The Mammoth Book of Perfect Crimes & Impossible Mysteries (55 page)

He lurched toward me, the blade upraised. As he crossed the doorstep and stepped onto the rug, I gave the line hidden in my hand a tug. His feet went flying out from under him. The knife fell from his hand. He cracked his head against the doorjamb and sagged to the floor, unconscious but still very much alive.

“Well, that’s one ghost laid to rest,” I said to myself. I reached behind a pile of boxes and switched off the tape recorder. Then I phoned the police.

Karen came over that night, long after they’d taken the raving postman away in a strait-jacket. I felt sorry for him but not
all that
sorry. He’d tried to kill me, too. I’d told her all about it on the phone, rubbing it in just a little when I reminded her about restless ghosts and hauntings by mail.

I wasn’t surprised when she showed up with a peace offering. “Housewarming gift?” I asked, accepting the brightly wrapped package.

“Open it up,” she smiled.

I did just that. “But I don’t need a chess set,” I protested. “I don’t know how to play and I’m certainly not going to learn now. I don’t believe in chess.”

“What about ghosts?”

“I don’t believe in them, either.”

“Then what do you believe in?” Karen demanded.

I looked around me, taking in the endless stacks of cartons and crates, untouched since the movers had left them there except for the addition of a faint coating of dust. “The scarcity of good apartments in New York City,” I said firmly. “That’s what I believe in . . . I think.”

O
nce upon a time, after returning from the bank where I had the pleasure of making a six-figure deposit of the week’s earnings, I casually asked my boss, Penelope Peters, what special talent made her so incredibly successful. After all, Penelope, due to a genetic imperfection in her cells, suffered from extreme agoraphobia. She was unable to leave her home without suffering major panic attacks that left her a total mental and physical wreck. Yet, working from her office deep in the heart of Manhattan, she earned astonishing sums week after week solving problems that stumped the highest and the mightiest throughout the country, and sometime even the world. Having served as her assistant; chief bottle-washer; and eyes, ears, nose, and legs for the past five years, I had witnessed her genius so often I had become inured to her working miracles. I just wondered how.

“Brains and personality,” answered Penelope, with the barest twinkle in her green eyes. It was the punch line to one of the oldest and dumbest jokes around, and she loved using it.

“Yeah, right,” I countered, “save it for the newspapers. Tell me the truth. I’ve devoted the past five years of my life running errands, going to used book stores, attending board meetings, and catching crooks for you. It’s time I learned the secret handshake.” Then, to show that I wasn’t actually annoyed with her, I added, “Please.”

“Oh, well,” said Penelope, rising from behind her imposing ebony desk in the center of her office. “You won’t believe using the Magic 8-Ball, I assume?”

“Nope,” I replied. “Nor the ouija board explanation or the sack of old bones in the closet. I want the real stuff. So I can finally make my own way in the world, starting with a big advertisement on the internet: ‘Sean O’Brien, Investigations; formerly employed by the notorious Penelope Peters, World’s Premier Problem Solver. ‘“

Penelope frowned. “You’re not really thinking of leaving?” she asked. “It would take me years to train another assistant.”

“Decades,” I replied, with a grin. “It would take you decades. If not lifetimes.”

“Besides,” she said, “I haven’t sent you scouring used book stores for years now. I buy everything off the internet and have it delivered by Fed Ex.”

“There was that time I took the ferry to Hoboken—” I began, but she cut me off with the wave of a hand.

“Enough, enough,” she said. Penelope walked to the mahogany floor-to-ceiling bookcases that covered the left wall and laid one hand on the top of a well-read volume. “Everything I know I learned from studying this book. Read it, absorb it, and don’t forget it. That’s all you need to do to be just like me.”

That I doubted. I stand six foot two, weigh two hundred and forty pounds, and made it through college on a football scholarship. I have a degree in accounting, a detective’s badge, and a black belt in karate. I’m a fast talker, possess a near-photographic memory, and know how to follow instructions. My hair and eyes are black as coal, and nobody mistakes me for a movie star. Any resemblance between me and my boss is purely imaginary.

At five foot seven, 110 pounds, with green eyes and brown hair, Penelope Peters might have made it as a top fashion model if she lost fifteen or twenty pounds and could manage to leave her home on assignments. Since the second option was out of the question, she obviously saw no reason to consider the first. Not that I think she would have bothered. Penelope didn’t like taking orders from anyone, which was why she had set up her consulting business years before, when her agoraphobia was just starting to act up. In the time since, she’s become the problem solver that other problem solvers come to when they’re stumped. Her IQ number is off the charts, and her office is filled with rare trinkets and expensive gifts sent to her from satisfied clients throughout the world. Her brains didn’t come from any one book. But, I’m no dummy. I know what my boss is like. Besides, I was curious. I took the book.

“The Sign of Four
by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,” I read aloud. “Sherlock Holmes? Everything you know, you learned from Sherlock Holmes?”

“Elementary, my dear O’Brien,” said Penelope, with a smile.

“He’s not a real person. He’s a character in a book.”

“Real or not, he knew the secret to solving mysteries,” said Penelope. “Any sort of mysteries, be they problems with business to problems with murder.”

“Which is?” I asked.

Penelope removed
The Sign of Four
from my hands and flipped the book open to what had to be a familiar page. She read aloud,”. . . when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”

“That’s it?” I said, somewhat doubtful. I must admit I wasn’t particularly impressed. Which explains, I suppose, why I’m the assistant and Penelope is the boss. “That’s all?”

“Nothing else,” said Penelope carefully sliding the book back into its place on the shelf. “A sharp mind, an attention for detail, and that sentence is all you need to solve the most perplexing puzzles ever encountered.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“You’ll see,” said Penelope.

I did, of course, less than a month later, when Penelope solved the murder in Monkeyland.

Imagine if you will a four-story building in the shape of a square. Think of it built out of concrete and steel, with huge panoramic windows on each of the four levels, with a round information desk on the first floor and two large elevators in a concrete hub in the center of the square. In case of fire or any other sort of disaster, the elevators immediately lock into place in the shafts and can’t be used until the “all clear” alarm sounds.

Located in the corners of the square are four sets of emergency stairs. In case of an emergency, your only escape from an upper floor is down and out to the first floor. And, try as you may, there is no possible method of accessing any of the top three floors from the first.

Attached to each of the four sides of the square is a stubby concrete and steel rectangular wing, about twenty feet wide and thirty feet long. There are no windows or openings of any kind in these rectangles, and the concrete/steel walls are over two feet thick.

Located in each wing is a single laboratory. During the day, entrance to the labs is by a security card obtained at the desk. The cards are produced each morning by a random number generator and are only good for one day. They have to be carried at all times on the upper floors. If anyone without a card is detected by the many sensors located throughout the building, alarms immediately blare and the entire building complex locks down until the violator is caught. Each lab, due to the nature of the dangerous work being conducted within, has its own air supply and is powered by its own generator.

Still, Homeland Security deemed that these precautions were
not enough.
Which explains the huge movable concrete slabs on each side of the lab entrances.

When I first saw the slabs, my jaw dropped and I stood frozen for a minute in absolute awe. They were, without question, the biggest door jambs ever created. Each slab stood sixty feet high by ten feet across and was two feet deep. They were constructed from concrete laid over a metal frame of thin steel rods. Each massive slab rested on a motorized block of titanium steel. When the complex shut down for the night, the two slabs of concrete per laboratory slide together to meet and form an immovable door-one that couldn’t be opened by anyone less powerful than Samson or Hercules.

“You expecting an alien invasion?” I wondered aloud.

“Never hurts to be prepared,” said Captain Anthony Rackham, my escort for the afternoon. “Better safe than sorry when you’re dealing with plague and ebola bacteria.”

I shuddered, the full meaning of the complex’s nickname, The Slab, hitting home. The less time I spent in this building, the better. Hopefully, Penelope was going to solve this crime quickly.

“According to the briefing I received this morning,” I said, “researchers are permitted to remain in the labs overnight when working on a project?”

“Whenever they want,” said Rackham. “Just because we’re military doesn’t mean we don’t understand the needs of scientists. Each laboratory is equipped with a refrigerator, a microwave, a cot, and a bathroom complete with shower stall. Some of our top researchers spend weeks here without leaving their labs. They’re dedicated to the safety of our country.”

What Rackham considered dedication, I defined as obsessive behavior. But I was too polite to say so. Especially since the Captain was a good two inches taller than me and looked like he stepped out of a Conan the Barbarian movie. Not that he wasn’t all slick and polished, from his sharply pressed uniform to his shiny black shoes. Rackham had been assigned to me when I first checked into the complex a half-hour before. I still wasn’t sure if he was my escort or my guard. Not that it mattered. I was here strictly as a recording device for my boss.

The call had come in the middle of the night. A man was dead under mysterious circumstances. He’d been discovered in a locked and sealed concrete laboratory. No one was positive if it was a crime or not, but if it was, it needed to be solved immediately. The police and FBI were baffled. Contact Penelope Peters. Which meant I was off early the next morning to The Slab, a secret government complex fifty miles outside of Manhattan. Exactly in what direction that fifty miles was can’t be stated. Or so I was warned when given directions. And from the tone of the voice of the man on the phone, I knew he wasn’t kidding.

“Now that we’ve gone over the layout of the building,” I said, “how about showing me the scene of the crime.”

“You’re in charge,” said Rackham, waving me into one of the elevators. “It’s on the top floor.”

I noted with my usual efficiency that there were two cameras in the lift. The chances of someone making it upstairs undetected in this building were absolute zero.

“We don’t appreciate surprise visitors,” said Rackham, as we stepped out onto the fourth floor, in answer to my unspoken question. “The stuff stored in these labs could wipe out half the planet. Think of it as a terrorist supermarket.”

“Terrific,” I said. “You think Dr Schneider was killed by enemy agents?”

“I’m not a detective,” said Rackham, sounding slightly smug, the first emotion evident in his cold tones. “I have no idea who murdered Schneider, if anyone. He might have died from natural causes. Working in his lab would have given me a heart attack in a week.”

Rackham steered me across the floor to a lab sealed off with yellow police tape. A pair of marine guards holding rifles stood in front of the door into the wing. They snapped to attention as we approached. The captain pulled open the door to the laboratory and stepped aside.

“After you,” he said. The lights in the lab were on. They were always kept on. “The scene of the crime.”

I had no idea exactly what to expect, but whatever I might have imagined was immediately wiped away by what I saw upon entering the lab. What I saw and smell and heard.