Free Shadow of Death by William G. Tapply

didn’t even have a route number—passed through the town. There appeared to be no straightforward way to get to Southwick from Boston. A series of state highways and secondary roads that included Route 119 through the Willard Brook State
Forest in north-central Massachusetts looked as direct as any.
    I figured it would take a little over two hours to drive from Boston to Southwick no matter what route I took, although in late September on those winding two-lane country roadways if you found yourself behind a caravan of station wagons full of out-of-state foliage worshipers—we New Englanders called them “leaf peepers”—it could add an hour to the journey.
    By now it was a few minutes after nine, so I called Julie at the office. My only appointment for the day, she said, was the Randolph St. George divorce, and he wasn’t due until eleven-thirty. I told her that’s when I’d be there, and when I was done with St. George I’d probably leave for the afternoon.
    She didn’t even argue with me. Since Evie and I started living together, my formerly slave-driving secretary had become somewhat more tolerant of my halfhearted commitment to hanging around the office, hustling for new clients, and accruing billable hours. Julie valued romantic love and domestic bliss above billable hours, even, and I guess she figured that since I’d “settled down,” as she put it, working at home was a respectable alternative to going to the office, as long as I could convince her that I actually worked.
    Well, I was grateful for her new attitude. It made no sense to me, of course. But I never pretended to understand how women think.
    After I hung up, I poured a mug of coffee, fired up my computer, and printed out all the documents Gordon Cahill had e-mailed to me. When I finished I had a stack of papers half an inch thick.
    Then I went looking for the Southwick, New Hampshire, connection.

    I started with Albert’s phone bills. From his office at Tufts he’d made several calls to Durham, New Hampshire, and a couple of others to Hanover, in the previous three months. The University of New Hampshire was in Durham, which was over toward the seacoast on the opposite side of the state from Southwick. Dartmouth College was in Hanover on the Vermont border, more than seventy miles north and west of Southwick.
    I discounted those calls. I figured Albert talked with colleagues in the history departments of many universities in many states, and calls he’d made to Ithaca, Ann Arbor, South Bend, Austin, Berkeley, and a dozen or so other college towns confirmed it.
    He’d made no other phone calls to anywhere in New Hampshire from either his home or his office. The phone bills didn’t list calls he might have received, of course.
    Four months’ worth of credit-card receipts showed not a single purchase charged in the state of New Hampshire. As well as I could determine, Albert paid cash for the gas he put into his car, so I couldn’t tell where he’d been.
    His bank statements included photocopies of every check Albert had written in the previous four months. Not one check had been made out to a New Hampshire business or deposited in a New Hampshire bank. Nor had he made any unusually large deposits into or withdrawals from his accounts.
    By now I had a stiff neck and eyestrain. Poring over documents and interpreting the significance in them was an important part of the private investigator’s job. Gordon Cahill and other gumshoes I knew constantly complained about the tedium of their work. I didn’t envy them. We lawyers spent a lot of time squinting at musty old lawbooks and agonizing
over the difference between a semicolon and a comma, but I wouldn’t think of swapping jobs with any PI.
    I wondered if Cahill had intended to point out something in these documents that explained Albert’s “weird” behavior recently. If so, I couldn’t see