by Harper Lin
“You’ll see it clearer after a burger and a good night’s rest,” Amelia said soothingly. “I better get going. I don’t want to get the receptionist in trouble.”
“That bubblehead? She’s probably already forgotten you are here.” Dan winked at her. “I’ll meet you at your place. If the kids are around, we can take them with.”
Amelia bounced on her toes. “They’d love that.” She blew Dan a kiss and hurried to the reception area, where the receptionist was tearing apart her desk.
“Thanks again. Sorry I took so long.” She handed the receptionist the bathroom key.
“Oh, you had it.” She sighed. “I thought I had lost it. No problem. Have a good night.”
Amelia almost started to giggle as she realized Dan was right.
Chapter Seven
After a lively dinner of burgers and fries with her three favorite people, Amelia spent a few romantic minutes with Dan, standing outside his car as Meg and Adam waved goodbye and went into the house.
“What a day.” Amelia yawned. “Will you be back at the Master Ketchup factory tomorrow?” She hadn’t talked to him about the murder all night. She didn’t want to bring it up in front of the kids.
“No.” He folded his arms across his chest and leaned against the car. Amelia thought he could easily be one of those older, distinctive-looking models for fancy British leather shoes or some kind of spicy cologne. “We’ve got to interview the parents. That’s never a good job.”
“I’ll bet.” Amelia took a step closer to him. “Didn’t they realize she had been missing since Friday?”
“How did you know that?” Dan asked, tilting his head to the right.
“Christine told me. How horrible those four days must have been for her parents.” Amelia couldn’t help but think of Adam and Meg. How does a mother breathe when she knows her child is missing? If she dwelled on the thought much longer, she was going to start crying.
“It’s a funny thing. The parents didn’t realize something was wrong until Sunday afternoon. Her boyfriend didn’t call because he was out of town with his own job. That’s already been verified. But Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox didn’t know he was out of town. So, when Danielle didn’t come home, they assumed she was with him. The two were serious enough. No engagement ring yet, but their relationship had all the telltale signs it was going in that direction. It was a missed one o’clock call, after twelve o’clock church services at St. Michael’s Parish in Watsego, that Mr. and Mrs. Wilcox knew something was wrong.”
“I don’t understand.” Amelia squinted.
“The Wilcoxes are devout Catholics,” Dan explained. “But, since Danielle was young and out in the world, she didn’t always go to mass at the same time or even at the same church as her parents. But they had a ritual that, no matter where she was, she’d call on Sunday after she got home from the latest church service. This time there was no call. Mrs. Wilcox immediately called the police.”
“Is there any footage from surveillance or anything to help out?” Amelia quickly steered the conversation away from the emotions or the heartbreak. Just the facts.
“No.” Dan sighed. “Whoever did this did it quickly and either slipped out during the final minutes of business hours when everyone was leaving, just mingling in with the crowd, or the perp somehow managed to sneak out without being seen by surveillance at all.”
“You’ve got your work cut out for you on this one.” Amelia blinked.
“Tell me about it.”
“If you’d like to stop by tomorrow you are more than welcome. Adam will be home, but Meg is spending the night with Katherine.”
“On a school night?”
“Yeah. They are partners on some science project and begged and begged to put the final touches on it while having a sort of sleepover.” Amelia smiled. “I’m sure by three o’clock they’ll both be as grouchy as ever and ready for bed before the sun goes down.”
“I’d love to. But it all depends on how things turn out with this case,” Dan said.
Amelia noticed he was keeping pretty tightlipped about it. If he thought that she would throw caution to the wind just by hearing a few syllables of his opinions of the case, well, he wasn’t totally wrong. Sure, she’d love to hear his take on the people at the MK factory. But she wasn’t going to drag it out of him or drag her kids into it. That would be unhealthy for their relationship. Plus, she had Christine to talk to. There was more than one way to skin this cat.
“Can we play it by ear?” he asked.
“Sure. Thanks for dinner, Detective.” She cupped Dan’s cheek with affection then turned to head toward her front door.
“Wait just a minute.” Dan held her hand firmly and pulled her toward him.
“No, no.” She put her other hand over her mouth. “I had raw onions on my burger. I stink.”
“So did I.” Dan didn’t loosen his grip.
“Yikes. Then it’s you who stinks,” Amelia teased.
Before she could make one final attempt to pull away, Dan slipped his arms around her waist and held her close to him. She looked up to his face, inhaling the scent of his skin and nervously fidgeting with his tie and lapel.
She had kissed Dan before. This was not a new development. But she couldn’t help feeling the awkward butterflies in her stomach when he looked at her like he was now.
“Don’t pull away, Ms. Harley,” he purred. His eyes were gently stroking her face, and the left side of his mouth curled slightly. “Where do you think you’re going?” As he leaned down, Amelia quit fighting and stood on tiptoes to meet him halfway in a passionate kiss goodnight.
“If I don’t see you tomorrow, I’ll call you.”
Amelia nodded and reluctantly pulled her arms from around his neck—they had snuck up there, somehow. From the front door, she waved. Dan returned the gesture with a quick tap of his horn and drove off.
“Mom?” Meg was in the kitchen with one hand on her hip and the other holding her mother’s cell phone. “It’s Christine. She’s been waiting for you for ten minutes.”
“Ten minutes? I wasn’t out there ten minutes.”
“Ugh, you guys are so weird.” Meg wrinkled her nose as she handed the phone to her mother then headed upstairs.
“Who’s weird? Me and Dan or me and Christine?”
“Both!” Meg yelled from upstairs before her door clicked shut.
“Hey, girl.” Amelia pulled a chair out from her kitchen table and took a seat. “How are you holding up?”
“Oh my gosh. Well, let me tell you, it’s like a circus in the office. I don’t mean to be… but there is work that still needs to get done,” Christine complained. “Now that we are short-handed in the marketing department, everything is falling on me. I went to Lena to have her pull one of the girls from sales or accounting or something, just to help with the easy stuff, and my gosh. You’d think I was requesting they carry a Dixie cup of Ebola back and forth all day.”
“People’s brains probably haven’t even totally wrapped around what happened.” Amelia tried to sound supportive. “It will probably be like that for a couple of days.”
“You’re right.” Christine gulped down something, probably wine. “My answer to a crisis or problem is to throw myself into some project. To me, it’s like a waking nap. I’ll focus on what has to get done, so my mind can get a break from focusing on the senseless murder that took place where I spend eight hours of my day, every day.”
“So, since you spend all that time there, let me ask you a few things. Who is Lenny, and do you know him?”
“Lenny? Short guy, right?”
“Yeah, that’s him.” Amelia smoothed the back of her neck.
“I really don’t talk to him. He’s a bit of a jerk. I think he’s in his early thirties, but he acts like a fourteen-year-old.”
“He didn’t seem too broken up about Danielle being killed.”
“Ha, I’ll bet he wasn’t,” Christine snapped. “Danielle didn’t care for Lenny. He would leer at
her, you know, when she walked past his cubicle. And he was always mentioning going out for a drink or meeting some people at a new place and she should come check it out. She used the word ‘persistent.’ I’d use the word pushy.” Amelia could hear Christine’s eyes roll. “Who in their right mind wants to dip their pen in company ink?”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Amelia concurred. John didn’t meet Jennifer at work, but he did meet her when he was out to lunch—at work. “Did Danielle tell you about his invitations, or did you just hear it through the grapevine?”
“She told me herself.” Christine cleared her throat. “At first, she kind of took it as a nice gesture. There are a number of assistants and a few of the warehouse guys who go down to Jack’s on the corner on Fridays to toss back a few. The unofficial Christmas party is there every year, too, from what I hear.”
“So why didn’t she ever go?”
“Well, what she told me was that he invited her to go out to Jack’s and told her a couple people from the office were going, too. But when Danielle started asking around, it turned out no one was going. It would just be her there. With Lenny. Alone. Like a date.”
“Sneaky,” Amelia crooned.
“Right? So, she decided she wasn’t going to go. She told me she let Lenny know that no one was going and that she didn’t feel comfortable going with him alone. Besides, she had a boyfriend. How would it look?”
“And what was his reply?”
“Typical for a jerk,” Christine replied. “He made it up in his head that she was too much of a snob, she thought she was better than everyone else, yadda, yadda. But that didn’t stop him from leering at her every time she walked by. I mean, she was a cute girl.”
“Do you think he’d kill her for it?”
“I don’t know. I talked to your friend, Detective Walishovsky. I told him about that, and he wrote it down, but I don’t know what he thought of it.”
“What do you think? In your gut,” Amelia pushed, hoping to hear something that made sense and that might wrap this thing up sooner rather than later.
“My heart tells me that Lenny is really too much of a wimp to ever do that. You know the type from your dating days. All talk and no action,” Christine joked. “But my head says sometimes a person just snaps.”
Before Amelia could ask any more questions, she heard the sound of a mob of angry people bursting through the door at Christine’s place.
“Okay! Do we need to shout as soon as we walk in! I am on the phone!” Christine yelled. “Yes, hello. Hello. How was soccer? Who got in a fight? Well, who threw the mud first? Oh, well, those six-year-olds are vicious. Amelia, I gotta run. My house is being invaded by Pele and the gang.”
“Sounds like fun.” Amelia’s words were smiling. “Tell the boys good job and love to Jason, too. I’ll see you tomorrow at work.”
“Absolutely.”
Amelia sat at the kitchen table and mulled over what Christine had told her. Thinking back to her dating days was not all that thrilling, since as far back as she could remember, John had been the only real boyfriend she’d had.
But she could imagine what Lenny behaved like, just based on her observation of him today. She’d postpone judgment and sentencing until she had another chance to talk to the guy.
A damaged ego could fuel a fire of revenge quite easily. Danielle would not have thought anything of Lenny coming near her, since they did work together, and if she were like the majority of women when put in an awkward situation, she probably did the best she could to avoid eye contact, for fear it could spark a conversation. By then, it could have been too late for her to defend herself.
Amelia called to mind her own hurt feelings after her divorce. It frightened her a little to think that she had even considered violence. But there was something in her, the love for her children, the possibility of her own business, the upcoming season of Better Call Saul—these simple things kept her grounded. She might have imagined—and even enjoyed—the thought of causing physical harm to the man who dumped her so cruelly and the bimbo he dumped her for. However, the safety gauge was on.
In Danielle’s case, Amelia was sure her assailant didn’t have a safety gauge.
Chapter Eight
The next morning in front of the Master Ketchup factory, things were pretty much the same as they had been the day before. People trickled up to the food trucks to grab a breakfast or cupcake or much-needed coffees. They finished their cigarettes, got in their morning gossip, then headed inside once the factory whistle blew.
“I don’t know if I’d like that kind of job,” Lila offered as she washed the morning’s mixing bowls. “Stopping and starting to the sound of a whistle reminds me too much of school.”
“Really? You strike me as the kind of gal who would have liked school.” Amelia took a drink of water.
“Ugh,” Lila replied. “I hated school. There was nothing they could teach me that I couldn’t learn faster and better on the street.”
“I’m not sure how to interpret that, Lila.” Amelia looked at her suspiciously.
“Please, I wish I was that scandalous.” Her shoulders bounced as she chuckled. “No. I mean I just don’t like the confines of a cube.”
“You’d hate this place. That’s what they have in there. I saw them when I went peeking in there yesterday.”
“Did you see anything else?”
“No. Heard a few things, but nothing I can really sink my teeth into.”
Just then, loitering outside the factory, pacing back and forth between the alley and the Pink Cupcake’s rear bumper, was the guy in the overalls who had sprinted across the street yesterday.
Amelia watched him as he strolled back and forth, looking at his watch and puffing a cigarette down to the filter. Finally, he saw what he’d been waiting for.
As everyone else was going into the building, the tight-skirted woman from yesterday emerged and began to walk across the street. Without nearly as much discretion as yesterday, they both headed off across the street.
Amelia watched.
“A little rendezvous before the nine o’clock conference call,” Lila mused.
“Right? Did you see them go that way yesterday, too?”
Lila shook her head, but her right eyebrow, which she’d drawn on with care, arched deviously high and up to her forehead as she looked from Amelia to the couple.
Within minutes, the pair had come back into view. He jogged to the factory entrance off the alley, and she went through the front door. Amelia and Lila worked with no more noise than the bustle of the neighborhood around them.
Before she knew it, Amelia heard the midday whistle blowing.
“Can you handle the restless natives?” Amelia asked, pulling off her apron and stepping down the back steps of the truck.
“Of course. Where are you going?”
“Nowhere. But I’ll be back in a minute.”
Lila shrugged and went back to arranging the final batch of PB&J cupcakes next to the new Breakfast Dessert cupcakes, which had quickly become popular among the big-boned construction workers down the street.
Without wasting any time, Amelia ran down the same gangway she had seen the couple retreat down yesterday and this morning. It came to a dead end, unless a person wanted to scale the chain-link fence and risk the barbed wire at the top, or didn’t mind giving their position away by yanking down the rusty fire escape ladder attached to the other building.
If Amelia didn’t find a hiding place, she’d be seen by the shady couple.
“No,” she mumbled as she stared at the large dumpster. The letters WM were painted in white on its dark-green body. Her heart was racing. Time was running out. Just up and in. Climb that box, swing a leg over and, once you’re inside, just crouch. Don’t touch the sides. Simple.
Looking over her shoulder, she saw people starting to emerge from all the buildings to take advantage of the weather and their fifteen-minute breaks.
Just do it!
Without thin
king, Amelia stepped onto a red plastic milk crate, lifted the plastic lid of the dumpster, and swung one leg over before the smell hit her. Gasping a little, she took a gulp of air, swung her other leg over, and carefully pulled the lid down over her, just as the man in the overalls appeared at the street entrance.
There wasn’t a ton of trash in the dumpster. Thankfully, most of it had been tossed to the side opposite Amelia. But as she crouched inside, she did start to feel herself sinking.
“What took you so long?” she heard the man say. Throwing caution to the wind, she put the very tips of her fingers against the lip of the dumpster and peeked out.
The woman was hurrying along. “I couldn’t help it.” She rushed up to him and, as Amelia predicted, kissed him full on the lips. “That detective called and said he wanted me to come down to the station.”
“What? Why?” the man asked.
“I don’t know. I think…” She hesitated. “Dean, I think they know.”
“They would only know if you told them.” Dean held her by her shoulders and looked in her eyes. “Did you tell them?”
“I don’t think I did,” she muttered.
“Well, what exactly did you say? You said something that’s got them wanting to talk to you again. How come they aren’t asking to talk to me?”
The woman shrugged. “If only Danielle would have kept her mouth shut. Why did she have to stick her nose in our business?”
“So you told them Danielle knew about us? Is that it?” Dean asked. “Mindy? Is that what you said?”
“Well, if they found out and knew I lied, they might dig deeper. I didn’t want them doing that. Right?” Mindy took a step closer to Dean. “I didn’t want them to know that you’ve been in jail before.” She reached up and ran her hand through Dean’s sandy hair. “I mean, I helped get you this job. If they knew I put in a different background check, we’d both be in trouble. This way it keeps that safe.”
