He didn’t bother taking notes as I talked. He listened attentively but without interruption as I made my way through the whole thing, ending with a detailed description of my encounter with Detectives Jamison and Shandrow earlier that afternoon. When I went to refill our coffee cups, I returned to find him staring at the office space at the far end of the room. It consisted of an old wooden teacher’s desk that Grandma Hudson had liberated from a secondhand store somewhere in front of a bank of used and abused secondhand filing cabinets.
“Is that your computer?” Charles asked, nodding toward my desk and my pride and joy, a tiny ten-inch Toshiba Portégé. The laptop sat in isolated splendor on the desk’s otherwise empty surface. Having learned my lesson about allowing other people, namely Faith, handle accounting records for my business, I do those functions myself now, on the computer. The Toshiba also holds the first few chapters of my several unfinished novels.
“That’s it,” I said.
“Mind if I take a look?”
“Sure.”
Charles walked over to the desk, slipped on a pair of gloves, and flipped up the lid on the computer. It lit up right away. He leaned over, studied the screen, and then turned back to me with a puzzled expression on his face. “Dead men don’t lie?” he asked.
“It’s a story,” I explained. “Fiction. It’s the title for one of the novels I’m working on.”
“You leave your computer sitting here like this?”
I shrugged. “Why not? I’m the only one who lives here.”
“You may be the only person who lives here, but you’re not the only person who has access.”
That was a scary thought and one I had never considered. Since I was downstairs all day, every day, I never locked the place up except on those very rare occasions when I was out of town.
“You’re saying one of my people may have been coming up here and messing with my computer behind my back?”
Charles didn’t deign to respond. “Tell me about this mystery convention you went to. What’s it called again?”
“Bouchercon.”
“How did you register for it?”
“On line,” I answered, nodding toward the computer. “On that.”
Charles sat down in front of the computer and made himself at home. He typed in a few keystrokes. “Yup,” he said. “Here it is in your browser history, the Bouchercon Web site. What about your hotel? What was that again, the Talisman didn’t you say?”
I nodded. The man may not have been taking notes during my long recitation of woes, but he had clearly been paying attention.
“Is there anything in here about your dealings with your ex?”
I nodded again. “There’s a file called Faithless Faith,” I said sheepishly. “I thought that writing it down would help me put it in the past.”
“Did it?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No such luck.”
“Unfortunately,” Charles said, “Faithless Faith seems to have found a way back into your present. What about your dealings with that developer? Are there any records of your dealings with Mr. Jones in here?”
“Yes,” I replied. “There have been a number of e-mail exchanges about that.”
“In other words, this computer makes your whole life an open book for anyone who cares to take a look-see. Do you happen to have one of those floppy disk drives around here?”
“It’s in the top drawer on the right along with a box of extra floppies. I use those to make backup copies of the business records on the computer’s hard drive. Why?”
“I want you to come over here right now and make copies of all your essential business files and anything else you want to keep, including those unfinished novels. After that, we’re going to reformat your computer. When the cops come back with a search warrant—and I’m saying, when not if—they’ll grab your computer and use everything on it to put you away. Not having your files won’t stop them, but it’ll sure as hell slow them down. Reformatting is the best way to get rid of everything you don’t want anyone else to see. If they ask, tell them your computer crashed and reformatting was the only way you could reboot it. You get busy copying your files. In the meantime, give me the keys to your car.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because you’re caught up in a complicated plot here, Mr. Dixon,” he said, holding out his hand, “and you’re about to go down for it.”
Reluctantly, I fished my car keys out of my pocket and handed them over. It seemed to take ages to go through the computer, copying the necessary files. The whole time I was doing so, I couldn’t believe any of this was happening. If Charles Rickover was right, one of the people who worked for me—someone I trusted—was trying to frame me for killing Faith. So who was it?
Charles came back upstairs a long time later. He was empty-handed and his face was grim. “Just as I thought,” he said. “There’s a bloody bat hidden under the mat in the trunk of your car. I believe I have a pretty good idea about where that blood might have come from.”
“Did you get rid of it?” I asked shakily.
“Hell no,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it’s the murder weapon. I’m not touching it, and neither are you.”
“You mean we’re just going to let the cops find it?”