by Lisa Black
“Do you have a job?”
“Yes, in customer service, but it doesn’t pay much. It’s my one day off, today. That’s why I went out for some breakfast.” She sniffed, then reached over to snatch a tissue from a small box on the desk.
“What is this?” Jack asked, holding out the notebook. She glanced at it without interest and said she didn’t know.
Riley took her through where she and Evan were from—she, Youngstown, him, Pittsburgh—and his family and significant others. She only knew of a mother, somewhere in Indiana. “He never said anything about his father and didn’t have any brothers or sisters. His mom’s number should be in his phone,” she added.
“We didn’t find a phone.”
“But . . . it has to be there. Did you look in his coat pocket? Even if a car smashed it you can still—”
“This wasn’t an accident,” Riley said, and told her that her boyfriend had been murdered, possibly shot by person or persons unknown. She didn’t cry so much as gasp, cringe, and moan; that she’d never seen her boyfriend again had been bad enough, but knowing that someone had purposely done that to them made it too horrific to take in. Riley did his typically good work, drawing every last detail he could from her while probing for a support system—did she have family, friends that he and Jack could call? Would she like to hear from a victim advocate who could walk her through what would be done with Evan’s body? Was there anyone else who might have a name and number for this mother in Indiana?
No, no, and no—but she would be fine. When she could think straight again she’d try to message some friends to see if they had any ideas about next of kin. Riley said they would also check out Evan’s workplace to see if Evan had written anything on his employment application that might be a lead to his family, and Shanaya shot him a look of grim gratitude.
Jack asked about the cell phone service. She told them it was Sprint and gave them the phone number. She checked her own phone to see if there had been any further messages or e-mails from Evan she had missed, said there were not since that call at 3:48 p.m. the previous day. She had tried him four times during the evening, but they had all gone straight to voice mail. She figured he was busy and hadn’t worried about it.
With nothing else to do, they stated their condolences once again and left the young woman sitting on the rumpled bed, holding the photograph of her dead boyfriend and staring at nothing.
They rode the elevator down in silence.
Riley buttoned his coat as they passed out into the snow, the air so cold relative to inside that it made Jack’s nostrils stick together when he breathed in. That was the way to tell cold from really cold.
“Partner,” Riley said, his tone much less light than his words, “let’s go to the movies.”
“Yeah. There’s something about this I don’t like, either.”
* * *
Shanaya made herself count to thirty. That should be enough time for the cops to get into the elevator and out of her hallway, unlikely to bang on the door with one last question.
It took some self-discipline to wait. She’d always been good at both those things, but hearing that Evani had been murdered knocked some of her abilities for a loop. She hadn’t been lying about knowing that something had to be wrong. Evani always came home. He might go out for a drink, he might hit the slots at the casino despite her threats to stab him in the groin if he lost more than two of their dollars on gambling. If he lost five she would gut him and stuff the entrails in his mouth as he died, she had said more than once, but who knew what he got up to when she wasn’t there to watch him? He might even have gotten drunk and gone home with another woman—unlikely, since they’d always been quite compatible in that respect. More than compatible.
But getting himself freakin’ murdered—that was way out there.
Maybe she should leave. Throw what little she had into a bag and keep herself safe.
But if whoever killed him knew about this apartment or wanted to get into it, he would have taken Evani’s key card and shown up last night. The guy, or guys, hadn’t been interested in the card. That should mean she was good.
She got to thirty. Surely the cops had to be on their way out of the building. She flipped the photo frame over and ripped the cardboard stand out of its slot. It had to be there. It had to.
Under the photo was a plain sheet of paper, and between that and the cardboard backing had been stuffed two sheets of folded paper. But what she sought wasn’t there.
Of course it wasn’t. Evani never did what she told him, the damn paranoid idiot.
Chapter 5
Friday, 10:45 a. m.
The glass-topped, gleaming white expanse of Tower City Mall seemed relatively sedate in the middle of a weekday. Three floors, plus a basement where the Rapid Transit trains came and went, it had fountains, a food court, both pricey and not-too-ridiculously-pricey shops, and an eleven-screen movie theater.
Where, it turned out, they had never heard of Evan Harding. The manager on duty, a friendly, competent, and skinny black kid who didn’t look old enough to see some of their current attractions scoured his computer and even called the corporate offices to confirm: no one named Evan Harding worked there. Not now, not previously. Jack showed him the cell-phone photo he had taken of the picture of the victim with Shanaya. The only other photo he had was one he’d taken at the crime scene, with the reddened shirt and the open, staring eyes—show that to a witness and they wouldn’t see past the blood. But the manager didn’t recognize Evan Harding, and neither did any other employee currently on duty.
Their name tags, Jack noted, didn’t look anything like the plain white plate the victim had pinned to his shirt.
Back out in the atrium, Jack said, “The girlfriend lied.”
“Or he lied to the girlfriend,” Riley said, crunching popcorn from a bag he’d bought at the concession stand.
“I don’t know. How often does the live-in girlfriend know so little about a guy? Girlfriends are usually kind of nosy, aren’t they?”
Riley gave him a look—that what does she see in you? look—and Jack backpedaled before his partner could ask the question aloud. The only thing more difficult than maintaining a real romantic relationship was maintaining a fictional one. “I’m saying I’m suspicious of her inability to tell us anything useful. The dead guy had no family, no friends—there’s no sign in that room that either of them were ever students. Maybe it’s shock and a minimalistic approach to possessions, or maybe he was into something shady and she’s covering for him.”
Riley crumpled up the paper bag. “Possibly. But when did you last see a drug dealer wearing a name tag?”
Jack considered this as Riley pitched his balled-up bag into a rounded garbage can for a perfect nothing-but-net score. “Shady jobs don’t issue name tags. But if it wasn’t shady, why not tell the girlfriend about it?”
“Do staff at strip joints wear tags? There’s a job he wouldn’t want to tell her about, how he’s surrounded by the scantily clad all day.”
“I don’t know. About the tags.”
“We could stop in at a few and check it out,” Riley said, currently between girlfriends and only half joking. Then a toddler somewhere behind them burst into a screeching peal, which echoed and grew as it bounced off the marble and the glass, piercing eardrums with the ease born of practice. “Either way, let’s get out of here.”
As they exited onto Public Square, Jack noted aloud that they would have to get a search warrant for the victim’s phone. He had already called the homicide unit’s administrative assistant to see if Sprint could get the phone located on the chance the mugger had kept it. Technology could only triangulate to an area and not a pinpoint on the map, but anything would help when they had so little to work with.
Snow kept falling, a few desultory flakes at a time. The tall buildings occasionally sheltered them from the wind and other times turned the street into a tunnel that funneled and concentrated it to a biting, shoving force of fr
igidity. “We have a car, you know,” Riley grumbled. “We don’t actually have to walk everywhere.”
“It’s only two blocks.” Jack didn’t like the cold but liked moving in and out, from cold air to overly warm buildings or cars and back again even less. And he hated driving in the stuff, the sickening lurch of the frame as the tires fought for traction. He hadn’t been raised in a cold climate and couldn’t figure out why, though he had a decent furnace, his house always felt chilly to him. He should get an electric blanket. If he planned to stay.
Riley continued to grouse. “Two blocks in June is one thing. Two blocks in December is another.”
“Didn’t your doctor recommend exercise?”
“No,” Riley said. “No, I have never discussed my doctor visits with you. You’re like a whole freakin’ two years younger than me so don’t—you’re going to get killed like that, you know. Speaking of health.”
Jack had been tapping on his smart phone with one thumb, nearly stepping into the path of a passing car. “I figure we got one other clue.”
“A to Z Check Cashing?” Riley guessed.
Jack covered his surprise. He really shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking Riley wasn’t that sharp just because Jack had managed, so far, to keep his extracurricular activities off Riley’s radar. Overconfidence would take Jack out much more easily than a speeding automobile. “Uh—yeah. It’s on the next street from our crime scene. Might as well check it out. That’s near where the car’s parked anyway,” he added as an incentive.
“That’s more than two blocks,” Riley grunted, and Jack let him have the last word on the subject.
A to Z Check Cashing did, indeed, exist in a storefront in the triangular building where Bolivar met Prospect Road, one street over from where the victim had been found. A loud set of bells jangled from the pneumatic arm of the door when they entered, giving an old-school alert to the cashier that a customer had arrived. Not that there was much storefront to keep an eye on—the customer area consisted of an empty, ten by fifteen square of dingy linoleum facing a solid, chest-high counter area. Perhaps five inches of space existed between this counter and an upper wall of clear but not clean plexiglass. There were cameras in each corner of the customer area, more visible in the ceiling behind the plexiglass. Employees must have to enter via the rear—no door or opening existed to get a human being to move from in front of the counter to behind it, which must go a long way toward discouraging robbers.
The air smelled a bit like a greenhouse tinged with both mildew and despair, but was blissfully warm. Riley let out an audible sigh. Compared to the city streets, they had walked into a sauna.
A paunchy, middle-aged man with thick black-framed glasses emerged from the back and took them in with one sweeping glance before his face stilled into a look of utter neutrality, having pegged them as cops. Cops who would probably be annoying him with questions about his less than upstanding customers. Cops who might scare those customers away if they hung around long enough. Before the man even opened his mouth, Jack knew he would sound brisk, businesslike, and ostensibly cooperative, and all with one motive: to get them out of there as quickly as possible.
The man said, with the barest trace of an accent Jack couldn’t identify, “How can I help you?”
Jack waited for Riley, always better at putting potential witnesses at ease, but his partner said nothing, staring instead at the man’s name tag, crookedly pinned to a red polo shirt. A plain white badge with rounded edges and red letters spelled “Ralph.”
Jack said, “We’re here about Evan Harding.”
The man’s eyes widened in surprise and something like fear. “Well. I see.” He straightened a bit; his chin came up, and he spoke more firmly. “I’d like to know where he is, too. He’s forty-five minutes late.”
Jack hid a smile. Finally, they might be getting somewhere. “He works here?”
“For me, yeah.”
“How long?”
The guy shrugged as if relaxing slightly. Something they’d said had reassured him, and Jack couldn’t guess what that had been. “Four, five months. Real reliable.”
In response to further questions he told them that he, Ralph, had owned the business for over ten years, he had five employees, that Evan had been a cashier working the front desk, and nothing else. He’d never had a problem with the kid’s work, no money missing, no customer complaints, forms always filled out properly. He didn’t know anything else about Evan Harding, not family, friends savory or un-, hobbies, vices. He didn’t come out and say that he didn’t care, but strongly implied it. He had last seen Evan about six p.m. the previous evening when he, Ralph, had left. Evan would be closing up that night.
“Did he often close?” Riley asked.
“Yeah, plenty times.”
Jack said, “You have cameras.”
The boss hesitated as if he might deny it, then realized the futility. “This is a cash business. Yeah, I got cameras up the wazoo.”
“Good. We’ll need to see those. And his employment application.”
Another hesitation while he calculated the futility. “Okay.”
He instructed them to walk around the building to the other side and find the entry door, which he would open for them. This time when Jack plunged back into the cold, it felt like a relief. “I see why the guy didn’t wear a heavier coat.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t go straight home from here,” Riley observed, and Jack stopped to orient himself. Across the street sat a medieval building and on the other side of that, the Erie Street cemetery. The student housing building could be found a few blocks directly east. From his workplace, Evan should have turned left on Prospect, away from the cemetery.
“He could have picked up some groceries or something, which the mugger helped himself to along with his money and phone. Or he grabbed a beer with a buddy. Could be anything.” But Jack kept staring at the building as if he could see through it to the cemetery on the other side. A large, squat fortification of red brick and sandstone, it would have looked at home in Morocco or Prague. “What is that?”
“Huh? Oh. Grays Armory.”
“An armory?”
“Yeah . . . the Grays were a civilian defense militia, kept their weapons there, but they were also a social organization like a Moose Lodge or Elks Hall or whatever.”
“When was this?”
“Like a hundred years ago, one-twenty, one-thirty. It’s a museum now but you can still rent the place out—I went to a wedding there once.” He kept walking, the stored warmth from the storefront having quickly worn off.
Jack caught up. “Looks pretty—solid.”
“Iron bars with spikes on the windows, and that gate in the entryway comes all the way down. If there’s ever a zombie apocalypse, that’s the place you’re gonna want to hole up.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” They reached the tip of the triangular building, stepped from Bolivar onto Prospect, and found the unlabeled employee’s entrance to A to Z Check Cashing. Jack knocked, half expecting a tiny door to open and Ralph’s olive face to peer out and demand a password. But these were modern times and yet another camera gazed at them as they heard the locks being thrown.
“This might be my second choice,” Riley said, “when the zombies come.”
Ralph hustled them inside. The rear of the store wasn’t a whole lot bigger than the front, but held two safes with both electronic and keyed locking mechanisms, shelves full of forms, and a messy, dusty desk with mysterious gaps in its surface, as if some items had been hastily placed out of sight while they walked around the corner. There was nothing wrong with a check cashing service, Jack knew. A healthy percentage of U.S. citizens did not possess a bank account and without one, of course, direct deposit was not possible. This made cashing their paycheck or reimbursement check more difficult. The service cost, fees were deducted, but as ATM fees, shipping and handling charges, and turnpike tolls proved, Americans were willing to pay for convenience.
Bu
t Ralph didn’t have it easy. A sign proclaimed the store open from six a.m. until midnight, six days a week. Obviously robbery remained a realistic and constant threat, not only from the baseline criminals assumed to exist around an inner-city location, but from his own customers. Many people might use check cashing services because they were in a hurry, didn’t trust banks, didn’t feel a need for banks, or were in transition from one town to another. But many others didn’t have a bank account because they couldn’t stay mentally or physically stable long enough to get one. And yet others were trying to cash checks that weren’t quite kosher—those for faked medical conditions, the social security payments of deceased parents, or ones stolen out of other people’s mailboxes. Those customers could become desperate and unpredictable.
Nor was foul behavior restricted to the public side of the counter. Check cashing fees might veer from reasonable to usurious—and any business that saw large exchanges of cash could be easily tweaked to include fraud and money laundering.
Either way, Jack could guess a number of reasons why Ralph would be less than enthusiastic to see cops on his doorstep. At the same time he had a vested interest in finding out what had happened to his employee, just in case it related to his job.
“Is there any money missing?” Jack asked the A to Z boss.
A gruff no. Ralph checked exactly that every morning, and all seemed to be as it should. Evan had closed up, leaving the paperwork tidy, all locks turned, overhead lights out. The man stood as he spoke, awkwardly using a mouse on the back of a clipboard to flick through screens displayed on a forty-inch flat screen mounted on the wall above the desk. Apparently he didn’t feel comfortable sitting with his back to the two detectives. “I used to keep all the lights on all night, hoping it would discourage burglars. But the drunks, they see the lights and they think we’re still open, so one, two in the morning they’d be banging on the door. Once people were leaving a party across the street and called the cops. Another time one of them broke the door, so I started turning the lights out. Same reason there’s no chairs in the lobby. I put chairs out there, the homeless guys hang out here all day just to stay warm.”
