It seemed fairly clear to me the box of disks had been shipped by mistake. Otherwise it would have been numbered and included on the inventory. The number of boxes in the inventory matched the quantity of numbered boxes received.

What should I do with it? Send it back to Ms. Enderby in California?

I found the two letters on my desk and scanned the one from Gail Enderby. There was a phone number included. I might as well call her and ask.

I used my cell phone, rather than the office phone, because I could never remember the long distance dialing code I was supposed to enter to authorize a call.

The call went to voice mail after five rings. A perky, young-sounding voice informed me that Gail Enderby was on vacation, and her stated return date was a couple of weeks away. She gave no alternate contact information. I wondered if she had seen the news yet about her boss’s death. I left a message, asking her to call.

That was that. The disks were in my custody for now. I replaced the packing material and re-taped the box. Instead of putting the box back with the others, I put it behind some shelves a few feet away from my desk. Perhaps the mysterious eavesdropper had spooked me, but the disks might be valuable. As long as I was the only one who knew they were here, I might as well keep it that way.

I picked up box one and placed it on my desk. Consulting the inventory list, I saw that this box contained fan mail. Curious, I pulled out one of the folders, dated twenty years ago, and began leafing through it.

The first couple of letters were full of praise for Godfrey.

“Trapped kept me up until three in the morning,” one fan wrote.

Another one said, “I had to get up and check all the locks in the house when I finished Midnight Killer.”

On most of the letters I examined there were notes that indicated when Godfrey responded, though copies of Godfrey’s answering letters were not in the folder.

The most interesting letter of those I read was one that took Godfrey to task for abandoning the gentler, more traditional mysteries he wrote at the beginning of his career in favor of “bloodthirsty, needlessly violent trash.” Godfrey’s note on this one was a terse “no response.”

I laid the folder aside and was about to pick up another one when my office phone rang.

“Good, you’re still here,” Melba said when I answered. “Peter wants to see you right away. I told him about the boxes.”

“I’ll be right down.” Sighing, I hung up. I wasn’t in the mood for a talk with Peter, but then I realized it was a good opportunity to do a bit of sleuthing.