Page 94 of Killer on the First Page
“Obviously,” said Ned.
“Not fingerprints,” said Penny. “DNA! Someone might wear gloves or wipe a surface clean of prints, but DNA? You should check for DNA.”
“I know about DNA,” said Ned. “I am aware of DNA.”
He threw a look Edgar’s way that said,Writers. Edgar, being a reformed writer himself, silently agreed.
But Miranda was not convinced by any of it. The killer brings the weapon back to their own B&B? It made no sense. Fling it in the bay or stash it in under a bush or toss it in a ditch. Why risk bringing it back with you?
“Where’d you find it?” Ned asked.
“I was vacuuming the guest rooms,” Gerry said. “I do the vacuuming.”
“He’s very good at vacuuming.”
“I was using the flat hose attachment—”
“Gerry says it gets under the furniture better. He’sverygood at vacuuming.”
“—and it bumped into something under the armoire.”
“Pennsylvania Dutch, pine with walnut finish.”
“Impossible to move. That’s why I used the—”
“—flat hose attachment.”
“Enough!” said Ned. “Not the furniture, the room. Which room?”
Geri and Gerry went quiet. Geri was looking at her hands, folded on her lap, and her hubby was avoiding eye contact with—
“Inez,” he said. “It was in Inez’s bedroom, under the armoire.”
Instantly on her feet and vehement in her denial, Inez shouted, “They’re lying! Both of them. This is preposterous! They could have planted that in my room. Anyone could have!”
“No one is accusing you of anything, Ms. Fonio,” Ned assured her. “Not yet.”
He held the speargun up to the light, its metal gleaming dully, and spotted a faint smattering of drops along the trigger.
Kane’s blood? Miranda wondered. From when he was hit by the arrow? Some of his blood could have fallen through the grate intothe furnace room below. But if it had, the Portland team would have spotted it on the grate. And she’d seen no droplets on the cement floor of the basement below. The killer’s blood, then? Perhaps from a nick on a finger when loading the arrow? Had it been Wanda Stobol from the start? Had she scratched herself on the weapon and then stashed it in Inez’s room before checking herself into the police station? That was the most straightforward explanation.
But tests would show it was neither Kane Hamady nor Wanda Stobol’s blood on the speargun—it wasn’t blood at all, in fact. It was something else entirely; something quite unexpected.
Ned placed the speargun back in the bag as gingerly as he’d extracted it.
The solution seemed both tantalizingly near at hand and hopelessly far away. Miranda felt like she was caught in a game of Whac-A-Mole, the kind she’d played as a girl at the St. Olaf County Fair. As soon as you hammered one problem down, another one popped up. Kane? Killed by an arrow shot upward into his chest as he bent over to pick up a copy of his own book. A locked lighthouse? The bolt to the door had been pulled back against a heavy spring that slowly expanded, pushing the bolt back into place after the killer had left. And now Wanda Stobol, killed by a phantom—or a faulty heart. Three locked rooms, three impossible crimes.
Then it hit her:none of them were meant to be locked rooms.
“They weren’t supposed to be impossible crimes,” Miranda said. “Each death was designed to tell a story. Kane is shot by Fairfax through an open transom. And then Fairfax, tormented by remorse, hangs himself in the lighthouse, closing the circle, sealing off the story. But the latch on the transom ruined the first story; if Kane hadn’t turned it partway down, if he’d left it unlocked after he opened it, we’d still be scouring the yard for a powerful crossbow vantage point. But it wasn’t a crossbow from a distance, it was a speargun up close. Thatlatch ruined the first narrative, just as Fairfax’s short stature ruined the killer’s second carefully staged scenario. What happens next? Wanda realizes that the killer is circling closer and she may be next. She announces she is going to tell the police everything, but only on condition she is locked up inside the station for safety. The killer has to move fast. If Wanda speaks, all is lost. But if she diesinside the cell, the story is again sealed off. Wanda killed Kane and Fairfax, and then her heart gave out. End of story.”
There was that word again...sealed. Miranda’s brain was trying to tell her something.
“Wanda Stobol died alone in a locked jail cell. By every indication, itwasheart failure brought on by the strain of events,” said Ned.
Miranda looked up suddenly. “Wanda Stobol wasn’t killed inside her jail cell, Ned.”
“What? She most certainly was.”
