Every Kind of Wicked (A Gardiner and Renner Novel Book 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?”

“Yeah. She comes in here sometimes, stops by to say hi to him. They say sweet nothings through the plexiglass. I don’t let people in the back unless I’m paying them to be here. I don’t let my guys screw around on the clock, no holding customers up, but she was okay, never stayed long. Hi, how’s it going, and she’s back outside.”

“What does she look like?”

Ralph grew solemn under their intense stares. “Black hair, maybe to here, straight. About so high. Maybe a hundred pounds, hundred-twenty. White skin. Not much breasts.”

After that they could think of nothing else to do but thank him for his time and leave.

Outside on the sidewalk, again, the frosty air felt good for the first few minutes after the near-sauna of the A to Z offices, a sop to Jack’s blossoming irritation. “Girlfriend lied to us from start to finish. She sent us to the movie theater purely to screw us over.”

Riley agreed, not even complaining about the short hike back to their car. “If we hadn’t noticed the name on those stubs, hadn’t grasped at that straw, our victim would have stayed a ghost. Why? What’s she hiding?”

“I suggest we go and ask her.” Jack snapped open the car door with a bit more force than necessary. They drove the three city blocks, and promptly realized it would have been faster to walk by the time they located the entrance to the parking facility, got their ticket, and found a space. But this let them enter the building from the side and avoid the too-watchful girl at the building office. Jack had gotten away with retaining the victim’s key card, and used it after a series of knocks went unanswered. Perhaps bursting in on Shanaya Thomas could be considered an unauthorized entry, but Jack had the strong feeling it wasn’t going to matter.

They entered the room.

No, it wasn’t going to matter.

Because Shanaya Thomas wasn’t there. Neither were her clothes, her makeup, the photo of herself and Evan Harding.

“She bolted,” Riley said in amazement, as if no other suspect or witness had ever done that to him before. “Why?”

“We find that out, we’ll probably find out why Evan Harding is dead.”