Eight Perfect Murders(9)

It was organized chronologically, every entry formatted the same way, the header specifying the date, the location, and the name of the victim. Even though it was a summary, dashed off at the last minute, it was composed of complete sentences and read like textbook journalism. Agent Mulvey had probably never received less than an A in her entire academic career. I wondered what had attracted her to the FBI. She came across as someone more suited to academia, an English professor maybe, or a researcher. She reminded me a little of Emily Barsamian, my extremely bookish employee, who couldn’t look me in the eye when we talked. Agent Mulvey wasn’t quite that awkward, just young and inexperienced, maybe. It was impossible for me to not think of Clarice Starling (another bird name) from The Silence of the Lambs. It was where my mind almost always went, to books and movies. It had been that way since I first began to read. And Mulvey, like her fictional counterpart, seemed too tame for the job. It was hard to imagine her whipping a gun from a holster, or aggressively questioning a suspect.

She did question a suspect, though. She questioned you.

I pushed that particular thought out of my head, drank some beer, and looked at her list, scanning the items before settling down to read the details. I knew right away that there wasn’t much here; at least nothing obvious was jumping out. Many of the unsolved murders were gun crimes. Young people in cities, mostly. One of the victims of gun violence sounded like a possibility but there wasn’t much detail in the description. A man named Daniel Gonzalez had been gunned down while taking his dog for a walk in the Middlesex Fells. It had happened early in the morning the previous September, and Agent Mulvey made a note that there were currently no leads in the case. The only reason this particular crime jumped out at me was because of the murder in The Secret History. The college-aged murderers in Donna Tartt’s book decide that they need to get rid of their friend Bunny Corcoran, fearful that he will reveal what he knows about a previous murder when the classics students had emulated a Dionysian bacchanal in the woods and accidentally (or not) killed a farmer. Bunny had not been part of the ritual, but he finds out about it and begins to leverage this information to get things—dinners out, trips to Italy—from his wealthy friends. They also worry he’ll drunkenly tell someone about what took place. Because of this, they plot to murder him. Henry Winter, the smartest of the group of students, finalizes their plan. They know that Bunny takes long walks on Sunday afternoon, and they lie in wait at a place where they think he might wind up, a trail above a deep ravine. When he arrives, they shove him off the edge, hoping it will look like an accident, hoping that the randomness of Bunny’s walk will hide the design of the murder.

Could the case of Daniel Gonzalez, killed while on his morning run, possibly be related? The fact that he was shot made it seem unlikely, but maybe the idea behind this copycat murder was to take someone out while he was doing a predictable activity. I got my laptop and looked up his obituary. He had been an adjunct professor at a local community college, teaching Spanish. While it wasn’t Latin or Greek, he was a languages professor. It was a possibility, and I decided to tell Agent Mulvey about it the following morning.

I went through the rest of the crimes. I was particularly looking for a drowning, thinking of John D. MacDonald’s book The Drowner. But, of course, if someone were drowned in such a way as to make it look like an accident, then it probably wouldn’t make a list of unsolved murders.

There were also no listings for accidental overdoses. That was the method of killing in Malice Aforethought. The murderer, a doctor, turns his wife into a morphine addict. Then it is simply a matter of making sure other people know about her addiction, that it becomes local gossip. Then he kills her with an overdose. Of course, there must have been hundreds, if not thousands, of drug overdoses in New England the past few years. Could one of those have been an intentional murder? The thing about my list was that, when I originally created it, I really was trying to come up with murders that were so clever that the perpetrator would never be caught. With that in mind, if someone successfully copycatted some of these murders, they’d be undetectable.

I ate two bites of my sandwich then had another beer. The apartment was too quiet, and I didn’t want to turn on the television, so I played music instead. Max Richter’s 24 Postcards in Full Colour. I lay back on my sofa and looked up at the high ceiling, at a thin crack that zigzagged out from under the molding; it was a familiar sight, that ceiling. I thought about what I’d tell Agent Mulvey the next morning at breakfast. I’d tell her about Daniel Gonzalez, of course, and how it might be related to The Secret History. I’d suggest that she research accidental drownings, especially ones that happened in ponds or lakes, and I would also suggest that she look into overdose deaths, especially ones in which the deceased used a syringe.

The album ended, and I restarted it, lying back down on the sofa. My mind was going in many different directions, so I decided to slow down and make a mental list. I told myself to list assumptions first. Assumption number one was that someone was using my list to murder random people. Well, maybe not random. Maybe the victims somehow deserved to die, at least according to the murderer. Assumption number two was that, while I was probably a suspect, I was in no way a serious suspect. As Agent Mulvey herself pointed out, she wouldn’t have come alone had that been the case. The purpose of her interview that afternoon had been to feel me out, try to get a sense of me. If she thought I was involved, I decided that the next time we met—breakfast tomorrow, or sometime after that—she would be with another FBI agent. Assumption number three: Whoever is doing this isn’t just using my list. The killer knows me. Maybe not a lot, but a little.