The B plot of book 4 is that yet another serial killer is operating in this area of small towns where everyone knows everything. This guy meets up with men hiking alone in the woods, injects them with a fast-acting paralytic agent, puts a bag over their head, and lets them suffocate. Multiple men have been found dead in this area with this very distinctive M.O., but naturally nobody noticed that they had a serial killer.
The world’s most idiotic clue
Once our intrepid investigators notice this, they finally go around investigating and learn that at least some of these men belonged to some secret club. Riley visits the house of one victim, Phil. Phil was an artist, and Riley has a hunch that something in his seven sketchbooks relates to his murder. His wife allows her to take the sketchbooks, and instead of examining them on the kitchen table in the house or going back to her police station with them, as she reasonably would, she goes to the local coffee shop. This coffee shop has samples of local artists’ art on the wall.
Riley finds a string of numbers in one of the sketchbooks:
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She deduces that the first number in each pair is the sketchbook number and the second number is the page number. But the drawings don’t add up to anything, so she looks around and sees a long picture on the wall. She pulls it down, puts it next to the sketchbooks, and … mirabile visu! It’s those drawings all put together! So she turns the long picture over and finds “Whitman Ridge”. This turns out to be the building where the hush-hush secret no-girls-allowed club hangs out.
This is hands-down the world’s most idiotic clue. Phil picked out seven random pages in his sketchbooks, wrote out the clue, taped together seven sheets of paper where he copied the drawings from those random pages, took the taped-together sheets to the local coffee shop and asked to hang them, and wrote the name of the building on the back.
So if he happened to be murdered, and the police happened to examine his sketchbooks for no particular reason, and if they just so happened to figure out the number clue while sitting in the local coffee shop, as opposed to his home or the police station, they might notice a long drawing on the wall among the displays of works by local artists. And if they happened to lay out all the sketchbooks, open to the correct pages, alongside that one long drawing, they would see that they match. They could therefore turn over the drawing and see the name of the building where the mysterious club they’re looking for is headquartered.
Why — why — why would anybody do such a thing? It is ludicrously stupid. It is absurd. It is insulting to the reader. I can’t believe any reader looks at this, nods wisely, and says “Boy, Riley’s really sharp to pick up on that.”
And it would have been so easy to make this plausible. Riley goes through the sketchbooks, noting lots of birds and leaves and trees and nature things but also some drawings of buildings: his house, the courthouse, the coffee shop, etc. But when she gets to the end, she sees there are maybe twenty drawings of buildings, and half of them are of one specific building. She shows a drawing of that building to the barista, who doesn’t recognize it but calls over an older patron who says, “Oh, that’s the Whitman Ridge building.”
The hush-hush secret no-girls-allowed club
Riley gets the name of one of the members of the hush-hush secret no-girls-allowed club and threatens to tell his family about it. This threat works even though, at this point, she doesn’t know why this club is secret anyway. He shows up and spills the beans: in an area of small towns where everyone knows everything, there’s a secret club that caters to cannibals, runs orgies, brings in high-priced prostitutes, and generally provides whatever the patrons want, for a price.
Oh.
This is, by the way, quite disconnected from the serial killer targeting men hiking by themselves and doesn’t make a lot of sense anyway. I mean, how many men are in this depraved club, if dozens of them are men who like to hike by themselves?
It seems to me that the fraction of all men who like to hike alone is rather low, meaning the number of members of the hush-hush secret no-girls-allowed club must be quite high — in an area of small towns where everyone knows everything. Maybe you could manage that large of a club in a big city like NYC, but among small towns? The whole male population must have been involved!
Moreover, the club has to be large enough that a dozen men could vanish, half of them turning up murdered, without anyone noticing. Again, the whole male population must have been involved.
This could have worked just as well, and far more plausibly, if the hush-hush secret no-girls-allowed club were just a loose organization of men who liked to hike, get out in nature, and sometimes get together to talk about good hiking trails. They keep it quiet because they don’t want just anybody joining and ruining their comfortable atmosphere. In particular, they don’t want women joining, and they know if the organization is known, inevitably a woman will demand to join and they will have to let her in voluntarily or be sued and forced to let her in and pay damages to boot. They’re engaged in security through obscurity.
And it doesn’t matter anyway. The hush-hush secret no-girls-allowed club really has nothing to do with the murders except that’s where the killer met his victims. I guess, and this is only a guess, that we were meant to think that anyone who leaves the club is killed, and the serial killer is the enforcer. Except the serial killer only kills men hiking alone, and we learn from his convenient journal that he started his series of murders by accidentally knocking a man off a cliff.
The red herring
One of the murdered men turns out to be a copy-cat killing, since the poison was not used. This man was murdered by his son, who went to all the trouble to mimic the serial killer … and then went home and chopped up his mother. He was caught red-handed, covered in her blood. He then got angry and confessed with his lawyer sitting beside him telling him not to answer. I have a feeling that in reality, that confession would be thrown out.
But why stage the murder of his father and then chop up his mother right there in the house?
Return of the world’s most idiotic clue
The last victim of the serial killer is Gary, who was found dead in a canoe. Keith the coroner, the only competent member of the police department, deduces that Gary killed himself because Gary got a lesser dose of the paralytic poison. He needed to use it to look like a victim, but he couldn’t take a full dose because then he couldn’t drop the syringe overboard.
The police go to Gary’s store, search his office, and find his personal safe which, it turns out, contains his supply of paralytic poison. Hmm. What is the combination to Gary’s personal safe?
I know! It’s
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Wait, what?
So Gary and Phil were chatting one day, and Phil explained his brilliant plan to guide the police to the Whitman Ridge building if he ever happened to be murdered. Gary said, “Oh, that’s cool. I just got a new personal safe, and I need a combination for it. Here, let me just jot down your code, and I’ll use that as my combination.”
This is so unbelievably stupid.
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