Booked for Murder (19 page)

“You're out of your mind,” Meredith blustered, too quick to convince.

“It was Baz, I'm right. You slept with Baz the last time you were in London. That's why you wouldn't tell Penny who you had your fling with. Because it was Baz and it would poison their professional relationship.”

“This is bullshit,” Meredith tried. She had more chance of stopping a runaway train with one hand.

“But Baz felt awkward with Penny, knowing why you two had split up. And Penny, who as we both know, was very sensitive to atmosphere, twigged there was something wrong. And she put two and two together, and that's why she wanted to get into Baz's office that night. It was Baz, wasn't it?” Lindsay demanded, slamming her drink on the table. The remaining whisky seemed to rise and fall in a pillar, spilling only a few drops as it settled down.

“You've got no grounds for saying that,” Meredith said.

Seeing she was about to capitulate, Lindsay kept up the pressure, her voice rising inexorably. “You dragged me over here to sort this mess out for you. I can understand you not levelling with your lawyer, because it looks bad that the prime suspect's last lover was not the victim but one of the other suspects. But you should have levelled with me, Meredith!”

Meredith ground out her cigarette and pushed herself away from the table, the chair legs shrieking a protest as she half turned away from Lindsay. “It was a one-off, for both of us. Her lover was visiting her family in Ireland. We were both lonely and feeling sorry for ourselves. She was just as keen as I was that nobody should find out we'd slept together. She had a lot to lose, after all—her lover as well as her professional relationship with Penny. And that brought her a lot of
kudos there at Monarch. She cares too much about what people think of her professionally to fuck around with that.”

“I think Penny guessed,” Lindsay said flatly. It was neither her place nor her inclination to condemn. Fidelity wasn't hard between her and Sophie. But she had no feelings of self-righteous ness on that count. She knew how easy it was to slip out of that habit when a relationship was on a rocky road where reassurance had become a rarity.

“She didn't say anything directly to Baz,” Meredith said.

“Penny wouldn't have. Not without evidence. And that's what she was looking for in Baz's desk and her computer. She bribed one of the staff at Monarch to smuggle her in after everyone had gone home for the day. She was looking for some piece of evidence to confirm her suspicions. I think she found it.”

Meredith swung back to face Lindsay, reaching again for the cigarettes. “Baz wouldn't have left anything incriminating in her desk.”

“No? What about e-mail?”

Meredith's gray eyes widened in shock. “Ah, shit,” she said softly. “Yes, there would be an e-mail trail a yard wide.”

“Still think Penny didn't know?”

Meredith sighed a stream of smoke. “I guess it's possible she found out. Depends if Baz has her files well protected or not.”

Meredith's words snagged Lindsay's memory. She'd completely forgotten about Penny's missing computer. Clearly, investigating murder and jet lag didn't go together. “Speaking of computer files, do you know where Penny's laptop is?”

“Her laptop? Isn't it in the flat?”

“No. The power lead is still plugged into the wall, but there's no computer. Do you happen to know if the police took it?”

Meredith shook her head. “They haven't got it. I know because I got my solicitor to ask if they had taken anything of Penny's from the flat. I wanted to know if they had the answering-machine tape, right? And it turns out that all they took away was the answering-machine tape.” Meredith's expression was wry.

“This is weird. Not only is the computer itself missing, but there isn't a single floppy in the place, not even a box of blanks. And there
isn't a single copy of the manuscript lying around either. What was in
Heart of Glass
that's so dynamite?”

“You think someone killed her to prevent the book being finished?” Meredith's tone reflected Lindsay's own incredulity that a novel could provoke such passion.

“I know it's bizarre, but it's looking a lot like it. The only way we're going to know for sure is if we can track down a copy, and I haven't the first clue how we're going to do that.”

They sat in silence until Meredith reached the end of her cigarette. “She was always paranoid about back-ups. She always backed up on to floppies at the end of the working day. She kept one set in the house and another tucked into the back of her personal organizer. And the third set she took down to Half Moon Bay once a week,” she said slowly.

“What? She never left them with us.”

Meredith shook her head. “I know. She used to drop them off with her best friend from high school, Carolyn Coogan. She and her husband, John, both teach math up in Pacifica. They live on the other side of the highway from you, about a mile south. She'd drive down one evening a week, or sometimes in the small hours of the morning. If she was late, she'd leave them in the mailbox.”

“Couldn't she just have posted them?”

“By US Mail? Puh-lease! Penny wouldn't trust her disks to them, but she wanted a set somewhere they'd be safe if the house burned down, and where she could have easy access to them if it became necessary. So she'd bring them down herself.”

“That explains why she used to drop in unannounced so often. She always said she'd just come down for a walk by the ocean. She'd borrow the dog and off they'd go, then she'd sit down for a beer afterwards,” Lindsay said. “Obviously she can't have been doing that while she was over here. Do you think she'd have made alternative arrangements in England? Maybe left the disks with somebody she knew in London?”

Meredith shrugged. “It's possible. I'd say it's more than likely. But I don't know how we find out.”

“If need be, we go through every single person in her address book,” Lindsay said grimly.

“Oh, great,” Meredith sighed. “Lindsay, I think you're going to have to handle that one by yourself. I'm not ready to talk to all those people yet.”

“Well, let's hope it doesn't come to that. Oh, one other thing.”

“What?”

“This murder by exploding beer bottle. It's really off the wall. Where did she get the idea for that?”

“You ever notice her scar? On her left forearm, about two inches long? Well, years ago, before she knew me or you guys, she was on holiday in Austria and it was a real hot summer like this one. She had some bottles of this wheat beer sitting on the kitchen table, waiting to go into the fridge once there was room for them. She accidentally knocked against the table, the bottles rocked back and forth, and one of them exploded. She said it was like a bomb going off. Glass everywhere. And one chunk of glass embedded itself in her arm. I guess she should have had the cut stitched, but she didn't want to go to hospital in a strange country, so her girlfriend closed it with surgical tape. That's why she had such a noticeable scar. She always said one day she was going to use it in a book.”

“And when she did, it looks like it killed her.”

Meredith looked at Lindsay while she automatically lit a third cigarette. “So what are we going to do about it?”

Chapter 14

S
ophie Hartley had just settled her patient on the examining table when the summons came. Rita Hernandez was an illegal immigrant who had escaped from El Salvador in search of the American dream. Instead, she'd ended up working a street corner in the Mission with a pimp who thought wearing a condom was a denial of machismo. Now she was HIV-positive and six months pregnant and she wasn't convinced that the Grafton Clinic was a safe place to be. Sophie had finally persuaded her she wasn't going to turn her in to the authorities, so a nurse telling Sophie she had a transatlantic call was the last thing she needed right then. “
Momento, por favor, señorita
,” she said in her English-accented Spanish, giving Rita a calming pat on the ankle. “Stay with her, would you?” she asked the nurse, then headed for the reception area.

“Line two,” the receptionist mouthed at her between responding to waiting patients.

Sophie picked up the phone. “This had better be good,” she said impatiently.

“I love you too,” the familiar voice said. “Sorry to hit you at work, but it's the time difference. I hoped I could pitch you into doing me a favor this evening when you get off work, then you'd be able to call me back in the morning our time with the results.”

“What kind of a favor?” Sophie said guardedly, running a hand
through her hair in the familiar gesture of affectionate frustration that Lindsay tended to produce in her.

“Penny was so paranoid she used to drive down to Half Moon Bay every week with a spare set of back-up disks. She used to leave them with . . .”

“Carolyn Coogan, her best friend from high school,” Sophie finished for her. “They live on Palisades Drive.”

“How did you know that?” Lindsay demanded.

“There are a lot of miles of shore around the Bay Area. I once asked Penny if she had some sentimental attachment to Half Moon Bay, given how often she used to drop in on us. She said there was nothing sentimental about it, purely practical.”

“You never told me,” Lindsay said.

“Just one of my hundreds of dark secrets,” Sophie teased. “You want me to go and see Carolyn?”

“Penny's laptop has gone missing. There are no back-up disks anywhere in the flat, and nobody's got a copy of her manuscript. I was thinking maybe she'd stashed another set somewhere, with somebody like Carolyn. And if so, whether she mentioned it to her. I know it's a long shot, but it would save me wasting tomorrow trying to track down everybody Penny knew over here. I'd really appreciate it,” Lindsay added, injecting a dose of pathos into her voice.

“I'll see what I can do,” Sophie said repressively.

“So you won't want to know who Meredith had her fling with,” Lindsay said tantalizingly.

Sophie groaned. “Make it quick. I have a patient waiting.”

“Baz Burton. Penny's editor.”

“No!”

“Would I lie to you?”

“Not and live. I want chapter and verse on this, Lindsay, but not now. Call me tomorrow, okay? Love you.”

“Love you too,” Lindsay said to dead air.

 

Radio stations all smelled the same, Lindsay had realized in recent years. It didn't matter how old or new the studios were. A blind person who had once sampled the ambience would have it indelibly
stamped in their olfactory banks for ever. It was an indefinable smell: a history of cigarette smoke now abolished but present like a ghost; a faint whiff of nervous sweat, the decaying molecules of the pheromones still lingering; the unmistakable tang produced by hot coffee in plastic or polystyrene; and dust. The office where Kirsten was working had the radio smell, even though it was in a sixties building behind Broadcasting House which seemed to be occupied almost entirely by teenagers.

Lindsay was sitting on the tiled window-sill, feet on a chair, head tilted back and hanging out of the metal window-frame in a vain attempt to get some air in her lungs that hadn't already been breathed by half the population of London. Kirsten sat at a cluttered desk swigging some designer fruit drink from the bottle while sweat ran down either side of her nose as she talked into the phone. “. . . that's right, you remember! Well, I'm sort of looking at an idea that might make a piece for one of the media magazine programs . . . Yeah, that's the sort of thing. I was wondering, you know. We still keep hearing about authors getting swag bags of money—Jeffrey Archer getting millions for his backlist, Martin Amis getting half a mil for a two-book deal. Plus, with the end of the Net Book Agreement, what seems to be happening is that bottom of the list authors, the unpromotables, they're getting the bullet, leaving the marketplace to the ones who can reasonably claim to be worth half-decent advances, yeah?” Kirsten paused in her flow, obviously listening to the voice on the other end. It was the third call she'd made so far.

At breakfast, Lindsay had moved in for the kill. She'd tried to talk to Sophie, but she'd only reached their answering machine, which informed her that Sophie had been called in to an emergency and that Lindsay should ring her around six in the morning, California time. Rather than kick her heels until early afternoon, she'd hit on the bright idea of using Kirsten's contacts to dig up background on Catriona Polson. She'd been perfectly prepared to do the research herself, but Kirsten was adamant that she wanted to help out. Lindsay wasn't sure if it was because she'd had the chance to get to know Meredith the previous evening, or because Helen had warned her not to let Lindsay close enough to her contacts to upset them. Either way, it relieved her of the tension of telling lies convincingly to strangers. Looking at
Kirsten grafting away there, she wasn't sorry she'd been forced to abdicate the responsibility.

“Yeah, right,” Kirsten resumed, blowing out a cloud of smoke from the forbidden cigarette she'd just lit. “Anyway, it seemed to me that the people who must really be coining it in off of this are not the authors, who after all, let's face it, have probably spent years in abject penury to write that one special book. And it's not even the publishers, given the balancing act they're all playing at just now with the ending of the Net Book Agreement and getting to grips with electronic publishing. No, the people who must really be raking it in are the agents . . .” Kirsten made a face, casting her eyes upward and holding the phone away from her ear so Lindsay could hear the yakkety-yak coming from the receiver.