"You mean me," Luis said in alarm. "This is my computer. I think I'd better go visit my cousin."
"We'll make sure he knows it's us, Luis," said Meg. "We'll use an address like gourm.det.quill.meg. Right, Quill?"
"Pfui," Quill said, in the best Nero Wolfe tradition. "This is nuts, Meg. I absolutely refuse to put either one of us at risk."
"It's not much of a risk. We input this order. We wait. Ernst shows up at our condo tonight. I threaten him, recording his confession with a concealed tape recorder of course. He agrees to pay blackmail. I agree to take the money. We get it all on tape."
"It's too dangerous." "It is not too dangerous! Ernst is a body snatcher. That's a far cry from murder, Quill. He just took advantage of the situation that presented itself. He's no killer.
Gosh, the man's sixty-two years old with a heart condition. And he loves to cook. I refuse," said Meg, with an utter disregard for the rational, "to consider anyone who's a good cook a killer."
"Oh, Meg."
"Let's put it this way. You want to go home, right? Sometime before next Christmas? You know perfectly well what's going to happen if we don't expose Kolsacker. We don't expose Kolsacker, we may never find the body. No body - no conviction for Evan and Corrigan. If we ever do get back to Hemlock Falls, we'll be dragged back here for depositions, testimony, and God knows what all. Month after month. It may even take year after year. You can just bet that Cressida isn't going to miss a trick to save her boys from a murder.I charge, and legal tricks take weeks. Months. Years. You want to tie yourself up that long? I mean, we do have a life."
"What if he doesn't show up tonight?"
"He'll show up," Meg said confidently. "Trust me on this one."
"We should at least tell Jerry what we're doing. He could give us some protection."
"As if!"
"Why don't we turn this information over to Jerry? He can trap Ernst if he wants to."
"Because the police can't entrap citizens, Quill," Meg said virtuously. "It's not legal. If you just presented the cold facts to a judge - where's the wrong-doing? We have no physical proof that Ernst snatched the body..."
"We don't know that he did, either," Quill pointed out.
"And in the absence of proof, all he has to say is that he - sorry about that - took advantage of his dear friend's absence to make a little money. And who on the jury is going to dispute that? Especially down here? Everybody wants to make money down here. No, Quill, we have to have some proof. This little blackmail scheme will provide us proof. I'll tell you what. We'll even let Ernst know that we know where the body is when we talk to him."
"But we don't know where the body is."
"He doesn't know that. Okay?" She sat at the computer, her fingers poised. "All I've got to do is use the E-mail to get word to Carmichael. Carmichael's obligated to pass word of this on to Ernst." She cocked her head. "Don't look so worried. I mean, it's much more realistic if we go ahead and prove that we have this knowledge and can pretend to be Verger Taylor and give orders for a while, by sending this phony buy order from Verger."
"Be quiet a minute, Meg." Quill dithered. She bit her nails. She pulled her hair. Finally she said, "Okay. But. If anything, anything happens to either me or Meg tonight, Luis, you go to the police. Agreed?"
"Can I put all this in the book?" Luis asked. "After you've captured him, of course."
They waited all night. Ernst the body snatcher never showed up.
-16-
"What do you think I should wear tonight? It's black tie." Quill yawned, shook a long black jersey dress free of its hanger, and held it up to herself. "I always feel like a cellist in this. Meg?" She stuck her head out into the hall. "Meg!" She walked into the living room. It was just before lunch. Tiffany had called in great excitement. The electrical problems were fixed, the banquet was on, and the hurricane wasn't supposed to hit until tomorrow. Everybody was coming. And - although it might not be nice to say it - the interest in Verger's disappearance had heightened, if that were possible, and nothing at all had happened for the last twenty-four hours, so they could count on excellent media coverage. She, Tiffany, was going to wear black.
Quill looked at the sky dubiously. She'd rapidly become accustomed to Florida's insistently sunny weather. It was gloomy today. And those looked like genuine cumulonimbus thunderheads stacking up in the east. The living room was unaccustomedly shadowy.
Meg, curled up into a small ball in the corner of the couch, was wearing a T-shirt that said NO GUTS, NO GLORY.
"Hey." Quill greeted her. "You talked to Doreen and Andy? The airport in Syracuse is still snowed in, I take it."
"Yep, I talked to Andy. Noreen had her baby. C-section. It was quite an operation, Andy said."
"Myles is still out helping with the blizzard victims?"
"Yep. He sends his love, though."
"I'm homesick," Quill said.
"Me, too."
"But thirty-six inches of snow in twelve hours with a wind chill factor of six below sounds positively gruesome."
"That it does. What else have you got to wear besides the black?"
"Nothing."
"Then I guess you'll look like a cellist."
"You all right?"
"Yeah. Tired, though. Jeez, I thought he'd show up. I was sure he'd show up." She rubbed her face with both hands.
Quill yawned again. "Look, as I told you about sixty times, Ernst probably won't get the message until this morning. I'm convinced we're right, Meg. No one else had sufficient motive to take Verger's body anywhere."
"Mr. X," Meg said glumly. "This may be the first case we fail to solve."
"I doubt it. I'm taking the tape recorder, and we'll keep an eye out for Ernst. At the first opportunity, I think we should get him into a secluded corner..."
"We've been over this about a million times," Meg grumbled.
"We'll go over it once more, just to be sure. I think the best place is the charcutiere kitchen. It's isolated, all your dishes will have been sent downstairs long before the banquet itself starts, and you'll be crawling the walls waiting for the L 'Aperitif people to fall over in delight over your dish - which they will, Meg. Guaranteed. Anyhow, we back him into a comer at the earliest opportunity and get him to admit the heist."
"The heist?"
"Whatever. And bingo, we're free and clear to go home."
"I've got to psych myself up for this thing tonight. All the challenge has gone out of the banquet, though."
"That's because you don't have enough to do," Quill said. "Just supervising the main course presentation isn't nearly enough. Usually about this time, you're in the middle of the kitchen at home, flinging pots against the wall, singing and yelling. But that was the point, wasn't it? Didn't we say something about easy money and the time of our lives and fabulous weather?"