinson, the state police detective, on two other occasions: one case, a foiled bank robbery, that had been cleared up within hours; and another, a hit-and-run, that remained unsolved. He’d gotten along with her just fine, although she was hard to read, one of those tight-lipped, weather-beaten New Englanders who looked like she’d been born with wrinkles on her face, and only spoke when it was absolutely necessary. Still, when she did speak, she was friendly enough, and she’d never shown any reticence about working with a local detective.

He’d been wanting to call her all day, to see if she’d provide an update on the Frank Hopkins homicide, but he’d forced himself to wait, not wanting to bother her so soon in the midst of an investigation. But after spending all day at home hunting the internet for possible connections between the nine names on the list, and finding very little, Sam decided to place the call.

“Detective Parkinson here.”

“Mary, it’s Sam. From Kennewick.”

“Hi Sam. You must have something for me.”

“I wish. I don’t have anything. I was calling in the hopes that you’d update me.”

“On Frank Hopkins?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m off that case now, myself. Well, they told me I’m consulting, but it just went federal so there you have it.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously. Just happened about an hour ago.”

“Why? Do you know?”

“There was another homicide. In Massachusetts.”

“What do you mean?” Sam said.

“A Matthew Beaumont was killed this morning in Dartford, Massachusetts. Shot while he was out for his morning run. I’m sure you remember that he was one of the names on the list. Well, he’d gotten the same letter as Frank had, so now it’s some kind of serial killer crossing state lines. Or that’s what it looks like.”

“Wow,” Sam said. “I’m not surprised but I am surprised at the same time. If you know what I mean.”

“I was surprised, too. I’ve been at this a long time, and when a homicide looks complicated, it mostly turns out that it’s not.”

“That’s what I was thinking, as well.”

“Well, it could still turn out that way,” Detective Parkinson said. “Frank Hopkins was probably killed by some strung-out drug addict. You’ve still got those over in Kennewick, right?”

“Drug addicts?”

“Yes.”

“A few,” Sam said.

“Look, Sam, people keep walking by my desk looking to see if I’m off the phone yet. I’m sorry I don’t have more information for you.”

“You had plenty, Mary, thanks.”

After ending the call Sam sat for a few minutes just staring out his second-floor window and thinking. Despite what Mary had said, that Frank’s death could still just be the result of some desperate addict, Sam knew that the second death negated that possibility. Frank had died with a list in his hand. Nine names. And now another person named on that list had been killed as well. There was no scenario in which this was simply a coincidence.

Sam stood up and went to the built-in bookshelf on the opposite side of his office. It contained, among other books, his grandmother’s entire collection of Agatha Christie novels. She hadn’t explicitly left them to Sam in her will, but everyone in the family knew that she wanted him to have her books, and in particular the Christie collection, some of which were probably very valuable first editions.

For most of Sam’s childhood he had spent summers at his grandmother’s house in North Yorkshire. Patricia Barnard was his mother’s mother, who had spent part of her adult life in Jamaica, arriving there from England in 1946 to take a post as a secretary at an export company. She’d fallen in love with Robert Hamilton, owner of a popular Kingston restaurant, and a Black Jamaican. She was married and pregnant within the year, giving birth to Rosemary, Sam’s mother. Sam had asked his grandmother several times about what it had been like to be in an interracial marriage in the 1940s and 1950s. She’d always said that the worst of it was other people’s bad manners—“just a funny look now and then, when we took the bus together.”

Bob Hamilton, her husband, had died when their only daughter was just eighteen, and Patricia had moved back to England, settling into a family cottage in the Yorkshire Dales. And that stone cottage was where Sam had spent the best months of his childhood, given freedom to wander through the English countryside, and, more important, access to his grandmother’s book collection. At the age of ten he’d read Agatha Christie’s Sleeping Murder and fallen in love with it. After that, he was hooked on the genre. And he became a true Anglophile, obsessed with Cadbury chocolate, Arsenal football, and even the silly English sitcoms his grandmother and he watched on her bulky television set in the sitting room. But it was the books that stuck with him most of all. He loved Agatha Christie and Dick Francis and Ruth Rendell, all his grandmother’s favorites, and those books provided for him a worldview, one so different from that of his life growing up in Houma, his parents angry all the time and eventually divorcing during his senior year of high school.