A Killer Plot (A Books by the Bay Mystery)

bark.
    Haviland was pacing anxiously in the doorway to one of the bedrooms. Olivia looked over his head toward the bed. The rumpled covers had been shoved into a wrinkled mass toward the middle and the white cotton sheets were covered by at least six pillows, all tossed about as though the bed’s occupant had spent a restless night. Max had smoothed out a section of the comforter, however, upon which he’d laid out a gray suit still encased within a dry cleaner’s bag.
    Olivia’s eyes continued to sweep the room and came to an abrupt stop at the pair of club chairs positioned beneath the double windows overlooking the ocean. Max Warfield was in the chair nearest the bathroom. His held was tilted backward at an awkward angle. The rest of his body was unnaturally still.
    “You were right! He’s had a heart attack!” Bert lurched forward in Max’s direction, but Olivia clamped both hands onto his arm, nearly forcing him off balance.
    “We mustn’t touch him,” she stated firmly. “See that thing wrapped around his neck? That’s a dog collar. Haviland’s dog collar. And I doubt Mr. Warfield is wearing it voluntarily. Call 911. Mr. Warfield’s been murdered.”
    Mutely, Bert retreated several feet, his eyes bulging with shock and fear. Unblinking, as though he suspected the corpse of making a sudden movement, the property manager punched the digits into his cell phone with trembling fingertips.
    Haviland sniffed Max’s hand and then growled again.
    “Get his scent, Captain,” Olivia told the poodle, feeling a fresh surge of rage course through her. “He was just here. The man who hurt you. He did this. Smell him, Haviland,” she whispered fiercely over Bert’s shaky conversation with the emergency operator.
    As Haviland disappeared into the bathroom, Olivia absorbed as much of the scene as she could without approaching the club chair where Max had been killed.
    Her eyes were immediately drawn to Max’s face, for his tongue lolled from between his slack lips. Swollen and blue tinged, it looked like some grotesque alien insect, and Olivia felt momentarily overcome by repulsion. She forced her gaze downward, seeing the slumped shoulders against the cushioned back of the chair, the limp arms, and the casual outfit of shorts and a T-shirt.
    Finally, she stared at Haviland’s blue collar, which was fastened around the dead man’s neck. The skin above and below the collar was a purplish red and marred with scratches, illustrating the desperation with which Max had fought against the object robbing him of oxygen.
    The most unsettling detail of all was the reflection of the windows in the dead man’s unblinking eyes. A halo of soft, white light fell across the glassy surface of his corneas, giving the impression that an otherworldly radiance was being released from within Max Warfield’s body.
    Bert was repeating the condo address in a much steadier voice when Olivia spotted the sheet of paper. It was a standard-sized sheet of white paper that had been neatly positioned on the table in front of Max’s torso. Olivia wondered if those were the last words Max Warfield had seen before he died or if the murderer had placed the paper on the table afterward.
    She walked forward four steps, leaning over the table as she removed her notebook from her purse. “The summer haiku,” she murmured and read the three lines upside down.
    The summer air is so
thick its almost too hard to breathe—
so don’t bother to try.
     
    “What are you doing?” Bert hissed, but Olivia didn’t hear him.
    Backing away from the table, she copied down the words of the poem, silently counting syllables as her pen recorded them.
    “This is wrong.” She reread what she’d written. “The lines are too long, the hyphen doesn’t divide the poem into two parts, the nature imagery is overly simplistic, there are grammatical errors ...”
    Olivia sank down on the edge of the bed, causing Max’s suit to slide into the depression created by her weight. “This poem was not written by the same person. Are there now two poets?” Chilled, she shoved the plastic bag away from her leg, stood up, and walked quickly out of the room. Haviland growled once more and followed.
    “Ms. Limoges? Are you all right?” Bert called after her.
    Olivia didn’t stop until she was outside. She needed to breathe real air, as though her lungs weren’t capable of processing the chilled, Freon-tinged air within the condo. Stepping away from the shade of