All Sales Fatal (13 page)

Eleven

When I managed
to get hold of him, Ernest Finkle obligingly provided GPS coordinates for where he’d found Woskowicz. “I never hike without my GPS,” he said, apparently not even curious about why I wanted the information. “Why, I get turned around in your mall.”

I thanked him and went to ask Kyra if she’d like to go for a little hike after her roller derby bout. “What about the cops?” she asked when I explained why I wanted to check out the site.

“What about them?” I asked, my expression daring her to suggest that I didn’t have a prayer of discovering something the cops had overlooked, or that the police might object to my inspecting the crime scene. The Wilderness Battlefield Park was open to the public… Why shouldn’t I stroll along its southern border if I wanted to?

Evidently reading the determination in my face, Kyra didn’t press the point. “Sure, I’ll go with you. Then you can buy dinner.”

I agreed, and three hours later, after the Vernonville Vengeance, Kyra’s roller derby team, trounced the Harrisburg Hornets, we stood in a copse of trees beginning to bud, the setting sun ruddying the dried grasses in an adjacent field and the Civil War–era artillery piece pointing at us from the far end. The chill of approaching night nipped at me as I pulled the GPS unit from my pocket, grateful for my leather gloves. Kyra slipped on an ear-warmer headband and fluffed her thick hair around it.

“Just over here,” I said, moving forward and to my right.

“Not much to see,” Kyra observed as she joined me.

Unhappily, she was right. I could barely make out tire tracks on the verge of what was intended to be a walking trail. A crushed pine sapling released its pungent scent and bore mute witness to the path Woskowicz’s SUV had taken. We were only about fifty yards off the road, where I had parked the Miata, but the trees and dense undergrowth of vines, saplings, and ferns effectively blocked the road from view. Keeping an eye out for poison ivy, I shone my powerful flashlight on the ground and followed the tire tracks from where they first broached the trail to a set of deeper impressions where Woskowicz had apparently parked. Kyra quickly lost interest as I played the beam back and forth across the ground, and she wandered to the edge of the copse to stare across the meadow.

“Do you believe in ghosts?” she asked out of the blue.

I snorted. “What? You think Captain Woskowicz’s ghost is lurking here, waiting to avenge his murder? I can’t imagine the murderer is likely to come back to this spot, so he’s in for a long, fruitless haunting.”

“Not Woskowicz,” Kyra said. “Them.” She lifted her chin to point at the field.

“Them?” I joined her in staring at the field, wondering if she’d spotted some tourists draining every last minute
from a day of battlefield tramping. March wasn’t exactly the height of tourist season, but dedicated Civil War enthusiasts showed up year-round. I saw nothing but lengthening shadows and a fox skirting the tree line as she began her evening’s hunt.

“The soldiers.”

Kyra’s husky voice gave the words unusual weight, and I leaned forward, almost expecting to see men in ragged gray or blue uniforms surging forward or scattering at the whistle of incoming artillery. No whiff of cordite stung the evening air, and no screams echoed. I’d been in a couple of firefights in Afghanistan, and it was my considered opinion that no soldier’s ghost would willingly stick around a battlefield, the site of terror and confusion and chaos. I told Kyra as much.

“Who said they were willing?” She asked the question almost under her breath and then, after a moment, turned her back on the field. We resumed our scan of the area, and I picked out what looked like another set of tire tracks on the other side of the trail behind where Woskowicz’s SUV had parked. These were set closer together, suggesting a smaller vehicle.

“Someone opened their door here,” Kyra said, pointing to waist-high breakage on a holly bush. “But it could’ve been last October for all we know.”

“No,” I said, sniffing the branches. “This is new. It still smells sappy, and the twigs show green inside.”

“So, someone—man, woman, or alien—arrived in his, her, or its own vehicle and climbed in with Woskowicz for a chat or a make-out session or whatever. They argue, the newcomer pulls out a gun, and pow!” She made a gun out of her index finger and thumb and mimed shooting me in the head.

“I think whoever it was came here planning to kill him,”
I said. “Otherwise, why the gun? It was premeditated. And Woskowicz either trusted the person or wasn’t afraid of him, because he had a gun of his own but kept it in his pocket. If he’d really been nervous about the meeting, he’d have had the gun out from the get-go.”

“Makes sense.” Kyra shivered. “Can we go now? I’m getting hungry. I always work up an appetite roller-skating.”

“Sure,” I said, sweeping the flashlight in an arc one more time. Nothing leaped out at me. Well, what had I been expecting? A monogrammed flask dropped on the ground and overlooked by the cops? A collection of lipstick-stained cigarette butts? A library book that could be traced back to the borrower? I laughed at myself inwardly and trotted to catch up with Kyra, already halfway back to the Miata.

After we ate
dinner and Kyra left, I went to bed, setting my alarm clock for midnight. I planned to return to Fernglen and visit with the night-duty officer for a bit, determined to start off on the right foot as acting director of security. If I got chosen to replace Captain Woskowicz, I wanted all the guards, especially those who worked the night shift, to know I valued what they did. Fubar objected with a startled “Mrrow!” when the alarm went off at midnight and I stifled it with a groan. Curling up in the warm spot I had vacated, Fubar watched through slitted eyes as I dressed in jeans and a sweater. “Tell me I’m being a good boss,” I suggested. He closed his eyes.

I parked in the deserted lot and waved at the nearest functioning camera atop a light post. Sunday and Monday were Edgar’s nights off; Victoria Dallabetta was working the midshift.

If she was in the office, rather than patrolling, she’d see
me, I hoped, and not be startled when I came in. Using my key to unlock the mall door, I slid inside and locked it behind me. Security officers didn’t have keys to the individual mall stores—the tenants hung on to those—but we had keys for the main doors, garages, and elevators.

My footsteps seemed louder in the semigloom of the mall at night, a gloom heightened by Quigley’s insistence on using the lowest possible wattage bulbs for night-time illumination. My refrigerator bulb provided more light. The escalators and fountain were turned off, reducing the ambient noise, so the squeak of my athletic shoes on the tile echoed strangely. I turned into our hall just as Dallabetta emerged from the ladies’ room, and she jumped when she saw me.

“Jesus Christ! You startled me.” A stocky woman ten years older than me with short, dark hair, Vic had been a Fernglen security officer for five or six years, and I suspected she resented my being made acting director over her. The suspicion deepened when she pushed through the glass doors into the office, saying, “Come to check up, have you? Well, I’m here, doing my job. Sorry to disappoint.” Plopping into a chair, she turned her back on me to ostentatiously study the camera screens.

“Actually,” I said, refusing to respond to her snippiness, “I just wanted to bring you some coffee”—I placed the lidded cup I’d brought from home on the desk at her elbow—“and cookies.” I pulled a baggie containing a half dozen chocolate chip cookies from my purse. “I know the midshift can get dreary.”

“I’m on a diet,” she said.

I took a couple deep breaths, determined not to react to her hostility, and seated myself beside her. “I know when I worked mids in the military, I was grateful for anything that broke up the monotony.”

“You want gratitude?” Vic swiveled to face me. “Fine, I’m grateful. Consider my monotony broken.” She worked her lips in and out. “You should know that I’m going to apply for the director of security job when they advertise it.”

“Great,” I said. What else could I say? “I’m going to throw my name in the hat, too.”

“Like I didn’t know that.” She turned back to the monitors, carefully studying a whole lot of nothing. “Quigley might have tapped you to fill in, but the hiring decision will be made by the whole board, and they’ll have to pay attention to my qualifications.”

I didn’t ask what her qualifications were, sure she’d see that as an attempt to disparage her or make an end run around her for the job. I rose. “In the meantime,” I said, “I hope you’ll feel like you can bring issues to me. I know I’m just in the job temporarily, but I want to do it right for Fernglen and all of us on the security team.”

Vic’s gaze slid sideways to me. “I can’t afford ‘issues.’ I’ve got a daughter to support.”

“I didn’t know you had a daughter. How old is she?”

“Fourteen going on forty-two,” she said, her face relaxing almost into a smile for the first time since I’d arrived. “Josie Rae. You got kids?”

“Me?” The question startled me. “I’ve never even been married.”

“Me either.” Vic turned back to the monitors, the fragile accord between us broken after mere seconds by my careless tongue.

“Well, good night,” I said lamely after an awkward pause. I left the cookies and moved toward the door. When Vic didn’t respond, I left.

Maybe I should pass up the director of security job and double my efforts to get on with a police department, I thought, walking slowly through the empty halls. My knee
had started to ache. Policing was what I really wanted to do. The pay raise that went with the director of security position wasn’t enough to make the personnel headaches worth it. I tried to put the brief interlude out of my head. I was tired and cranky and it was one thirty in the morning—not the best time to be making career decisions. As I neared my car, grateful for the chilly air that blew some of the cobwebs from my head, a movement on my right made me spin.

Jay Callahan approached me, his hands held shoulder high, a grin on his face. “Fancy meeting you here.” He wore a black leather jacket and jeans and looked… dangerous.

“I should have known,” I said sourly. “I suppose there’s no point in my asking what you’re doing here at this hour.”

His grin grew broader. “Someone got up on the wrong side of bed this morning. Or haven’t you been to bed yet?”

“I’ve been and now I’m going back.” I opened my door.

“I don’t suppose that’s an invitation?”

I gave him a look. Not that the idea didn’t have some appeal.

“I heard about Captain Woskowicz.” His expression sobered. “Two mall-related shooting deaths in a week… seems a tad unusual. Makes a good case for gun control.”

Something in his voice made me look at him closely. The streetlamp several parking spaces over cast a fitful glow on his face, but I felt, rather than saw, his air of alertness or expectation. “Interested in guns, are you?” I asked.

“Oh, no more than the next guy.” He came closer, and I was absurdly conscious of the breadth of his chest under a dark sweater and the thigh muscles outlined by his jeans. He reached a hand toward me, but just then the squeal of tires brought our heads around in time to see a Cadillac Escalade burst out of the garage and tear toward the exit. Moments later, a midsized sedan followed it, catching
enough air over the speed bumps to score high points in a snowboarding competition.

“What the—” The incident had happened so fast, I didn’t even have time to note how many people were in the vehicles or get license plates—not that I could’ve read them at this distance and in this light. I slewed toward Jay, who stood with the slight breeze riffling his hair, his posture relaxed after his initial stiffening when the cars barreled out. I narrowed my eyes. “So that’s what you were doing here.”

“Me? What?” He assumed a look of injured innocence.

I had run into Mr. Jay Callahan in the garage before at strange hours, apparently observing meetings between unknown people who remained in their parked cars. “Gimme.” I beckoned with my hand.

“Give you what?” He slid his hand into his pocket.

“Aha! I know you’ve got the license numbers. I want to ask the police to run them.”

“What makes you think—oh, all right.” He pulled a small notebook from his pocket and ripped out a page with two license plate numbers, one Virginia and one Florida, on it. “They won’t tell you anything.”

I felt a warm glow at his implicit acknowledgment that he was more than a businessman trying to make a go of a cookie franchise at the mall. He trusted me enough to let down his guard slightly, although I knew better than to expect him to brief me on exactly what kind of an operation he was involved with. As I reached for the page, his hand caught mine. Startled, I met his eyes. “EJ—” A rueful smile curved his mouth as he hesitated. He seemed to think better of what he was about to say. “I know you won’t—”

“I won’t tell anyone you like to lurk in the mall parking garage after midnight writing down license plate numbers. It’s kind of an American suburban version of train spotting,” I said.

He laughed softly and released my hand. I still felt the warm imprint of his fingers. “If you hear anything about guns or weapons, either the ones used in the murders or others, will you let me know?”