with the murder of Robin Callahan. He had particularly loved Agatha Christie’s The A.B.C. Murders, in which a specific killing was hidden among a string of murders made to look like they’d been done by a madman. What if he could do the same with Robin Callahan? Maybe kill a few people who all had similar names—names of birds, for example. Then he thought he could even leave a single feather at the scene of each crime. Or better yet, mail a single feather to the local police.
And that was what he did. He killed Robin Callahan inside her own home, having gotten inside by showing her his old police identification card. He also killed Ethan Byrd, a local student whom Marty found by searching through police reports looking for bird-related names. Ethan had been arrested at a sports bar in Lowell for threatening the bartender, and for disturbing the peace. He found Jay Bradshaw the same way; he’d been arrested for rape, but never convicted. It turned out Bradshaw spent most of his days on the Cape sitting in his garage, trying to sell used tools. Marty had pulled up in broad daylight, then beat Bradshaw to death with a baseball bat he’d brought and a sledgehammer he’d borrowed.
As soon as he’d begun to plot the A.B.C. Murders, Marty knew that he couldn’t stop until he’d finished the list. Bill Manso was another name he pulled from browsing police records, a man who had been investigated in a domestic disturbance, but someone who had also been accused by a neighbor of breaking into her house during the daytime, stealing her underwear. This had all happened five years previous, but Marty read up on the case, discovering that Manso had gotten off because he was a regular train commuter into New York City, and that he’d provided evidence that he was commuting at the time of the break-in. The train made him think of Double Indemnity, another book on the list. Marty had read it, of course, but he’d also gotten the movie from the local library. He liked the movie better (“It gave me a brand-new appreciation of Fred MacMurray”). He decided to kill Bill Manso, bludgeon him to death, and leave him on the tracks. Then he’d take the commuter rail himself the following morning, bust out a window at just the right time to make it look as though Manso had decided to jump. He knew it wouldn’t wash. Scene-of-the-crime investigators would know almost instantly that Manso had been killed elsewhere, and that his body had been staged. But what excited Marty was that someone might start to figure it out, make a connection between the two books, and that it would lead back to me. Maybe they’d even arrest me. Either way, I’d become involved, and that was what he was hoping for.
Marty wasn’t sure how to gain access to Bill Manso, but when he got down to Connecticut, it was made easier by the fact that Manso liked to drink at the bar nearest to the train station. Manso would go directly from his commute to the Corridor Bar and Grill at five thirty every day and stumble out of there at about ten at night, to drive the mile and a half to his town house condo. Marty killed him in the parking lot with a telescoping baton (“Much better than a baseball bat, let me tell you”) and left his body along the tracks. The next day he took the train and punched out a window in between cars using the same steel baton.
Four murders in, Marty got impatient. He didn’t say that in so many words, but he decided it was time to get a little more obvious. Time to get me involved.
Like all the regulars at Old Devils, especially anyone who came to our author readings, Marty had known Elaine Johnson. She’d cornered him on numerous occasions to let him know the books he should be reading, and the books that were a waste of time. She told him about that nasty lesbian who owned the apartment she lived in, and about how disgustingly dirty the city of Boston was, and about how, without her, the Old Devils Bookstore would have gone out of business years ago. And she told him about her heart condition, how her doctors had told her she should move to a quieter region, make sure that nothing stressed her out.
Knowing she’d moved into her dead sister’s