by Lisa Black
She took the tapings, dredged up a smile for him, and went back to her bench.
Chapter 28
Monday, 3:45 p. m.
Jack did run by the forensics unit before he left, an idea forming in his mind. There, he asked Maggie if she could leave to accompany him on a stakeout.
“A what?”
“Bring your print kit.”
“Silly boy,” Carol said from behind her computer monitor. “She doesn’t go to the grocery store without her print kit.”
“I do, too,” Maggie protested, but mildly.
* * *
“Is this legal?” she asked ten minutes later.
“Parking in the alley? We’ve got this.” He pulled a rigid plastic placard from beneath the driver’s seat. It bore the official department seal and read CLEVELAND POLICE—OFFICIAL BUSINESS. “That should keep us from getting towed for at least ten minutes. After that, it gets risky.”
“I meant following Shanaya Thomas.”
“For that,” he said, “I’ve got this.” He patted the search warrant in his coat pocket, and they reluctantly left the shelter of the vehicle. The wind howled and Maggie could feel it pushing at her, threading its way through her parka, but that proved only the merest hint of chill compared to stepping out of the alley and onto the city sidewalk. East Ninth Street ran north to south and created the perfect wind tunnel for the howling gusts off the lake. She buried her mouth and nose in the fake fur edging the parka’s collar and hustled along toward the bank’s entrance, focused on the primitive need for safe shelter above all.
Jack checked the lobby through the large glass windows, then opened a brass-edged glass door and ushered her in. On a soaked indoor-outdoor mat she stamped her boots out of habit even though the wind had been moving too quickly to let snow settle.
The vast lobby of the old Huntington Bank building spread out and demanded attention, driving everything else from her mind until she had seen and acknowledged its majesty. Pillars, topped by huge and elaborate carvings, lined each side and stretched up through three stories and ending at a curved glass atrium ceiling. Champagne-colored marble covered the walls, the columns, the floor. A child’s shout bounced off the stone, as did several conversations of office workers and bank tellers. The pillars were—
Jack pulled on her left wrist, gently but firmly. “Come on. Stop staring.”
“How can I help it?”
He moved them toward the third bench from the front. Benches sat back to back, lined up the center of the lobby to neatly bisect the area. A man sat at one, apparently playing a game on his smartphone. He wore a parka something like Maggie’s but not laundered nearly as often, a stocking cap, untied boots, and dirty jeans.
Jack sat at the other end of the bench from him and Maggie tucked herself in between Jack and the armrest.
The man pretended to make a call. “She went down with one of the managers about three minutes ago. The security guard confirmed that that’s where the safe deposit boxes are. I asked him if it is ‘safe deposit’ or ‘safety deposit,’ ’cause that’s always bothered me. He said he didn’t really know. I couldn’t believe it—how can he work in a bank every day and not know if it’s safe deposit or safety deposit? We always said safety deposit in my family, but that doesn’t seem to make sense if I think about it.”
Whether a passionate interest in language usage or simple boredom prompted this discourse, Jack remained on target. “I only have a warrant to ‘examine and possibly collect any personal contents stored at this facility,’ so she will have plenty of legroom to protest if she wants. And knowing her, she’ll want. I don’t have time to waste arguing with the bank, so I’m hoping they won’t ask us to leave if we’re quiet.” He turned to Maggie to say he might need her to fingerprint the contents of Shanaya and Evan’s safe deposit box.
“You’re assuming they have one because of the key.”
“Yes, the key. She’d been trying to get it from us for days, but without admitting that she wanted it. Why? Because it holds her proceeds from scamming money out of innocent people on the phone, and maybe whatever Harding could embezzle, skim, or extort from the Medicare or -caid recipients. She bailed out of their apartment and I think she’s given up on the job. Once she gets what’s in that box, she’s going to disappear.”
“That’s a somewhat large assumption.”
“It is. But Evan Harding kept that key taped to his ankle to keep it from someone—why not his girlfriend? Otherwise he’d have left it in their apartment. If that box is full of cash then who else, besides her, had a motive to kill Harding?”
“Maybe whoever the cash belonged to.”
“And there’s no way to determine that without her cooperation,” Jack pointed out. “Nothing else has gotten her to talk. Maybe seizing whatever she’s got in that deposit box will. You find anything interesting on your end?”
The change in cases discussed did not throw her off; she’d long become accustomed to the scattershot approach of most detectives. “Amy and Josh aren’t back yet, so I don’t know what they found in the car. Rick’s jacket—who knows. It’s outerwear, and we all probably carry around traces of the entire city with us. He had natural and synthetic fibers in nearly every color, plenty of his own hairs, two blond ones.”
Jack cleared his throat. “Did he have a girlfriend? Currently?”
“Rick always has a girlfriend,” she told him. “Of sorts. But I don’t know who, so someone will have to ask Will. He’d probably get all embarrassed about telling me.” Ridiculous, of course, but Will had always been the complete opposite of his partner. Will thought about people’s feelings more than he really needed to. “I found seven animal hairs, some kind of weird thing.”
“He didn’t have a pet?”
“No—he likes animals as well as the next guy, I guess, but I can’t see him actually getting one without me there to clean its cage. But that’s not what’s weird. The roots . . . I’m sure it’s not a dog or a cat. Other than that, all I can guess is that it’s some kind of mammal. I was working on it when you came in. There were also some wool fibers, don’t know what . . . Rick didn’t like wool, so I doubt it’s from his clothes. They could belong to Jennifer Toner’s carpeting, if Rick stayed there long enough to fall to the ground after he had been stabbed. I’d been figuring the killer stabbed him, then grabbed him and hauled him out immediately. It would be quite a struggle to get him off the ground once he was there, and I bet his clothing would have been more disarrayed. That’s more or less a guess, though.”
She noticed Jack watching her. Perhaps he wondered what kind of person could sit and so dispassionately picture the ice-cold killing of a man she’d not only slept with but once loved enough to marry.
She wondered, too. But all that passion had been another time, another life, and both had ended long ago. Now she felt only professional responsibility. And sadness that things had not turned out well for Rick. Right now it seemed things had not turned out very rosy for either of them.
But all Jack said was, “Unless there were two of them.”
Maybe they were both ice-cold, she thought. Maybe they were just sensible. “That would always make things easier, checking the hallway for witnesses, getting the body out the window, moving the car to Euclid without having to leave your own car behind.”
“That leaves our girl here out,” Jack said, “if we could ever have considered her in the first place. As far as I know she had never heard of Rick or either of the Toners and couldn’t have hefted a sack of kitty litter out a second-floor window.”
“There she is,” the undercover officer said.
Maggie followed his line of sight to a very young woman with jet-black hair and a gray Columbia jacket. She exited the main part of the bank and entered the lobby carrying a small purse in one hand and a backpack strapped to her shoulders.
Jack strode parallel to the woman, staying to the side of the lobby. The undercover promptly took off in the opposite direction. Maggie staye
d put.
Shanaya Thomas strode toward the main doors, her gaze sweeping the area from side to side, even up and down, as if snipers might be positioned on the upper landings. It took her only ten steps to spot Jack. Of course, he hadn’t made much effort to stay hidden and Shanaya knew, only too well by now, what he looked like.
She froze in the exact middle of the vast lobby, indecision on her face. Now Maggie could see the oversized backpack she carried. It spread from the back of her skull to below her hips.
It took Shanaya only a split-second to make her choice. She whirled and ran, arms pumping, boots squeaking against the marble floor, legs churning with visible effort under the heavy backpack. She might be young and strong and gripped with adrenaline, but the laws of physics still reigned.
That, and the undercover officer positioned in front of the other exit, who now flashed a badge and told her to stop. He didn’t shout, Maggie noted. No reason to alarm the bank patrons.
Maggie watched all this; she did not consider trying to head the woman off should she change direction yet again. Body-blocking fleeing suspects was not her job and even more, not her jurisdiction. She had no legal authority to restrain or restrict anyone.
Besides, Jack had somehow closed the gap between them and now materialized behind the woman as she spun again, searching for any avenue of escape. He clamped a hand on her elbow and her face fell from fear into shock, hopelessness visibly piercing her heart as a spike had pierced Evan Harding’s.
Possibly wielded by this same woman, but that couldn’t temper Maggie’s empathy right then. She watched Shanaya Thomas stop, close her eyes, and stare at the floor in either shame or utter exhaustion. No matter what she had done, she remained a very young woman in clear agony.
Maggie moved over to them, catching up as Jack said: “Shanaya Thomas, we have a search warrant for all items currently in your possession, as said items are presumed to be material to the murder of Evan Harding.”
“Why?” the woman cried. “Why are you doing this to me?” Her voice bounced off the stone walls, thin and weak and despairing.
Jack answered, “Because we’re trying to find out who killed your boyfriend. Don’t you want to as well?”
“That has nothing to do with this! This is my stuff. You can’t take it!”
“Maybe. Maybe not. But this warrant says I have the right to look at it. And if it is obviously the proceeds of illegal activity, then we may retain it until a warrant can be obtained for seizure.”
“You can’t do that! It’s mine!” Tears squeezed out of her eyes and she brushed them away with the back of a hand. “It doesn’t have anything to do with Evan!”
“Maybe,” Jack said, “Maybe not.”
Chapter 29
The bank gave them a small conference room to use, happy to get them out of the lobby and the public eye. There were probably, Maggie thought, several reasons for examining and processing the contents there instead of back at the station. For one thing, Jack had a warrant for those contents but no warrant to arrest Shanaya, and his statement indicated a right to examine the contents but not necessarily seize them, unless they indicated criminal activity. If Shanaya carried nothing more in the oversized backpack than her birth certificate and a family photo album, then he could let it and her go without further custody or paperwork. Maggie doubted that would prove the case, from the thud the bag produced when Jack dropped it on the conference table. Besides, the homicide unit and the entire department still churned with the agitation of a police officer’s murder, the pervasive disquiet of a large and disturbed organization, so the bank conference room provided a quiet space in which to focus their attention on Shanaya Thomas.
Maggie was officially present to photograph and fingerprint any items of interest, to see if Evan Harding’s prints turned up, but she wondered if she might be moral support. Perhaps having another female in the room—along with the intimidating Jack Renner and the stocky undercover guy who sat near the corner and did nothing but stare coldly—might help the young woman relax and speak more freely. Perhaps she could be a silent “good cop” to Jack’s bad . . . though Maggie didn’t want to dwell on how accurate that title may or may not be when applied to Jack. Besides, Shanaya Thomas didn’t seem to need or want the support, company or sympathetic glances of her own gender or any other. She didn’t so much as glance at Maggie, only occasionally at the undercover officer, and at the bag on the table. The rest of the time she stared at Jack as if trying to bore through his skull with her gaze. She didn’t seem scared. Upset, worried, a touch despairing here and there, but for the most part angry. Really, really angry.
“You have no right to seize my property,” she stated, enunciating every word.
Jack read her the rights printed on the Miranda warning card, even though she wasn’t technically under arrest, then reminded her that she had told them how she spent her days committing fraud. Any reasonable officer of the court would assume that this bag of money had resulted from those fraudulent actions. Surely she didn’t expect to keep the money.
“My employer is fraudulent. He has all the money I obtained for him. That’s got nothing to do with what’s in that bag.”
“That should be easy enough to establish, then,” Jack said. He asked Maggie to proceed.
She took a picture of the unopened bag. Sturdy and new, it had been constructed of black canvas with straps and mesh areas most likely designed to carry pup tents and bedrolls. It had three large outside pockets, two of which were empty. The third was not.
With latex-gloved hands, Maggie carefully—the possibility of needle sticks or potential weapons ever kept in mind—removed the contents. She spread them out and took a picture of the whole group, then the individual items.
There were seven different drivers’ licenses, four for Shanaya, three for Evan. Seven different names, seven different addresses, and three different states. Also copies of fourteen birth certificates, five Social Security cards—some of these matched the birth certificates—and eight miscellaneous identifications such as medical insurance cards, student IDs to colleges in Pennsylvania and Indiana, and a commercial truck driver’s license with Evan Harding’s picture in the name of Chad Kaiser.
Even Jack seemed a bit taken aback by this find. How did these pieces fit into a puzzle that would show who murdered three people, and why? “Do you want to explain these to us?”
Shanaya Thomas, or whatever her real name might be, answered with a defiant stare and without a single word.
Maggie unzipped the center section. Photograph, spread the opening wider, photograph again.
The stacks of money inside shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but seeing a four-foot-by-two-foot bag nearly full with tidy bundles of currency—well, that one usually saw only on television.
Jack said, “I assume all this stuff had been in a safe deposit box? Which you opened with the key your boyfriend kept taped to his ankle?”
One eyebrow twitched when he said this, as if she had been wondering what Evan Harding had done with that key, but she said nothing.
“The safe deposit box you just vacated? We spoke to the bank manager. He confirmed that you were the owner of the box, along with Evan—”
“Exactly. It’s my property.”
“—and today you had decided to close it, along with the account you two had here together. He couldn’t give me any details, of course, but he could tell me that you were a valued customer.” He indicated the stack of money. “I didn’t know they made deposit boxes that big.”
Maggie, meanwhile, had begun stacking the bundles into piles of five, photographing as she went. There seemed no need to categorize the bundles—all of them had fifty-dollar bills in bundles of fifty. A brown-edged band let her know a bundle contained one-hundred bills so that her little stacks of five totaled $25,000 each.
Jack pointed at the stacks accumulating on the table, Maggie pulling ever more from the backpack as if they were loaves and fishes.
“Th
is is why you killed him,” he said to Shanaya Thomas.
For a second, pure shock wiped the sullenness off her face. “What? I didn’t kill him! How can you say that?”
“Who else, then? No other person appeared to ask us for this safe deposit key. No one else had a motive.”
“I didn’t have a reason to—”
“This isn’t a reason? He taped the key to his ankle to hide it from you, but both your names were on the account. Now that he’s dead, the whole shebang is yours and yours alone.”
She said, “He kept the key on him because he was always afraid that someone would burglarize our room and find it. Student housing, security’s pretty basic and there’s always kids around—I know it was stupid, paranoid, but that’s how he was. He kept it anywhere but on a key chain, not even on a chain around his neck, in case the store got robbed or he got mugged by one of their low-life clients when he closed up at night.”
“Look at this from our point of view,” Jack said, calmly but not casually. “Only you and he had access to this money. His body’s barely cold, and you’re heading out the door with—this.”
“We did all this together . . . I didn’t kill him, I needed him. I loved him,” she added.
This last should have been heart-rending, yet it seemed more like an observation absently made. Evan Harding had been her partner first, her lover an off-in-the-distance second.
“Shanaya,” Jack said, “where did this money come from?”
She continued to speak with exaggerated clarity: “It’s our savings. We’ve been saving everything we could for years—you saw where we lived, no car, cheap phones, hardly any clothes. We wanted a nest egg so we could get married and move. We worked hard for that money, and it’s mine, and you have no right to steal it.”
Jack didn’t show even a flicker of anger at this accusation. “It will be inventoried and counted and you will get a receipt for every penny. But we will have to establish where it came from.”
