The Jazz Cat Murders: An Agatha & Smitty Murder Mystery by Barton Sara & Barton Sara M

Author:Barton, Sara & Barton, Sara M.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 26

“Can you describe the thing?”

“It looked like a voodoo doll. It had hair like mine and this horrible little face.”

“You were scared,” I said. “Why wouldn’t you be?”

“A couple of the girls said I was making a big deal out of nothing. But it didn’t feel like nothing to me, Mary.”

“Of course it didn’t. You were supposed to be scared, Fawn. That was the intention. Did you ever have the sense that someone was stalking you at the camp?”

“Are you kidding? I was so creeped out that I wanted to call my parents and have them come pick me up. But Ellen McCaffrey and Denver Corbis talked me out of that.”

“Both of them?”

“Yes. They heard me scream and ran to the cabin to see what was wrong. I showed them the voodoo doll. They told me it was just someone’s sick little joke.”

“And now they’re dead,” I sighed. “Did you have any contact with Sadie?”

“Sure. She was one of my bunkmates.”

That surprised me. “Did you get along with her?”

“Absolutely. She was one of few the people who took me seriously. She didn’t think it was a joke. And she sure didn’t think it was funny. She said it was creepy.”

“Fawn, do you know if anything happened to Sadie at that camp?”

“Yes. She said that when she was in the latrine, she heard someone talking about her. The person said she was a real whore because she and Jasper Weinstein were getting it on in the woods.”

“Did she recognize the voice?”

“No,” she said. “That’s the odd thing. She said the voice didn’t sound human.”

“Could it have been a synthesized sound, something meant to mimic human speech?”

There was silence on the other end of the phone for a few long moments. When she spoke again, she seemed almost relieved.

“You mean like the weird sound I heard? Maybe.” I heard her expel a long breath. “That means it was just a harmless prank.”

“No, it was never harmless. I think you and Sadie were supposed to drop out of the competition.”

“But why?”

“We’re still trying to understand the motive for that. Maybe you were stalked by someone who wanted to win. Was there anyone who seemed aggressively competitive?”

“Yes, but it wasn’t anyone who stood a chance of winning, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“What do you mean?”

“There was this guy…I can’t remember his name. He was weird. He kept trying to convince us that he was going to be a hot shot record producer.”

“He intended to become a producer, not a performer?”

That seemed unusual to me. Why would someone go to the trouble of attending a jazz camp if he didn’t intend to have a career as a musician?

“What kind of musical background did he have?”

“He didn’t really. He was some kind of computer nerd who was convinced that he could create jazz compositions by programming his computer to do the work.”

“Using artificial intelligence?” That was all the rage these days, wasn’t it?

“Maybe. I didn’t really get what he was talking about. He was so full of himself that I stopped listening to him.

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