Rules for Perfect Murders - Peter Swanson Page 0,11

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.

The reason I thought that—the reason I knew that—is because the fifth victim that Agent Mulvey mentioned, the woman who had the heart attack at her house in Rockland, Elaine Johnson—thing is, I actually knew her. Not well, but as soon as I heard the name, I knew that it was the same Elaine Johnson who used to live in Beacon Hill, a frequent customer at the bookstore, and a woman who came to every author reading we ever hosted. I knew I should have told Agent Mulvey this at the time, but I didn’t, and until I felt I had to, I didn’t plan on telling her.

I was sure she was withholding information from me, so I planned on withholding this information from her.

I had to begin to protect myself.

CHAPTER 5

I was beginning to fall asleep on the sofa, so I got up, rinsed out the beer bottles, threw away the remainder of my sandwich, brushed my teeth, and changed into my pajamas. Then I went to my bookshelf and found the book I was looking for. The Drowner. I had the original Gold Medal paperback, printed in 1963. It had one of those lurid illustrated covers that adorn pretty much all of John D. Mac-Donald’s midcentury paperbacks. On this one, a dark-haired woman in a white bikini is being pulled down through the murky green depths by a pair of hands gripping one of her pretty legs. It promised, like all these covers, two things: sex and death. I ran my thumb along the edge of the book, riffling the pages, and that musty, prickly smell of an old paperback reached my nostrils. I’ve always loved that smell, even though the book collector side of me knew that it was a sign of a book that had been improperly maintained over the years, a book that had probably sat in a cardboard box on the floor of a damp cellar for too many seasons. But to me the smell took me instantly back to the Annie’s Book Swap where I began to buy books when I was in the sixth grade. I