The Root of All Evil (Hope Street Church Mysteries Book 4) (21 page)

“Better. Pastor Matthews’s copier is digital. That means it has a hard drive inside, and the copied images are stored on that hard drive.”

“And if the victim
did
make a copy, we can see what it was. All right, Ms. Lee. You’ve done a good job. I’ll send some men over to get the machine tonight, and we’ll have our techs get into the hard drive first thing.”

Cooper took a deep breath and pushed back. “Inspector, do your men have a lot of experience with taking apart office equipment?”

“Um. I don’t believe so. Some experience, but probably not a lot. Why?”

“Because I
happen
to be in that line of work . . .”

Inspector McNamara groaned. “Ms. Lee . . .”

“I’m serious! I’m head of the repairs and leasing division of Make It Work! I know copy machines better than just about anyone in this city. And I’m guessing you’d prefer an expert to a novice when it comes to evidence in a murder investigation.”

After a moment, McNamara replied, “Oh, all right.” Cooper could hear the irritation in his voice. “My men will retrieve the copier and log it into evidence tonight. Be at the station in the morning, first thing. Your services would be appreciated.”

• • •

Friday morning, Cooper arrived early at Make It Work! and went straight to Mr. Farmer’s office. She entered without knocking.

“Mr. Farmer, I’ve got an important job to do this morning, and—”

Angela sat on the edge of the desk, while Mr. Farmer stood, holding her in a tight embrace and kissing her passionately. Cooper wished she’d knocked.

It took a few seconds for the lovers to realize they weren’t alone. Mr. Farmer jumped away from Angela, his face bright red, and Angela stood, clearing her throat and making sure her clothes were straightened, as if that somehow would make Cooper less suspicious.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Cooper said, not that an apology would remove that image from her mind. “I, uh . . . uh . . .”

“I think I’ll get back to my desk,” Angela interjected. She winked at Cooper as she left.

Mr. Farmer took a seat at his desk, putting on his best employer face. “I apologize for my . . . unprofessional . . .”

“No need, sir,” Cooper assured him. “I’m just glad you and Angela are happy together.”

The corner of Mr. Farmer’s mouth turned up in a smile. “We are.” He caught himself smiling, erased the expression with a coughing fit and then continued. “Now, to work. What do you need, Cooper?”

“I’ve offered our services—or, my services—to the police as part of an investigation,” she explained, as Mr. Farmer’s brows shot up with interest. “I wanted to clear that with you before I head over this morning.”

Angela burst back into the room. “The police?” she asked, having been listening the whole time. “What on earth do they need you for?”

“They need some work done on a copy machine. It’s evidence, or it
might
be evidence. I said I’d go over this morning and take a look, but only if it’s all right with you, Mr. Farmer. I don’t want to involve your company in an investigation unless you’re on board.”

“Of course I’m on board,” Mr. Farmer replied. “Anything we can do to help the police. And who knows? Maybe this will turn into a regular thing for us—helping the police in their time of need. Think of the great reputation!”

“Think of the contracts we could get,” Angela added. “Think of the revenue!”

Cooper enjoyed how their minds worked so differently. When Mr. Farmer and Angela were finished, Cooper replied with a quick, “Thanks, sir,” before hurrying out. After all, McNamara had said to be at the station
first thing
.

She turned into the hallway with Angela at her heels. “I’d apologize for what you walked in on,” Angela said quietly, “except that I’m not really sorry. I wish you hadn’t walked in and interrupted it, but it was nice to have a romantic moment with Mr. Farmer.”

“So you two are pretty serious.”

“Cooper, it’s so wonderful! He’s such a kind man, and he cares about me
so
much. Do you know what he did?”

“What?”

“Well, you know how his sister is.”

Cooper nodded. She’d had the displeasure of meeting Mr. Farmer’s sibling—a bullheaded woman with a terrible attitude, whose choice to go by the name Mrs. Farmer had caused Angela a near heart attack when they’d first met. Angela had thought her man was actually married. As it turned out, Mrs. Farmer was a divorcée who used her maiden name but preferred the way “Mrs.” sounded. Cooper wasn’t a fan of Mrs. Farmer.

Angela continued. “We were eating dinner all together—the three of us—a couple weeks ago. She made a few comments about me being a secretary and about the business needing to be more efficient. The same comments she always makes. After we ate, Mr. Farmer pulled her aside and told her she needed to get used to me and try to like me because he planned on having me around for a very long time.
A very long time
. He doesn’t know I heard him, but I did.”

“Angela, that’s great!”

“And yesterday, we had to have dinner with her again, and she started to make the same comments. Mr. Farmer stuck to his guns! He told her again she’d better try to like me because I’d be around for a very long time. The same words and everything!
A very long time.”

Cooper was glad to see her friend so happy. “It’s wonderful that he’s sticking up for you. But when he says
a very long time,
what do you think he means?”

“It means I might
finally
be looking at that white dress and veil!” Angela declared. “Oh, Cooper, you’ve no idea how excited I am!”

“I have an idea,” Cooper replied with a smile. “And I can’t even tell you how excited I am for you. But . . . just, don’t get your hopes up too soon. Mr. Farmer’s always done things in his own time, and he might not be asking you anything just yet.”

Angela cocked her head to the side in a pensive pose and smiled empathetically. “Still not sure what Nathan’s planning?”

“I’m still not sure if he
is
planning. As far as I know, he may be planning on dating for another five years, or . . . I don’t know.”

Angela smirked. “Maybe he’s waiting to see if you’re . . .
physically
compatible. You two still haven’t . . . you know.”

Cooper sighed. “It just never seems to happen. I spend the night at his place, and he sleeps on the couch. We kiss, and when I think it’s finally the right time, something inevitably happens. We’ve come very close on more than one occasion, but . . . You don’t really think that’s what he’s waiting for, do you?”

“The man may want to make sure he likes the popsicles before he buys the whole ice cream truck.”

The heat began to rise in Cooper’s neck, and she glanced at her watch. She was glad to see the morning was getting on; it gave her a way out of the uncomfortable conversation. “I’m sorry, Angela, but I have to go.”

As she left, Angela hollered after her, “See if you can get those cops to sign one of our annual contracts!”

Dear Angela—always looking out for Mr. Farmer’s business.

Cooper grabbed her old tool bag and a laptop and drove to the station. Normally she’d have listened to the radio or a CD, but today she couldn’t. Angela’s words went through her mind again and again. Was she correct about the problem? Did Nathan worry they wouldn’t be able to connect on an intimate level? Cooper felt herself getting angry. If that was Nathan’s concern, he should have said something. After all, the first time they almost slept together, it was Nathan who said he wanted sex to be more than just something physical; he wanted it to be “making love.” Was he so worried about the physical side of things now that he wouldn’t move their relationship forward?

She was still thinking about Angela’s comments when she arrived at the station, but she put on her best professional smile, walked to the front desk and asked for Inspector McNamara. He emerged from the office area a few minutes later.

“You’re late,” he said.

“I didn’t realize you had a set time for my arrival.”

“I said ‘first thing.’”

“Yes, well, I had to go to the office first. I wanted my boss to sign off on my helping you before I did it. You don’t want me to get in trouble, do you?”

McNamara took a swig of steaming coffee. “Follow me.”

Cooper walked with the inspector back into a part of the station she’d never seen before. They stopped at a window, behind which sat a policeman going through stacks of paperwork. McNamara rapped on the window. The policeman inside slid a clipboard under the window and McNamara signed his name to it.

“This is Cooper Lee,” the inspector told the other man. “She’s here to see the copy machine we took from Hope Street Church yesterday.”

The policeman nodded, pushed a button, and a door by the window unlocked. McNamara took Cooper inside. The room was large, like a warehouse within the police station. Shelving rose from the floor to the ceiling, in labyrinthine style, the shelves lined with marked plastic bags.

“This is evidence,” McNamara explained as Cooper scanned the room. “You touch nothing, but that.” He pointed to the copier set up a few feet away, close to the door. “You don’t touch. You don’t look. You don’t even breathe on anything but that copier. Got it?”

Cooper nodded. His words and gruff tone left no room for misinterpretation. Cooper was doing her best to stare at the copier and only the copier when the door opened again. It was Officer Brayden.

“Good,” McNamara said. “Officer Brayden here is going to keep an eye on you.”

“Do you think I’m going to try and steal something?”

McNamara laughed. “I doubt that. But chain of evidence is important in these investigations. I need someone here who can swear in court that the evidence wasn’t compromised.” The inspector reached into his pocket and retrieved a USB thumb drive, still in the original package. “Put everything on here, give it to Officer Brayden, and he’ll deliver it to me. Understood?”

Cooper took the drive. “I understand.”

Before McNamara had even left the room, Cooper was at work on the copy machine. She checked the outside of it, making sure she knew where everything was located, where every screw belonged and how it fit together. Then she retrieved a screwdriver from her tool bag and began to remove the copier’s back plate.

“So, you work on office machines for a living?” Officer Brayden asked, leaning on the wall and smiling at Cooper as she worked. “I like a woman who can work with her hands. Shows character.”

“Mostly it just shows grease stains,” Cooper joked in return. “But I appreciate the sentiment.” When the plate was loose enough, she set it aside carefully, keeping the screws on top of it. She moved on to the hard drive casing inside the machine.

Officer Brayden watched intently. “What got you into this line of work?”

“I like fixing things.” Cooper smiled to herself. It had been a while since she’d been in the “trenches” of machine repair, and she was enjoying it immensely. “My daddy’s in charge of maintenance at one of the local schools. I suppose I got my tinkering nature from him. Once I see a problem, my fix-it side kicks in, and I can’t stop myself.”

“McNamara told me about your
fix-it
nature. Is that why you always seem to be caught up in the middle of a homicide investigation?”

Cooper paused and turned to look up at Officer Brayden. “Out of curiosity, which bothers the inspector more: that I stick my nose into his investigations or that I’m actually helpful?”

Brayden laughed. “Six of one, half a dozen of the other.”

Cooper returned her attention to the copier and slid the hard drive out of its housing inside the machine. She looked around for a place to continue her work and spotted a table in the corner. She pointed to it. “May I?”

Brayden nodded, and Cooper took the hard drive and her bag to the table. She unpacked her laptop and several cables and connected her computer to the drive. As she did so, she was struck by a brilliant idea. Her help in the investigation didn’t have to stop with the copier this morning. She could continue to help . . . if she knew what Sylvia was copying.

And all she had to do was copy the hard drive onto her own computer at the same time as she saved the contents to McNamara’s USB.

She needed to keep Officer Brayden away from the computer screen so he wouldn’t suspect. “So, Officer, what got you interested in police work?” she asked, trying to distract him from the actual work at hand. “Are you one of those guys who always wanted to be a cop?”

“I thought I told you to call me Will,” he said, smiling, as Cooper inserted McNamara’s USB drive into her computer. She opened a special program to read the copier’s files and nodded.

“Yes, you did. I wasn’t sure if you were Officer Brayden or Will this morning.”

“I’d rather be Will.”

“All right then. So,
Will,
what got you interested in police work?”

Will took a few steps closer. Cooper tilted the screen away from him. Fortunately, he didn’t seem to notice.

“I was never sure what I wanted to be,” he said. “When I went to college, I got into an entry-level criminal justice class, because I heard all you did was watch a lot of videos about procedure. I thought it would be easy and I’d never have to think about it again.”

Cooper watched the progress bar on her screen as the hard drive copied to both her computer and McNamara’s drive. “I guess it didn’t work out that way.”

“Nope. It got me interested. I enrolled in a few more justice courses the next semester, and my advisor told me if I liked it that much, I ought to major in it. Next thing I knew, I graduated with a degree in criminal justice and entered the academy.”

Just another minute. Cooper rested her hand on her chin to cover the screen in case Will came too near. “So what do you like to do when you’re not getting criminals off the streets of Richmond?”

Will laughed. “I’m a boring person. Enough about me. I’d be more interested to hear about what you like to do.”

Uh-oh,
Cooper thought as she watched his face. There it was. A look in Will’s eye that was definitely more than friendly. She was giving him the wrong impression. She sat back to appear less interested and glanced at the screen. Just a few more seconds.