by P. J. Tracy
Cassie ignored her. The Sarahs of the world were yippy little Chihuahuas—a nuisance but not a threat.
“You should really be ashamed of yourself,” she pressed. “This is a nice store for nice people, and that just looks cheap.”
Cassie broke open a roll of quarters on the edge of the register drawer, pretending it was Sarah’s head. She didn’t dislike the woman; she was just too stupid to live. Stupid enough to be really dangerous. She decided to try being magnanimous. “You better start learning to stand up for yourself, Sarah, or you’re going to get rolled right under the big machine.”
Sarah pressed her lips together until they disappeared. “I don’t even know what that means.”
“That’s what worries me most.”
“You always say stupid stuff like that that doesn’t make any sense. But you better button up or I’m going to report you.”
Oh, dammit, now she’d gone too far and she was going to have to do what the stupid cow said. She couldn’t afford trouble, not after all the time and effort she’d invested in Global Foods. After an interminably long probationary period, Dalek finally trusted her enough to put her on the roster to close the store tomorrow night and the timing couldn’t be more perfect. A “flour” shipment from Illustrious Bakers—which was the code name for cartel shipments this month—was due to arrive anytime. She just needed a few more pieces of evidence to tie this thing up in a neat little package and get the hell out of this place.
Sarah’s prissy whisper scattered her thoughts. “What’s going on in the back?”
Cassie’s head snapped up and her eyes narrowed, traveling down the main aisle just in time to see Dalek rushing through the doors that led to the loading docks. She knew exactly what was going on, but she wasn’t about to say anything to Sarah. This was her little secret. “I heard him mumbling about a late shipment,” she lied. “Truck got hung up on the interstate or something and he was worried they’d try to dump a bunch of spoiled produce on him.”
Sarah looked doubtful, but just shrugged. “Oh.”
“I have to use the can. Hold down the fort, ’kay?”
Sarah grunted. “Hurry up.”
Cassie felt her heart thumping hard in her chest as she passed by the bathrooms and cautiously approached Dalek’s office. The door was cracked open—a miraculous oversight, because the office was always locked. She pushed the door open a little farther and under the glow of a desk lamp, she saw another miracle—his open laptop. His desktop computer would be here tomorrow night and she could deal with it then, but the laptop never left his possession and she might never get another chance at it.
Cassie looked over her shoulder, then craned her head toward the loading dock doors. She could hear muted conversation, the screech and rattle of a semi’s back door being lifted open.
This is it, this is it, in and out in a minute or two.
She felt the sting of adrenaline prickling through her veins and tried to keep her breathing as steady and even as possible as she ducked into the office. She double-checked the room for any security cameras that might have magically appeared overnight, but of course there were none. And what a great irony that was—Dalek didn’t dare keep a digital documentation of his activities here, which left it wide open for compromise.
With her eyes fixed on the door, she plugged a very special flash drive into a USB port on Dalek’s laptop, punched a few keys, and watched the progress bar flash as the contents of his hard drive uploaded. Come on, come on, she screamed in her mind as her sense of time warped and seconds became hours.
And then she heard two things: the loading dock doors opening again, and her heart pounding in her ears. Her hands started to shake almost uncontrollably as she canceled the upload, yanked out the flash drive, and restored Dalek’s screen saver. Her hands hadn’t shaken like this since her first day on the gun range at Quantico. And son of a bitch, there was no time to scrub her tracks. She’d fucked up big-time, taken too much of a risk, because if Dalek got suspicious and started poking around in his system manager, she was burned. Or worse.
She sprinted out of the office, spun around, and closed the self-locking door behind her just as Dalek appeared in the hallway.
“What are you doing, Miss Miller?”
She turned and gave him a sweet smile, forcing her breathing into an even, normal rhythm. All those Kapalbhati yoga classes were paying off. “I noticed that your door was open when I came out of the ladies’, so I thought I’d close it for you.”
Joe Dalek looked a little befuddled. “It wasn’t closed?”
“No.”
“Oh. Well, thank you, Miss Miller.”
“Anytime, Mr. Dalek.”
“Miller?”
“Yes?”
“Button up.”
—
In the old days, Joe Dalek would have watched Cassie walk the long aisle back to her register for the sheer pleasure of watching her little ass move under her skirt, and eventually, he would have caught her alone in the storage room and shown her things she’d never seen before. But that was before his new side business and the thugs that went along with it. There were too many rules now, too many eyes watching him, making sure he didn’t step out of line, get slapped with a sexual harassment suit, and call attention to this squeaky-clean gold mine they shared.
Dalek had never once set foot on the moral high ground, but his innate cowardice had always kept him from going too far to the dark side, and he wouldn’t have done it this time if he hadn’t been offered the deal at gunpoint, looking down at a bunch of photos of dead people who’d been stupid enough to refuse.
They’d propositioned him at exactly the right time. He’d been about to lose his franchise and everything else he owned, which he probably deserved for investing in a store that catered to rich, pretentious bitches in this borderline neighborhood. Still, it wasn’t his fault. He was just another victim of the economy, that was it, and what choice did he have but to find a supplemental income?
He was filthy rich now after only a year, and it had been so easy, so smooth. Not a hint of trouble.
He entered his office and froze in the doorway. Dear God. Not only had he left his door open, he’d left his laptop on the desk. For twelve solid months he’d carried that thing everywhere he went, even the bathroom, and he would have done the same thing today if those stupid assholes unloading the truck hadn’t dropped a banana crate full of cocaine in the back lot and watched like idiots as white powder flew everywhere. That alone was enough to get him killed, and now he would have to do damage control and explain the loss of product down to the last gram. There just hadn’t been time to grab his breath, let alone his laptop, before racing outside to shut down the loading dock and direct the cleanup.
With an odd sense of trepidation, he approached his desk. Nothing was disturbed; nothing was out of place, and his laptop’s screen saver was on, just as it should have been. He watched the big rotating globe that was part of the company logo until GLOBAL FOODS began to orbit around the sphere like a ring around Saturn. When he touched the mouse pad, the locked password screen appeared and he let out a sigh of relief. Not that a dim bulb like Cassie Miller posed any threat, but there were others in the store who did. She’d done him a favor today, and he’d have to think of a very creative way to repay her for her loyalty.
—
Cassie walked back to her station like she didn’t have a care in the world, but her mind and her heart were still racing at breakneck speed as she sorted through the possible scenarios in her immediate future. The best case would be if Dalek had bought her story about closing his office door on the way back from the can. He’d let her close up alone tomorrow as scheduled, she could upload his desktop hard drive, and be on her merry way once and for all. The worst case would be that Dalek, paranoid as hell and with good reason, would take today’s discord as a bad omen and tighten things
up at the store for a few weeks or even months. He wouldn’t let anybody close up shop alone, wouldn’t ever leave his office unlocked again, and maybe, just maybe, he’d figure out that somebody had been messing with his computer.
Cassie made a snap decision as she approached the registers, and she didn’t have to manufacture a look of distress and panic. When Sarah saw her, her perennial, pinched, world-hating expression went from disdain to empathy, just like that. She suddenly saw a possible ally in Sarah against Dalek if it ever came to that. But it would take careful cultivation and nurturing to turn Sarah to her side, and Cassie didn’t know if she had the stomach for it, or if such a distasteful prospect would be necessary at all.
“What’s wrong, Cassie?”
Wow. She’d used her name for the first time since she’d started working there six months ago.
“Female troubles,” she easily lied. “Bad ones. I need to take my break early.”
Sarah, apparently no stranger to bad female troubles, nodded. “Sure, go ahead.”
“Thanks. I owe you one.”
Cassie jogged out to the parking lot and slipped into the Ford Fiesta the agency had assigned to her for this job. It took her roughly five minutes to log into her work computer and send the partial of Dalek’s laptop hard drive to the office, along with a succinct note telling her handler that she would try to get a full copy of his desktop drive tomorrow night. Something was better than nothing. Then she put her computer back in the lockbox on the passenger-side floor, right next to her service weapon.
As she walked back into Global Foods to finish her shift, she never noticed the man watching her from the loading dock bay.
FIFTEEN
Nothing hopped up a homicide unit like the possibility of a serial killer, primarily because they were so hard to catch. It took a lot of hands on deck to sort through the reams of mostly useless information from all the interviews and reports while they searched for a connection, any connection that might point to a suspect. The trouble was, there was rarely any personal connection between a serial killer’s victims and the killer himself—he just liked the way they looked.
Former patrol sergeant Eaton Freedman, a recent addition to Homicide and McLaren’s new partner, had established himself at a desk near Gino’s and Magozzi’s. He was deep into a tall stack of papers, occasionally scribbling notes on a pad.
Chief Malcherson had finally pulled him off precinct control, partly to give the homicide unit a little color, partly because Freedman was carrying a load of muscle that slowed him down on the street, and he refused to stay off the street and let the officers under him do the running. The man was very big, very black, and had a nice combo of people skills and terrifying stature that slid into Homicide as easily as he had aced the detective exam. He could scare a suspect to death by asking his name, and soothe a grieving relative with a genuine empathy he tore out of some squishy soft spot.
Gino shook out a few tropical fruit-flavored antacids from the bottle he always kept on his desk, then crunched them down with the dregs of neon-green Gatorade. “You getting anywhere, Eaton?”
“Fuck no . . .”
Gino rapped his knuckles on his desk. “Goddamnit, Freedman, how long have you been working Homicide?”
“This is my second glorious week.”
“And how many times have we told you that if you use that kind of language in Malcherson’s house, he will shit-can your black ass right out of here.”
“You want to give me an English lesson or do you want to know what I found out?”
“You said you didn’t find out anything.”
“Yeah, well, now I’m going to tell you how I didn’t find out anything. None of the early tips panned out, and I can’t find any connections between the victims so far. They revolved around different suns and probably never crossed paths. If this guy has a hunting ground, it’s either big, or I’m just not seeing it. I’m starting to wonder if he might not be an opportunist. Creep takes his little murder kit, picks a park, hides out in the brush, and waits for his archetype to jog by. Which is the problem with serial killers. They’re usually smarter and better organized than the average dirtbag, and you have to wait until they get sloppy.”
Gino rolled his eyes up to the ceiling. “Thanks for that inspirational thought. Another great line for Malcherson’s press release—we’re just going to wait for this guy to get sloppy, and hope he doesn’t finish the whole deck before we find him.”
Freedman raised a brow, sending a cascade of wrinkles up his forehead to the shiny cap of his shaved head. “Shit. You think that’s where our perp is going?”
Gino shrugged. “It occurred to me. Where’s McLaren?”
“He’s in Tommy’s office, working on the prison records and eating stinky kung pao chicken from The Lucky Panda.”
Gino’s face brightened for the first time all day. “We’d better go check it out.”
Tommy Espinoza, MPD’s resident computer geek, had a lot in common with McLaren. They were both single and on the prowl for female companionship, they both consumed more junk food during the course of a day than even Gino did, and their desks continually vied for domination as the world’s most trashed desk.
Johnny McLaren smiled and tossed Gino a pair of chopsticks when he walked into the room. “I figured you’d sniff us out eventually.”
“Freedman outed you.”
“Knew he would. Come on, help yourself, I got extra.”
“Don’t mind if I do.” Gino loaded up a plate while Magozzi went to stand behind Tommy and McLaren, who were busy at the computer, files stacked precariously on both their laps because there was no room on the desk. Crime-scene photos were spread on a side table next to a greasy container of something.
“How’s it going?”
“So far, it’s not,” Tommy said as he shoved noodles into his mouth. “We’re running probability on the prison records Johnny pulled, but so far there are no red flags on a potential suspect. Weird as it seems, we don’t have a single violent offender who went in after the first murder and got cut loose in time to do the second. At least in Minnesota.”
Magozzi picked up a fortune cookie and broke open the cellophane wrapper. “Maybe he’s from out of state. Theoretically, he could be from anywhere. Can you expand the search?”
“Sure, but from this end, with limited manpower and computing power, that’ll take a lot more time than I think you want to burn. Say we get five hundred red flags nationwide that fit your year-long time frame between murders—that’s five hundred cases that have to be looked at individually so we can try to find a connection to Minneapolis. My opinion, if you want this thing done fast, go straight to Monkeewrench. They have that monster computer, the Beast, that’s already programmed for this kind of stuff, and they can link into any database in the world without leaving tracks. If you want fast answers, they’re your golden ticket.”
McLaren finally retired his chopsticks and paper plate to Tommy’s overflowing trash can. “And there’s always the possibility that this guy has never even done any time. Maybe he just took a year off to decide that he really likes the murder gig and he’d give it another go.”
Magozzi cracked open his cardboard cookie and pulled out the paper slip that revealed his fortune. You will meet the man of your dreams very soon.
He tossed the cookie and the fortune on top of McLaren’s discarded chopsticks. “I’ll talk to Grace tonight.”
In the three hours before Malcherson’s six-o’clock press conference, Magozzi and Gino finished their reports, followed up on every single tip and lead, and scoured initial lab reports that were mostly inconclusive. The single bright spot in the day was the blood on the thornbush Gino had pointed out to Jimmy Grimm—it was human blood, male, and Jimmy was putting the screws to the DNA lab for a high-priority analysis so he could run it through the CODIS registry of felons. If the guy and his ge
netic markers were in any system, they’d be able to track him down.
“Showtime,” Gino announced, turning on the old TV that sat on top of a file cabinet by their desks. The thing was a relic, and although everybody in Homicide had talked about replacing it with a new HD flat-screen at one point or another, nobody seemed particularly eager to discard an old friend that reminded them all of a more innocent time. Sure, they complained about it, but over the years, it had almost become a team mascot.
“I could paint my condo in less time than it takes that damn thing to warm up,” McLaren complained as he and Freedman went to stand beside Gino and Magozzi for a better view.
“It’s your case, so why aren’t you two out there with Malcherson?” Freedman asked Gino and Magozzi.
“It’s just going to be a statement, not a real press conference,” Gino said, gnawing on the last fortune cookie that ominously didn’t have a fortune in it. “It’s actually a good strategy—Malcherson’s the slyest fox in the henhouse and he’s used to this kind of crap, handling the press. We’re just feet on the streets. More we stay off camera, more we can get done.”
Freedman laughed. “And the less you can screw up. Good to know for the future.”
“Best lesson of all—keep your mouth shut at all times and let Malcherson be your voice box. Even though you have a really magnificent voice, Freedman. Still can’t figure out why you never went to radio.”
“I’ll be asking myself that very same question the first time I get my own nightmare case. . . . Oh, here we go.”
They all watched the tiny screen as Chief Malcherson exited City Hall and stood in front of a cluster of microphones that amplified the din of reporters shouting questions. No surprise that Amanda White’s shrill voice carried above the rest.
