by Julie Miller
Olivia agreed. The only witness statements had come from the men who’d checked out the abandoned car and found Dani’s body on their way to work the next morning. There wasn’t anybody around that she could see, although it was hard to shake the feeling that there were eyes on them right now.
Glancing around at the broken windows and shadowed doorways across the street from the warehouse, she half expected to see two glowing, Halloween-like eyes staring back at her. But there was no one, of course. Nothing but some bits of trash and clouds of dust blowing along the empty street. Just a few blocks away, similar historic structures had been saved and remodeled to become a shopping district, apartments and restaurants. But there was no kind of care or redemption like that here. “I’m sure this is hard for you. I’d be happy to take you to a restaurant or coffee shop to wait until I’m done here.”
Gabe’s blue eyes stopped their scan of the neighborhood. “I’m not leaving you in this place by yourself. The last woman I knew who came here—”
“I’m not Dani. I’ve been trained for working in a questionable environment, and I’m certain I’m carrying more weapons than she did. Besides, I’m not here to roust out any witnesses or trap a suspect. All I’m doing is walking through an old crime scene, trying to visualize what happened that night. I’m not worried.” Even though the prickle of awareness at the nape of her neck tried to tell her otherwise.
“All Dani had was a can of pepper spray. She shouldn’t have come to this place alone. I should have protected her.”
“You tried. You offered her your experience and wisdom and she ignored it. Maybe she thought she had something to prove.”
“To whom?”
“To you.” Gabe’s blue eyes darkened like cobalt and fixed on her. Olivia didn’t shy away from her point. Could he really not see the similarities here? “You seem to bring that out in people. You demand a high standard of excellence. Do the job now. Do it right. No mistakes allowed. If someone wants the mighty Gabe Knight’s approval, then he or she has to go above and beyond normal expectations.”
His drumming fingers stilled and tightened into a fist. “Am I really such a bastard?”
Pinching her thumb and forefinger together in the air between them, Olivia winked. “Little bit.”
A low-pitched laugh rumbled through his chest, softening the hard lines of his face and alleviating some of the tension between them. “I’ll try to work on that.”
The rare gift of his laughter made her smile. “No, you won’t.”
“Probably not.” The laughter ended on a resolute sigh as Gabe pushed open the car door and climbed out. “Come on. Let’s get this over with.”
Olivia grabbed the manila envelope from the seat behind her and got out of the Explorer. She made a sweep of their surroundings, still looking for those hidden eyes, before crossing the street and joining him on the sidewalk in front of the old Tile Works building. “Would you feel better if I called for backup?”
“Tremendously,” he admitted in that sardonic grinching of his. “But we’re here, and I don’t want to be any longer than we have to.” He, too, seemed to be scanning the area for any signs of life besides them. “What exactly are you looking for?”
She opened the envelope to pull out the pictures from six years ago, along with her father’s crime scene report, making a point to keep the most graphic photos at the bottom of the pile where Gabe wouldn’t see his fiancée’s body or the pool of blood beneath it. “I want to re-create what we know about the crime. Visualizing what went down here may give us a clearer direction with our investigation. If we understand the how, then the why and the who might become more apparent.”
Gabe held the envelope while Olivia lined up the images with their current surroundings. “Not much has changed except for the crime scene tape.” Looking over her shoulder, he pointed to the rusted hinges on the front doors. “Other than that new padlock, it looks as though this place hasn’t been disturbed in six years.”
Olivia nodded, matching the double iron doors of the warehouse entrance with the background of the photo. He was right. There was no padlock back then. “Dani’s car was parked against the curb here, and she was found on the sidewalk beside it, hidden from view from the street. There weren’t any signs of a struggle inside the car, and no blood there, so she was already outside when she was shot. Probably talking to her informant, BB, someone she expected to see, someone she trusted enough to get out to talk to in this neighborhood in the middle of the night.”
Gabe looked up and down the street. “There are plenty of places where her assailant could have hidden. Parked in a car in that alley. Up in one of those office buildings or warehouses across the street. He probably waited until her contact had left and ambushed her.”
“If this was a carjacking, she’d have gotten out on the driver’s side. I’m ruling that out.” Olivia switched photos and knelt down where Dani Reese’s body had lain, wondering why the woman would be trying to get into the passenger side of her car—or if there was some other reason why that door, instead of the driver’s side, was open. She touched the spots on her back and chest where Dani had been shot. Once in the back when the shooter had surprised her, or she was running away. Once in the chest when he’d caught up to her. That shot had brought her down. “Even at night, she probably saw her shooter.” Sinking back onto her haunches, Olivia looked up from the sidewalk where Dani had fallen, imagining a blank face where the killer would have stood over her. “With the small caliber of bullets that were used, he’d have to be fairly close.”
When she touched her fingers to her face to note the kill shot, Gabe grabbed her hand, pulling it away. “Don’t do that. Please.”
With little more than a flare of his nostrils to reveal the emotions that must be reeling inside him at this reenactment, Olivia switched her grip to squeeze his hand as she stood. “Sorry. Do you want to wait in the car?”
“Nope. Too far away.” Gabe’s grip tightened around hers before releasing her. “I want answers. But I’m not going to lose anyone else trying to find them. Understood?”
She reached up, obeying an impulse before really thinking it through, and brushed her fingertips along the firm line of his jaw. “I’ll make it as quick as I can,” she promised.
“Don’t worry about me. I’m a crusty old bastard, remember? Just keep working. I’ll be fine.” He turned his face, tickling her fingers with a brush of soft stubble before pressing a quick kiss to her palm. “What’s next?”
Little frissons of warmth tingled through the sensitive nerve-endings on her hand and she pulled away. It was just a thank-you kiss, an appreciation for the comfort she’d offered. It didn’t mean anything more than that. There was no bond forming here.
With her brain misfiring on hormones and compassion, Olivia pulled up the next picture and forced herself to think about the murder. She looked at the picture in her hand, then down at the sidewalk where a few sturdy weeds were already turning green between the cracks.
There was one other difference in these photographs.
A different sort of electricity fired through her veins. She took two steps, three, four, away from the spot where Dani had died. Time and the elements had washed them away, but in the picture there were two tiny sprays of cast-off blood droplets, each one no bigger than a broccoli floret. Too small and too far away from the body to have come from the gunshots.
“Olivia?”
A six-year-old incident was starting to fall into place.
She went back to the curb where Dani’s car had been parked and walked through what she was pretty certain had occurred that night. “Dani didn’t open the passenger-side door that night. The killer did.”
Gabe followed her path. “Why?”
She mimicked reaching inside the car. “To check the glove compartment. He was searching for something.”
“The flash drive.”
“Or proof of death. Sometimes with a hit, the killer has to bring the victim’s ID to whoever hired him to prove the job is done.” Gabe backed away when she turned and looked down at her feet, imagining Danielle Reese and a growing pool of blood there. “Our guy wasn’t an experienced killer. He didn’t want to touch the body if he didn’t have to. That’s why he shot her in the back first—from a distance. But he couldn’t find what he needed in the car, so he went through her purse.” She pulled out the previous photo. Dani’s bag had a long strap that she wore across her body, from one shoulder to the opposite hip. Olivia knelt down, imagining how a man, anxious to get away as quickly as possible, would have gotten into the purse that was anchored beneath his victim. “He couldn’t have pulled Dani’s purse off her shoulder unless he moved her. That may have given him the idea to make it look like a robbery, if that wasn’t his instruction in the first place.”
She pretended to tug at the purse on the ground and rifle through the contents. Then she removed imaginary jewelry and stood. She stepped over the space where Dani had lain and walked toward the errant blood drops. Holding up her hand, Olivia looked at fingers that would have been wet with blood. “The report said this was Dani’s blood, but she wasn’t shot over here.” She made the movements of flicking her hand. Twice. “He got blood on him, and it was freaking him out.” Olivia lifted her gaze to the iron doors. “She didn’t go into that warehouse. He did.”
Gabe pointed to one of the photos he still held. “There was no padlock on the door six years ago.” Olivia nodded and hurried back to her car. Gabe jogged behind her. “What are we doing?”
“Going inside that warehouse.” She opened the back and put the photos inside before pulling the toolbox her father insisted she carry to the rear bumper. Between the clank of the tools shifting in the metal box and the drumbeat of anticipation pounding in her ears at the potential new lead on the case, Olivia hadn’t been as alert to her surroundings as she should have been. But in the next moment of silence, she detected a low humming noise—like the sound of a car or machine engine idling in the distance. Olivia turned her head to the nearby cross street. “Do you hear that?”
“The traffic?” Gabe had turned to scan the abandoned buildings up and down the street the moment she did. Olivia tuned in to the stop-and-go sounds of vehicles in a residential area just a few blocks to the south. “There still may be some sump pumps working in the area since we’re so close to the water.”
“No, it’s...” With a cooling breeze stirring up the hint of an evening rain shower, she was also more aware of the whoosh of the Missouri River current on the north side of the buildings as the water slapped against rocks on the shore and the pylons of old loading docks. She couldn’t hear the sound of the engine at all, anymore. Maybe she’d imagined it. Or maybe, as Gabe had suggested, the sound had simply moved on with the flow of traffic. “It’s nothing.”
Time to scrap that fanciful flight of imagination. The watching eyes hadn’t been there, either. She must still be a little off her game since that night when Marcus’s infidelity made her question whether or not she could trust her own judgment. But she wasn’t about to let Gabe Knight see any hint of incompetence while she was on the job.
With a renewed sense of focus, Olivia handed Gabe a pry bar and pulled out a flashlight for herself. “Here, caveman. Make yourself useful.”
“Really?” he mocked, dutifully taking the pry bar and closing the hatch for her. “Is that going to be a thing?”
“Well, there are other names I could call you,” she teased right back. Joining in his low-pitched laughter, Olivia locked the Explorer and crossed the street to the iron doors of the Tile Works.
The steel padlock didn’t immediately budge for Gabe, but with an extra oomph of muscle and a screeching surrender, the rusted bolts holding the hasp in place snapped in two. Olivia pulled at the outer door, but ended up having to put her shoulder into it and accept Gabe’s help there, as well. The iron door itself was heavy, the hinges were rusty, and with the slight caving of the exterior wall, the tendency for it to swing shut again made it feel like pushing a dead car up a hill.
“I bet that hasn’t been opened in six years.” Olivia brushed the grime and dust off her hands and jacket before stepping inside the cavernous interior and turning on her flashlight. The sudden beam of light chased a band of small rodents and big bugs back into the shadows. “I love what they’ve done with the place.”
“Wait. Unless you’re going to arrest me for vandalism?” Olivia shook her head as Gabe pried off a piece of the framing from the inside of the door. It snapped off easily, indicating the wood was dry and rotten. “I don’t think I’d lean against anything,” Gabe warned, wedging the one-by-one between the door and the frame to prop it open. “I doubt it would hold up.” Then he stood beside her, pulling back the front of his tweed jacket and propping his hands on his hips, heedless of the transfer of dirt and rust to his jeans. “Talk about a needle in a haystack. How do we find something the size of my little finger in here?”
“You mean the flash drive?” She swung her light up to the cobwebs hanging like Spanish moss from the second-story catwalk and stair railings, and the triangular ceiling joists holding up most of the roof. “I’m not sure what we’re looking for. Hopefully, something here will tell us why the killer came in. Or better yet, who the killer is.”
Gabe nodded beside her. “So where do we start?”
Windows on both levels had been boarded up. Some of the glass was intact, some had been broken by vandals using them for target practice, some had receded from their desiccated putty and fallen from their frames to shatter into dusty bits of shine on the concrete floor. The weight of a giant iron hook and heavy chains hanging from a winch near the dockside doors had pulled support timbers from the roof and peeled open several holes in the corrugated metal overhead. The openings in the roof let in enough sunlight to reflect off the dust motes floating through the stale air, and cast the interior in dim shadows. Olivia swung her light around at ground level, the extra illumination transforming hulking blobs in the corners into piles of wood pallets and cube-shaped stacks of old boxes.
“We start closest to the door. If our perp came in here to hide, he’d be looking for the first spot he could find.” They went to the first pallet, where several rows of dust-shrouded cardboard boxes were stacked like bricks.
Gabe wiped off the top layer of dust to reveal the faded blue logo of Morton & Sons Tile. He lifted a box from the top to get a closer look, but the cardboard collapsed in his hands. He held it away from his body as sand and chips of broken tiles poured out onto the floor, sending a fresh plume of dust into the air that they both had to turn their eyes and noses from. Once the box was empty, he tossed it onto the pile of tile and grit. “Looks like old stock left over from when Morton & Sons went out of business. Age and moisture have turned the clay back to dust.”
“Gabe.” Olivia’s attention had already moved on to the next pallet. Although the second stack of tiles was as perfectly cube shaped as the first one, something was out of place. “Look at that. Everything else is symmetrical here. Why is there an extra box sitting on top?”
Reaching over the top of the stack beside her, Gabe touched his fingers to a depression there. “This looks like a sinkhole. The boxes underneath must be caving in.”
“Why?” she whispered, feeling that spark of anticipation again. She was on the verge of finding answers.
The urgency in Gabe’s voice meant he could sense it, too. “Because there’s an empty space beneath it.”
“Where that box used to be.” Retreating a step, Olivia ran her light over the stack again, stopping at a box three down from the top, about waist-high for her. “It’s backward. The logo doesn’t match up with the rest of the boxes in this stack.” An idea, just as clear as a crime scene marker, flashed through her head.
“Hold this.”
After handing off the flashlight, she snapped a picture of the boxes with her phone. Then she hunched down to work her fingers into the seams between the boxes and pull the backward one out of the pile, as though removing a plank from a Jenga puzzle. Only, she was certain whatever she was about to find wasn’t any game.
She waited for a line of sandy grit to stop spilling through the seam in the bottom before turning the box around. “Look.”
Faint brown spots, five in the pattern of fingertips gripping the box to pull it from the stack, peeked out beneath the layers of dust.
“Is that blood?”
Olivia nodded and set the remnants of the box on top, snapping another photo. “I’ll take that to the lab for analysis.”
“So our killer who couldn’t get Dani’s blood off his hand pulled that box out. Why?”
“Your sink hole.” Olivia tugged the sleeves of her jacket and blouse up her arm and flexed her fingers at the opening. “If anything in the rodent family runs up my arm, I will be screaming, and I’ll have to shoot you if you tell anyone.”
Gabe moved behind her to shine the flashlight into the empty cavity. “Good to know you have a weakness, Detective. Your secret’s safe with me.”
Slowly, she thrust her hand into the void. Up to her wrist. Up to her elbow. She stretched her fingers, hoping she’d find anything except a clump of fur and a wormlike tail. “You’re sure it won’t show up on the front page of the Journal? Do you have any idea how many mice and creepy-crawly things three brothers can find and bring into the—”
