by L. A. Witt
So that ruled out . . . not nearly enough people.
“Hey, Andreas.” Paula kept her gaze fixed on a photo of the inside of a victim’s trunk. “I think I might have something for you.”
Darren and I both perked up.
I came around the table. “What’ve you got?”
She tapped the photo. “That grocery bag. It’s . . .” She stepped away, looking over the other photos until she paused on another. “Ah. Here. These two have the same logo, and that is not a big chain grocery store.”
My heart sped up. Shit. She was right.
Darren got up and joined us. “Hey, I think . . .” He turned around and rifled through a box. A moment later, he produced a photo of the contents of a victim’s purse. On top of one receipt, printed in faded register ink, was the same logo.
“Looks like you’ve got three victims who’ve shopped at Reginald’s,” Paula said.
“And that’s no chain.” I glanced between the different images. “There’s only one, isn’t there?”
“Uh-huh. It’s a little mom-and-pop place over on Fifteenth and Harrison.” She turned to me. “It’s stayed alive because it’s got one of the best meat departments in town, so people come from all over. It probably won’t last much longer now that they’re putting in that Walmart, but it’s hanging on by its nails for now.”
Darren looked at me over his coffee cup. “Check it out?”
“I’ll take any lead I can get at this point.” I picked up my keys off the table. “Thanks, Paula. Put the coffee on my tab.”
“The coffee?” She snorted. “That’s gonna be nothing compared to the price of that.” She tapped the photo where she’d seen the grocery bag.
I laughed as I grabbed my coat off the chair. “We’ll settle up later.”
I parked in the tiny parking lot in front of Reginald’s. Paula was right—this place was hanging on by a thread. The building was rundown, with handwritten signs in the dingy windows advertising discounted deodorant and buy-one-get-one-free cantaloupes.
“So what’s the game plan?” Darren asked.
I shut off the engine, but didn’t get out. “If our guy is here, we don’t want him to know we’re even investigating a murder. Any murder. Not until we’ve got a lock on who he is. If he’s good enough to get away with this many murders, he’ll be in the wind at the first whiff of suspicion.”
Darren nodded. “So, maybe something about theft?” He gestured around the parking lot. “Carjacking?”
“Carjacking, no. Not if that’s how he’s collecting victims with their own cars.”
“Shit. Good point. I forgot about—” He paused. “Anyway. Maybe a loss-prevention type of deal. Chasing down someone who’s ripping off shit for cooking meth.”
“Good idea. All right, let’s roll.”
The store was more crowded than I’d expected. Only a handful of cars were parked outside, but the place was busy. There were half a dozen checkstands, each manned and with a line of several people.
“Least they’re smart enough to open all the checkstands,” I grumbled.
“You know the place you shop does that just to piss you off, right?”
I shot Darren a glare, and he smothered a laugh. Asshole.
At the front of the store, between the Coinstar machine and the scratch ticket dispensers, was a customer service counter. There was only a small line there, so it seemed like a good place to start without disrupting the whole store. Behind the high counter was a mustached white guy in a pressed white shirt, a tie covered in cartoon unicorns, and a smile that was probably visible—and annoying—from the International Space Station.
I groaned. “You’re talking to him.”
“What?” Darren turned to me. “Why?”
“Because cheerful assholes like that make me want to commit homicide.”
Darren snorted. “Oh come on. You put up with me.”
I glared at him.
We stepped around the line, and Darren showed his badge so the cheerful asshole and his irritated customers could see. Loud enough for them to hear, he said, “I hate to interrupt, but we need some help.”
“Sure!” That obnoxious smile vanished in favor of a look of earnest concern. Eyes wide, he extended his hand. “My name’s Jim. What can I do for you, gentlemen?”
Some people in line grumbled and shuffled. I debated asking them some questions just to pass the time—they were definitely more my crowd than this yoyo.
Darren, however, was in his element. He stepped closer and shook Jim’s hand, then rested his forearms on the counter. “Is there a manager or someone we can chat with? We’ve got some questions about some recent theft.”
“Some—” Jim blinked. “Oh. I see.”
“Yes,” I said. “Possibly for use in manufacturing meth.”
“Oh. Um. I didn’t know anything had gone missing.” Jim recovered, shook himself, and nodded toward the registers. “Deanna’s the manager, but she’s on a register. Come with me and I’ll get her for you.” He motioned for us to follow him, and led us to a black woman in her sixties who was checking out a short line of customers at one of the checkstands. “Hey, Dee? These gentlemen need to talk to you for a minute. Do you want me to take over your line?”
She eyed us, then looked past him at the customer service counter. “You’ve got a line over there. I’ve got this.”
“Sure thing.” Jim gave us a smile and gave Darren’s shoulder—the uninjured one, thank God—a friendly pat. I silently dared him to even think about doing the same to me, but he walked back toward his counter. Thank God again.
“Ma’am?” Darren showed the manager his badge. “Detectives Ruffner and Corliss. We won’t take much of your time—we just need to ask you a couple of quick questions.”
“Sure, gentlemen.” She flashed an uneasy smile. “Let me just finish with this young lady.” As she continued scanning items, she looked over her shoulder. “Phil, I need you to take over for me for a minute.”
“Be right there,” another checker called out.
After she’d checked out the young woman, she stepped away from the checkstand. Extending her hand, she said, “Deanna Winters. What can I help you boys with?”
As I shook her hand, I said, “Ma’am, we have reason to believe one of your employees might’ve been a witness to some criminal activity.”
Her spine straightened. “Oh. We . . . haven’t really had much crime here lately. None that I know of.”
“We think some meth cookers have been coming in from another part of town,” Darren said. “Stocking up on supplies to take back to the suburbs.”
Deanna scowled. “Well, I haven’t seen or heard anything myself. And we haven’t noticed anything missing.” She glanced toward the pharmacy at the other end of the store, and more to herself, muttered, “Might be time for another inventory.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “The gentleman we’re looking for may not have seen anything either, but he was described by another witness. We don’t think he’s involved—we just need to know what, if anything, he saw.”
“Well, sure.” She shrugged. “You’re welcome to talk to any of my people you need to. Is there someone in particular?”
“We don’t have a name,” Darren said. “Only a description. Do you have any employees who could be described as middle-aged Caucasian? Slightly overweight, around my height, with—”
“That would be Brian, I think.”
“Brian, ma’am?” I asked.
“Brian McIntosh. He’s a stocker, but sometimes works as a checker. You want me to go get him?” She pointed over her shoulder. “He’s stocking the coolers right now, but—”
“No, no.” Darren looked past her. “We’ll get him. You said your office is in the back, right?”
“Oh I can do it.” She motioned toward the back of the store. “You boys wait in my office, and I—”
“No,” Darren insisted, his voice firm but his expression as friendly and charming as always.
“We’ve taken enough of your time.”
She hesitated, but then shrugged. “Suit yourself. Brian’s in aisle four.”
On the way to aisle four, I said, “Why the insistence on going and getting him ourselves?”
“Got a hunch.”
“Yeah? What hunch?”
“You’ll see.”
I couldn’t decide if I was impatient or amused, but I was definitely curious. Darren had solid instincts. If he’d caught a scent, better to let him follow it than make him explain himself first.
We rounded the corner, and as we approached, I quickly took stock of the guy. He was a white male, kind of round in the features and probably older than Darren, younger than me. Late thirties, maybe. Or early thirties with an unfortunate early pattern balding gene.
At his feet were six neatly stacked and sealed boxes, and a seventh one that was open. On top of the stack, a box cutter, pen, and clipboard were laid out in a perfect row. The boxes he’d already emptied were collapsed and leaning against the shelf, lined up and straight.
He glanced at us as we approached. Then again, and this time seemed to realize we weren’t just going to walk past him. He tensed up, eyeing us warily.
“Brian McIntosh?” Darren asked. “Hi, I’m Detective Corliss. This is my partner, Detective Ruffner.”
The stocker watched us uneasily, a carton of apple juice in his hand. “Can I help you?”
“You can. See, we’ve got some questions.”
Brian held the carton against his chest like it might ward us off. “About . . . about what?”
“We got a call from your boss.” Darren gestured over his shoulder. “Apparently some items have been going missing from the pharmacy section. You know anything about that?”
Little by little, Brian relaxed, easing his death grip on the apple juice. He shook his head. “I didn’t know anything was missing.”
“Well, would you mind helping us out with a few things?” Darren paused. “In fact, let’s not do this out here. Why don’t you come in the back with us so we can talk?”
“Um.” Brian looked at the carton in his hand, and those remaining in the box. “I need to finish this.”
“I’m sure your manager can find someone else to fill in,” Darren prodded. “We only need to ask a few questions about—”
Brian’s fingers tightened, denting the sides of the carton. “No, I need to—”
“Won’t take but ten minutes of your time. Let’s just—”
“No!” Brian glared at both of us. “Not. Until. I’m finished.”
Darren glanced at me, something unreadable in his expression. Then he shrugged. “All right. When you’re done, why don’t you come into your manager’s office for a few minutes?”
Immediately, Brian relaxed, loosening his death grip on the juice. “Okay. Just . . .” He set the carton on the shelf. His voice was calmer now, more even, and as he reached for another carton, he quietly said, “I need to finish.”
“No problem.” Darren flashed one of those charming smiles. “You know where to find us. Take your time.”
Brian smiled uneasily. His eyes flicked toward me, and the smile vanished. A second later, he dropped his gaze and continued working, offering no further conversation.
Darren beckoned to me. I followed, and we headed to the back of the store and into the manager’s office. There, he shut the office door behind us and stepped away from it. There wasn’t much room in here, but he put as much distance between us and the door as he could.
“Brian’s our guy,” he said under his breath. “I know it.”
“What makes you say that?” I had my gut feeling as well, but the certainty in his voice made me curious.
“He can’t leave something unfinished. The minute someone’s interrupting him, he gets agitated. I had a hunch, which is why I tried to convince him to leave in the middle of his job.”
“Nicely done.”
A hint of a smile flickered across his lips. “When I was looking through the crime scene photos, I noticed that the victims who had defensive wounds were even more brutally killed. I mean, one victim had something like six stab wounds that were absolutely postmortem.”
“So if someone interferes with his plan, he gets angry.”
“Angry enough to almost slice off a woman’s head instead of slitting her throat?” Darren nodded. “Yeah, I’d say so.”
I tapped my nails on the manager’s desk. “Okay, so now we have to prove it.”
Scowling, Darren nodded. “I know. To start with, we need to find out how many of the victims have been to this store, and if there’s been any direct interaction with them and Brian.”
“The manager said he works as a cashier sometimes, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay, that’s a start. I’ll talk to her and see if we can get records of any transactions from his register for the last few months.”
“That won’t help if people paid cash.”
“No, but it could link him to any who paid with credit cards, which would be a start.” I gnawed my lip. “Except that’s going to take ages to go through. We don’t have time for that.”
“We don’t, no, but . . .” He met my eyes, his expression cautious.
“What?”
“Uh, well.” He cleared his throat. “There is an intern back at the station . . .”
I winced. Shit. I still hadn’t talked to my daughter. She was not going to be thrilled if I asked her. But I didn’t have a lot of options. “Okay, I’ll talk to Erin. See if Mark can let her go for a couple of days.” I gestured at the door. “I’ll go talk to the manager. You stay here and . . .” I waved a hand. “I don’t know, work your charm on this guy so he thinks we care about missing supplements.”
“Fair enough.”
I started for the door, but he stopped me with a hand on my arm.
“Wait.”
I turned. “What?”
His other hand grabbed my tie and pulled me in, and he kissed me. By the time I’d made sense of his surprise attack, he’d let me go, and I stood there like an idiot, stunned and blinking.
“Sorry.” He smiled sheepishly. “I just . . . I needed to do that.”
An irritated “not while we’re at work” should have come to the tip of my tongue, but it didn’t. In fact, now that he’d mentioned it, I needed it too. Except it had happened so fast, I’d barely had a chance to comprehend it.
“Don’t be sorry.” I touched his waist and drew him back in. “Just give me a little warning next time.” And with that, I pressed my lips to his and let the kiss linger for a couple of seconds. We had a job to do, and the world seemed to be crumbling all around us, but damn it, pausing for a few seconds wouldn’t bring the sky crashing down on top of our heads.
When I drew back, he held my gaze, and I was suddenly painfully aware of just how little time or energy we’d had for anything physical recently. By the time Darren had been healed enough to even think about it, we’d had a serial killer on our hands.
“We’ll, um . . .” I let him go and absently straightened my shirt. “We’ll get back to this.”
“Soon?”
“As soon as possible.”
He grinned, and so did I. Neither of us moved in for another kiss. Not a good idea to tempt ourselves much further, and we did still have work to do.
One last glance, and I stepped out of the office. With the closed door between us, I stopped to take a deep breath. Yeah, we seriously needed to pick up where we’d left off—hell, where we’d just started—before he’d gotten hurt.
But, in the meantime, we had a serial killer to bust.
“You want me to do what?” Erin stared wide-eyed at the stack of printouts I’d brought back from Reginald’s, each page covered with dense lines of small, single-spaced text. “There must be two hundred pages.”
“Almost four hundred, actually,” I said. “Listen, it’s going to be tedious, I know. I’d do it myself, but we’ve got a hell of a ticking cloc
k right now.”
She swallowed. “So what am I looking for, exactly?”
“I need you to cross reference these names”—I put a single-page list down beside the printouts—“to the names on those transactions.”
“Oh. Okay.” She quirked her lips. “And Mark doesn’t mind me spending a day or two on this?”
I shook my head. “I cleared it with him. This is important.”
She gave a quiet laugh, and I didn’t think I’d ever heard anyone inject that much bitterness into one soft huff. “Of course it is.”
“Considering we’ve got less than ten days to keep someone from dying . . .”
Her eyes flicked up and met mine, eyebrows pinched.
“That’s why I need someone to do it for me,” I said as gently as I could.
“Glad you’ve conveniently got an intern lying around,” she grumbled.
“Erin—”
She glared at me. It wasn’t at all like her to snap at me or be petulant. Even as a teenager, that hadn’t been her. But I’d also been putting her off and putting her off, and God knew she probably wanted to talk about the last time we’d talked. I doubted she was surprised that I kept body-swerving the conversation, but much like her mother, her patience only stretched so far. “For the record, when I told Darren I wanted to talk to you, this isn’t what I had in mind.”
I sighed. “Look, I’m sorry. I am. And I haven’t been avoiding you.” Much. “This case is a big one, and it’s—”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s life or death.” The resignation in her tone did not do good things to my already taxed conscience.
“Erin.” I put my hands on her shoulders. “Look at me.”
She hesitated, but finally lifted her gaze.
“I know you’re upset about—” I glanced around the empty room out of sheer habit. “About my status. And we will talk about this. I promise.”
