Free Nerds Who Kill: A Paul Turner Mystery by Mark Richard Zubro Page B

into the room with him. He and Fenwick watched the two women leave together.
    After they left, Fenwick said, “I love someone who hated the victim. It is one of my favorite things.”
    Turner said, “Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, dead victims bleeding, witnesses blabbing, those are a few of your favorite things.”
    “You are not to begin singing Broadway show tunes.”
    “You write poetry.”
    “Yeah, but you can’t sing.”
    “Hey, I always say every syllable of your poetry is perfection.”
    “Yeah, but you never say anything about the poems themselves.”
    “Every single one of your syllables is flawless. It’s just some are more flawless than others.”
    “Something can’t be more flawless.”
    “Precisely. And I wasn’t singing, I was misquoting. Besides, being able to sing Broadway show tunes is part of the gay gene.”
    “I thought there wasn’t a gay gene.”
    “There isn’t, but it’s a handy cliché at a moment like this.”
    Fenwick said, “Mrs. Foublin didn’t look like she had the heft to be plunging swords into people.”
    Turner tapped his notebook. “But we now have people who didn’t like Devers. A lot more than we had earlier.”
    They returned to the room Foublin had been killed in. At the door, Turner said, “They each knew the killer, so they let them in, or somebody knew how to break into the modern hotel room.”
    “Could they have been having an affair?” Fenwick asked.
    “Devers and Foublin?” Turner said. “We’ll have to find out. Foublin didn’t look studly and young to me, but you never know.”
    Fenwick said, “His wife wasn’t bad looking. Why go after someone nearly twice your age?”
    Turner said, “I assume there is some connection between these two murders, and between these two victims, that caused the killer to want to murder them, and I’m ready to eliminate all consideration of suicide on the part of anybody. And I don’t buy the notion of murder down here, and then Devers going up to her room and committing suicide.”
    Fenwick said, “I agree.”
    “No puns, no humor, no corpse cracks?”
    “When you’re right, you’re right.”

6
     
    Sanchez entered with a thin, pale young man. He wore khaki pants, a blue shirt, and a navy blue blazer. Sanchez introduced him as Matthew Kagan.
    Kagan said, “There’s all kinds of rumors downstairs. People keep disappearing and not coming back. I don’t think it’s some big, clever, secret event that needs lots of planning and personnel. And nobody has an explanation for all the cops being here. They don’t need this many cops to have a balloon drop.” He had a tenor voice.
    Turner said, “Muriam Devers and Dennis Foublin are dead.”
    Kagan gaped for a moment. He said, “The rumors are true.”
    “How well did you know them?” Turner asked.
    “Devers got me fired from a reviewing job. I was starting to syndicate my science fiction reviews around the country. I didn’t put it together that she was responsible until long after. The firing didn’t happen the day after my negative review about her appeared. Devers was a sneaky bitch. She planned it so I’d never figure it out. She was big on secrets.”
    “How did you find out it was her?” Turner asked.
    “I was having coffee with her first editor at Galactic Books, Melissa Bentworth. She told me what had happened to her. I began to put two and two together. I had a friend of mine who still worked at the syndicate ask my former editor. The friend got the story. It was Devers.”
    “She was that concerned about one review?” Fenwick asked.
    “She was concerned about everything connected with her career down to the smallest detail. She had that sweetness-and-light persona perfected. Everybody loved her except those of us that hated her.”
    “What didn’t you like about her book?” Fenwick asked.
    “The plot and the characters.”
    “Doesn’t leave much,” Fenwick said.
    “She was great at settings. I don’t know why people