Grave Reservations by Cherie Priest

25.

Leda Foley lifted her borrowed laser pointer like Lady Liberty’s torch. “Ladies, gentlemen, and the otherwise affiliated… I suppose you’re all wondering why I’ve gathered you here today.”

This opening line received a smattering of enthusiastic applause from Tiffany and Niki but groans from Grady and Matt. Ben gave her the rolly hands gesture for Keep going. She kept going.

“I’m here to reveal the identity of a murderer!”

Grady called from the front row of the audience: “You already told me who it was.”

She pointed the laser right at his forehead. “Yes. I did. I told you, and you said it wasn’t enough that I merely knew who did it. You said I have to prove who did it.”

“Well, who was it?” asked Niki. “Don’t leave the rest of us hanging!”

Leda aimed the pointer at her best friend’s cleavage. “I will. But first, a brief explanation of what I’ve learned about my psychic abilities throughout the course of this case.”

Now everybody groaned. Ben booed and cupped his hands over his mouth when he called, “Cut to the chase!”

“Everybody calm your tits!” Leda commanded. “I’m getting there, but the answer won’t make any sense unless I explain how I got there, okay? And Grady’s the only one who knows the whole story, so I’ll have to set the scene for the rest of you.”

Before anyone could argue, she quickly said, “For most of my life, this whole clairvoyant thing has been really hit-and-miss. I spent a lot of time making incorrect predictions based on my psychic flashes, or that’s what I thought. What was actually happening was that I was drawing the wrong conclusions from the right information. I was bad at sorting out the signal from the noise. Singing here at Castaways has helped a lot with that, so thank you, Ben—and Matt, and everybody else who’s been making that possible over the last few months.”

Tiffany led the tiny crowd in another small fit of applause.

When it died down, Leda said, “Even so, I’ve been generating a lot of useless hits for poor Grady over there when it comes to the case of the murdered Gilmans. I was pinging hard on things like the name Scott, and a piano at the Beckmeyers’ place. I had no idea what any of it meant, but I knew it was important. My point is, I knew I was right, but I didn’t know what I was right about. I was thinking about it all wrong—trying to tie each little piece of info to some specific theory, when in fact, I needed to take all the small weird things as a whole and look at them that way. It’s like I’ve been playing a game of Password with myself.”

Niki frowned. “I don’t get it. I want to get it, but I don’t.”

“Let me try this from another angle.” Leda turned her attention to the murder board. “Let me walk you through what really happened, starting with Tod Sandoval and Amanda Crombie.”

“You can do that?” asked Matt.

She steeled herself, assuming her best teacher pose. “Well, I’m going to try. Some of this is stuff I know from psychic visions, some of this is stuff I figured out from the clues at hand. Some of this, I’m pulling directly out of my ass. Let the record reflect that I never said otherwise.” She stabbed her laser pointer at the left-hand column of index cards. “Now, here goes: Tod and Amanda didn’t meet until a few minutes right before they died, we know that much. We also know that they met at a gas station a little east of town. Here’s what I think happened next… cobbled together via psychic flashes and good ol’ intuition. And I know, I know. Some of this is speculation, but I’m asking you all to play along, okay? Hear me out: Tod had just filled up his car when he heard someone calling for help in a loud whisper—it was Amanda, hanging out just outside the service station lights. She didn’t want to be seen, because she knew she was being followed. She’d been run off the road nearby and attacked by a strange man—but she’d escaped, and now she was hiding and trying to get help.”

Matt was on a question-asking roll. He raised his hand and didn’t wait for Leda to call on him. “Why wouldn’t she take a chance, sprint inside, and ask the desk person to call the cops?”

Leda pointed the laser at his sternum. “I don’t have the faintest idea.”

“Actually, I do,” Grady said. “She’d lost her glasses. She was really, really nearsighted, and she couldn’t be sure that the assailant wasn’t right behind her or looking for her around the gas station. She couldn’t even be sure that she wouldn’t accidentally ask him for help.”

“Good to know. At any rate, she picked Tod. She asked him for help, and of course, he tried to help. He was Tod. He always tried to help.” Leda’s voice hitched, but she was on a roll and she couldn’t stop now. She swallowed and kept going. “He offered her a ride, but they didn’t get very far. He ran off the road and crashed into the guardrail near the lake, and maybe he was stunned—maybe he thought he’d blown a tire and got out to check.”

Tiffany raised her hand. “Why did he run off the road?”

“I can’t say for certain, but I can guess: The killer saw Amanda get into Tod’s car, so he followed them. He’d already run Amanda off the road, and he figured he could do it again. He could’ve flashed his high beams…” Her voice wobbled. The high beams. The brilliant white light behind her eyes.

“It wasn’t just an ocular migraine,” she marveled aloud. “It was the high beams.” Several hands went up, but she waved them all away. “Never mind. One way or another, Tod and Amanda were both out of the car. Tod tried to be a hero, and it didn’t go well for him. Amanda didn’t get very far on foot without her glasses. When they were both dead, the killer stuffed Tod into the car and pushed it into the water.”

Grady’s hand shot up. “Why did he leave Amanda’s body in the culvert? Why not stick her into the car, too?”

“I have no idea,” said Leda. “I never touched or saw anything of Amanda’s, and I don’t have that connection to her experience. But if you forced me to guess, it was probably just because it was easier. If he shot Tod near the car, all he had to do was stuff Tod into the car—and get rid of two birds with one stone. If Amanda made it far enough away that it’d be hard to haul her back, then he might as well stash her someplace close at hand.”

The detective nodded. “You have a point. He could’ve tipped her in almost anywhere. But we still don’t know why she was the target in the first place.”

Leda waved her laser around one of Amanda’s index cards. “She was an accountant. She found evidence of embezzlement.”

“Another connection between the two cases,” Grady observed. “Amanda caught someone skimming from Probable Outcomes, just like our Gilman killer was caught doing the same.”

“Correct. It turns out that stealing money is like any other crime: If you’ve gotten away with it once, you can do it again. And the same goes for murder. After Tod and Amanda, our villain just kept on thieving. Which brings us over here, to”—she waved her pointer at the right-hand column—“Christopher and Kevin Gilman. And Janette Copeland,” she added—indicating one of her freshly written cards. “All murdered by the same dude. I’m not even sure he killed Tod on purpose, but once he’d knocked off one person… taking out a few more didn’t seem like such a stretch to him.”

Leda took a step back and stood to the side of board. “Now, let us consider the Gilmans. Christopher may have been a real dick, but he wasn’t stupid—and when one of his newer employees began stealing from Digital Scaffolding, he took notice… but he didn’t blow the whistle.”

Tiffany, who had not been privy to the whole case thus far, raised her hand and asked: “Why not?”

Leda said, “Allow me to refer you to this card.” She pointed at one that read, in its entirety, Christopher Gilman: dick. “Chris was a jerk and an opportunist. He realized that he had dirt on the thief. With this information, he could use this dirt to manipulate the thief into doing even worse, grosser things than skimming a little cash. Things like…” She swirled the red dot around a card that read Richard Beckmeyer: frame-up victim.

Matt said, “What?”

Grady filled him in. “Christopher Gilman wanted to get rid of Beckmeyer and his wife, the angel investor, so he tried to blackmail the thief into smearing Beckmeyer into oblivion—or at least out of the company. But it didn’t work.”

Niki asked, “Why not?”

Leda took the reins on that one. “Because our thief was also a murderer. Christopher thought he was just some pencil-pushing millennial schmuck, but no! This was a man who’d killed other people to cover his own ass once before—and he was prepared to do it again. It was probably easier this time. Why, you ask? Well, for one thing, his first victims were just plain unlucky. Tod was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Amanda had the misfortune of being the woman who figured out that a thief was sitting in the next cubicle over. But Christopher Gilman? Everybody hated that dude. More than a couple of people suggested that they were glad he was gone, not least of all his now-dead widow.”

Matt said, “Ouch,” and crossed his arms, settling into the chair with the grin of a man who’s stumbled across a truly excellent reality TV show.

Their hostess with the laser pointer agreed. “Ouch indeed. But if he wanted people to remember him more fondly after his death, he shouldn’t have been such a douchebag when he was alive. Now, I don’t know how much dirty business the thief actually performed for Chris Gilman, but eventually, our guy had enough of being manipulated. He lured Chris out to the hotel with… with God knows what. A promise of money or information? Perhaps.”

“But what about Kevin?” asked Grady.

Leda indicated the nearest card with Kevin’s name on it. “Kevin knew his father was hot garbage, and he’d become suspicious. That’s where Kim Cowen comes in.” She used the laser to highlight the woman’s bright orange card. “Kim was Christopher’s assistant. She was the one who handled the nitty-gritty of his day-to-day life, and she had a big-ass crush on Kevin. Kevin suspected that his dad was up to some shady shenanigans, and on that fateful day, he asked Kim where to find him.”

Niki said, “Oh no…” and covered her mouth with her hands. Through her fingers, she said, “She must blame herself.”

Leda nodded. “She absolutely does, even though she knows it wasn’t her fault.” She cast a glance at Tod’s column of cards and tried not to think about all the ways she’d twisted the events surrounding his death until she was to blame for it, in a thousand different ways. “Sometimes you can know something and still… not know it.”

But this wasn’t about her. It was about Keyes.

Once more, she swallowed hard and raised the pointer. She’d come this far. Time to bring it home. “Kim told Kevin that his dad was taking a private meeting out in Shoreline, and Kevin decided to crash it. I think he meant to confront his father, maybe even threaten him, I don’t know. I never got a good read on him, or his intentions. The important part is that he found his dad. Somewhat inconveniently, Christopher was in the process of being murdered, and since Kevin got an eyeful of it… Kevin got murdered, too. Meanwhile, the thief escaped to murder another day.”

Ben asked, “Shouldn’t we be calling this guy a murderer, not a thief?”

“Good point. Going forward, he’s Mr. Murder. You like that better?”

“I do,” Ben said happily.

Leda held the laser pointer like a gavel and pretended to bang it. “Then it’s duly entered into the record. Mr. Murder went back to his regular life, pretending that he hadn’t murdered anybody or stolen anything. And it worked! For a while, at least. Then some cop who didn’t blow up in a plane crash came sniffing around with a travel agent who was pretending to be a police consultant.”

Grady’s hand shot up. “Technically, you weren’t pretending. Technically, you were consulting—and you did a good job. You gave me fresh information to work from.”

Leda aimed the laser back at Grady, very briefly. “Thank you. I appreciate the vote of confidence.”

Niki waved her arms, trying to hustle the reveal along. “Leda… then what happened?”

“Then Mr. Murder got scared.” Leda aimed the laser at Niki, and let it linger. “Mr. Murder got scared, because we brought an extra consultant when we interviewed him, and Grady introduced her as a forensic accountant.”

“Oh my God.” Niki put her hands back over her mouth and drew her feet up onto the chair. It was only then that Leda noticed she was wearing a much smaller boot on her injured foot.

“It was bull, obviously. But Mr. Murder bought it. By sheer, stupid coincidence, he was afraid he’d been found out yet again, and he started to panic.”

“You mean, it was…”

Triumphantly, Leda declared, “Yes! It was Abbot Keyes! The guy you met in the coffee shop at the UW bookstore.”

“The Victorian orphan?”

“The very same,” Leda said with a big smile and a hearty nod. “His real name is Scott Keyes, or it used to be. He legally changed it a month or two before he got hired at Digital Scaffolding. It’s funny, I couldn’t figure out how or why I was pinging so hard on the piano keys, and on the name Scott… but there you go. He tweaked it just enough to adjust for internet searches on his name and work history, but not so far that he could be accused of trying to reboot his identity. Maybe he was tired of the Francis Scott Key jokes.”

Matt cackled, then asked, “Wait… would people seriously make those jokes?”

Leda shrugged. “I would. But we all know I’m a weirdo. Anyway, after we left him, he spiraled and got careless. He knew we’d be running down the list of people from Digital Scaffolding who might’ve had access to accounts, and he was afraid he was about to get hoisted by his own sloppy petard. That’s why he ran around town, making efforts to clean up after himself—and only making things worse in the process.

“He started with Richard Beckmeyer. Richard was the last guy Chris Gilman had a problem with. He hadn’t worked at the company long, but he and his wife had access to the financials, and they might’ve kept backup records. Apparently they hadn’t, or at least Keyes couldn’t find them in time to make off with them. But he had to look, so he broke in and nearly killed Sheila Beckmeyer in the process.”

Tiffany asked, “Wait. How many people has this guy accidentally killed, or almost killed?”

Leda paused and did the math out loud. “Accidentally? I don’t know about Tod, but maybe Tod—plus Kevin Gilman. They’re both definitely dead, and so is Janette Gilman. She was an accident, too. Kind of. Then there was Sheila, and she survived.”

“This guy’s a freaking hazard,” the bartender muttered.

“A danger to himself and others, yes,” Leda agreed. “After Sheila narrowly survived his burglary and attempted arson, he moved on to Janette Gilman, thinking she might be holding on to the paperwork, or taxes, or anything at all that might peripherally implicate him in wrongdoing. He tried to ransack her office when she wasn’t there, but she doubled back and caught him—and it all went south. Literally. She fell off a very tall and broken escalator, and that was the end of Ms. Gilman. I mean, Ms. Copeland.”

She added, “She hated her dead husband so much that she went back to her maiden name as soon as he was gone.”

Matt said, “Wow,” and looked like he’d very much like a bowl of popcorn for this show. “And she still died, and it was still his fault. Man, this guy sounds like a real winner.”

Leda was confused. “The dead boss, or the killer?”

“Both of them,” he said with a serious head nod of disapproval.

“Totally correct.” She adjusted her grip on the laser pointer and directed it back at her murder board. “Now, you may be asking yourself, ‘Self, why did no one make the connection between the murder of a woman at Probable Outcomes and two murders at Digital Scaffolding—even though Digital Scaffolding hired several people who’d formerly worked at Probable Outcomes?’ ”

Niki demanded to know, “Yeah, why not?”

Grady held up his hand. Without waiting to be called on, he said, “The murders occurred a couple of years apart, for one thing—and for another, we didn’t know that Keyes used to work at Probable Outcomes. He left that off his résumé, and since he’d changed his name, he wouldn’t have turned up in any cross-reference searches between the two. But the fact is, until Leda joined the conversation, we didn’t realize that we needed to look for a connection between the two cases, or the two companies.”

Leda said, “Yes. What that nice man just said. That’s why. Since Keyes had zero connection to Tod, that complicated any searches the police might’ve made for someone with a motive to kill him. No one knew whether Tod or Amanda was the original intended target. Now we do! Now we can go collect Keyes, throw him in jail, and maybe give him the chair!”

Grady cleared his throat, loudly and pointedly. “We don’t have the death penalty in Washington anymore. And when we did, it was either lethal injection or a noose.”

Leda let the laser pointer droop. With a frown, she asked, “Noose?”

“Yeah, the state used to let you choose.”

“People could choose… hanging?” she squeaked.

“Well, it didn’t happen very often.”

Leda couldn’t decide if she was relieved or disappointed. Probably disappointed. “Then he can just rot in prison for the rest of his life.”

“If we can spin all this speculation into evidence. You’ve definitely given me enough to bring him in for questioning, but don’t get ahead of yourself. There’s still a lot of work to be done before we can lock him up and throw away the key.”

Deep down she’d known this particular roadblock was coming, but it left her deflated all the same. “But you believe me, don’t you?” If he believed her, then there was still a way forward. “Don’t you?”

Everyone looked at Grady. Grady kept his eyes on Leda. “I do believe you, but I’m just one cop. You need more cops, a judge, and probably a lawyer or two to believe you, too. I think we can make it happen, though—I really do.”

“You do?”

“Yeah, and that’s why I sent a couple of uniformed officers to swing by the university and keep an eye on him before I drove out here.”

Niki turned to him. “How do you know he’s at the school?”

“I made a phone call to an administrator and got his class schedule. Right about now, he’s in a programming class that runs until seven o’clock.” Grady took out his phone and checked the screen. “Oh, hey, excuse me a minute.” He rose to his feet, then paused to address Leda. “I don’t mean to sneak out before the end of the show, but…”

She waved encouragement at him. “No, don’t be ridiculous—go! Go make sure he’s in custody! I’m done here anyway, I guess.” She checked the board, ran her eyes down all the index cards, and then nodded to herself. “Yep. That’s pretty much everything. I have solved a murder!”

More applause, led by Ben and Tiffany together. Everyone who wasn’t already standing rose to their feet, and Leda took a little bow.

“Thank you, thank you,” she said, keeping one eye on Grady as he discreetly walked away and began poking at his phone’s screen. “I’ll um… I’ll put this stuff away now, so you can open the doors. You ought to be open by now anyway. People will get restless.”

“That was magnificent! Just magnificent!” Ben’s clapping finally died down, but the big, beaming smile on his face did not. “Oh!” he barked, “Leda! Wait—did you bring those costumes? Niki said you would have them with you.”

She ceased her efforts to lift the murder board off the chairs without knocking anything loose, and let it sit back on top of the chairs. “They’re in my car. Do you want them right now?”

“I did put rockabilly down as tonight’s theme! It’s already on the flyers.”

She rolled her eyes and grinned at him anyway. “I’m not sure how ‘rockabilly’ Lucy and Ethel are, but I guess they’ll do.”

He gestured like he was wearing a dress with fluffy crinolines. “But the skirts, yes? You have the tiny waists, and the big slips, and the curly-hair wigs?”

“Yeah, yeah. All that and then some. It’ll be fine. Let me just put this away….”

Matt said, “Don’t worry about it—I’ll take care of it. You go get the dresses, and you can change in my office before we let the crowds inside.”

“Great, thank you. I really appreciate it,” Leda told him as she hopped down off the stage. “Give me five minutes, and I’ll be right back.”

But before she could make a run for Jason, Niki tugged her elbow to get her attention. “Hey, are you… is this… is everything… okay? That was pretty intense. Good,” she added, “but intense. If you want to take a minute before getting back to real life, nobody will hold it against you.”

Leda hesitated. “I love you for asking….” She looked back at the stage, being swiftly disassembled from crime-solving and reassembled for karaoke.

Niki followed her gaze and said out loud what Leda had only been thinking. “Well, they don’t know you like I do. They didn’t know Tod.”

She nodded, slowly and then more firmly. “I appreciate it. I appreciate you. But I appreciate them, too—and as far as they’re concerned, the show must go on.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.” She squeezed Niki in a fast, intense hug and turned her loose. “Now get in there and get ready to rock and roll. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Riding high on adrenaline and busily running away from some uncomfortably mixed feelings, she ducked into Matt’s office. She’d left her purse in there, and she’d need her car keys. She seized them in her fist and flinched. A halo of light flashed around her left eye.

“I know, I know,” she told it. “The headlights. I get it. Knock it off, already.” She grabbed a travel umbrella that had been sitting on Matt’s desk for a week or more and added that to her arsenal. This was fine. Everything was going to be great.

But the light kept flashing, white and cold, as she took the keys and ran out the back door, into the rainy night.