Rules for Perfect Murders by Peter Swanson

Author:Peter Swanson [Peter Swanson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571342396
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2020-06-13T16:00:00+00:00

ON THE DRIVE BACK to Boston, Gwen told me about her day spent wrangling with the local police department, who didn’t seem to consider the death of Elaine Johnson a priority. Still, she’d managed to get a team of forensic investigators to go over the house, in particular focusing on the handcuffs and the eight books in the bookcase downstairs.

I asked her if I’d get a chance to look at the books, maybe see where they’d come from.

“They bagged them as evidence, but I’ll have the photographs sent to you. Would you know if they came from Old Devils?”

“Maybe, if I looked at them. All the books that wind up on the shelf are given a price by me, or by one of my employees, in the upper right-hand corner of the first page. But some books never make the shelves; they get sold online directly, and unless I remember a specific copy of a specific book, then I’m not going to recognize them.”

“But if Charlie came into your store, and bought the books, or some of them, then …”

“It would mean he’s a customer.”

“Right,” Gwen said.

We had just crossed over from Maine into New Hampshire, and it had gotten dark. Gwen’s face was periodically illuminated by passing cars.

“I forgot to ask, were there any witnesses?”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“I mean, did you find a witness who saw someone, or someone’s car, outside of Elaine Johnson’s house around the time of the murder?”

“Oh, that. No. I questioned the neighbor across the street who reported that Elaine’s mail hadn’t been picked up, but she hadn’t seen 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.

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