Read Online How to Succeed in Murder by Margaret Dumas - Free Book Online

interesting,” he told me. “They noticed a pattern in the issues being reported to tech support over the last six months or so. At first I didn’t see it—it’s very intricate—but it’s there. There’s something going on with the code and it isn’t random.”
    “Tech support?” I looked from Mike to Jack. “Isn’t that the department Clara Chen managed? Only it had a fancier name.” Something about clients.
    “Oh.” Mike suddenly looked nervous. “Um—I mean…” He found something worth studying on his empty plate.
    “Yes.” Jack was watching me carefully. “Stokes told us it was Clara who first noticed the pattern.”
    Again, it took every ounce of self-control to refrain from shouting “Ah ha!”
    “But,” Jack continued, “he also told us he was absolutely sure she hadn’t said anything about it to anyone else. So if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking…”
    “What? You mean that someone killed Clara Chen because she discovered a conspiracy at Zakdan?”
    Jack closed his eyes briefly. “Something like that.”
    “Come on, Jack—it’s a motive!” I looked to the other guys for support. Gordon suddenly became fascinated with the flame under his chafing dish and Mike gave his plate even more attention.
    “It might be a motive,” Jack said evenly, “ if it turns out that the glitch in the software was deliberately engineered and not just a bug—which we haven’t established. And it might be a motive,” he continued before I could respond, “ if the person who engineered it knew that Clara had noticed something.”
    “But.” Mike gave me a half-hearted smile. “Since Morgan Stokes is the only one who knew she’d noticed something, he’d be the only one with a motive to kill her.”
    “And then only if he’d been the one to engineer the bug,” Gordon concluded. “In which case he’d hardly have hired these two to investigate it.”
    “So, Charley.” Jack stood, and something in his body language triggered the other two to start looking around for their jackets. “We still don’t have anything solid to go on.”
    I could accept the facts. I nodded in agreement, and said one word.
    “Yet.”
    ***
    Jack told Gordon that we—meaning, I assumed, he—would clean up and return his catering paraphernalia to him later. So later that evening my husband and I formed a cozy little picture of domesticity at the kitchen sink.
    Jack washed, I talked.
    “Simon and I drove past Zakdan today. It’s right down the street from the Design Center.”
    “I know. Mike and I went there yesterday.”
    “Yesterday? You didn’t say anything about it.” It was actually nice, watching Jack with his sleeves rolled up, flexing his forearms in the sudsy water.
    “You didn’t ask.” He reached for a towel. “Which reminds me—what did you do yesterday?”
    I swallowed. Not that I wanted to lie to my husband about going behind his back with Eileen and Brenda to look for nefarious goings-on at Zakdan, but… Okay, yes. I did want to lie about that.
    “Brenda came over for a while,” I said. Which wasn’t a lie. “And gave me serious grief about the lack of comfy chairs in the living room.” Also completely true. “That’s why she sent Simon over to ambush me today.” Utterly truthful, and a nice segue into a completely different and much safer topic. “Oh! I haven’t shown you what I bought!”
    “I assumed it was being delivered,” he said. “Something in modern lines with geometric shapes?”
    “That was just an idea. Meet me in the dining room.”
    I dashed upstairs and recovered the world’s heaviest shopping bag. Then I went to the dining room to find Jack waiting, leaning against the wall with his arms folded and a gleam in his eye.
    “Wait…” I turned my back to him so I could remove my treasure from acres of tissue paper without him seeing it. “I really wasn’t sure—it was between this and a life-size ceramic rooster, but I thought this was