Heather Graham - Wicked Deeds

“Yes, sir,” Benedict said.

“Stay, will you? These special agents might want the footage slowed down.”

There was only one real agent there at the moment—Griffin. But he didn’t say anything and Vickie kept quiet as well.

“We have footage from the opening at eleven o’clock all the way through the night,” Benedict explained. “So, it would take hours to watch it all.”

“Go ahead, start at the beginning,” Griffin told him. “I’ll have you speed it up—but please, Detective Morris, Officer Benedict, please let us know if you see someone coming or going that we should know about.”

“Of course,” Morris told them.

They began to watch the footage. They saw Gary Frampton, the owner, opening the door and looking out on the day, then closing it again. His daughter, Alice, arrived. A small cluster of men and women who’d been identified as kitchen staff showed up. Then later, Lacey Shaw, the Poe lover/gift shop manager, and then their waiter from the night before, whose full name was Jon Skye. More staff ambled on in. Then came the customers.

“There! Stop it. Back up a bit!” Morris told Benedict.

The young officer did as he was told. Morris leaned in to the screen, pointing at people as he said, “There. Naturally there is a major Poe literary society here, a national Poe society and others. Among them is one actually called the Blackbird Society, and they’re dedicated to all things Poe. Franklin Verne belonged nominally to a number of societies, and among them was the Blackbird Society. That woman there, Liza Harcourt, is the president. The man at her side is Alistair Malcolm, vice president of the society, and with them is...” He paused, staring at the screen.

“That’s Brent Whaley,” Office Benedict said. “Another writer. He’s probably best known in science fiction circles, but he loves horror and Poe. Oh, and he belongs to several societies, the Poe one here, and also an H. P. Lovecraft one up somewhere in the northeast, probably Rhode Island, where Lovecraft was from and where he’s buried.”

They all looked curiously at Officer Benedict.

“You have great information,” Griffin told him.

Benedict flushed and shrugged. “My parents are kind of armchair members. They pay their dues and they love to read all the different stories and articles that go out. They’re just kind of homebodies.”

“They all went in together,” Morris noted. “I’ve met Liza and Malcolm, just not Brent Whaley.”

“Well, they must be friends. They’re society friends, at least,” Benedict said.

Other diners came and went. Benedict sped up the recording, and people on the screen began to look like little ants.

Liza left the restaurant at about three thirty in the afternoon.

Malcolm left a few minutes later.

Brent Whaley didn’t seem to leave.

“Take it all the way to the next morning,” Griffin asked.

They watched as the evening diners—including Vickie and Griffin themselves—came and went. They watched as the staff left, including their waiter, Jon Skye, gift-store maven Lacey Shaw and finally Alice Frampton with her father, Gary. Then nothing. Just a few late-night stragglers walking past, but the front door didn’t open again, and the time stamp on the video rolled into the next day.

“Did you see Brent Whaley leave?” Griffin asked, looking at the others.

“Let me run the footage back,” Benedict said.

Morris pointed at the screen when a large group was leaving together. “Is that Whaley there? I think it’s the same man—the top of his head appears to be the same. But maybe not.”

“You have to be right,” Benedict said. “Yeah, that has to be him. He’s just surrounded by that big crowd—looks like it was a rehearsal dinner for a wedding. Guess Brent got into the middle of it.”

“Maybe—or maybe not,” Griffin murmured.

“We’ll find out. Because if he was still in the restaurant... I guess we’ll pick up Brent Whaley. If he tells us he walked out in a crowd...we’ll know for sure. But even with the cameras, there are things that can be missed. And there is the delivery door... Oh, we’ll be really nice. We’ll ask for help from him,” Morris said wearily. He shook his head. “Would one writer kill another? Out of jealousy, anger or a perceived insult?”

Griffin looked at Vickie. “I don’t think it involved writers, but... ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’” he said.

“Oh, yeah, man! I read that one,” Office Benedict said, enthused. “So cold! So precise... But our victim wasn’t walled in.”

“Poe liked to wall people in, huh?” Morris asked, shaking his head. “‘The Black Cat.’ He liked burying people alive, too. ‘The Premature Burial’—and others, I’m sure.”

“Everyone is a Poe expert,” Griffin murmured, looking at Vickie a little bit baffled. She had to smile. “Detective, Mrs. Verne said that you took her husband’s desktop computer. Have you been able to find anything on it, any references to him planning to meet up with anyone—anything at all?”

“Our tech people are on it—and they’re good,” Morris assured him.

“I’m sure they are,” Griffin said. “We’ll be in touch then,” he said. “Will you let me know if you’re able to find Brent Whaley?”

When they left a few minutes later, Vickie whispered to Griffin, “That really was a great rendition of ‘The Raven’ you gave earlier.”

He laughed, squeezing her hand and smiling at her. “Yeah? Well...”

He looked away. Something was bothering him, she thought. “My turn,” she said. “What? What’s going on?”

“I saw him.”

“Him—who?”

“Him—Poe. Edgar Allan. He was at the burial ground.”

“The ghost of?” Vickie asked, frowning.

“Looked just like Poe—and disappeared in the wink of an eye. In my experience that means, A, I’ve worked at this job too long, B, there’s a really amazing magician at work in Baltimore, or, C, the ghost of the master of horror and mystery himself, Edgar Allan Poe, is walking among us!”

3

Vickie stood on North Amity Street, looking at the building that Edgar Allan Poe had once called home.

She was on her own; Griffin had headed to the morgue with Carl Morris. The medical examiner—Dr. Myron Hatfield—was going to start right in on Franklin Verne.

With the uproar in the city over the very unusual passing of such a man, it was imperative that he give a cause of death as quickly as possible. He had already been approached by various media outlets, of course.

He’d said he could not give out cause until he had received results on every test that must be considered when such a death had occurred.

Bravo, Myron! Vickie had thought. She was sure that certain things might quickly be obvious. She was glad that the man intended to be thorough—and that he wouldn’t be pressured into speaking before he was ready.

Morris had, she realized, kept a number of pieces of information from the press. There was no mention of the dead blackbirds found by him, nor the little souvenir-style raven Verne had been holding so tightly in his hand.

Vickie looked up at the house. She had downloaded and printed some information about the residence while at the police station.

While the home wasn’t furnished, it was on the National Registry of Historic Places, and, according to her reading, very much the same as it had been during the years Poe had lived there between 1833 and 1835. A Poe society had struggled long and hard to preserve the building and had managed to do so. Through time—and due to the expense of keeping up the old property—city organizations took over. Now Poe Baltimore, an organization dedicated to keeping alive the brilliance of the man who had lived and written some of his most amazing work in the city, took care of the house.