Invitation to a Killer by G.M. Malliet

Author:G.M. Malliet [Malliet, G.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2022-10-21T00:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

It seemed to me there was one large missing piece to the puzzle. If this were one of my books, it might be a red herring. Or just one of those inexplicable things that do happen. Things I never write about because readers just won’t accept that life is weird and full of loose ends. They don’t buy a book for loose ends – those they can get from their own lives. There is so much we have to take on as part of being human, however bizarre. Unexplained phenomenon, like UFOs.

Still, the situation required, to my mind, an immediate follow-up, if only to free my mind to return to more mundane and necessary tasks, like doing the laundry and writing a book.

And that was to learn more about the heretofore unexpected existence of the Doc Burke’s wife, Fatima.

Who possibly lived, or had lived, in Sierra Leone.

And who for some reason had swept into town to collect her husband’s ashes.

Why would she do this? Maybe I only had part of the story and to get it all, I would need to find her.

Google to the rescue, of course. Fatima Alvarez as a search term pulled up some Instagram and Facebook accounts belonging to younger women. I assumed the Fatima I sought and Doc Burke had been separated for some time and that she had not been a child bride, but there was actually nothing provable attached to either of those hypotheses. I had to go with what was logical to my mind and then maybe branch out into very young women with young children or very elderly women older than the doctor’s sixty-five years.

I also tried searching on Fatima Alvarez Burke, of course, and drew a blank, with Google wondering if I mean Bark rather than Burke, which I did not.

LinkedIn suggested it was housing some likely candidates. Because I had not logged in to my account for ages, I first had to jump through many hoops to satisfy them I was not working for the Anonymous hackers’ group. I had of course forgotten my password and thinking it was Roscoe for my dog I tried a few versions of that before they locked me out and after more tedium which I will spare you involving two-factor authentication and the name of my high school English teacher (Elizabeth Barrow, if you’d like to use my account), I was able to narrow down the possibilities inside LinkedIn to five candidates. One was a licensed real estate agent operating out of Ohio, one was a youngish editor for a small press, one was an insurance claims adjuster, one was a banker, and another was a registered nurse.

Doctor. Nurse. Not an altogether unlikely pairing, as I’m sure you’ll agree. This woman, who on her professional account used the name, Fatima A. Burke, happened to live in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

Bingo. Had to be her.

I looked up the time difference and saw Freetown was four hours ahead of Northern Virginia. Nine at night for her, then.

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