Rules for Perfect Murders - Peter Swanson Page 0,17

then I flew back the next day, on Sunday, the fourteenth. I can send you the flights I was on, if you’d like. I know it was basically the first two weeks in September.”

“Okay, thanks,” she said, which I took to mean that she wanted me to send her my exact flights.

“If Elaine Johnson was killed by Charlie …” I said.

“Yes?”

“Then it makes it much more likely that Charlie is definitely using my list.”

“Yes, it does. And it means that he not only knows who you are, but that he knows people around you. I’m assuming it can’t be a coincidence that one of the victims is someone you knew personally.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Is there anyone who has a grudge against you, maybe an ex-employee, someone who might have known that Elaine Johnson was a regular at Old Devils?”

“Not that I know of,” I said. “There aren’t that many ex-employees from the store, actually. I only need two extra people, and the two I have now have both been with me for over two years.”

“Can you tell me their names?” she said, pulling a notebook out from her bag.

I gave her Emily’s and Brandon’s full names and she wrote them down.

“What can you tell me about them?” she said.

I told her what I knew. It wasn’t much. Emily Barsamian had graduated from Winslow College, outside of Boston, about four years ago, and gotten an internship at the Boston Athen?um, a prestigious and historic independent library. She’d supplemented her income by coming to work at Old Devils for twenty hours a week. When the internship was finished, she upped her hours and had been with me ever since. I knew hardly anything about her personal life because she rarely talked, and when she did, it was only about books, or sometimes movies. I suspected that she was a secret writer but hadn’t confirmed it. Brandon Weeks was my gregarious employee. He still lived with his mom and his sisters in Roxbury, and both Emily and I probably knew everything about him, certainly everything about his family, and about his current girlfriend. When I’d hired him, as extra help during the holiday season two years ago, I admit that I had doubts about whether he’d show up with any kind of regularity. But he stayed on, and as far as I remembered, had never missed a single day or even been late.

“And that’s it?” Agent Mulvey asked.

“For current employees? Yes. I go in every day, myself. And when I go on vacation, either we hire a temp, or Brian, my co-owner, comes in and does a few shifts. If you want, I’ll put together a list of past employees and send it to you.”

“Brian is Brian Murray?” she said.

“Yes, you know him?”

“I saw his name on your website. I’ve heard of him, yes.”

Brian is a semifamous writer who lives in the South End, and who writes the Ellis Fitzgerald series. He’s easily up to about twenty-five books by now; they don’t sell as well as they used to, but Brian writes them anyway, keeping his female detective Ellis at a perpetual thirty-five years old, and keeping both fashion and technology advancements out of his narratives. The books are set sometime in late ’80s Boston, as was the TV series called Ellis that ran for two years and provided Brian with the town house he bought in the South End, his lake house in the far north of Maine, and enough extra money to invest in Old Devils.

“Include other people on your list, if you think of them. Pissed-off customers? Any exes of yours we should know about?”

“It’s going to be a short list,” I said. “My only ex is my wife, and she’s dead.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, but it was clear from her expression she already had that information.

“And I’ll keep thinking about the books on the list.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Don’t hold back. Let me know any thoughts you have, even if they seem insignificant or unlikely. It can’t hurt.”

“Okay,” I said, folding my napkin and putting it over the uneaten portion of my breakfast. “Are you checking out, or are you staying here?”

“Checking out,” she said. “Unless for some reason the train is canceled, then I guess I’ll spend one more night here. But I’m not leaving right now. You haven’t told me if you looked at the unsolved crimes I gave you last night.”

I told her that none of them had jumped out at me, except

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