Die Buying (23 page)

“How did you come to find him?” Catherine asked. She reached for one of her friend’s hands and held it as Elena’s gaze drifted to the window and its view of the tan sweep of lawn declining to the curb.

“He called me.”

At that, Elena looked at me. “He did? Why?”

“He said he knew something about his father’s murder.”

“What could he—” Elena began, only to be trampled by Catherine Lang’s “I won’t believe Jackson was into drugs!”

Elena and I stared at her. Her cheeks reddened. “I’m sorry. But if Robbie knew something, wouldn’t that mean—”

She left the thought unfinished. I wondered if she were right. Could Porter have been a drug dealer or manufacturer? Were his development projects fronts for distribution? Or maybe he was a hardcore user and his habit was sucking all the money out of his bank accounts. That might explain the missing furniture. I reined in my thoughts. I was speculating way ahead of the evidence, always a risky thing to do.

“Jackson was a bastard,” Elena said. A little color showed in her cheeks. “A bastard. But I never knew him to take drugs.” She looked bewildered. “And my Robbie. Last year, when he came out of rehab, I hoped—” She began to sob, turning aside to bury her face in the sofa.

“I’ll let myself out,” I said, acutely uncomfortable.

Catherine Lang nodded as she patted Elena’s back and murmured to her. Walking quickly to the door, I opened it and took a deep breath of the cold air that blew in. The brief visit made me want to connect with my family, and I dialed my mom’s cell phone number as I slid behind the wheel. Not getting an answer, I left an affectionate message and hung up. Dad’s number also went to voice mail. Huh. They must be traveling. The only thing that detached my father from his cell phone was an on-camera performance or airline restrictions. Becoming aware of a figure watching me from the front window, I put the car in gear, filled with a new resolve. This murderer had had things his or her own way long enough. I was going back to the scene of the crime to get some answers.

At midnight, the
parking lot behind the mall was an expanse of black nothingness, lit only by the occasional lamppost. Joel’s minivan, the vehicle his parents had passed along to him and which his financial situation obliged him to accept despite the van’s rock-bottom rating on the “cool” scale, glided to a stop outside the delivery door closest to Diamanté. Very few of the stores had doors opening directly to the outside; most opened to narrow halls that mall patrons never saw. They were used mainly for deliveries.

“Okay, Joel, you’re the body,” I said, hopping out of the van. I swept my gaze along the mall’s roofline, making sure we were between the fields of vision of the two nearest cameras.

I thumbed the push-to-talk radio clipped to my shirt. “Can you see us, Edgar?”

“Negatory,” came the reply in the big man’s laconic voice. Woskowicz had stuck him with the midshift until he hired a replacement for Weasel.

“Why do I have to be the body?” Joel asked, nonetheless moving to the back of the van and arranging himself in a supine position in the cargo area.

“Because,” Kyra explained in an exasperated voice, “if we two weak womenfolk can carry your hefty corpse into Diamanté, then it proves anyone could have offed Porter. We’ve already been over this.” She looked sleek and dangerous in a black turtleneck over polypropylene running leggings that showed the formidable muscles in her thighs.

I’d asked Kyra for her help as soon as I got home from the Porter’s house, and run the idea past Joel at the pool. They’d agreed to help me reenact the crime, hoping we might learn something useful. Since we had no idea where the murderer shot Jackson Porter, we were just doing the body-disposal bit. We’d clued Edgar in so he wouldn’t call the cops on us if he spotted us behaving suspiciously.

Kyra eyed Joel where he lolled artistically, eyes closed, on the van’s floor. “Do you suppose he was already naked when they took him in, or did they nakedify him after they got him in the store?” We pondered Joel whose cheeks flushed pink, making him look like the world’s healthiest dead man.

“I don’t know,” I finally said. “We’ll keep him clothed for now.” I winked at Kyra.

“You are not taking off my clothes, even in the interest of catching a murderer,” Joel said, alarmed, rising to a half-sitting position.

“Lie down, corpse,” Kyra said, shoving at his chest. “I’ve got his legs.” Hooking her arms under Joel’s knees, she dragged him to the edge of the van.

I moved in near his shoulders, awkwardly maneuvering until I could get my hands into his armpits. “Okay. Don’t drop him.”

“Yeah, don’t drop him,” Joel pleaded from the corner of his mouth.

We took ten steps toward the mall, Joel’s butt sinking closer to the asphalt with every step, a crescent of pale flesh showing where his sweatpants pulled down. Finally, Kyra said, “I’ve gotta put him down for a moment. He weighs more than a blue whale. You ever think about mixing in a salad?” she asked him.

Joel played dead, but I noticed he sucked in his stomach. I bit back a smile.

“You know,” I said, “if the murderer had this planned out, maybe he brought along a dolly or something.”

“Or found one inside?” Kyra suggested.

“Stay here.” Leaving my friends, I used my key to unlock the delivery door. The hall that snaked behind Diamanté and a dozen other stores branched off to my left. Ahead and to my right were the restrooms and the janitorial supply closet. And right outside the men’s room sat the huge, gray trash bin Fernando and the other janitors hauled around all day. Bingo! Grabbing it by its thick, rubber lip, I hauled it outside.

“That’s more like it,” Kyra said.

“Yuck,” Joel said.

“You’re dead. You don’t get a vote on mode of transport,” I told him. “Ready?” With a lot of effort and some serious grunting, Kyra and I hefted Joel so he lodged butt-down in the trash can, his arms and shins draping down the sides.

“No way could one person have done this,” Kyra said, panting.

The muscles in my arms and chest burned. “Maybe a strong man,” I said. “And he’d probably have had to drag him, which would’ve scraped up his feet if he’d already been naked.”

With Kyra pushing and me pulling, we got the trash can into the hallway and let the door bang shut behind us. It was easier going on the smooth linoleum, and we arrived behind Diamanté a minute later.

“Time?” I asked.

Joel looked at the stopwatch on his wrist. “Ten minutes and twenty-three seconds since we pulled up,” he said.

“Okay. Since we don’t have a key to Diamanté, we just have to guesstimate from here on out. Say thirty seconds to get the door open, a minute to push the trash can to the display window. How long to undress the body?”

Kyra shrugged. “Three or four minutes if there were two of them? Longer if it was a solo routine.”

“Sounds about right. So, twenty-five minutes, tops, from start to finish?”

They nodded.

“And the only cameras they had to worry about were the exterior ones since there aren’t any in these back halls,” Joel said.

“How would the murderer know that?” Kyra asked.

“With a little recce,” I said. “Wander back here like you’re going to the bathroom, then drift down the hall. It’s not like the cameras are hidden or anything. The mall wants people to know they’re there to discourage shoplifting and vandalism.”

We retraced our steps to the outer door. As we started back toward the van, I asked, “So what did Weasel see, if anything, that got him killed?”

“It’s not likely he was patrolling down the delivery hall,” Joel said.

“The car.” I knew it. “He was driving around and he saw the car, van, whatever. He probably didn’t think much about it until the next day when he heard about the murder.”

“Or,” Kyra suggested, “he stopped and challenged whoever it was.”

“Not Weasel,” Joel and I said together. “He was too lazy,” Joel explained.

“And I can’t believe even Weasel could come across a murderer disposing of a body and not call it in,” I said.

“So, he saw the car and noted the plate number,” Joel said, climbing into the driver’s seat of his van. “And then what? Phoned up the murderer the next day instead of giving the info to the police?”

“Or maybe he saw whoever it was walking back to the car
after
propping up Porter in the window,” Kyra said.

“Or maybe someone paid Weasel to murder Porter and then rubbed him out to make things nice and tidy,” Joel said, swiveling his head around to look at Kyra in the backseat.

“Eyes on the road. You’ve been watching way too many Robert De Niro movies,” Kyra said disapprovingly.

We rode in thoughtful silence as Joel drove back to my place. Without more data to work with, it was impossible to figure out exactly how the murderer had moved Porter’s body or how Weasel had gotten a line on the murderer, if he had. It was completely possible that his murder had nothing to do with the Porter case; it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn Weasel numbered ex-cons and other undesirables among his personal acquaintances. I sighed. About the only thing this exercise had accomplished was proving it was possible to get a body into Diamanté without being spotted, and it was likely Porter was still clothed when he arrived at the mall. Big whoop. That and a fiver would buy a cup of coffee.

Saturdays are Fernglen’s busiest days, and we had a full complement of officers, including a still-sniffling Captain Woskowicz, on duty by opening time. Grandpa Atherton called to tell me he had his cameras in place and would keep me posted. I volunteered to do dispatch duty for the morning, to which Woskowicz just grunted before disappearing into his office and closing the door. Keeping an eye on the cameras, I went back through the log for the week, organizing the data to put it into a PowerPoint presentation for the weekly Monday-morning briefing to Quigley and his staff. With two deaths at the mall, this week’s briefing would be considerably longer than usual. Putting the data into succinct bullets, I did a slide on Jackson Porter’s death and one on Robbie Porter’s, ending with the same status on both: OPEN. I put together a slide about the Herpes Hut liberation, finding a photo of a Komodo dragon to jazz it up a bit. I ended that one with an optimistic status: ninety-eight percent of animals recovered. I didn’t point out that the one snake still at large was a fifteen-foot python.

Titling the next slide “Vehicle Vandalism,” I clicked back through the log entries to list the dates and approximate times of the graffiti attacks, adding the type of car in another column. Leaving a space for today (because I was sure the taggers would get in their one-a-day quota before the day was over), I listed the data for Friday, then Thursday, and all the way back to Monday and Kenneth Downs’s BMW. When I reviewed last Sunday’s entries, I couldn’t find one related to vehicle vandalism. I checked again, reading through each entry carefully. Nothing.

I pushed back in my chair and tapped a pencil against the desk. Huh. Several explanations immediately popped into my mind. It had happened on Weasel’s shift and he hadn’t bothered to log it. Possible. The taggers had taken the day off, maybe to attend a tagger’s convention or because they ran out of spray paint. Unlikely. The person whose car got vandalized hadn’t reported it. Even more unlikely. Car owners needed a report for their insurance. Unless . . . I sat up straight, excitement prickling along my arms. Unless they had a good reason for not reporting it, like they didn’t want it known they were at the mall. Was it even remotely possible that the taggers had spray painted the murderer’s vehicle? I forced myself to take a deep breath and think it through. Maybe the owner had reported the vandalism to the Vernonville PD, rather than to us.

Jabbing at the phone buttons, I waited for what seemed an eternity for the officer who answered the phone to get back to me: no reports of vandalism from Fernglen Galleria last Sunday. I hung up. Taking another deep breath, I called Grandpa and told him what I suspected. “It’s more important than ever to get a lead on the taggers,” I said. “With any luck, they’ll remember what car they vandalized last Sunday.”

“That’s good thinking, Emma-Joy,” Grandpa said. “I’m on it. Out here.”

I debated calling Detective Helland. He’d probably sneer at my theory, the way he had when I suggested the pair who liberated Kiefer’s reptiles might have a connection with Jackson Porter. Reluctantly, I decided I had to call him anyway. He had the resources—if he chose to use them—to check with body shops to see if any of the suspects had had a car repainted this week. I couldn’t do that.

A long silence greeted my new theory after I laid it out for Helland. Finally, he said, “Do you have any idea how many paint and body shops there are within a fifty-mile radius of here?”

“Dozens.”

“Hundreds. No way can I spare the manpower to call them all to see if, by chance, they’ve painted one of a dozen cars owned by one of the people connected with this case.” His tone was more weary than scornful. “But it’s not bad thinking on your part, and if you catch up with the taggers, let me know. I could certainly move forward with more specific information, like make and model.”