Somebody Killed His Editor: Holmes & Moriarity, Book 1 (2 page)

Rachel’s idea of ambush was different from mine—less likely to land me in Tehachapi Correctional Institution. In my best consummate professional manner—whatever the hell that meant—I was going to propose a brand new and absolutely brilliant series. Now all I had to do was come up with the idea for one.

“This is the perfect opportunity to try something new,” she urged.

“I don’t want to try anything new.”

“Well, you should. You’re a thirty-something-year-old man writing about a seventy-year-old spinster and her cat. That
cannot
be healthy.”

I was so flattered that Rachel thought I was still in my thirties that I didn’t put up half the fight I should have.

I managed to locate one Reebok tangled in a knot of silken jockstrap (what had that kid in Saks been smoking?), found the other rudely nudging the crotch of a pair of Kenneth Cole trousers, and managed to exchange my footwear in a kind of squatting fumble, sort of like a Russian dancer after a few vodkas. As I balanced there, one hand planted in wet pine needles, one hand tugging on my boot, I caught a flash of color out of the corner of my eye.

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Josh Lanyon

I sank back—barely noticing that I was sitting on a pinecone—and stared. A small building sat in a clearing a few yards from me. It looked like a miniature Japanese teahouse. The shoji screen door hung drunkenly from its frame, and a bundle of rags spilled out onto the ground.

I felt the hair prickle on the back of my neck. Suddenly the woods seemed deadly silent. A single diamond drop of rain fell soundlessly from the branch in front of me. Nothing else moved.

Slowly, I got to my feet and limped past a bronze statue of the seated Buddha. As I drew near the teahouse with its broken door, the pile of rags came into sharp focus. I could pick out the glint of gold, splashes of purple and rumpled khaki, and then I knew for sure that I was looking at clothes.

Clothes and hair.

A body.

I stopped a few feet away. It was a woman. A woman with blonde hair tumbled across her face. She appeared to be wearing plum-colored pajamas beneath a khaki trench coat. Her feet were bare. Small, bare blue-white feet with red painted nails and a gold toe ring.

I took another step forward and then stopped. She wasn’t breathing. She wasn’t moving. She wasn’t the right color. You don’t have to write crime novels to recognize a dead body when you see one.

A really good clue was the broken and bloody tree branch lying an inch from the tip of my boot.

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I was out in the middle of nowhere with a corpse.

On the bright side,
I
was not the corpse.

For a second or two—or three—maybe four—I stood there showing none of the cool presence of mind demonstrated by Miss Butterwith in her forty-eight cases.

“Oh,
fuck
,” I whispered. Usually I’m better at dialog.

You would think that someone who made his living off death and danger would be better equipped to deal. Not the case, sad to say. After what felt like a very long time, but probably wasn’t (one hopes)
that
long, I started looking around myself for…what? A convenient telephone booth? A cop? Miss Butterwith?

I saw my suitcase lying open a few feet away. I saw the empty road beyond. The road seemed very empty and the woods seemed dark and silent.

Of course it could have been a natural death. That broken branch could have come down in the wind and rain and conked the unknown woman.

And then bounced off her rubber head and landed two feet away?

Yeah, right. I was trying to convince myself of this at the same time I was working out that nobody, probably not even people desperate to escape a writing retreat, go for long strolls in PJs and bare feet in the middle of November.

So…chances were good that she was not the victim of a freak accident. So…this might actually be a crime scene I was standing on.

I took an apologetic step backwards.

If it was a crime scene, it was not unreasonable to assume that there might be a criminal lurking somewhere. Somewhere nearby. I stared at the teahouse. A few feet to my left, a branch snapped. I jerked around. I couldn’t tell if the wind was stirring the bushes or…

Movement in my peripheral vision. I turned back to the teahouse, and as I stared, it seemed to me that I glimpsed something black move behind the torn screen. Was someone standing inside the doorway, watching me? Or was that motion an effect of shadows and light? Lots of shadows and not much light. I strained to see more closely.

“Hello?” I called too loudly.

The rain pattered down softly on the leaves and roof. I glanced at the laughing Buddha. He looked less jolly—in fact, he seemed to be sweating bullets.

Josh Lanyon

Writers are typically…observers. We’re not action heroes. I mean, I don’t even
write
about action heroes. I took another step backwards, then another—and nearly tripped over a second tree branch. I caught my balance, turned and sprinted the few feet to my suitcase, throwing myself down beside my bags, stuffing my things back inside, fumbling to lock it. Getting to my feet, I slung my carryall over my shoulder and made for the open road.

You know that thing about Death Be Not Proud? Well, Fear Be Not Proud either. And Fear Be Not Elegant. What Fear be is stumbling, bumbling flight, crashing through brush, slip-sliding on pine needles, sloshing through puddles that are always deeper than you expect.

I burst out onto the open road and paused, chest heaving as I tried to catch my breath.

No one seemed to be following me.

It—
she
—had to have come from the lodge, right? She couldn’t have walked from town. She was wearing pajamas, so she had probably come out here in the middle of the night.
Why?
It was late afternoon; why hadn’t anyone noticed she was missing? Why wasn’t this place crawling with people looking for her?

It was just me and… Well, hopefully it was just me. I stared. Nothing moved in the dark impenetrability of the woods, yet I
felt
like I was being followed. I
felt
like I was being watched.

And standing out in the middle of an open road made it very easy to watch me. To pursue me, if it came down to it.

I jogged across the road and ducked into the trees on the other side. Standing in the shadows, I gazed out at the woods opposite.

Nothing happened.

It was so quiet I could hear my wristwatch ticking. How long was I going to wait? Till something happened? I didn’t
want
anything to happen. Enough had happened already. Much better to hightail it out of there before the next thing happened. Especially if it was going to happen to me.

Picking up my bags again, I started race-walking towards the hill.

What else could go wrong? Did they have bears up here? I knew my California history, even if I did set all my own books in picturesque English villages with horrendous crime rates, and it seemed to me that this area had once been populated by grizzly bears and cowboys and other antisocial carnivores.

A covey of quail burst from the bush in front of me. I yelped. However, being short of breath it came out more like a balloon losing air fast. The quail vanished into the wet silence, wings beating, making weird twittery sounds.

My thoughts kept circling back to the woman lying dead in the woods. How long had she been there?

Not too long, from the looks of things. Even though we try to keep the forensic details to a tasteful minimum in cozy mysteries, I’d watched plenty of episodes of
Bones
. And not merely because of David Boreanaz.

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Somebody Killed His Editor

At the crest of the hill I paused for another rest. Safe to say, I would not be winning the President’s Challenge this year. My calf muscles were burning. I had a stitch in my side. My back was starting to twinge in that ominous way. Unbelievable to think I was struggling so hard to get someplace I hadn’t wanted to go to begin with.

Below, I could see a rambling old-fashioned log-and-stone house and several outlying buildings and cabins. Lights twinkled in the many windows of the main house. A thread of pale smoke rose cheerily from separate chimneys. In the scattered cabins, the windows were mostly dark.

Beyond the lodge were the vineyards, rippling in the wind, with an eerie glint of red or blue or silver flickering here and there amidst the yellowing leaves—something metallic to discourage birds, I guessed.

The valley was encircled by a forbidding wall of mountains wreathed in storm clouds. Lovely. The kind of place the Donner Party might choose to vacation.

I dropped my bags then and there. Not that putting my back out wouldn’t have been the perfect touch to this weekend. What the hell was I thinking buying all this stuff? Wasting money when I was technically unemployed? Even the mental picture of bears dancing around the woods in my brand-new Calvin Klein briefs couldn’t convince me to haul my bags farther. New underwear. The sure sign of desperation. I hadn’t bought new underwear since…

Yeah. Like the Road Not Traveled wasn’t bad enough, I had to take a detour down Memory Lane.

Nope. Not going to happen. Gritting my teeth against the torture of heels rubbed raw—and memory rubbed rawer—I forged on.

And on.

At last the stone-and-log homestead loomed before me like a painted backdrop on the set of
Bonanza.

Chimes made of rusted cowbells jangled on the breeze as I made it up the steps to the long porch. Pushing open the heavy front door, I nearly swooned with the combination of warmth and the homely scents of firewood and cooking.

I half-collapsed on what appeared to be an abandoned—unless you counted the stuffed moose head mounted on the wall—front desk. There was a silver bell on the polished desk. I rang it.

Silence followed the cheerful ring.

“Hello?”

From down the hall I could hear voices and general merriment…like a party. Weren’t these people supposed to be writing? How could anyone get any work done with that racket going on?

In a kind of sleepwalker’s shuffle, I headed down a short hallway carpeted with faded Indian rugs. I caught a glimpse of myself in a long horizontal mirror and got a funhouse view of Quasimodo’s kid brother. It was almost a relief to realize that it was me—I’d have been terrified to be alone with that creature.

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Josh Lanyon

A few yards farther down I found myself outside what appeared to be a meeting room. Huge picture windows looked out over a long deck and the vineyards. The mountains beyond could have been a painted backdrop. Open timber beams disappeared in the shadows of a soaring ceiling. An immense stone fireplace crackled cheerfully.

The room was packed with people, and everyone seemed to be talking at once—which, as I recalled, is pretty much how conferences go. A lot of the people were female and under thirty. Despite the chilly weather there were a lot of bare arms and bare legs. I’d seen fewer bare midriffs at a belly-dancing competition. That, of course, was the chick-lit contingent. They wrote mysteries called things like
A Whole
Latte Death
and
Death Wore a Little Black Dress.
With their cartoon covers and glam author shots they’d managed to turn murder and mayhem into something quite…frivolous.

An angelically beautiful guy with golden curls and a guitar sat in front of the fireplace. He wasn’t playing—maybe it was a prop. I made a mental note to put in a request for “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore”.

I located Rachel almost immediately by the ring of spellbound people who appeared to be staring at their shoes. Rachel is five feet tall without heels and imposingly beautiful—like one of those tiny Mandarin empresses. Thumbelina meets
Vogue.
Despite the lack of inches she’s not easy to overlook. She was chatting with a knot of people, not one familiar to me. Rachel’s crystal-clear Asian-English accent carried.

“Murder is
always
hot
. Always
topical. Auden said it best. ‘The murder mystery is the dialectic of innocence and guilt.’”

Shoot me now.

To her far left was Steven Krass, who I recognized from his photos in
Mystery Scene.
Tall, blond and handsome—the kind of recruit you seek when you’re looking to people your Fatherland.

He was talking to a lithe and lean man dressed in black, sporting one of those dapper little mustache and beard combos like a young Spanish grandee.

Oh. Mah. Gah.
As the natives say. J.X. Moriarity. How perfect. How…ironic. How perfectly ironic.

The last time J.X. and I had crossed swords—and other body parts—was at the start of my career. By some ill luck, here he was in at the kill. For some reason the image clearest in my brain was the Full Living Color memory of his tanned and taut ass slipping out of my hotel bed and into a pair of Levi’s.

Rachel turned and spotted me. “Oh,” she said. It was more of a gasp really—like the kind of sound the Queen of England would make if someone slapped her on the back and called her Liz.

The people with her—she’s always got a string of hopeful followers—turned to see what had alarmed their deity. It was like in a film where everyone zeros in on the newcomer and the soundtrack fades and action decelerates to slow mo—usually to be followed by a hail of bullets and the demise of everyone wearing white.

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Somebody Killed His Editor

While Rachel did not actually pull an Uzi out of her Prada bag, she was not wearing her happy face as she detached herself from the others, pushing her way through to me. Grabbing me by the arm, she hissed in my ear, “Christopher, I told you to dress
up.
”

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The implication being that this was how I usually looked?

I freed myself from her warden’s clutch. Like the rival villain in a penny dreadful, I hissed back, “For your information, the bridge is out. I had to walk all the way from the main road.”