Mike Ashley - The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes and Impossible Mysteries

“Let’s go meet the grieving spouse.”

Trey Grandmaison looked appropriately startled to see Detectives Murex and Knuckles patiently waiting for him at his Manchester Airport gate.

“We’re very sorry to hear about your wife,” said Ray Murex.

“A true tragedy,” added Bob Knuckles.

“We’d like to clear up a few things. The airport has allowed us to use one of their offices.”

Trey Grandmaison followed them willingly, but pensively.

“Let me start with what we know for certain,” Murex told him after they took seats. “We know that John Doom died in your gray room while you were in Richmond, and was left there for several days while you were presumably absent. We also know that your wife did not expire as a result of sleep paralysis.”

Trey Grandmaison looked at both men by turns. “Sleep paralysis is a medical condition my wife had for years,” he said gravely. “This time, it killed her.”

“It did not kill her. Therefore, you did.”

“I did not! Look, Effie developed narcolepsy. Probably from too much RVing in altered brainwave states. Her doctor can produce the medical records proving it.”

“The reason we know sleep paralysis did not kill your wife is that tape she made.”

A vein pulsed in Grandmaison’s forehead. “Tape?”

“The one recorded in-flight,” Knuckles put in. “You didn’t think we knew about that, did you?”

“I discarded that tape in LA.” The vein continued pulsing.

“Not surprising. Loving husband that you are. Of course you’d throw out your wife’s last recorded words-except she didn’t record them. You did.”

Trey Grandmaison almost cracked a grin. He turned it into a grimace. “I wish now I had saved that tape. We could disprove your theory electronically.”

“Yeah,” Murex went on. “Too bad. But let me continue. The reason we know your wife did not die of sleep paralysis any more than she or John Doom died while remote viewing something that frightened them to death is that if Mrs Grandmaison had been suffering sleep paralysis at the time, she would not have been able to record her experience. Sleep paralysis doesn’t just freeze the major muscles in the body, but the vocal cords as well. A person suffering from SP can’t speak. If they can’t speak, they can’t describe menacing black clouds threatening to murder them. Can they, Mr Grandmaison?”

Trey Grandmaison said nothing. But that vein pulsed more strongly.

“You didn’t think it through very thoroughly, did you?” Knuckles pressed. “You knew you couldn’t pull that remote viewing Hell smokescreen twice. So you had to top it. But plausibly. Maybe Mrs G. did suffer from SP. But we all know she didn’t die of it.”

Gray eyes opaque, Grandmaison said, “No one knows that.”

“I know what you’re thinking. If a person dies of fright as result of sleep paralysis, only they and God would know the truth.”

Trey Grandmaison threw up his hands. “I wish I had saved that tape. It would resolve everything.”

“Fortunately for us, but unfortunately for you, LAPD made a dupe. And here it is.” Knuckles slid a microcassette recorder across the table. He hit play.

“2004 8547 January 31st. 2004 8547… I am in a dark room. I can see a door, but it is closed. Something is stirring above the door, where the wall joins the ceiling. Ominous. Black. A cloud…”

Murex stopped the tape. “Fair job of masking your voice. How hard do you think it will be to match your voiceprint to that recording?”

Trey Grandmaison turned pale and then flushed. He lunged for the recorder, fumbled it open and almost got the minicassette into his mouth before Murex and Knuckles fought it out of his hands.

After they had cuffed him, and his rights were read, Bob Knuckles asked, “Would you say that we’ve got your number, or your coordinates?”

Ray Murex said, “You can tell us about it, if you’d like.”

Grandmaison surprised them. He did exactly that.

“John Doom was a student of mine. One of my earliest students. He kept taking my courses and then he started teaching RV under another name. Using my coordinates. It was getting out of hand. He’d steal my students from my own classes. Charge half what I did. Between him and the sagging economy, I was having a hard time. Something had to be done.”

“So you decided to do away with him?” Murex prompted.

“That was Effie’s idea. She came home from Richmond on the pretext of giving Doom some private training and while he was insession, she sat on his chest, holding a pillow over his face until he suffocated. I showed her how to hold his arms down with padded knees so he wouldn’t bruise.”

“In other words,” Knuckles said, “she burked him.”

Murex looked blank. “Burked?”

Grandmaison nodded sullenly. “An old assassination technique. Leaves no marks. Looks just like natural causes. Effie had him fast for four days beforehand, promising that it would improve his session work. That was so his bowels wouldn’t empty and create a sanitary problem while the body cooled in my gray room.”

“Except the body was flipped over after telltale pinpoint haemorrhages appeared in the whites of the eyeballs,” said Murex. “Either his eye capillaries burst while he was smothered, or gravity did it. Either way, the position of the body gave the show away. You can skip the part about how you staged the death scene in the hotel room. We figured that out. Why did you do your wife?”

“She was starting to become unglued. Guilt. Fear. I don’t know. But I knew she couldn’t hold it in forever. So while everyone was asleep on the plane, I did the same thing to her she did to Doom.”

“What goes around, comes around,” clucked Knuckles.

The throbbing vein in Trey Grandmaison’s forehead became still. “It was easy. I booked seats in the last row. There was no one for six or seven rows around of us. And they were dead to the world.”

“You’re kind of a control freak, aren’t you?” Knuckles pressed. “That’s why you staged the death scene using TIRV class materials, isn’t it? To baffle us and provide you the opportunity to send us off on wild-goose chases?”

Grandmaison shrugged. “It’s elementary psychological warfare. What kind of murderer would leave a trail leading directly to his front door?”

“One who was drummed out of the Army for reasons of mental instability. You were so wound up in your Stargate razzle-dazzle, you didn’t think we’d look beyond it. You were dead wrong.”

Murex frowned. “So you killed this rival Doom because he was stealing your coordinates.”

“They’re worth thousands of dollars,” he said leadenly. “And they’re my livelihood.”

“But they’re only numbers. You told me so yourself.”

Trey Grandmaison’s composed face wavered, recovered, then fell completely apart. His voice broke.

“It’s all I salvaged from my military career,” he sobbed. “My business was everything I had. You don’t know remote viewing, so you wouldn’t understand.”

Ray Murex stood up.

“Maybe not. But I understand observable justice. Let’s go.”

J.A. (Joe) Konrath (b. 1970) is the author of Whiskey Sour (2004) and its sequels which feature forty-something Chicago police detective Jacqueline (“Jack”) Daniels. She also features in several short stories including the following. Although he has only been writing professionally for three years, Konrath has already been nominated for several awards and won the Derringer Award in 2005 for his short story “The Big Guys”. Konrath has also had stints as a stand-up improv comedian, and you can see some of that living-on-your-wits in the way Daniels has to think fast yet stay sane in this, her first locked-room mystery.