Die Buying (5 page)

“No blood at the scene.” At Joel’s blank look, I explained. “He wasn’t shot in the window. The murderer shot him somewhere else and moved him.”

“Oh.” Joel’s disappointment showed in his eyes. He returned to his chair and slumped into it, his broad thighs stretching the fabric of the black uniform pants. “Well, she could still have done it.”

“Sure she could,” I agreed cheerfully. “And so could a dozen or two dozen other people. In police investigations, we like to rely on a little thing called ‘evidence.’ ”

“Excuse me.”

Detective Anders Helland filled the doorway, all broad shoulders, sharp suit, and patrician features. Joel jumped to his feet; Helland had that kind of presence. With an effort, I remained seated. “Yes?”

“That idiot Woskowicz isn’t here, is he?” Helland said it like he didn’t give a damn if Woskowicz was listening from the next room.

Against my will, my opinion of the detective went up a few notches; anyone who could zero in on Woskowicz’s idiocy within minutes of meeting him deserved some respect. Although, Woskowicz’s intellectual failings weren’t exactly hard to suss out. “No.”

“The cretin actually walked right into my crime scene. No gloves, no booties, no common sense. God knows what evidence he destroyed or corrupted.” Ignoring Joel, Helland focused on me, his pale gray eyes assessing. “I need a liaison here at the mall. You’re it.”

“I don’t wa—”

“For starters, I’ll need blueprints of the mall, names of all employees with contact data, video from any cameras that would have line of sight on either the interior or exterior entrance to Diamanté, and a corned beef sandwich with extra mustard. Think you can handle that?”

“Yes, sir!” Joel piped up before I could tell the man what to do with his corned beef sandwich. “EJ already got me started—”

“I’ll have the documents and video to you within the hour,” I said, keeping my tone professional.

But Helland was already out the door and I doubted if he heard me.

A little browbeating got me the blueprints from the mall manager’s office in record time. But the personnel list was another matter. They didn’t have one. Each of the stores maintained their own list of employees; no central list existed. Quigley’s office maintained personnel records only on the mall’s direct hires: janitorial staff, security staff, and mall administration. I accepted the list of those employees, knowing it wouldn’t satisfy Helland, and crossed back to the security office where Joel had finished transferring the camera data to a CD. We sat side by side in front of his computer monitor, fast-forwarding through a whole lot of nothing, looking for a murderer hauling a body into Diamanté. Detective Helland was going to be disappointed by the video evidence, I suspected. Although the mall had approximately one hundred cameras, only about a third of them were actually hooked up. The rest were for show, to scare crooks away from shoplifting or vandalism, the video equivalent of “This house protected by So-and-So Security” stickers on the windows of a house with no alarm system. A flicker of movement on the screen caught my eye and I paused the CD.

“Weasel,” Joel said.

He was right; it was only Billy Wedzel, the midshift officer responsible for mall security from eleven at night to seven in the morning. The camera had caught activity near the movie theater until the last film let out at just past midnight, but nothing after that. A couple of fuzzy cars entered the north garage at just after two a.m., moving with the stuttering motion that not enough frames per second produced. I wished Helland and crew good luck in getting a license plate number. The cars were on the opposite side of the mall from Diamanté, anyway, and probably had no connection with the murder.

“Well, that wasn’t worth wasting a CD on,” Joel observed, disappointed.

I popped the CD out and slid it into a case. “Maybe the murder will get management to upgrade the camera system,” I said, not believing it. Cost cutting was the order of the day at Fernglen, and it would take a terrorist attack or an alien invasion, I figured, to get Quigley to allocate more money to security. Taking the blueprints, the abbreviated personnel list, and the CD, I glided back toward Diamanté.

Crime scene tape still roped off the area, but the crowd had diminished. The body was gone from the display window, I noted with a glance, and Gina Kissell and her baby had left. The lone cop standing at the entrance to the wing looked over at Detective Blythe Livingston when I told him I had documents requested by Detective Helland. She stood talking to a crime scene technician who was stooped over, removing his blue paper booties, and she nodded permission for me to enter. The uniformed officer had me sign in on a clipboard before letting me pass.

Feeling a bit like an interloper, and hating it, I approached Detective Livingston. “I’ve got the CD from the security cameras and some of the data Detective Helland asked for,” I said.

“Some?” she asked with an appraising look from shrewd brown eyes.

I tucked my hair behind my ear. “The mall doesn’t have a consolidated list of all employees—they’re hired by the individual stores.” I thrust the documents and CD toward her, but she put her hands up, palms out, refusing to take them.

“I’m due in court in thirty minutes, so I’m out of here. He’s in the store.” Noting my hesitation, she added, “We’ve processed it. It’s okay to go in.” On the words, she headed away from me with brisk click-clacks from her pumps.

Armed with her permission, I crossed the threshold of Diamanté, automatically cataloging what I saw. Other than in the display window, where three mannequins lay in a tangle of stiff limbs and vacant stares, probably pushed aside so the coroner’s team could remove the body, nothing looked out of place. No footprints, mud, blood, or other marks marred the marble-tile floor. Widely spaced racks of clothing, many glistening with the sheen of silk or the sparkle of sequins, stood undisturbed, waiting for a wealthy socialite to spin them and make a selection. The glossy red doors that led to three fitting rooms were all discreetly closed. The scent of a lavender air freshener overlay the faint, sweet odor of decay. Breathing shallowly through my mouth, I moved further into the store.

A cash register sat unattended on a glass-topped counter filled with jewelry. No smudges. Finola and her staff clearly did a better job with cleaning than I did; my glass-topped coffee table showed fingerprints, dust motes, and cat hairs mere seconds after I Windexed it. Voices came from the open door of an office tucked behind the counter, and I approached quietly, willing to eavesdrop to learn what the early investigation had turned up. However, as I neared the door, Finola Craig emerged, saying, “I’m perfectly certain nothing’s missing.” Her slender fingers toyed with the chains dangling from her neck, making them clink. “With the exception of that”—she waved toward the window—“everything is as it should be. I closed up myself last night: reconciled the register, cleaned the counters, vacuumed, straightened the stock. Oh, hi, EJ.” She looked startled, but not unhappy, to see me.

Detective Helland came out of the office. “About time,” he said, spotting the folders I held. He stepped toward me and stretched out an imperious hand. Slapping the folders into his left hand, I noted the breadth of his palm and his long fingers. No ring. My eyes met his, and I dared him to mention the sandwich.

“Thanks. I’ll let you know when we need something else. Don’t worry about forgetting my sandwich,” he added blandly. “One of the uniforms picked one up for me.” He nodded toward a deli bag I hadn’t noticed on the far side of the register.

The man was infuriating. Reluctantly, I let professionalism win out over my irritation. “The security officer on duty last night was—”

“I’ll go through this,” Helland interrupted, waving the folder, “and let you know who I need to interview. You can set them up.” Without a “thanks” or a “good-bye,” he strode from the store, leaving fluttering fabrics in his wake.

I gave Finola Craig a speculative look, wondering what she’d told Helland, but decided to talk to her later. Helland might pop back in, and I was damned sure he wouldn’t be happy about me interviewing one of his possible suspects. Not that I cared about his happiness or planned to let his anticipated ire stop me from interviewing anyone I wanted to, but I didn’t want him to catch me. Besides which, I needed to get back on patrol. “Are you holding up okay?” I asked Finola as we moved toward the door.

“It’s horrid,” she said, blinking rapidly. Blotches of darker gray blossomed on the breast of her pearl gray jacket. “Nothing like this has ever—I can’t believe that Jack is—” Pulling a lace-edged hanky from her skirt pocket, she hurried away from me in the direction of the restrooms. I stared after her for a moment. Yes, having someone murdered in your boutique was an ugly thing, but she seemed overly distraught to me. She’d referred to the vic as “Jack.” Pretty cozy way to talk about a casual customer. What, exactly, had her relationship with the dead developer been?

Swinging by the Herpetology Hut, I was hoping for an update from Kiefer, but the store was locked and he wasn’t there. Probably still out corralling his stock. As far as I knew, the Vernonville PD hadn’t sent anyone to take his statement yet, and there’d been no sign of anyone from Animal Control. Sigh.

“Miss! Officer!” A man hurried toward me, suit jacket flapping, fleshy face reddened by anger or exertion.

I stopped the Segway. “How can I help you, sir?”

“My car! Some criminal spray painted my Beemer. In broad daylight!”

“Show me,” I said, dismounting from the Segway. Unfortunately, I had a pretty good idea of what he was going to show me; we’d been having trouble since Christmas with cars getting spray painted by kids—it felt like teens to me—clever enough to avoid our surveillance cameras. They tagged one car a day, always at different times. I walked beside the incensed man to the wall of doors giving access to the north parking lot. On the way, I got his name—Kenneth Downs—and his address. It wasn’t hard to spot his car once we emerged into the weak February sun. It was the only black BMW in the lot with “Jesus Is Ur Savior” written in orange across the hood and driver’s-side panels. The “i” in “Savior” was dotted with a smiley face. Downs gobbled at the sight. “It’s . . . it’s sacrilege!” he finally spat.

I didn’t think he intended the irony. Without replying, I took photos of the graffiti and jotted notes for my report. “You’ll need to inform your insurance company,” I told Downs, giving him my card. “You can have them call me.”

“Aren’t you going to fingerprint it or something?” he asked, walking around the car, head bent looking for other damage. “Maybe I should call the real cops.”

“There won’t be fingerprints,” I told him, having taken it upon myself to dust the first couple of graffitied cars we’d found in December. “The taggers wear gloves. And you’re certainly welcome to call the Vernonville PD, but I can tell you they won’t send an officer out for property damage of this sort. They’ll just file a report.”

“I pay taxes!” Downs grumbled. “For what?” He yanked open the car door and it bounced off him, leaving a smear of orange on his slacks. “Damn it!” He slid into the car, slammed the door, and ground the gears as he pulled out, narrowly missing a woman pushing a baby stroller.

“You’re welcome,” I said to his rapidly disappearing bumper. The woman with the stroller gave him the finger, and I felt like high-fiving her. Throughout my law enforcement career, from the time I’d enlisted in the air force and gone to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio for training, my biggest challenge had been remaining polite and even sympathetic in the face of crass rudeness. I forced myself to remember that citizens weren’t used to confronting violence—attacks on their persons or property—and that they felt violated. Still, I had to bite my tongue sometimes when people acted entitled or abusive. In many ways, dealing with criminals or enemy soldiers was an easier proposition. And wasn’t that a sad statement, I thought, returning to the mall.

I walked back
into the security office at three, the end of my shift (I was on days this week, which ran seven to three), after a couple hours of patrolling. I’d reassured two shoppers who’d encountered lizards (and returned the little geckos to Kiefer), discouraged a teenager from riding his skateboard down the escalator, and helped an elderly gentleman find his car. Routine. The kind of humdrum policing I did most days. All the while, the murder played in the back of my mind, and I made a mental list of the things I’d follow up on . . . if it were my case, which it wasn’t.

As I pushed through the glass doors to the office, I heard an unwelcome voice apparently finishing up a joke. Weasel. Billy Wedzel, actually, but “Weasel” fit better. He followed the punch line with nasty laughter, the kind of Beavis and Butthead sniggering adolescent boys have perfected. “Get it?” he said in his nasal voice. “Her ta-tas—”

“I got it,” Joel said in a long-suffering tone. “I just didn’t think it was funny.”