Snapped (19 page)

He said it like it was a movie title.
High School Musical. Summer School Massacre
. Allison folded her arms over her chest. “I can’t discuss an ongoing investigation.”

“Understood. But allow me to tell
you
something I’ve uncovered about the case. Something you may not be aware of.”

“How old are you, Ty?”

He frowned. “Why?”

“Standard question in a police interview.”

He gave a serious nod. “Twenty-one.”

“You’re about to be a senior.”

“That’s right.”

“And you’re interning at the
Bee
this summer, I take it?”

“Not exactly.”

“You just said you were with—”

“I’m more of a mojo. I work for various news outlets.” His confidence was back as he tapped his card. “They’re listed there, if you need to run a background check.”

“What’s a mojo?” Allison asked, letting her curiosity get the best of her.

“A mobile journalist.” He smiled. “I cover stories from the road. Post them on the Net, do podcasts. You know.”

Allison’s phone vibrated at her side, and she looked down to check the number. It was her dentist’s office. She let it go to voice mail, which seemed to increase Tyler’s sense of importance.

“Trust me, Detective. You want to hear what I have to say.”

“Okay, let’s hear it.”

He looked startled. “What, you mean here?”

She glanced around the empty sandwich shop and shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

“This is sensitive information.” He cast a look over his shoulder at the hair-netted woman dumping out coffee grounds.

“Lay it on me.”

“Okay.” He took a deep breath. “Eric Emrick contacted me two weeks before his death. He said he wanted an interview.”

Allison watched him for a long moment. The skin at the back of her neck prickled, and she wasn’t sure why.

“An interview about what?”

“I don’t know. But it was serious. And he was scared.”

“Scared of what?”

“I don’t know that, either.”

Allison leaned forward on her elbows. The smarmy smile was gone, and he looked serious. His entire tone had changed.

“What do you
think
he was scared of?”

“He thought someone was trying to kill him.”

Sophie hauled her third basket of laundry down the stairs and chided herself for being a clotheshorse. Granted, she did much of her shopping at outlet stores, but her savings account would be in a lot better shape if she managed to squirrel away a paycheck every once in a while.

A college-aged guy she’d never met before was seated cross-legged on one of the washers when she entered the room. Tuesday nights weren’t usually a big laundry time, and she’d hoped to have the place to herself.

He glanced up from his Kierkegaard and gave her a once-over.

“Hot enough for you?” she quipped, dropping her basket on the floor by one of the open washers. The room felt like a sauna, probably because all three dryers were running.

“That one’s out of order,” he said as she started to dump her clothes in.

Sophie sighed. “Thanks.”

The other two washers were in use. She was going to be here all night.

She glanced at her watch. Another twenty minutes until her first load would be dry. Just enough time to run to the corner store for more detergent. She could always ask to borrow some from the young philosopher, but she didn’t see any. Maybe he was using the water-only method.

“Mind watching my stuff? I’ll be right back.”

He didn’t look up. “Sure.”

Sophie did the one-block dash to the corner store and grabbed the last bottle of soap. She plucked a diet root beer from the fridge, then caved in to temptation and picked up an Almond Joy before heading to the register.

Her phone sang out, and she pulled it from her pocket. Jonah calling with an update? But Kelsey’s number came up on the screen.

“Have you been watching the news tonight?”

“No, why?” Sophie slid her twenty across the counter and smiled at the silver-haired store manager. She’d always liked him. He kept his shelves neat, his coffee fresh, and mopped the floors twice a day.

“Well, they’re running you again,” Kelsey said. “And you’re going to love this. They’ve got a kook panel. Tom Rollins dug up a bunch of conspiracy theorists who are going gaga over your possible accomplice sighting. He’s interviewing all of them at once, too, like he’s Larry King or someone.”

“Keep the change,” Sophie whispered to the manager as he passed her a bag. Then to Kelsey: “What do you mean, ‘kooks’?”

“Oh, you know. One of them’s a Second Amendment nut, says the whole thing was staged by the gun-control lobby to draw attention to their cause. Another one is
spouting something about Free Masons and secret societies. And I’m still trying to figure out the last one, but he seems to believe Himmel is not actually Himmel but someone disguised as human who may have been put here to … I’m not sure, really. His point is still
emerging
.”

“God, what a sideshow.” Sophie walked briskly down the sidewalk, checking up and down the street for creepy-looking shadows. “Guess I opened a can of worms. Are there any sane people on?”

“You be the judge. They had a police spokesman on a few minutes ago with the basic ‘We can’t comment on an ongoing investigation’ comment. And then there was—”

Something rammed her from behind, and she flew forward onto the pavement. A weight crushed down on her and someone yanked her head back by the hair. She screamed and kicked. She groped for her purse, her phone, anything—

Smack!
Her head hit concrete. Pain roared through her skull and she saw stars. Her hand curled around something hard. A bottle. She struggled to breathe, to yell, to kick. She flailed her arm back.

A curse boomed in her ear.

“Hey!” Footsteps, coming closer.
“Hey!”

The weight disappeared. More footsteps. The unmistakable sound of a shell being chambered. On a burst of panic, she rolled sideways just as a shotgun blast ripped through the night.

She lay there, shocked, blinking up at the night sky and waiting for the pain. It was in her back, her head. But she hadn’t been shot.

The store manager’s face loomed over her. “Are you okay? I called 911!”

He reached for her head, and she jerked away. She tried to roll onto her side, but she still couldn’t really move. She couldn’t really breathe, either. She wheezed and choked and tried to get air into her lungs.

A gnarled hand reached for her arm and helped her sit up. “Are you okay? Did he get ya? He had a knife on him, looked like a big one.”

Sophie’s tongue felt numb. She registered the coppery taste of blood as she lifted her hand to her lip and glanced around. She heard a dog barking and the ever-increasing wail of a siren.

The manager planted the butt of the gun on the sidewalk and heaved himself to his feet. He offered her a hand. She looked at it and suddenly felt woozy.

The siren shrieked closer, and she sank back against the warm concrete. Her head pounded. Her ears rang. She blinked up at the sky and it seemed to be falling down on her.

“Are you sure you didn’t see
any
thing?” Allison asked. “Not even his hair color?”

Sophie leaned against the back of the Buick and glanced over her shoulder for the hundredth time. “All I saw was an arm. I told you. He had one of those tribal tattoos—a full sleeve, I think.”

Allison made another note on her pad.
Full sleeve?
It was a good detail, but those tats were so common now, it might not get her very far. She glanced down the sidewalk to where a patrol officer was interviewing the store manager, and hoped he was having better luck. Purse snatchings were a dime a dozen, but the knife bumped things up to a whole new level.

Allison eyed the blood spatter on the sidewalk. When she first arrived on the scene, she’d thought it was Sophie’s, but turned out it belonged to the perp. She’d apparently nicked him with a broken root beer bottle before the manager chased him off with his twelve-gauge.

“Okay, anything else in that coin purse?”

Sophie looked at her. “Huh?”

“The coin purse he stole,” Allison said. “Anything in it besides cash? Maybe an ID? Credit card? Social Security card?”

Sophie adjusted the ice pack against the side of her head. “Um, no. Just the money. My purse is upstairs. I was doing laundry, so …” The words trailed off and she swung her head the other way, toward the apartment building. “Oh crap, my clothes.”

“Excuse me?”

“Nothing.” Sophie glanced over to the patrol officer, who was still talking with the store clerk near the door. The red-white-and-blue police strobes were creating a scene, and Allison would bet the manager was hoping to finish up soon so he could get back to selling his beer and cigarettes.

“You know, there is one thing,” Sophie said. “His voice.”

“What about it?”

“He yelled something when I cut him. I don’t know what it meant, but it sounded like Spanish.”

Now, there was a useful detail. Allison jotted it down as Sophie glanced around nervously.

“Do you think the clerk saw enough to identify him? Like maybe in a lineup or something?”

“We’ll have him come in to look at some photo books,” Allison said. “Are you sure you don’t want to do the same?”

“I told you, I didn’t see his face. He was behind me.” Another nervous look around. She rearranged the ice pack, and Allison noticed her hands were still trembling.

“You know, you should probably get to the ER, get that head checked out. I can run you over there.”

“I’m okay.”

“You should seek medical treatment,” Allison pressed. “You could have a concussion.”

“I know what a concussion feels like, and it hurts way more than this.”

Sophie bent down to pick grit out of a scrape on her knee, and Allison watched with annoyance. This woman didn’t take orders well.

“Actually, there is something you could do for me.” She stood up. “I left my door unlocked when I went down to the laundry room. I’d appreciate it if you’d do a walk-through with me, just to be safe.”

Allison signaled the patrol officer before following Sophie across the parking lot to an exterior stairwell. Instead of going up, Sophie darted through a door beside a vending machine alcove.

“Son of a bitch!”

Allison stepped into the room, which was a few degrees cooler than a pizza oven. Sophie stood beside an open dryer, hands planted on her hips, scowling down at a mound of wet clothes on the floor.

“He
stole
my dryer cycle, the little prick.” She heaped the damp clothes onto an already-full laundry basket.

“Who?”

“Philosophy Boy.” Sophie huffed out a breath and propped the basket against her hip, then strode out the door.

Allison followed her up the stairs, taking in the feel of the apartment complex. It wasn’t the nicest place in town, but it wasn’t the seediest, either. There was a tiny pool on-site. The tenants drove halfway decent cars, and many were students, judging from the parking stickers.
But from a security perspective, the place was abysmal. Only one light in the entire parking lot. Half the lights illuminating the balcony were burned out, and the ones that weren’t gave off a pathetic amount of wattage.

Sophie stopped in front of one of the doors. Allison rested a hand on her weapon and then turned the doorknob. Unlocked, as Sophie had said.

A lamp was on in the living room. Allison recognized the soulful voice of Diana Krall coming from a pair of Bose speakers perched on a bookshelf. A laptop computer sat open on the breakfast bar beside a leather purse, which Allison took for a good sign. If some intruder had been up here tonight, he would have taken at least the purse.

Allison checked the bathroom, the bedroom, and the apartment’s two tiny closets. She returned to the living room.

“All clear.”

Sophie had deposited the basket of wet laundry on the kitchen table and was glancing around anxiously. Clearly, the woman was unnerved.

“You check your purse?”

“Everything’s there.”

A snippet of music rang out, and Sophie pulled her phone from her pocket. She’d dropped it during the attack. It was all scuffed up, but still working apparently.

“Hello?” She sighed. “Really, that’s
not
necessary. I’m fine.” Pause. “Just my coin purse. About twenty bucks… I know. I know. Listen, lemme call you later, Kels. I’m talking to the police.”

Sophie hung up and set the phone on the counter. Her hands were still shaking and she actually looked worse
in this light than she had outside. All her color was gone.

“You know, you probably won’t get a wink of sleep here all by yourself. Way too much adrenaline.”

Sophie looked at her.

“It’s happened to me before.”

“What, getting mugged?” She sounded surprised.

“Long time ago, but I remember the feeling.”

Sophie glanced at Allison’s sidearm. Her nervous gaze darted around the apartment.

“You have a friend you could call, or maybe a relative?” Allison pressed. “Someplace you could stay tonight?”