Rules for Perfect Murders - Peter Swanson Page 0,51

anything. She’s old, and I doubt she could even see anyone on the street.”

“So, no luck there,” I said.

“I’m not surprised. If there’s one other connection between all these murders—besides your list—it’s that there have been no witnesses. No clues at all, really. No mistakes.”

“There must have been something.”

“There was a murder weapon left behind at the site of Jay Bradshaw’s homicide.”

“He was one of the A.B.C. murders?”

“Yes, he was beaten to death in his garage. In some ways his murder is a bit of an outlier. It was messy, for one; he fought back, and there was a lot of blood. His garage was full of tools, all of which could have been the murder weapon, but it turned out that the weapon that was used, at least initially, was a baseball bat.”

“How do they know it didn’t come from the garage, that it was brought there?”

“They don’t know, not for a fact, but there was no other sports equipment at Bradshaw’s house. And all the tools in his garage were carpentry tools. That’s what he was—a carpenter—although he’d been charged ten years earlier with attempted rape while putting up bookshelves for a divorced woman. Since then he’d done very little work. He kept a sign up in front of his house at all times, advertising ‘used tools for sale,’ and according to his only friend, he spent most of the day in his garage. He would have been easy to target. The baseball bat was the only piece of evidence found that seemed as though it didn’t belong in his garage.”

“Was it special?”

“What, the bat?”

“Yeah, was there something unusual about it? Was it from the 1950s or anything? Signed by Mickey Mantle?”

“No, it was new, and it was a brand that’s sold at just about every sporting goods store. It didn’t go anywhere. Also, it didn’t actually deliver the killing blow. Bradshaw was hit by the baseball bat, but he’d been killed with a sledgehammer, directly to his head. Sorry for the image.”

When Gwen pulled up in front of the bookstore, she said, “Here you go,” then quickly added, “Oh, maybe you wanted to go to your home. I didn’t even ask.”

“This is fine,” I said. “I should probably check in here anyway, and I only live a few blocks away.”

“Thanks for coming. As soon as I get those photographs of the books, can I send them to you?”

“Sure,” I said.

The store was open for another fifteen minutes and I could see Brandon behind the front desk, a book splayed open in front of him. I swung through the front door and he looked up. “Boss,” he said.

“Hey, Brandon.”

He tilted the book he was reading so I could see the cover. It was The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith, who not so long ago had been revealed to actually be J. K. Rowling. “Good,” he said, and went back to reading.

“I’m just popping in. Anything happen while I was away?”

He told me how yesterday afternoon a woman in a fur coat came in and bought two hundred dollars’ worth of new hardcovers and arranged to have them shipped to her address in Malibu. And he told me that he thought he’d finally fixed the faucet in the employee bathroom that was always leaking.

“Thanks,” I said.

I heard Nero’s plaintive meow and bent down to greet him.

“He misses you, I think, when you’re not here,” Brandon said, and something about those words caused me to have one of those periodic waves of deep sadness that suddenly infect me from time to time. I stood suddenly, and the light swam in front of my eyes. I was hungry, I realized. It was late, and I hadn’t eaten since lunch in Rockland.

I walked home and got my car, then drove over the river to Somerville, the town I’d lived in with Claire. I sat at the bar at R.F. O’Sullivan’s, a place I hadn’t been for years, drinking Guinness and eating one of their softball-size burgers. Afterward I drove to the Somerville Public Library, pleased to see it was still open. I went to the second floor and found a computer with an open internet browser, punched in the name that Marty had given me earlier, “Nicholas Pruitt.”

Not only was he an English professor at New Essex University, he had published a book of short stories called Little Fish. There were two pictures of him I could find online, an author photograph, plus a candid from a faculty cocktail party. He was