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Gus shrugged. “I’m afraid my old friend Detective Mendes is no longer sharing insights with me.”
“Mary Cowell’s story will be in the papers by morning, I presume.” Mac sat down and poured Tabasco sauce over the toasted sandwich on his plate before biting into it. “Things will probably get a lot worse then.”
“Can’t we call the police?” Theo poured herself a glass of milk. “Surely it’s trespassing, or public nuisance…or something.”
“I don’t like our chances getting help from the police, Theo,” Gus replied. “Chances are they leaked this to the press in the first place.”
“But why?” Theo said aghast. “Why would they do that?”
Mac glanced at Gus before he spoke. “Generally, it’s to put pressure on a suspect, to try and force them into a mistake.”
“Oh, God, they really think I killed Dan…”
“I don’t think they’ve found any other suspects,” Mac replied. “But we will.”
“Have you had any luck tracking down Spiderman?” Gus asked.
“Not a lot.” Mac frowned. “I’m beginning to wonder if the cobweb tattoo is a misdirection.”
“What do you mean?”
“Tattoos are only an identifying mark if they’re permanent.” He took a pen from the inside pocket of his jacket and drew and cobweb on the back of his hand. “Say I attack you and you see that I have a tattoo on my hand. You focus on that rather than my face. The police also focus on that, looking for suspects with a cobweb tattoo. And I simply wash my hands.”
“But I would never have known that the man who ran into me was the man with the blond dreadlocks if it hadn’t been for the tattoo,” Theo protested.
“But what if they weren’t the same man?” Mac said.
“You don’t think the incidents were related?” Theo was confused now.
“No, no. I think they were.” Mac tried to explain. “But because of this tattoo, we think the same man was involved. So all the identifying features you noticed in the first man—the blond dreadlocks, the color of his eyes, his height, and so on are compromised by your description of the second. So the police are left with the impression that either the man is a master of disguise who accidently failed to cover his most identifying feature, or…”—he paused—“that Theodosia Benton is an unreliable witness.”
Gus groaned. “Bloody hell! A halfway decent attorney will make her look like she’s either mad or a liar.”
Theo looked at them both in dismay. Mac was right—the only reason she’d thought Spiderman was one man was the tattoo. And perhaps her mind had merged what she saw to fit with that.
“On the other hand,” Mac continued, smiling encouragingly at Theo, “it does tell us that whatever’s going on, it’s not the work of a single random killer. This is much more coordinated.”
“You need to concentrate on looking into Murdoch,” Gus said, taking another grilled cheese from the platter between them. “Organizations don’t kill people on impulse or indiscriminately. There’s a reason…gambling debts, organized crime, espionage of some sort.”
Mac nodded. “I’ll talk to his publisher tomorrow…assuming they don’t just pass me on to his agents, perhaps I can get something out of them.”
“Wouldn’t the police have already talked to them?” Theo asked.
Gus grinned. “Yes, but Mac’s going to do his private eye thing.”
Mac ignored him but Theo was intrigued. “What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to get them to let their guard down a bit.”
“Exactly how?”
Mac rummaged in his jacket and found his wallet. From it he extracted a business card which he handed to Theo. Hamilton Pendleton-Smythe of Lionsgate Films.
“Who is Hamilton Pendleton-Smythe?”
“The chaps call me Ham.” Mac Etheridge’s inflection became English—Oxford. “Lionsgate feels that Mr. Murdoch’s last novel will translate very nicely to the big screen, and considering the interest generated by his tragic passing, such a project might be rather timely.”
“Isn’t this illegal?”
