Deadly News: A Thriller (4 page)

Abby sighed. “I guess.” She tried the door handle one more time. “I’ll figure it out later. Come on.”

In the hallway, he headed toward the elevator, but she diverted him to the stairs. Outside, the sun leaving the area for another day, his car was just where he’d left it, in a yellow zone, with a meter maid slapping a ticket onto the windshield.

“Well, perfect timing,” he said.

“So, where to?”

Abby finished buckling her seatbelt, then stared at Ecks.

“Abbs?”

She closed her eyes, then opened them. “Sorry. I don’t know. I just sort of realized there’s nothing I can do right now.”

“You could go to the police.”

“I guess. Damn—fingerprints, DNA.” She punched the dashboard.

“Hey! Chill. They’ll take your fingerprints and DNA, that way they can separate it out.”

“You were there too.”

“I’ll give them mine. Has anyone else been there recently?”

She looked at him. “Has anyone else been there? Yeah, every night I have a few guys come by, you know, just to relieve stress.”

“You’re joking.”

“Am I?”

He started the car. “Okay, we’ll go to the police then, see what they say.”

“Fine. I guess.”

Since traffic was light that day, they arrived at the police station, five blocks away, only forty-five minutes later. Parking was more difficult.

After ten minutes of circling the lot, waiting for someone to leave, Abby couldn’t take it anymore and said, “Just park there. It won’t take that long.”

“You want me to park in a loading zone again? I’m not a collector.”

“You’re not a coll— Oh. Ha. So funny.”

“It wouldn’t be if you were the one paying for it.”

They looped around the tiny lot again.

“Oh come on, just park there.”

“Frick.” He parked in the loading zone, which was conveniently close to the entrance.

As they were getting out, a large women came out of the door to the station. “You’re not planning on parking there, are you?” she said, glowering at the two of them.

“No,” Abby said seriously.

“Good. Because both of you getting out, and the car off, makes it look that way.”

“We’re just trying to be green,” Abby said.

The woman cast her gaze against Ecks.

“I’m just helping out. My mother always taught me to help a woman in need.”

“Well,” the woman huffed. “Maybe there’s a scrap of chivalry left.” She huffed again. “Carry on.”

“My mother taught me to help women in need?” Abby asked inside the station.

“It worked, didn’t it?”

“I don’t think she was a cop, so not much danger of her doing anything anyway.”

“She could have—”

“Can I help you?” an obscenely bubbly teenager asked from behind the counter, popping out of nowhere.

Abby peered through the window and saw the teen must have come from that door there, to the left. “Hi. I hope so. I’d like to report a break-in.”

The teen kept smiling. “To your car?”

“No, I don’t have a car, actually. Um, to my apartment.”

“Why didn’t you call us? That’s not safe you know, waiting like that.”

Abby looked at Ecks, as if for that promised assistance.

He wasn’t paying attention to her.

“Yeah, you’re probably right. I was just, I don’t know. But, can you do something?”

“Sure. What would you like me to do?”

Abby stifled a sigh. “I guess take a report? Dust the place for fingerprints?”

“Oh,” the teen laughed. “This isn’t television. We don’t do that kind of thing in real life.”

Abby stared blankly, deadpanned: “You don’t dust for fingerprints? Or don’t take reports?”

The teen stared, smiling. “Just go ahead and fill out that form, right there—no, the other one, yeah—just sit down over there and fill out the form, and I’ll get one of the cops out here—officers, I’ll get one of them out here to take a statement. And then we can go from there.” With that, she disappeared through the door she’d entered through.

Abby took the sheet and sat down in one of the cloth covered plastic chairs lining the station’s front window.

Ecks sat down next to her, and their arms touched due to the chairs’ proximity to one another. God, she thought, trying to concentrate on the form, what was this, high school?

Maybe a half hour after finishing filling out the form, an officer came in through the front door. He scanned the station, spotted Abby and Ecks. “Abby, I presume?”

Abby stood, and shook the officer’s outstretched hand. “Hi.”

“Hello. I’m Officer Delano.” He gestured at his nametag. “I’m told there was a robbery?”

“I don’t know if anything was stolen. Maybe a reverse robbery.”

He gave her a questioning look.

“Fingerprints?”

He looked blank for a moment more, then smiled. “Ah, I get it. Clever. We can certainly hope so. Would you like to sit down, or maybe get some fresh air while you tell me what happened?”

Abby looked around. “Fresh air I guess would be nice.”

“Great.” He held open the door for her and Ecks, and a minute later Abby found herself leaning against the hood of his car, telling him what had happened. She felt an odd reluctance, perhaps from too much news about corrupt officials and conspiracies and the government’s inherent incompetence—which in sufficient quantity was indistinguishable from malice, Becky was fond of quoting—to tell him everything, and kept catching herself leaving things out.

“Hmm,” he said when she’d finished. “That is odd. Nothing stolen and no attack of any kind. And, uh”—he looked at his pad—“Ecks here wasn’t there, correct?”

“Yes. He just gave me a ride here.”

The cop smiled, his eyes remaining unaffected by the movement. “Of course. Okay, let me see what I can do. In the meantime, I’d suggest staying away. Do you have somewhere you can stay?”

“I can figure something out.”

“All right then.” He looked at his watch. “My shift’s just about ending, so I’ll file the report once I get back. The number you gave me is your cellphone, correct?”

Abby nodded.

He held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Ms Melcer. I’ll let you know what’s going on as soon as I do.” He gave a quick salute to Ecks, then got in his patrol car and backed out of the lot, before entering the street and accelerating quickly to avoid a collision with oncoming traffic.

“Why does everyone think I’m in the military?”

“I don’t think that’s what he meant.”

“What now?”

“I don’t know. You hungry?”

“Why Abbs, are you asking me out?”

“No. I’m hungry, I was just being nice and asking instead of saying, ‘Ecks, I’m hungry, feed me.’”

“I’d feed you. What do you feel like?”

They got in Ecks’s car. He started it, then they sat there.

“Are we gonna go?”

“Once you tell me where.”

“Anywhere, can’t you decide?”

“I’m not the one who’s hungry. But fine, we’re going to Vince’s.”

Abby shook her head. “No, I don’t want Italian. Let’s get Chinese somewhere.”

“Too bad. You forfeited, and I’m driving. We’re going to Vince’s.” He laughed. “I’m kind of hungry now.”

They left the lot, and headed in the opposite direction from that which Officer Delano had gone. They didn’t notice the person on a nearby roof taking photos of them. Abby would later see one of those photos, in which she was facing directly toward the camera, and in which she was completely unaware.

While they ate, Abby brought up a hotel. Ecks offered to drive her there, and she sighed. After taking a slightly more direct route—“I wish I didn’t have to spend the money”—Ecks caught on and offered his place.

They got there around ten o’clock that night, and the first thing Abby did was go around and lock all the windows.

“We’re on the thirteenth floor, I don’t think anyone’s coming in that way.”

“You never know. Wait, I thought this was the fourteenth floor?”

“It is technically. Or, non-technically? Anyway, you know how some buildings don’t have a thirteenth floor?”

“So we are on the fourteenth then.”

“Well no, because if you go outside and count, that window which you actually just unlocked would be the thirteenth from the ground.”

“Shit. Why are your locks so weird? And why do your windows even open this high up?”

He walked over and locked it for her. “I have no idea. Want to see something else weird about this place?”

He brought her into his bedroom, and headed toward the bed.

“Hey now,” she said.

At the side of the bed, he pulled aside a door that blended in with the molding.

“Whoa. That is cool. Closet?”

“Come see.”

It wasn’t a closest. Or maybe a stairs closet, if so. Inside was a winding spiral staircase that led up to a little loft area, which overlooked the main room of the apartment.

“How did I not notice this?”

Ecks pointed up toward the ceiling. “It’s the lights, and slope of the ceiling. Also the paint has something to do with it. Once you know it’s here, it’s easy to spot.”

“This is pretty sweet,” Abby said, turning and scanning the little office. There was a short desk in one corner, with a laptop identical to her own atop it, a padded wooden chair with a purple cushion, a low sofa, and a flat screen hanging on the opposite wall. “This where you write all your Pulitzer candidates?”

“Joke now, one day you’ll be begging me for an interview.”

“I bet.” She sat in the chair and opened his laptop.

“Hey!”

She lifted her hands away from it, tongue on her back teeth, half grinning. “Wow, Ecks, you should calm down.”

“God, girls are nosey.”

“Lots of girls come here, do they?”

He sat down on the sofa, taking his laptop with him. The cord didn’t reach that far, and came unplugged and dropped to the floor as he sat. “Not up here.”

She stared at him. “I’m the first?”

He didn’t look at her as he answered. “I’m sure lots of people have been up here. But since I moved in, it’s only been me.” He shrugged a single shoulder. “It felt like a secret. I didn’t want to share it with just anyone, because that would ruin it, make it not special.”

She got up and sat down on the sofa next to him. It was small enough that they were very close.
I’m not drunk enough for this
, she thought.

The next morning—

“Whoa! Hold on,” the thirteen-year-old says. “Back up sister. We want to know what happened.”

Abby looks shocked, you think. As though she hadn’t given this much thought. “What do you mean? Nothing happened. We slept and then got up the next morning.”

“See? You’re doing it again. It’s the in-between we want to know about.”

“You want to hear my dreams?”

“I want to hear your feels!”

“What?”

“Oh, let her have her secrets,” the doctor’s wife says.

“Yeah,” the woman who broke the champagne bottle’s fall agrees. “There are too many men here to share true feels.”

“I don’t know what any of you are talking about. Now do you want to hear about my completely irrelevant love life, or the possibly deadly important relationship between what’s happened to me over the past few days and tonight’s disaster?”

“Love life?” the thirteen-year-old says, leaning forward.

“Come on honey,” the wife says, pulling the girl back, then appearing to lean on her for support. “We can hear about that later. Go on Abby. What happened next?”

You return your attention to Abby, and she begins once more.

The next morning she got a call from an unfamiliar number. Reluctantly, she answered. “Hello?”

“Abby. Abby Melcer?”

“Yes—”

“This is Officer Delano. I’m here with our forensics guys, and your landlord wants to check with you whether it’s okay for us to go in.” He did not sound pleased.

“Oh. Yeah, of course.”

“Great. Great. Hold on a second, you can tell your landlord that.”

There was a rustling, then Abby’s landlord, a middle-aged man who doted like a long-lost aunt, came on the line. “Hello Abby. How are you this morning?”

“I’m good, George. You can let the police in.”

“Oh, yes, okay. You know, I just wanted to check in with you, make sure it was okay. I wouldn’t want you to hold me responsible if anything, well, I mean, you kids have all kinds of things these days, easily damaged things, expensive. I just wouldn’t want to be held responsible. You have renter’s insurance, yes?” Maybe it was just the phone, but his voice seemed higher than normal.

“Yes, I do,” Abby lied. “It’s fine, you can let them in.”

“Okay then, here’s Officer… here’s the officer.”

“Wait!” Abby shouted, remembering her keys.

“Yes!”

“I lost my key. Can—”

“No problem. No problem at all. I’ve been meaning to change the locks.”

“You have?”

“Certainly! Two break-ins in as many weeks? Both times no physical damage? Maybe someone has some keys they shouldn’t.” There was a pause. “You know I had to fire the last cleaning crew, those, uh, those people may have made copies before giving the keys back.”

Abby wondered why the crew had keys to apartments in the first place, but was more concerned with the other break-in. “Who else was broken into?”

“Um, this is Officer Delano. Maybe you can talk to your landlord when you get back, or on his own phone.”

“Sure, sorry…”

“Okay then. We’ll let you know what we find. Do you need a ride to the station?”

“The station?” She looked at Ecks. “I can find my way there. When?”

“We’ll let you know. I have a bunch of paperwork from a John Doe that needs to be done today, and our lab guys will need a bit of time to process the evidence, so probably tomorrow morning..”

“Okay.”

“Great. See you then.”

They disconnected.

“Who’s George?” Ecks asked from beside her.

“My landlord. He wouldn’t let the police in.”

Ecks chuckled. “Someone else was broken into? During the night?”

“I don’t know, the cop took the phone back before I found out. We should go there later.”

He nodded. “Coffee?”

“You have tea?”

“No.” He smiled. “But I don’t have coffee either.”