Paper Bullets

by Reed, Annie

  CHAPTER 15

  SAMANTHA WAS STILL ASLEEP when I plugged the thumb drive into my laptop.

  I’d brought the laptop out to my dining room table so I wouldn’t disturb her. She usually slept with her door only partly closed in case the cat wanted to curl up on her bed. This morning the cat was grooming on the living room couch, stretched out in a pool of sunlight streaming in through the front window.

  The day had all the promise of being a scorcher. I didn’t know why a cat, who came equipped with a permanent fur coat, would seek out a sunny spot on a hot day, but this wasn’t the first time I’d seen her do it.

  Since I wasn’t going to Norton’s office and had no plans to go to my own, I’d slipped on a light cotton blouse and a pair of shorts. Instead of coffee, I was already drinking iced tea. The cat could keep the nice sunny spot all to herself. The dining room was still nice and cool.

  My laptop was a few years out of date, and it didn’t have the biggest screen. I planned to replace it someday, although as long as it kept working, someday kept being pushed further and further into the future. Right now it was good enough for what I needed.

  Except for the rather terse written report I’d created in a hurry for Ryan, most of the digital files I had regarding my surveillance of Melody were the pictures I’d taken on my camera. I had a digital voice recorder that I used as well, but the only things I’d recorded were the addresses of the places Melody had gone and the times she arrived and departed so I could be precise in my written report.

  The digital recorder was still in my purse, and I hadn’t downloaded the recordings to my computer. I’d have to remember to ask Norton if he wanted copies of my voice files to give to the cops along with the rest of it.

  When I’d looked at all my files last night, I’d been surprised to discover that I’d taken over a hundred pictures. The vast majority were of the two guys I’d spotted outside the cafe. Or more precisely, of Justin Sewell and the white SUV Lewis Richards owned.

  As I scrolled through the photographs, one shot made me catch my breath. I’d been focused on Justin Sewell, trying to get a good picture of him to show to Ryan, but I’d caught Melody in the photo as well. She’d been walking to her car. What I hadn’t seen when I was actually at the cafe taking the shot came through clear in the picture: Melody had turned around to glance at Justin, and she was smiling.

  It didn’t look like a simple smile, either.

  I zoomed in until her face filled the frame. Unlike all those TV shows where the computer automatically filled in a blurry shot, the more I zoomed in on Melody’s face, the fuzzier the picture got. So I pushed the computer toward the other side of the table and scooted back in my chair until I had enough distance that the picture looked more like a photograph again instead of a random collection of colorful pixels.

  The photograph had caught Melody doing something she probably hadn’t wanted anyone to see, especially not anyone connected with Ryan. She’d been flirting with Justin Sewell. She might not have given him a little finger wave or a raised eyebrow, come hither look, but there was more to her smile than what a woman would give a strange man on the street who couldn’t take his eyes off her.

  Yesterday when I’d watched her leave the cafe by herself, I’d wondered who she’d had lunch with. Sure, it was possible she’d spent forty-five minutes inside having lunch by herself. I ate lunch alone all the time, but it was usually at my desk while I was working or fast food in the car while I was on the way from one job to the next. Melody never struck me as the kind of woman who’d do that. She had a lot of girlfriends according to Samantha, and she was always going somewhere to meet them for a drink or a movie or a party or even to work out together. That’s why I’d thought she’d met some of her girlfriends at the cafe.

  But if she’d met friends, wouldn’t they have left together? Women tended to do things in groups. They went to the restroom together, gathered together at parties while the husbands and boyfriends they’d come with were off in another room talking business or watching the game on TV. Even as anti-social as I could be at times, when I’d been married to Ryan, I did the same thing.

  No, if Melody had met with a group of girlfriends for lunch, they would have left the cafe together, or at least within a short span of time after Melody. That hadn’t happened. The only person who came out of the cafe immediately after her had been Justin Sewell.

  Had he been the person she’d met for lunch?

  I zoomed out on the picture and studied it again, trying to figure out if I was reading more into her smile than was really there.

  Melody had never struck me as a stupid woman. She was engaged to a well-known local attorney. The cafe on California Avenue was only a few blocks away from the courthouse. All the cafes and restaurants in the area catered to the attorneys whose offices were clustered around the courthouse. Hell, Ryan’s office was less than a quarter mile away. If Melody was going to have an affair with someone, even flirt with someone over lunch, she couldn’t have chosen a worse place if she wanted to keep the whole thing a secret from Ryan.

  But what if she hadn’t cared? I couldn’t tell from the picture whether she had her engagement ring on. In the shot, her left hand had been hidden from view when she turned to look at Justin.

  I scrolled through a few more pictures in the sequence, trying to see if she had her engagement ring on, but none of the shots showed her clearly enough for me to tell.

  I sat back in my chair, staring at my laptop but not really seeing it. What had she been up to? Had she been cheating on Ryan, or was it just an innocent lunch with her banker? Justin’s business card did say that he was a personal banker. But why would Melody need to have lunch with a banker? As far as I knew, she had no plans to start a business of her own. Then again, I’d probably be the last person to hear if she did.

  My cell phone vibrated. I’d put it on the table next to my laptop and turned the sound off so that if anyone called, the ringtone wouldn’t wake Samantha. The house was still quiet, with only the sounds of the neighborhood filtering in. The occasional car passing on the street in front of the house, birds chattering in the trees, a neighbor mowing the lawn before the midday heat set in, someone else using a leaf blower to clean their yard by blowing the trash into someone else’s.

  In my neighborhood, life went on as usual. Melody’s hadn’t, but the neighborhood didn’t care. There was probably a deep philosophical lesson in there somewhere, but I was too tired and too focused to worry about the big picture.

  I glanced at my phone. I’d received a text from Kyle.

  You awake? I’m out front. Didn’t want to knock if you’re still sleeping.

  Instead of replying to the text, I padded over to my front door on bare feet. I unlocked the deadbolt and the security screen door and went out onto the front stoop.

  Kyle had parked his unmarked police car in front of Freddie March’s house. He must have seen me come out the door, because the next thing I knew he’d trotted across my front lawn and enveloped me in a hug.

  “I was on a stake out last night. I didn’t hear about what happened until I got back to the station this morning and got your message,” he said. “Are you all right?”

  I shook my head. “Not even close.”

  He felt warm and solid in my arms. He smelled like coffee and cigarettes. Kyle didn’t smoke, but he wasn’t always alone on stakeouts. His normally clean-shaven cheeks were scratchy with stubble. I tilted my head back and saw the dark circles beneath his eyes.

  “Catch your guy?” I asked.

  “Made some progress.”

  He couldn’t talk about specifics, and I knew better than to ask. When we did talk about his work, it was always in generalities.

  “Are you sure you should be seen with me?” I said. “I’m a ‘person of interest’ in a homicide. Might not be good for your career.”

  The words came out sounding more bitter than I’d intended.

  He snorted. “They’re fishing, and they kno
w it.”

  Kyle kissed me lightly on the lips, a gesture meant more to reassure than anything else, but I took it. After all of Norton’s warnings about how serious my situation was, it was nice to get that reassurance even though I could tell by Kyle’s expression that he was worried about me.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said. “We’ve got some stuff to talk about.”

  I heard the sound of the shower when we went back inside. Samantha apparently couldn’t sleep well, either.

  During the entire summer, I’d rarely seen her up before ten-thirty in the morning, which meant that most days I was out of the house while she was still in bed. She was old enough that I trusted her to stay home alone, and not invite Maddie over if I said not to. I’d only taken her to the Marches’ last night because the last thing I’d wanted was for my daughter to be alone after hearing that the woman who was about to become her step-mother had been murdered.

  I poured Kyle a glass of iced tea and we sat at my dining room table. A picture I’d taken of Justin Sewell was still on my laptop screen.

  “One of the guys I thought might be stalking Melody,” I said, gesturing at the screen. “Now I’m not so sure.”

  While Kyle sipped his tea, I scrolled back through the pictures to the one of Melody looking back at the cafe, smiling at Sewell.

  “She knows him,” Kyle said. “Did she have lunch with him?”

  “I’m starting to think that.” I gave him a brief rundown on how I’d tracked Sewell back to the bank and got his name. “He’s a personal banker. He didn’t take my twenty bucks, so I’d thought he was an honest guy. Now I’m beginning to wonder.”

  “He could still be an honest guy, just an honest guy interested in a woman who isn’t.”

  I didn’t say anything about Kyle’s present-tense reference to Melody. He’d only met her once. A few months after we’d started dating, we had a Friday night dinner date which we were late for because Ryan had been late picking up Samantha for the weekend. I never made Samantha wait at home by herself for her father, so the three of us had been watching a movie when Ryan eventually arrived with Melody, who’d either been drunk or high. She’d apologized for making Ryan late, and generally been much more charming than her usual sober self. She’d even flirted a bit with Kyle, which I’d figured was just because she hadn’t been herself.

  Or had she? Was she one of those women who had no boundaries? She’d told me once that she didn’t know Ryan was married when they first started going out, but what if that had been a lie?

  Kyle tapped some keys on the laptop, scrolling back and forth between the pictures I’d taken. “You have pictures of the guy you think is Richards on here?”

  “Keep scrolling forward. The only good pictures I got of him were later, after I ran into Melody at the gym.”

  Instead of scrolling all the way to the end, he took his time looking at each picture I’d taken. The ones of the white SUV pulling out onto the street and driving past where I had been parked were blurry. If I hadn’t run into Mr. Muscles at the gym, and then seen him go out to the SUV, I wouldn’t have been able to find out who’d been driving just from the pictures I’d taken.

  “Who’s this?” Kyle asked, pointing at the screen.

  The shot must have been taken right after the SUV passed my car. The SUV was a white blur off to the left side of the frame. I hadn’t really studied the shot before since it didn’t seem to be important.

  Kyle was pointing at the older guy who’d been sitting by himself at the table for two in front of the cafe. The guy I’d thought had been annoyed when Justin Sewell was standing on the sidewalk taking cell phone pictures of Melody.

  “He was eating lunch by himself while he was reading something on his tablet,” I said. “I only noticed him because he looked pissed off when Justin got in his personal space.”

  In the shot, the guy wasn’t looking at Justin. He was looking across the street toward the area where I had parked.

  “How do you make this thing zoom in?” Kyle asked.

  I worked the controls, and the guy’s picture enlarged just like Melody’s had.

  “He made you,” Kyle said.

  Sure enough, once the picture was big enough and focused on the random diner, I could see that the guy was looking directly at the camera. Which meant he’d been looking at me.

  “He must have seen the camera,” I said. I’d been fairly subtle with the camera when I’d been trying to get a picture of Justin Sewell. The SUV had startled me enough that I’d forgotten to be covert. I’d just raised the camera and fired off shot after shot hoping that a picture would show me who was driving the car.

  Kyle scrolled backwards through the pictures. This time I focused on the man sitting by himself at the table. He wasn’t in many of the shots. Except for one early shot I’d taken of Justin before I’d tried to zoom in on his face, the man hadn’t paid attention to anything except his tablet. In that early picture, he’d been looking at Justin, an expression of annoyance clear on his face.

  “You think he’s important?” I asked Kyle.

  “I think he’s familiar.”

  “Bad guy familiar?”

  “Maybe.” He spent another minute staring at the guy’s picture before he shook his head. “It’ll come to me,” he said.

  “In the shower.”

  He raised an eyebrow.

  “That’s where things I’m trying to remember come to me,” I said. “In the shower, or in the middle of the night when I can’t sleep.”

  “Or on stakeouts.”

  He rolled his shoulders like he was trying to stretch out stiff muscles. I’d been on a few stakeouts myself, waiting for hours in a car for a witness trying to duck a subpoena. I rubbed his shoulder, and he leaned into my touch.

  “You’re good at that,” he said.

  “Years of practice.”

  Kyle wasn’t a big man, but he was solid. He worked out just enough to keep himself in the kind of shape he needed to be in to run down a suspect. The first time I’d slept with him, I’d been pleasantly surprised to discover that he didn’t have six-pack abs.

  Ryan was one of those men who was naturally athletic and built, and he had to do very little work to keep his six pack in perfect shape.

  I wasn’t naturally athletic, and even though I was trim enough, I’d always felt a little inferior in the body department compared to Ryan. With Kyle, I felt like we matched.

  The relationship was still too new to figure out where it was headed, but I had a good feeling about us. I might even learn to like baseball.

  As I rubbed his shoulders, Kyle scrolled forward through the pictures, not slowing down until he got to the pictures of Mr. Muscles that I’d taken while I was waiting in line to put gas in my car. He studied the last picture, one where I’d zoomed in on Mr. Muscles’ face.

  “That’s him,” he said after a moment. “Lewis Richards. Bulked up and a few years older, but that’s the guy. He’s bad news.”

  I stopped rubbing. “What kind of bad news?”

  The shower had stopped running. I heard the bathroom door open. Samantha, headed back to her room. Once she was dressed, she’d be out in the kitchen, rummaging through the fridge for something that had the fewest possible calories for breakfast.

  “Not the kind of news she should hear,” Kyle said.

  I closed the picture file and shut down my laptop. It wasn’t too hot outside yet. We could sit outside and discuss the kind of things Kyle didn’t want to mention around my daughter.

  Two outdoor conferences in two days. The way things were going lately, maybe I shouldn’t have let Ryan take all the good outdoor furniture with him when he moved out.

  CHAPTER 16

  I WASN’T SURE I LIKED the idea of my backyard becoming the place I went to talk with people about unpleasant things. The memory of the discussion I’d had with the detectives the night before was still too strong, but at least Kyle wasn’t here to arrest me. Not that I’d technically been under arrest,
just the next best thing.

  Kyle sat beside me on the glider, his arm around me, my head on his weary shoulder. The glider was still in the shade, so I wasn’t in danger of burning the pale skin on my legs.

  I’m not a sun worshipper like my neighbor. The couple who lived in the house on the other side of mine were in their late twenties, had no kids, and were gone most weekends. When they were home, she liked to sit out in the sun on a chaise lounge in the backyard, country music playing on a portable stereo. She was the tannest woman I’d ever seen. I wondered sometimes if she realized what her skin would look like in another twenty or thirty years.

  My neighbor wasn’t out in her yard this morning. The leaf blower had gone quiet, but another lawn mower had started up somewhere a few blocks over. A dove sat on the power line that ran down the backyard fence line between the houses on my block and the ones the next block over. It cooed at another dove hidden in the full branches of a tall Ponderosa pine that shaded the back corner of my yard.

  “So tell me about Lewis Richards,” I said.

  We swung gently back and forth for a moment before Kyle responded.

  “A lot of this comes from the guy I was on stakeout with last night. He used to work in the gang unit until he got assigned to Robbery/Homicide. He was part of a county-wide task force, one of those inter-agency, we’re-better-off-pooling-our-resources things.”

  “He knew Richards?”

  “He didn’t work with him directly, but gangs and drugs go hand in hand, and he’d been given a heads up about Richards in case he ran into him in connection with his work.”

  Richards had apparently been the kind of undercover cop—at least back in those days—who immersed himself completely in the role. While no one ever proved it, everyone thought the way he got in close with the major drug dealers was by using whatever drug they happened to be selling.