Page 104 of Killer on the First Page
“Penny, I need your help. I’m closing in on a killer.”
“A killer?”
“The fiendish person who murdered Ray Hamady, Fairfax DePoy, and Wanda Stobol.”
“But they arrested Inez.”
“Not arrested, detained. She was never formally charged.”
“But what about the DNA on the speargun? If it wasn’t hers, whose was it?”
“No one’s.”
Penny was perplexed. “There was no DNA?”
“What looked like blood was in fact red food coloring. It came from the glass vial that Inez wore around her neck. Everyone assumed it was real blood in the vial, that it washerblood, but it wasn’t. She just said it was. But the killer didn’t know that and assumed it would have her DNA. It didn’t. Which begs the question: Why would droplets of food coloring be sprinkled on a murder weapon? If the vial had broken in the furnace room, some of the food coloring would have splattered. It didn’t. The fake blood was added to the weapon later, and it would hardly have been Inez Fonio who did that. No. It would have been added by someone intent on framing her, someone whothoughtit was Inez’s blood in the vial. Let me ask you a question.”
“Please.”
“How well do you know Lachlan Todd?”
“I don’t. We met when I worked onPastor Fran Investigates, but I left the show soon after he arrived on the scene. When I saw him again at the bookstore, he introduced himself to me, unaware that we’d crossed paths before, albeit in a tangential manner. Why?”
“Barely knew him, yet you used your clout as an executive producer to bring him on as head writer and then to have him promoted to showrunner?”
“I don’t know himwell, but I’m a fan of his work. The episodes he wrote forPastor Fran Investigateswere among my favorites.”
“Really? Name one.”
“Sorry?”
“Name one of the episodes he wrote. Any episode.”
“I—I, well... there are too many to mention.”
“An actor lives on false praise, Penny, but every now and then, the flattery falters. Geri and Gerry thought my character was a priest. I was a pastor, of course, but I didn’t have the heart to tell them. You were dropped from our TV show because your scripts were too good forPastor Fran Investigates. They were nuanced and layered, had lengthy scenes of introspection and not enough spectacle. Lachlan and Edgar could crank out high-concept confectionary. You couldn’t. You haddepth, and you left before the show ever went into production. I have a hard time believing you became a fan of the show after we parted company. If you honestly were a fan of Lachlan’s work, if that’s truly why you hired him, name something he wrote—anything, made-for-TV movies, pilots, anything.”
“Miranda, I don’t really have time for this. I was just being polite when I said I was a fan of his work.”
“You write mysteries for a living, Penny. Here’s one for you: an over-the-top hack is unexpectedly handed the reins to a dramatic television series based on novels that are rich in detail, rather than the usual inane gimmicks he traffics in. Does that strike you as... suspicious? It certainly makes one wonder. It makes me wonder what Lachlan saw that night when he stomped off from Hiram Henry House and then came hurrying back, scared of bears. It makes me wonder who he might have seen slipping out the back, or coming in.”
Her cheeks flushed. “You need to leave.”
“He’s playing with fire, our Lachlan, dancing with the devil like that. But when one has hit the bottom so hard, is so abjectly desperateto get back in the game, well, the rules of the game no longer matter. Knowing Lachlan, he has some unnecessarily elaborate time-release mechanism to reveal the truth, should anything happen to him. But you are so much smarter than he is, smarter than all of us, that I don’t imagine it would take you much time to find and dismantle such a safeguard. And when you do? Goodbye, Lachlan. You kept insisting that we test the speargun, not for fingerprints—there were none, as you well knew; they’d been wiped cleanby you—but for DNA. Why? Because you were sure that Inez’s DNA was on it. Unfortunately, that wasn’t her blood around her neck. When it comes to Inez, everything is always more performative than real.”
“This is conjecture, nothing more.”
“Itmighthave been Fairfax. That’s true. He could have killed Kane and then later been murdered in turn by a second assailant who was in cahoots with him. There’s no reason there couldn’t have been two killers roaming the streets of Happy Rock that night. Except for the dust.”
“The dust?”
“The dust in the basement. Fairfax was a short man, and there was nothing to stand on down there except some crates stacked to one side. He might have dragged those over to reach the grate above him, but the dust on them was undisturbed. I can hardly picture someone as short as Fairfax angling an arrow so precisely through the narrow gaps in a floor grate. No. You would want to place the speargun directly against the grate as you waited. The killer would have to be tall. Fairfax was too short. And how would the killer know to placeKane’sbook—not someone else’s—on the grate in the reading room unless they knew exactly what Kane was going to do: barricade himself inside and pass the stolen page through the transom to Fairfax DePoy, who would be waiting outside.Thick as thieves.I believe that was the phrase Cephus used. It wasn’t a conspiracy of two—itwas a conspiracy of three. A pact had been made: Kane, Fairfax, and yourself. They thought you were in this together. But you had other plans, didn’t you, Penny?”
Miranda slid a photograph across the table. It was the one the janitor had pinned up. He’d crossed out Wanda’s face, but the surviving members of the Idaho Seven remained. The close-knit smiles. The fingers, entwined.
“If you look carefully, what do you see? Here—where your arm lies next to his, where your fingers meet. You’re holding hands. How sweet! You and John D. Ross.”
“This proves nothing.”
