Page 22 of A Talent for Murder

“He tried to get there right away, but he didn’t always manage it, depending on what was happening with work. That night he got sent the text from Nora saying that she was bringing a man with her to her car. This was right around eleven forty-five. He claims it took him fifteen minutes to get to the car and she was already dead.”

“Why didn’t he call the body in then?”

“He said he panicked, that he didn’t want to get involved. Et cetera, et cetera. And then, at three, his better nature won out, I guess.”

“And you don’t think it’s him?”

“I don’t. If you talked to some of my colleagues you’d get a different story. Holmgren is a scumbag, but he’s not a murderer. She got killed by someone who was staying at the hotel.”

“You’ve been through the list of the attendees of the conference?”

“About a hundred times.”

“No names jumped out at you?”

“Not really.”

“Did you look at a guy called Alan Peralta?” Saying his name out loud made Martha feel like all her muscles had simultaneously clenched a little.

“That name’s a little familiar. He was at the conference?”

“He wasn’t an attendee. He was working at the conference. He sold novelty teacher items from a booth.”

“Got it. Yeah, he was a guest at the hotel. We did look at him, only because he spent some money at the hotel bar.”

“On the night of Nora Johnson’s death.”

“On every night he was there, if I remember. Should I be looking at this guy?”

“Maybe. You’ll be the first to know if I find out anything.” Martha stumbled over the words, but the detective didn’t seem to notice.

“I’ll take any leads. This one feels pretty cold.”

She muffled the phone again and Martha could hear a muted conversation. “Sorry,” Detective Cruz said when she was back on. “I need to get going. We good here?”

The final person Martha managed to speak with that morning, a Linda Callahan, turned out to be as uninterested in speaking to her as the first two detectives had been. Detective Callahan had worked the suspicious death of Mikaela Sager, the massage therapist who had turned up washed ashore by the Imperial Beach Pier in the South Bay of San Diego.

“It looked like a drowning at first, but the coroner found a head contusion, so now it looks like someone walked her to the end of the pier, bopped her on the head, and dumped her.”

“And there are no suspects?”

“Nope.”

“She was a massage therapist.”

“Yep.”

“Any chance that her calling herself a massage therapist was a euphemism for some kind of sex work?”

“It’s possible, I guess. She worked out of her home.”

“What about the night she died?”

“What about it?”

“What was she doing? Was she out with friends, out on a date, working? How’d she end up at the pier? Did she drive there?”

“She drove there. We don’t know what she was doing that night except getting herself killed. And before that, we know that she ate fried calamari and drank tequila. That’s what her stomach contents showed us. Oh, and she hadn’t had sex, at least not recently.”

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