Legal grey area – that’s Morrie’s favorite type of area.
I wrapped my arms around myself. “Youhaveto let me know what the police have on him.Please. I’m going crazy not knowing what’s going on. Iwaskidnapped, if you recall.”
“Yes, you were.” Jo reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “Are you sure you’re okay? That must’ve been scary.”
I nodded. I hated lying to my best friend, but Jo was a scientist. She liked everything to have a logical explanation. ‘My boyfriends are fictional heroes brought to life by a magical bookshop and my father is the poet Homer who fancies himself a vampire slayer’ was not going to fly with her. “I’m better when I’m not thinking about it. Which is why I was hoping you’d distract me with grisly autopsy details.”
“Fine.” Jo leaned forward. “You know I can’t resist talking about work, anyway. So here’s the lowdown. Kate disappeared last year. She was seen talking with a guy who fits Morrie’s description at a village pub a few hours before she got on a bus to the wilderness center. She was with a big group of blokes on a survival course as part of a company retreat, and the pub staff recall she seemed withdrawn, and the men didn’t talk to her unless it was to make lewd comments. She was the only woman in the group. On the last night of the retreat, she left her camp and was never seen again. A note pinned to her shelter – written in her own hand – let police to believe her death was a suicide. But then she showed up a week ago, murdered.”
Jo swallowed. “On her body was a business card that led the police and MI5 back to Morrie’s death faking business. There was some contamination of the crime scene, but shoe prints have been identified near the body that match Morrie’s signature broguesexactly, and I found dried mud on a pair of his beside Nevermore’s front door. In the lab I was able to match pollen in the mud with the unique flora of the wood – Morrie was at the crime scene.”
“Or someone wore his shoes there, to frame him.”
Jo shifted in her chair. “This is why I didn’t want to tell you this. I knew it would be upsetting to you. Look, according to your statement, Morrie doesn’t have an alibi for the day of the murder. You and Heathcliff were in the shop, and you said Morrie was down in London. We have CCTV footage of him arriving at Charing Cross, but we can’t confirm when he returned. It’s possible he went to London, then doubled back to Barsetshire Fells.”
“I’m sure as soon as the police find Morrie, he’ll be able to explain what he was doing in London and provide an alibi. He’s often there for business—”
“Mmmhmmm, an alibi for his not-totally-legal fake death business. That won’t be at all suspicious.” Jo pushed her mince pie away from her, even though she’d hardly eaten a bite. “There’s one more thing you should know. The blade that stabbed Kate was a letter opener, quite a distinctive one, shaped like a sword. We found it in a bin in Barset Reach the day after Kate’s body was discovered, covered in her blood. I lifted Morrie’s print from the handle. And look at this.”
Jo dug out her phone and flipped through to a picture taken at one of our many Friday night drinks. Jo, Morrie, and I stood in front of the blazing fire, dressed in ridiculous costumes. Jo pretended to faint while Morrie held a jewel-encrusted letter opener to my throat. “That’s theexactweapon we found. It didn’t just look like the letter opener you have at the shop. Itwasthe letter opener from the shop.”
I swallowed. Once. Twice. Three times.
Morrie’s print on the murder weapon.
Morrie doesn’t have an alibi for Kate’s murder.
Morrie’s shoes are covered with mud.
This doesn’t look good. In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d say Morrie did it.
Jo studied my face as I digested the information. Was that the look of a concerned friend, or was she seeing how I reacted, gauging if I was in on the crime? I shoved the thought away. Jo would tell me if I was in trouble here.
“Um…” I struggled to form words. “Is there… is there any evidence that supports my conviction that Morrie is innocent?”
“Actually, yes.” Relief crossed Jo’s face. “So, the face was pretty scraped up and decomposed, which doesn’t help with ID, but DNA came back positive – the body is definitely Kate Danvers, although she’s put on weight since she was last seen alive. The strangest thing is that she wasn’t killed by the stabbing. She died by ingesting poisonous mushrooms.”
“What?”
Jo nodded. “I know. Weird, right? You’d have thought the first thing she learned on that wilderness survival course was how to distinguish edible spores from the deadly ones. And there was something else weird, too. She lost a lot of blood – more than I’d expect from a knife wound inflicted post-mortem. I found two small puncture marks on her body, but I can’t tell if they’re related to the blood loss.
Puncture marks?My mind immediately went to Dracula, who was out there, getting stronger and closing in on me with every passing day. But that was crazy – the whole world didn’t revolve around me and my enemy. To think otherwise was pure selfishness. No, Kate Danvers was murdered by a person, not a vampire.
I tuned back into Jo “—the stabbing took place a few hours after death, probably even more. None of this exonerates Morrie, but it does show that this murder is more complex than it first appeared.”
“Any other physical evidence?”
“Yes. She’d been banged up pretty badly, but all the bruises had been administered post-mortem. The working theory is that the killer stabbed her at a remote site near the top of the ridge and then dragged her through the forest to the fallen log, but I can’t see that tracking with the pattern of bruising right now.”
Take that, Sherlock. I bet you couldn’t tell all that with your nineteenth-century methods. Modern science will prove you wrong yet.
Even though my mind was reeling, I squeezed my friend’s hand. “Thank you so much for telling me the truth, even though it was ugly. I can see how bad things look for Morrie, but I still believe he’s innocent.”
“I know, me too.” We held each other’s gaze, and I could sense Jo searching my features for some clue, some sign that I knew more than I revealed.
She knows something’s up.
That suspicion could come from anywhere. I was keeping several secrets from Jo. I wished I could break down and tell her the truth about who the guys really were and the strange things that happened in Nevermore Bookshop, and the ultimate danger of Dracula. But I knew that was a Pandora’s Box that once opened, couldn’t be closed. I’d never had a girlfriend like Jo before, and I wanted her to stay my friend. I was afraid that if I told her about the magical bookshop, she’d decide I was bonkers and never talk to me again.
