Eight Perfect Murders(12)

“No,” I said. “I guess I would kill two people, then hide one of the bodies, and make it look as though the killer has gone on the run.”

“Exactly,” she said.

The waiter was hovering, so we both ordered. Agent Mulvey got the eggs Florentine. I wasn’t hungry but ordered two poached eggs on toast, with fresh fruit on the side. After we ordered, she said, “This has me thinking about rules.”

“What do you mean, ‘rules’?”

“Okay,” she said, and thought for a moment. “If I was the one who had set myself this task . . . this goal of committing the eight murders that you described in your list, then it would be helpful to set some guidelines. Some rules. Do you copy the murders exactly? Or the idea behind the murders? How similar do they have to be?”

“So, you think the rules dictate that the murderer adheres as closely as possible to the actual murders in the book?”

“No, not the details of the murders, but the philosophies behind them. It’s almost as though the murderer is testing these books in real life. If the idea was simply to mimic the books, then you could just shoot someone in a country house library and call it a day. Or, for the A.B.C. Murders, you’d actually copy them exactly. You know, find someone named Abby Adams who lived in Acton and kill her first, et cetera. But it’s not just about that, it’s about doing them right. There are rules.”

“So, for The Red House Mystery, it’s all about pointing the police toward a suspect that they will never find, and never get to question.”

“Yes, exactly,” Agent Mulvey said. “It actually is clever. I was thinking about it all last night. Let’s say I wanted to kill someone . . . my ex-boyfriend, for example.”

“Okay,” I said.

“If I just killed him, then I would be a suspect. But let’s say I killed two people—like my ex-boyfriend, and my ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend, say—and made sure that the body of the new girlfriend wasn’t found. That way I could make it look like the killer had run away. The police wouldn’t be looking for the identity of the killer; they’d think they already knew it.”

“It wouldn’t be easy, you know,” I said.

“Ha,” she said. “I wasn’t really considering it.”

“Because the killer would have to be willing to kill two people.”

“Right.”

“And hiding a body is not easy.”

“You’re not speaking from experience, are you?” she said.

“I’ve read a lot of mystery novels.”

“I think I need to look for a crime in which the prime suspect has disappeared.”

“Is that common?” I asked.

“It isn’t, really. It’s not so easy to disappear these days. Most people leave pretty obvious trails. But it happens.”

“I think you’re on to something,” I said. “It might be a matter of looking for two deserving victims—criminals, maybe—one of whom died and one who disappeared. That is, if your theory’s correct that—what should we call our suspect? We should have a name.”

“Why don’t we call him . . . ?” She paused.

“Something with a bird.”

“No, that’s confusing. Let’s call him Charlie,” she said.

“Why Charlie?”

“It just popped into my head. No, that’s not true. I was trying to think of a name, and I thought of copycat, which made me think of a cat, which made me think of my first cat, when I was young, and his name was Charlie.”

“Poor Charlie. Does he deserve to have his name used this way?”

“He does, actually. He was a total killer. Brought us a mouse or a bird every day.”

“Perfect,” I said.

“Charlie it is.”

“So what was I saying? Right, look for deserving pairs of victims. Charlie doesn’t like to kill innocent people.”

“We don’t know that for a fact, but it’s a possibility,” she said, pushing herself a little back from the table to allow her food to be put in front of her. “Thank you,” she said to the waiter, then picked up a fork. “Mind if I eat and talk? I skipped dinner last night and I’m starving.”

“No, that’s fine,” I said. My poached eggs had arrived, and the sight of them, the edges of the whites slightly translucent, made my stomach flip. I speared a cube of cantaloupe on the end of my fork.

“And maybe I’m wrong,” Agent Mulvey said, when she was done chewing her first bite of breakfast. “This could have something to do with you, of course. Someone trying to get your attention, maybe someone trying to frame you.” She opened her eyes a little wider as she said this. I jutted out my lower lip, as though thinking about the possibility.

“And if that’s the case,” I finally said, “then it makes sense to ensure that the murders have obviously been based on the books on the list.”

“Right,” she said. “That’s why I want to look more closely at what happened to Elaine Johnson, the heart attack victim—”

“Who might or might not have been killed by Charlie,” I said.

“But if she was, then I need to go to the crime scene. There might be something that connects it to Deathtrap.”