A Fatal Frame of Mind

Chapter Twenty-seven

“He’s the killer.”

Gus seriously considered ignoring Shawn’s declaration. All he wanted was a few minutes to close his eyes before dinner. And the room the hunchback had taken them to seemed to want the same thing. Its two queen beds were huge and firm and covered with deep down comforters. Its shutters were open, and the soothing sound of a fountain wafted through the soft air. And it was so large that Shawn’s voice seemed to be coming from miles away.

Still, the accusation was so outrageous that some kind of response seemed obligatory. Gus cracked open one eye. “The old guy?”

“Who else?” Shawn said.

“What do you mean who else?” Gus said. “It could have been anyone else. There are billions of people in this world, and the only ones we know for sure didn’t do it are you and me.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, my friend,” Shawn said. “Well, it’s the place where you are most currently wrong. If we wanted to go back through the catalog of all the places you’ve been wrong, we’d have to start with Mrs. Peyser’s first-grade class, where you thought you were putting your hand over your heart and pledging your achievements to the flag. But this is the big one.”

“I still think it would be better to pledge my achievements than just my allegiance,” Gus said. “That way I’m actually doing something for my country. And I don’t see how I’m wrong here.”

“Look back on everything that’s happened on this case so far,” Shawn said. “Who have we dealt with? Jules and Lassie, of course, but I think we can rule them out pretty safely. That guy from the museum.”

“Hugh Ralston, the executive director,” Gus said.

“Right,” Shawn said. “But he’s pretty boring. I mean, he works in a museum. He’s going to start killing people? Not on my watch. Who else does that leave? A bunch of uniformed cops, not one of whom we met more than once. And that trucker guy with the crazy wife who wanted us to wait on them. I don’t think so.”

Gus wanted to keep his head comfortably nestled among the down pillows. But the insanity of what Shawn was saying lifted him up like a possessed teenager levitating for the exorcist. “Those are just the people we’ve encountered,” Gus said. “Why does the killer have to be someone we’ve met before?”

“There are rules to this kind of thing,” Shawn said.

“You don’t believe in following rules,” Gus said.

“I told you, I don’t believe in man-made rules,” Shawn said. “But even I can’t ignore the immutable rules of the universe.”

“And which rule would this be?” Gus said. “Because I really don’t think that the key to this mystery lies in how many French fries I give you.”

“Think about it,” Shawn said. “Think back on all our cases. Has the killer ever turned out to be someone we hadn’t met in the course of the investigation?”

Gus cast his mind back over the hundreds of crimes they’d investigated. “What about that serial killer, Mr. Yang?” he said. “Not only hadn’t you met Yang earlier in the case-you didn’t even know she was a female.”

“Really?” Shawn said. “That’s the best you can come up with? A serial killer I was in phone contact with for ages before she revealed herself? Of course we’d met. Just not face to face.”

Gus wasn’t sure that counted, but he decided to let it go. There had to be another example. He just couldn’t think of one. “That doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen,” he said finally.

“Think of it this way,” Shawn said. “Let’s say you’re watching Scooby-Doo-and I’ve seen you, so don’t bother denying it. Anyway, the gang tracks down the ghost that’s been haunting the old circus, they set a trap, and bang! They grab him and pull off his mask. Who’s under there? Well, it’s the developer who wants to put a shopping mall on the fairgrounds, of course. But how would you feel if they whipped off the mask and underneath was a guy you’d never seen before?”

“This is not a Scooby-Doo episode,” Gus said.

“Granted, our current adventure may lack the mastery and grace of classic stories like ‘Hassle in the Castle’ or ‘Foul Play in Funland,’ ” Shawn said. “But as I’ve always said, aim high.”

Had it not seemed so far off the point, Gus might have noted that the only time Shawn had ever told anyone to aim high was in the last minutes of a seventh-grade dodgeball game when he was unsuccessfully imploring Malachi Rabinowitz to throw the ball over, rather than at, his face.

“You can’t accuse this man of being a killer just because no one else we’ve met has seemed interesting enough,” Gus said.

“That’s far from the only evidence I have,” Shawn said.

“You’re half right,” Gus said. “It certainly is far from evidence. What else do you have?”

Shawn waved his arms around the room. “How about this secret villain’s lair hidden behind a fake mountain?”

“Apparently it’s only secret if you can’t find the front gate,” Gus said. “I don’t think SPECTRE’s volcano had a street address.”

“Or this level of guest amenities.” Shawn checked out the grooming supplies that sat on a low table under a mirror. There was a matched set of razor, bowl, and shaving brush, all elegantly carved out of ivory. “Somehow I doubt this guy keeps the TV remote on a chain so people can’t walk off with it. And I looked in the robes. There’s no note about how we can buy one at the front desk but if we steal it we’ll get charged ninety-five thousand dollars.”

“Yes, he’s rich and he’s generous,” Gus said. “That must mean he’s a murderer.”

“What about his name?” Shawn said. He rapped his fingers against a framed diploma that hung on the wall, proclaiming in Latin to any guest who cared that their host had a doctorate in art history from Harvard University. Then he took a second look at it, as if noticing something interesting, before turning back to Gus. “Who names their kid Flaxman Low if they don’t want him to grow up to be some kind of villain? And then there’s his henchman.”

“You mean his servant?”

“Whatever,” Shawn said. “He’s got a one-eyed, gun-wielding hunchback working for him. Apparently hiring an albino with barbed wire wrapped around his midsection was too subtle for the guy. Either that or he was afraid of the advocacy groups. After every action movie in the eighties had an albino villain, they started to get a little testy.”

“If hiring the handicapped makes you a villain, then we should be focusing our investigation on the March of Dimes,” Gus said.

“I would, but we haven’t met any of them yet, either,” Shawn said. “And that brings us back to Flaxman Low, murderer.”

“You keep saying that, but you don’t have any evidence,” Gus insisted.

Shawn stared at him. “Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?”

“All of them,” Gus said. “With a mounting sense of dread that you’ve gone insane.”

Shawn crossed the room in a few large strides, and for a moment Gus thought he was going to attack him physically.

“Look around you,” he said. “The hair, the lair, the henchman. It even fits structurally.”

“What do you mean ‘structurally’?”

“Look at the events of the last day or so,” Shawn said. “We were there at the crime scene, we had rising tension as Kitteredge was interrogated, and then it was chase, chase, chase,” he said. “Now it’s twenty-four hours later, and we’ve got a break from the tension. We’re in a safe place with a good friend. According to every movie Alfred Hitchcock ever made, this friend has to be a bad guy.”

“I thought we were in a Hardy Boys book,” Gus said.

“It seemed like it at the time, but apparently we’ve been upgraded,” Shawn said. “Now we’re being lured to our doom by Eva Marie Saint. Except that Eva Marie was a lot prettier and wore her hair shorter.”

“Does that inflamed brain of yours have any idea of why he murdered Filkins?”

“No, but if we pay attention in the next few minutes, we may be able to put it together,” Shawn said.

“How do you figure that?” Gus said, wishing he had never lifted his head from the pillows. At least that was one thing that could be easily remedied. He lay back down and closed his eyes.

Then he heard the sound of a throat being cleared. And judging from the deep growling noise that came from the throat, it didn’t belong to Shawn. Gus sat up and saw the hunchback standing in the doorway.

“Dinner is served,” Malko said.

“That’s how,” Shawn said.