by Lisa Black
“It is toasty in here,” Riley agreed. He had already shaken out of his parka.
“Yeah.” Ralph grinned at the TV screen, the first smile they’d seen on him. “My one indulgence. I don’t care if it snows outside, I’m not going to shiver all day to save a few bucks on the gas bill. Here. That’s Evan.”
The display screen split into fourteen equal-sized boxes. Four each showed the public area, the counter area, and the office, and one each hung above the outside of the front and rear doors. The time stamp read 18:15—six-fifteen p.m.—the previous evening. The victim, very much alive, worked the front counter, processing customers’ checks and forms and dispensing cash from a drawer built into the counter. As they watched in fast-forward mode, he restocked the drawer during slow times, taking cash from a small safe in the office.
“I stock that little one before I leave for the day. No one can get in the big ones except me,” Ralph explained.
In between customers, Evan disappeared into the tiny restroom, snacked out of a bag he kept in the office mini-fridge, surfed the apps on his phone, and used the cashier computer to check what appeared to be his social media pages and online shopping sites.
“They’re not supposed to do that,” Ralph growled. “Damn Facebook.” However, he seemed cheered that his employee had not been up to anything untoward, and asked how much the officers wanted to see. The time stamp now read 20:05.
“Let it run,” Jack said.
He didn’t expect to learn much. Evan Harding had left the business in its usual condition, and therefore hadn’t been robbed or abducted. But they were there and the tape was queued, so they might as well watch all of it rather than risk missing something that might explain how Evan Harding had come to be dead in the snow, one street over.
Customers came and went. Most turned over their form, endorsed their check or showed a receipt on their phone, took their cash and left. Some, as the owner predicted, seemed to enjoy the warmth or simply having something to do and hung around chatting. Evan Harding would lean against the counter, arms crossed—polite but not encouraging.
When no customers were present, Evan spent time on his phone—hardly unusual in today’s world. He also used downtime to tap at the keyboard. “What’s he doing?” Jack asked, when Ralph did not seem interested in this activity.
“Online transfers.”
“What does that mean?”
“We have a website. Just like Western Union. You can go on the site and transfer money to another person’s bank account, as long as you have their name and account numbers. Or to your own account, of course. We receive the request, make sure everything is filled out and that the account the money come from is legit, and put the transfer through.”
“So you have access to people’s bank account numbers?”
“No, no. The site encrypts that part. It’s like when you put your password in to get your e-mail—all you see is row of dots? Same thing here. So we can’t see bank account numbers.”
“Then how do you know they’re legit?”
“Because funds go through.”
During another quiet period on the recording as Evan Harding typed some more, double-checked his work on the screen, and then opened the cash drawer and counted out a stack of bills. These, he put in his own pocket.
Again, his boss did not seem concerned. When Jack asked, he shrugged. “Probably cashing his own money. I let my guys do that, cash their checks, welfare, reimbursement. Why would I want some other boss getting my percentage?”
“But he didn’t have a check.”
“Online, then.” His head swiveled as he took in both cops’ expressions, sighed, and said, “I can look it up.”
“Yes,” Riley said. “Please look it up.”
He sat at his desk and used another mouse to search the previous day’s transactions, narrowing things down by the time stamp on the video. “Credit card.”
“What?” Riley asked.
“He took a cash advance on a credit card. Five hundred dollars.” He checked again. “Visa.”
“Do your employees do that a lot?”
One hand gave a short wave. “Sometimes. They need money and I don’t give advances.”
“Did he have money problems? In need of cash for some reason?”
“I don’t know. They’re my employees, not my friends. We don’t chat about personal things. I do that, they get comfortable. Start asking for more hours, less hours, more raises, bonus, that sort of thing.”
Plainly, Ralph didn’t care what his employees did—so long as the books balanced at the end of the day.
Jack had been keeping an eye on the video as they spoke. With the video running at two times normal speed, he saw Evan Harding once again take cash from the drawer after a computer entry. This prompted another check of the ledger, Ralph now more pensive. This cash withdrawal had been paid for by another credit card, a Discover. Four hundred dollars.
They didn’t bother asking Ralph what his employee needed all the cash for.
“So our victim left the store with nine hundred dollars cash in his pockets,” Riley said. “He might as well send a smoke signal to the Murphy’s Law gods saying, Now would be a great time for me to get mugged.”
On the surveillance tape the time stamp now read 21:48, nine forty-eight p.m. Evan Harding had been learning on the counter, chin on one hand, staring at nothing in particular, when the door opened and a young woman entered. Black skin, light-colored coat, a knit beret posed to keep her ears both warm and stylishly attired. She immediately crossed to the counter and began to speak. Forcefully, to judge from her unwavering gaze, the taut knuckles of each hand gripping the counter, the way she leaned so close to the plexiglass that her breath occasionally caused a faint sheen to appear on its surface. She had a purpose, and right then it focused on Evan Harding.
From the cameras behind the counter, Jack watched Evan straighten, take one step back, eventually raise both hands in weak protest. He responded to the woman, though whatever he said neither appeased nor much slowed her torrent of words.
Riley had been watching, as well. “Unhappy customer? Or psycho ex-girlfriend?”
“Without words, it’s hard to tell.”
She didn’t produce any paperwork to bolster a claim of funds gone awry, but Jack couldn’t quite see her as an ex, either. Evan hadn’t raised an eyebrow when she first walked in, hadn’t lifted his chin off his hand until she reached the counter. Jack had seen enough domestic disputes to know they usually involved a great deal of gesturing, with hands to the heart, head, stomach, sweeping angry swishes of the arms, back to the heart—all the places in which wounds were felt most deeply. This woman didn’t gesture much at all, though she was clearly very, very angry. So much so that, safe behind his plexiglass wall, Evan Harding took another step back.
But no inching toward a phone or panic button and the woman had no weapon, so not robbery. Something personal.
Finally Evan began to speak up. From his breathing and the tension in his neck he didn’t shout like the woman had, only spoke fast, pouring out words.
Whatever the confrontation had been about, it had not been resolved. The woman kept shouting, Evan kept up his weak defense, and it ended when she marched to the exit, tossed one last thought over her shoulder, and threw the door open so that it bounced against the adjacent window and rebounded with such force it would have hit her had she not been moving so fast.
Evan watched her go with a worried, wide-eyed expression, arms hugging himself.
But he did nothing, didn’t call the police, didn’t—appar-ently—leave a note or an e-mail to inform his boss of the incident. Just watched her go. It took some time before his posture relaxed again.
There were only two more customers after the woman, two men an hour apart, cashing routine checks. The first came and promptly went, the second wandered the lobby a bit, chatting, perhaps enjoying the last warmth he would feel that night, until it got too much even for him and he took his le
ave. About eleven forty-five Evan Harding began what must have been his closing routine, straightening stacks of forms, counting the cash in the drawer and locking same, exiting the building to go around and lock the outer door, and reentering the back to shut down the counter computer and turn out the lights.
Then he left.
The rear outside camera showed him stepping out onto the sidewalk, giving the knob one last shake to ensure the security of the door, and walking off to the west, the opposite direction of his apartment. The camera’s bubble eye caught only the portion of the sidewalk directly outside the door, but it appeared to be as deserted as one would expect at midnight on a very cold weekday.
The cameras continued to record their dark, empty rooms.
“Huh,” Riley said. “Where the hell was he going at midnight?”
“And who was the woman lambasting him up one side and down the other?” Jack asked, then said to the boss, “Can we download a copy of that video? From the woman’s visit on?”
Ralph had been typing on his computer, intently enough that Jack had to repeat himself to get the man’s attention. When he glanced over the boss’s shoulder the screen showed columns of numbers . . . he had been double-checking his stores, making absolutely certain that no money had gone missing, that Evan’s cash advances had been legitimate. The man turned with a satisfied sigh and said, “Sure. Only to USB, though. I don’t have a DVD burner in it.”
“Okay. Do you have a spare USB drive?”
Ralph scowled as if Jack had asked to date his teenage daughter. “No.”
“Can you e-mail the video?”
“No-oo. I tried that once, and it was too big.”
“Can you break it into smaller videos?”
“I look like Bill Gates? Or that Zuckerberg kid? I don’t know how to do that.” Ralph was losing patience, and Jack couldn’t entirely blame him. Evan Harding’s death didn’t appear, so far, to have anything to do with his work at A to Z. It wasn’t Ralph’s job to investigate, and no crime had been committed against the check cashing store. On top of that he now needed to hire a new employee, and finding someone he could trust around stores of cash would not be easy.
“Okay,” Jack said. “I’ll call Maggie.”
Chapter 6
Friday, 11:45 a. m.
She greeted them with: “Aren’t you going to the autopsy? I was heading over there to pick up the tapings.”
“Why?” Jack asked. In murders with close physical contact, such as a bludgeoning or a stabbing, transparent tape was pressed to the surface of the victim’s outer clothes to pick up hairs, fibers, and other trace evidence possibly deposited by the killer. But when a gun was used....
“Because your guy wasn’t shot. He was stabbed. No exit, no projectile on the X-ray.”
“So, not shot,” Riley said.
“Not shot.”
Jack said, “Either way, this might be important.”
Maggie’s gaze swept the area, taking in the large flat-screen, the cluttered desk, the mouse. She pulled a USB drive out of her pocket. “Where’s the unit?” she asked Ralph.
The owner of A to Z Check Cashing had forgotten his impatience and need to get on with his workday as soon as he had opened the door to the Cleveland Police forensic specialist. He now ushered her to his swivel chair with the holes in its upholstery, hovered over her to click through the video system menu, and went so far as to offer her a cup of coffee. “Are you sure? It’s of very good beans. I order them special from Ecuador. The best coffee is in Ecuador.”
Jack could tell from the way she scooted as far to the side of her seat as she could that the A to Z boss invaded her personal space. He moved closer, hoping his looming presence would discourage the man. He knew he tended to intimidate people, usually when he didn’t mean to. Right now he meant to.
And right now it didn’t work. Ralph, apparently, didn’t notice.
“That would be great,” Maggie said. “I love fresh coffee.”
The man presented the mouse to her as if it were a crumpet on a doily and hustled off to a worn drip coffeemaker with a dingy glass pot. Maggie immediately began to flick through the menu on the screen, twice as quickly as Ralph had, and with her usual efficiency she had the video playing back the confrontation of the unknown woman before Ralph got the filter in the pot.
Through the first viewing Jack had been watching for a physical confrontation or some sort of action to erupt. Upon re-watching, he was struck by the impossibility of it. Evan Harding had been completely safe behind the barriers formed by the plexiglass and the counter. Yet—
“She’s threatening him,” Maggie said.
“With what?”
“Don’t know. But he looks threatened.”
He did indeed. Evan Harding didn’t argue back, not very forcefully at least, as he might if they were talking about some romantic conflict. He didn’t seem impatient or defensive, as an employee might with a disgruntled customer. He looked worried. Very worried.
Ralph returned with a Styrofoam cup of liquid the color of pitch. He tried to wedge himself in next to Maggie but couldn’t penetrate the cops flanking her; Jack plucked the cup from his fingers and placed it next to the keyboard. “Do you know that woman?”
Unhappy, the boss glanced up at the screen. “Nope.”
“She hasn’t been in here?”
The man took another look, seemed sincere when he answered, “Not that I know of.”
“Any idea what she might have been complaining about?”
“Who knows? Everyone complains. People say they will send money and they don’t and say they did. Or they send money and people say they didn’t get it, you gotta send more. People think they sent money and they didn’t because their brains are no good. Always, somebody’s complaining. These people . . .” His voice trailed off, and his shrug seemed to sum up what a world of difficulties existed for those on the fringes of society, people without a home in nice suburbs, two cars in the drive, and a steady income.
Maggie set the backup program to copy the video clip to her external drive. A long white box with an inner line through it appeared, a spot of green at the left end. After several seconds, it grew another millimeter in a desultory way. Maggie politely took a sip of the coffee, though Jack knew she didn’t drink hers black.
“How long is this going to take?” Jack asked.
“As long as it takes. They’re all different.”
Riley said, “We could go on to the autopsy. There’s nothing else we need to do here—”
“No,” Jack said. They could learn more from the victim’s last hours than from the track the knife had taken through his body. This decision had nothing to do with the A to Z boss practically salivating over Maggie’s shoulder.
She had meanwhile returned to the confrontation scene and zoomed in to one frame. “There’s a logo on her bag.”
The woman carried a tote bag hitched over one shoulder. Jack had thought the white on dark pattern might be a decoration, but now he saw it formed stylized letters led by some sort of half-circle blob of an icon. “I can’t make that out.”
The three men watched the cursor move as Maggie sorted through a few menu and preference options, then clicked on a tiny camera symbol. A still .jpg of the frame appeared on the screen. Then she went searching for a photo enhancement program, discovering a basic form of Photoshop.
Even Ralph tore his gaze away from Maggie’s hair. “How did you do that? I didn’t know you could do that.”
She rattled off some directions, her voice fading as she tried to sharpen the picture. The icon became an amorphous shape under a thin half-moon arch, and there seemed to be three separate words. Jack still couldn’t make them out.
“I could be wrong,” Maggie began, which Jack knew meant she probably wasn’t, “but I think that’s the Cleveland Public Library.”
“Huh,” Jack said.
“Really?” Riley asked.
“Pretty sure. It’s, like, an open book with the
pages fanning and then the name. I know I’ve seen it there.”
“Cool. Maybe she works there.”
Maggie tempered this optimism. “They have a gift shop. Her being a library patron doesn’t narrow your suspect pool much.”
Riley said. “Sure it does. I haven’t had a library card in thirty years.”
“That, young man,” Maggie told him, “is nothing to be proud of.”
“Maybe so. Can you print me her picture?”
“No color,” the boss of A to Z said. His fascination with Forensic Specialist Gardiner didn’t mean he would be providing ink and paper to anyone who asked. He was a businessman, after all.
Maggie clicked the Print button, then selected a few other stills of the woman and the victim to save to the USB drive.
The green bar eventually reached its apex and, after another polite pretend sip of the coffee, she retracted the USB drive and thanked the boss of A to Z with a smile that made him forgive her the theft of a piece of copy paper. He bid her adieu with deep and obvious regret.
Riley asked his standard ending question: Was there anything else Ralph could possibly tell them about Evan Harding? Had he seemed worried? Stressed?
“No, and no. He was my easy employee. The guy I have on days—well, you can see he still isn’t here. Every day it’s a different excuse; the bus broke down, his stepson sick, the dog ran away. Sheesh. But Evan, a model. Customers like him, I like him, his girlfriend not have kids that get sick. No problems.”
“What girlfriend?” Jack asked, hoping the comment had not been rhetorical.
“Skinny little thing, cute enough. Almost as pretty as that girl that was here. What was her name?”
The cops waited, then realized that he wasn’t asking himself what Evan’s girlfriend’s name was, he was asking them what Maggie’s name was. Jack’s tone sharpened by a few strokes of the whetstone. “You’ve seen Evan Harding’s girlfriend?”
