“I’m quite aware of what your website is,” I said evenly, knocking my knuckles on the surface of the desk. The mousy thing flinched. “I need his personal number. Why would I need his office number when you’ve already established that he’s not here, hmmm?”
Somehow her thin lips thinned even further. “I’m not authorized to give out personal information.”
“This is a matter of life and death.”
“I’m sorry. If you give me your name and number, I can leave a message for him and he’ll see it first thing in the morning.”
“The morning? I must speak with him now. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t urgent.” I placed my hands on the desk and leaned toward her. She leaned back, her cheap office chair creaking beneath her. “You don’t understand how important it is that I speak with him.”
“I’m going to have to ask you to back up,” she said, though her voice quavered.
I pressed a hand to my temple, fighting off a sudden blinding headache. Minimize stressful situations, the doc had said. Well, doc, I don’t have the luxury of minimizing stress when I have people like this woman to contend with now, do I? She couldn’t see that I wasn’t some nutcase off the street? My livelihood is hanging in the balance and she doesn’t have a shred of sympathy for me!
A hand wrapped around my forearm and I yelped. When my I whipped my throbbing skull to the right, I found a burly security guard beside me. The receptionist was on her feet now, peering at me around the fake leaves of the Ficus tree beside her desk. What a coward!
“All right, buddy,” the guard said. “Why don’t you go walk this off?”
“Walk this off?” I asked, then snatched my arm from his loose grip. I straightened my shirt. “I’m not intoxicated.”
I just have a headache so acute, I’m mildly nauseated.
Even though the guard didn’t touch me again, I was escorted out of the building like a common street thug all the same. My frustration was so overwhelming that, for an hour, I stalked around the neighborhood the newspaper office was nestled in.
I eventually drove back to Carter’s neighborhood, watching his house in my rearview. I spotted Vickie walking Ollie around her usual path. I could see her searching for me, coming around the corner with anticipation lighting up her features, only to have that hope slough away when I was nowhere to be found. Desperation was so unbecoming.
Perhaps an ambush was in order. If I threatened Carter in front of his family, he’d be so fearful for the life of his wife and child that he’d tell me what I needed to know out of a sense of self-preservation.
I liked this idea.
My phone pinged, breaking my concentration. I tore my gaze away from Carter’s house. My throat tightened, worried The Client had sent another rage-filled message. He had yet to reply to my last one. I hoped that meant he was mollified for now.
I had very few notification alerts set up on my phone, one of which was for any responses I received from my Reddit post about the missing cameras.
So far, all I’d received was an asinine “Any luck, bud?” from FoToS4LyFe. No. No luck, bud.
The alert that had just come through was from that very post. I sat up a little straighter. Someone named Clair4U had replied.
Hi! I think my aunt bought your storage unit! She owns a thrift shop in Albuquerque. One of the cameras was bought by someone already—sorry!—but we have the other two. I’m so glad I found this post. I was searching for more information on the Canon AE-1 and found your post instead. Kismet, eh? She would love to give them back to you since they’re heirlooms. Plus no one in the family knows how to use film cameras! Would you like to meet up?
Kismet, indeed.
A picture was attached, showing the two remaining cameras. My heart lurched at the sight of them. My attention shifted to the third item in the photo—the camera bag I’d forgotten all about. A cold sweat poured over me. Son of a bitch! The bag looked intact. The thrift store owner hopefully hadn’t found the Velcroed bottom. I should have superglued the thing down.
No matter. I would meet this person and the guilt she felt about selling off the other camera would loosen her lips, and she’d cough up the information I needed to track down the buyer who threatened to unravel the life The Client and I had woven for ourselves.
I started up my car and pulled out onto the road. Carter was a dead end anyway. As I looked in the rearview mirror, I spotted Vickie standing on the corner a block away, head cocked in a manner as curious as her little dog. There was no way she’d recognized my car, was there? Just before I turned right at the next stop sign, I glanced into the mirror again. Vickie had moved on.
Within a few days, Clair4U and I had set up a meeting in Epicurean Subs. It was one of the more detestable locations Albuquerque had to offer, but if it meant I could get my cameras and bag back, I would stomach walking into the place. When I stepped inside the shop, which smelled too heavily of spices and vinegar, another recovered memory surfaced. I had ducked into this very shop during one of the days I had been trailing Kendra on her way to work. I wondered if silly little Digby had ever gotten over her.
Kendra. Kendra’s overgrown oaf of a new boyfriend who I had nicknamed Axel/Gage. That was who had done this to me! He was the reason I was here now, attempting to reclaim my cameras from a stranger.
I found a young Black woman sitting at one of the tables. My camera bag sat on the booth seat beside her. She smiled at me when I entered.
“Are you rangefinderanders?” she asked, standing with her hand out.
“And you must be Clair4U.” I shook her offered palm.
She flinched so violently when our hands met that I wondered if she’d gotten an electric shock from the contact.
“Sorry,” she said, laughing lightly. “That’s me. Clair4U, I mean.” She returned to her seat.
I inwardly groaned. She wasn’t just going to give me the cameras and let me go on my merry way. I reluctantly slid into the chair across from her.
“I’m sorry we only have two of the three. Were you very close to your father?”
“Thick as thieves,” I said. “Do you happen to know who bought the other one? I would be more than willing to pay double what they bought it for. I don’t know how much you know about cameras, but the one that sold was a rangefinder.”
“Oh, like your handle!” she said.
Yes, you simpleton. “Exactly. It was my father’s favorite.”
She reached for her purse and took out her phone. “I asked my aunt that very thing just before I left to come here,” she explained as she swiped at her phone screen. “Let’s see if she answered me yet. She doesn’t take down customers’ information or anything when they make a purchase, but she has a very popular email list she encourages people to sign up for. She thought he might have signed up.”
She absently placed the camera bag on the table as she continued to scroll through her phone. I quickly fumbled to open it, checking that the cameras hadn’t been damaged.
“Those are yours, correct?” she asked.
I heaved a sigh of relief. “Yes. I was holed up in the hospital for nearly four months. When I got out and found out my unit had been sold, I was devastated, thinking I’d lost this piece of my father.”
“I’m glad we could get them back to you,” she said, still fiddling with her phone. “Oh! My aunt replied. It looks like he signed up for her email list after all. Would his email address be helpful?”
She looked up at me with her innocent brown eyes. The Client would have liked this one.
“An email would be incredibly helpful,” I said, resisting the urge to rip everything out of the camera bag to assure myself that the negatives of Brynn and Shawna were still there. “Thank you.”
A chair suddenly pulled up next to me. My head whipped left, and my gaze settled on an older Black guy in jeans and a tucked-in black shirt. Was this Clair’s dad or something? My lizard-brain instincts kicked in a second later. There was something about cops that stood out like a sore thumb. This
guy had cop written all over him even as he casually rested an elbow on the table a foot away from mine. My attention shifted to Clair. Her arms were crossed and she was leaned against the plushy booth. The wide-eyed innocent expression was gone. In its place was one that very clearly said she wanted to claw my face off.
“Are you Anders Pedersen?” the cop asked.
My palms itched. I looked from him to the woman and back again. A lump formed in my throat. I didn’t know what to do.
“He seems confused,” the lady said. “You’re also known by another name, right? The Nob Hill Prowler?”
Oh shit.
“Sorry,” I said, standing up so quickly, I almost knocked my chair over. I held my hands up in innocence. I was so unnerved, I’d forgotten my cameras on the table. “I’m not sure what’s going on here, but I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding. I’m not who you think I am. I just wanted my father’s cameras back.”
I bumped into the unforgiving body of someone behind me and whirled to find a guy who looked even more like a cop than the one at the table. At least it wasn’t Axel/Gage ready to pummel my face again. “Sorry, bud. I was just leaving.”
Someone grabbed hold of my wrist and pulled it up behind my back. “Anders Pedersen, you’re under arrest for your involvement in the murders of Shawna Mack, Brynn Bodwell, and Emery Dawson.”
The cop said other things, but there was a horrible ringing in my ears. I didn’t resist as he handcuffed me, mostly because my knees had gone wobbly. And the ringing—like an alarm bell only I could hear—rattled my brain around my skull. I was escorted out the door and down the sidewalk. The ringing persisted. The men spoke to me. I know they did. But I couldn’t hear it. I peered in at “Clair4U” as the cops led me away. She offered me a little finger wave.
My lip twitched.
She was Carter Quincy’s source. She had bought my cameras, developed my film, and had ruined my life.
The ringing stopped abruptly, the absence of it nearly deafening.
There were myriad things I should have been thinking then, but as I was put in the back of a sleek black vehicle and driven away, only one word filled the silence in my head, repeating like a mantra, like a heartbeat: How?
CHAPTER 27
Anders Pedersen had been arrested nearly a week ago and Riley had yet to hear anything. She had started staying at Michael’s place, making the long drive to The Laughing Tiger from his house most afternoons. Even though she knew Anders was in custody, her anxiety told her he was lurking around, watching her just as Hank had. Anders, though, made Hank’s antics look like amateur hour in comparison. Anders had turned stalking into a business.
Riley and Michael were curled up on his couch Saturday afternoon watching a movie when her phone on the coffee table started to ring. “Detective Howard” scrolled across the screen. She fumbled for the phone so quickly, it startled Baxter off the couch.
“Hi!”
“We have a bit of a situation.”
Her stomach flopped. “What kind of situation?”
“Anders has stipulations for giving up information, and part of those stipulations are that you tell him how you figured out who he was.” When she didn’t immediately reply, Howard said, “The self-importance wafting off this guy is enough to choke a person. He thinks he’s smarter than everyone in the room, but it really seems to piss him off that you’re the one who got him in hot water.”
“Me?” she asked, incredulous.
“He said he’ll give up the name of Mack’s, Bodwell’s, and Dawson’s killer,” he said slowly, “if you tell him how you figured him out.”
Riley blinked in rapid succession. Clearly the cops hadn’t divulged the fact that they already knew the killer’s name—Bruce Trager—and that law enforcement of several stripes were working to track the guy down.
“Hello?” Howard asked after several beats of silence.
“Sorry. I had to pick my jaw up off the floor.”
Howard chuckled darkly. “You absolutely do not have to talk to the guy if you’re not comfortable doing so. We can negotiate for something else.” He cleared his throat awkwardly. “He also has implied that there are others out there that Bruce murdered, but that we’ll never find them without his help.”
Riley already had confirmation that there were others. When she’d shaken Anders’s hand in Epicurean Subs, a snapshot of memory had slammed into her. She’d seen Anders taking a picture of another Black woman—one other than Shawna and Emery. As much as the guy creeped her out, Riley was in this for the long haul. “I’ll talk to him.”
His little exhale of breath, however slight, told her he was relieved she’d agreed. “Now, let me state that as much as anything he says can be used against him in a court of law, anything you say can potentially be used as well in his defense. One thing that’s on our side right now is that Anders isn’t a wealthy man. His lawyer is court-appointed and likely has a full docket. That said, this case is largely circumstantial and we’re still waiting on a warrant to search his apartment and computer. His lawyer might try a defense of ‘They have nothing on my client, and their key witness thinks she can talk to dead people’ and the case could potentially get thrown out.”
Riley’s stomach flipped. She hadn’t even thought of that as a possibility.
This meant, if she went through with this, she’d need to get a solid confession out of the guy. If he thought he was the smartest person in the room, he also thought he was smarter than her. Maybe he hoped she would divulge all her sleuthing secrets, allowing him to assess how much she truly knew. If her intel wasn’t damning enough in his eyes, what would stop him from pleading the Fifth when it was his turn to talk?
Something Detective McGregor had said came back to her. It would be incredible if I could tell Malcolm definitively what happened to his mother before my career is over. At this point, that’s all either of us wants. We just want it solved. Shawna deserves that much.
“I’ll do it,” she said again, more confident this time.
“Okay,” Howard said. “I’ll arrange a meeting and get back to you.”
Three days later, Riley walked into an Albuquerque police station with Michael and a lawyer friend of Rochelle’s that she’d met only two days ago. Wendy had passed the bar recently but hadn’t established herself as a practicing lawyer yet. Riley’s parents, Michael, and Riley’s friends all figured it was the best—and least expensive—option on such short notice. Riley hoped that if they showed up in smart clothes, that it would do half of the work for them.
The lobby of the station was all sleek lines and marble. It was quiet inside aside from the phones that rang every few minutes. The wide space had a few benches taking up the area between the glass front doors and the long counter that bisected the room. A handful of front desk clerks were busy with phone calls and paperwork. Riley wasn’t sure what she expected—maybe a small holding cell off to the side filled with hostile criminals.
Riley’s mind was so abuzz with wildly bouncing thoughts that she didn’t even see Detective Howard approach her until he was right there beside her.
He cocked a brow at her. “You all right?”
Riley swallowed hard. “I think I need water or something?”
Howard nodded once and then made his way across the lobby to a water cooler.
“I’ll get us checked in,” Wendy said before marching across the tile floor to a bank of receptionists’ desks.
Michael stood in front of Riley and cupped her face in his hands, making her look at him. “You got this. Do you know how proud I am that you got under a psychopath’s skin? I mean, that’s no easy task, babe.”
She managed a faint smile. “That’s because he’s also a raging narcissist.”
“True.” He kissed her, making her forget for a moment where she was and who she was about to go meet. “I’m still proud of you.”
Detective Howard cleared his throat.
Michael let her go and took a step back. Riley, f
ace on fire, took the small offered cup of water from the detective. She knocked it back, but her mouth was still parched.
“Remember that this guy requested this meeting because his ego has been bruised,” Howard said. “I don’t think there’s an altruistic bone in his body. He’s going to try to get you to do all the talking. Any of those talking points we went over a couple days ago are still game, but if any of us watching get the sense that things are going sideways, we’ll pull you out.”
“She’s not going to be alone with him, is she?” Michael asked.
“Nope. Both lawyers and myself will be in there with her, and Anders will be handcuffed to the table.”
Michael nodded calmly at that, as if anything about this wasn’t batshit.
“Ready?” Howard asked.
Riley considered bolting out the glass doors, screaming the whole way. “Yep.”
After kissing Riley goodbye, Michael settled down on one of the benches with a book. Riley followed after Wendy and Detective Howard, thankful that at least one of them knew the way, because her mind was a panicked buzz again.
Detective Howard stopped at an interrogation room in the middle of a sterile hallway, the lights above them too bright and harsh. He offered her an encouraging nod, then swung the door open.
It was a room not unlike the ones she’d seen on her many true crime shows. Plain walls—one of which was taken up by a dark two-way mirror—and a large table surrounded by five chairs. Two of them were occupied. Riley swallowed as she stared at Anders Pedersen. She’d seen him almost two weeks ago in Epicurean Subs, and while that setting had been more dangerous, she somehow felt even more anxious seeing him here. Detective Howard placed a gentle hand on her arm and she flinched.
“Go ahead and have a seat, Riley,” he said.
As she did so, Anders’s eyes never left her. She and Wendy sat across from Anders and his lawyer, while Detective Howard took a seat at the head of the table across from the door. She was glad he was there, but even gladder to see that Anders’s hands were in fact handcuffed to the table. Giving the room a quick scan from her new vantage point, she spotted a broad-shouldered man by the door with sandy blond hair, a scar above his right eye, and a no-nonsense expression. Riley was glad he was there too, serving as muscle in case Anders tried anything fishy.
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