Unidentified Woman #15 (16 page)

“Why don’t you just tell me these things?” Nina asked. “Why do you make me pull the stories out of you one paragraph at a time?”

“I didn’t want you to worry.”

“Too late. I’ve been worrying for the past five and a half years.”

“I guess I didn’t want you to know that
I
was worried. I have no idea what’s going on or why. I’d like to help Fifteen—Ella—but right now I honestly don’t know if she’s the good guy or the bad guy.”

“Or a little of both.”

“Exactly.”

“What does the garage sale have to do with it?”

“Maybe nothing, but the fact that the kids had so many copies of the flyers makes me think they were distributing them.”

“So we’ll be working undercover?”

“You could look at it that way.”

The smile that crossed her face was so vibrant I had to look away.

“Fun,” she said.

*   *   *

A full third of Arden Hills consisted of an abandoned and terribly polluted U.S. Army munitions plant that city and county officials had been trying to develop with little success for well over a decade. Beyond that, it was like any other middle-class suburb you’ve ever driven through, houses with all the personality of paper cups set in orderly rows. The paper cup we were looking for was located on a street near Round Lake. It was large and white, with an attached two-car garage and a plus-size yard. Both garage doors were open to the elements. I could see several cafeteria-style tables laden with goods inside as we drove past, as well as several more lining the snow-free concrete driveway. There were so many customers that we were forced to park Nina’s Lexus a full block away. We had taken her car so if anyone ran the plates, her name would pop up instead of mine.

The warming trend had continued. It was a balmy forty degrees with the sun shining bright and many of the customers had gone gloveless and hatless with winter coats hanging open, including Nina.

“Spring has sprung,” she said.

“It isn’t spring in Minnesota until the first day of baseball season, and sometimes not even then.”

“You can be so cynical, McKenzie. I don’t even know how you make it out of bed in the morning.”

“What I want to do—I’ll go first. You come along a couple of minutes later. We’ll pretend we don’t know each other.”

“Is there a reason for that?”

“If these people are connected to Fifteen, it’s possible they might also be connected to Karl Olson, which means they might know who I am. Anyway, men flirt more freely with you when I’m not standing by your side. I’ve seen it.”

“You want them to flirt with me?”

“I want them to talk to you.”

“Okay.”

I opened the car door, but left Nina a final word before I climbed out. “Doesn’t mean you have to flirt back.”

“Who? Me?”

I left the Lexus and walked to the driveway. The customers were in a festive mood, and I wondered if it was a product of the weather or the prices on the merchandise arrayed along both edges of the driveway—all of it offered at fifty to thirty percent of its retail value. One side had little-used lawn mowers and snowblowers, an arbor like the kind some people get married under, garden hoses and tillers, ten-speed bikes, a couple of air conditioners, an unassembled twenty-foot aboveground swimming pool, hammocks, benches, birdbaths, tools and toolboxes, auto parts, and even a 12-horsepower go-kart. On the other side were household items like microwave ovens, a George Foreman grill, KitchenAid mixers, waffle irons, coffeemakers, teapots, nonstick skillets, slow cookers, stereo equipment, and clock radios that played nature sounds when you hit the snooze bar.

A young man—I placed him in the midtwenties—was busy showing a fistful of customers that the remote-controlled cars, trucks, helicopters, and airplanes on display really did work. A woman close to his age was demonstrating an 850-watt Breville juice extractor that she said she’d let go for a hundred bucks. I lingered a moment to watch, telling myself I could use a juicer.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nina passing a blue and white sign announcing that the house was for sale. She browsed her way up the driveway into the garage. I followed discreetly behind, making sure I was never more than a few yards away from her.

The garage was heated, and even though the doors were open wide, the blowers overhead were working hard enough to keep it toasty warm. Nina had draped her long charcoal coat over her arm, revealing the snug white turtleneck she wore beneath it. Which was probably why the young man standing behind the table was watching her so intently. She was examining a green silk blouse when he approached.

“This is very impressive,” Nina said. “It reminds me of the rummage sale they hold every September in Minneapolis—the one conducted by the wealthy parents of the kids who attend that expensive private school along the river. People literally line up around the block and wait hours to be among the first to get a chance at their castoffs.”

“That’s pretty much our business model,” the young man replied.

Nina’s smile wasn’t quite as dazzling as her pale blue eyes, yet it was close, so when she flashed it at the kid, he couldn’t help but smile in return.

“You hold these a lot?” she asked.

“A couple times a month, usually,” he said. “What we do, we gather high-value merchandise from people who don’t want to bother with eBay or their own garage sales, but at the same time don’t want to just give it away to Goodwill or some church. Think of us as a floating consignment store.”

“I never heard of such a thing.”

“We send out a few flyers, but mostly it’s word of mouth. One customer tells another customer. We don’t want a high profile. That’s why we never hold a sale at the same place twice. The government, the IRS, they tend to ignore garage sales, but if they knew we were holding them regularly, they’d want us to take out a license; they’d want us to pay taxes.”

Nina waved her hand as if it were a topic not worth another moment’s consideration, which made the kid smile some more. She kept browsing. Designer clothes, denim jeans, handbags, cell phones, digital cameras and recorders, iPods and MP3 players, smartphones, GPS devices, HDTVs, laptops, tablets, and video game players, as well as an assortment of high-end cosmetics, electric toothbrushes, men’s razors, pregnancy tests, and a couple of cartons of baby formula, were carefully arranged on the tables. While the list sounds impressive, there wasn’t that much of it, and the merchandise looked as though it had already been thoroughly picked through. Still, there wasn’t a mark on any of it. Not even a smudged thumbprint.

I followed closely behind as Nina searched through a pile of silk blouses.

“These are beautiful,” she said. “Only I can’t find anything in my size.”

“What is your size?” asked the young man.

“Four to six, depending on how the clothes run.” I detected a certain amount of pride in Nina’s answer. Given the number of sit-ups she does nearly every night, her feet hooked under the sofa, it was a pride well-deserved.

“We can’t control what merchandise comes in,” the young man said. “It changes from month to month. But we’re having another sale tomorrow afternoon in Woodbury, and there’ll be plenty of different products, different clothes. Maybe we’ll have what you’re looking for then.”

“Where in Woodbury?” Nina asked.

“Just a sec.” The kid dipped down below the table, rummaged through a box, and came up with a flyer. He handed it to Nina. I glanced at it over her shoulder as I moved past. It was identical to the one in my pocket.

A woman pushing sixty was also listening to their conversation.

“Are you going to have more than what you have today?” she asked.

“Ma’am?” the kid said.

“You usually have a much better selection.”

“Like I said, we can’t control what comes in. And it is winter.”

“Last February was winter, and you had more stuff.”

“She’s right,” a man said. He was the same age as the woman, but I didn’t get the impression that they were together. “You had much more merchandise the last time.”

The kid spread his hands wide as if he didn’t know what to say. The woman gave him a disappointed head shake and drifted away. So did the man. Nina kept browsing the tables until she came to a selection of jewelry—rings, watches, necklaces, pendants, and earrings. She found a teardrop pearl hanging from a white-gold chain. She read the price tag and examined the pearl some more.

“Two hundred and eighty dollars?” Nina batted those marvelous pale blue eyes.

“For you, two hundred and thirty dollars,” the young man replied.

“I don’t suppose you take credit cards.”

“Sorry.”

“Uh-huh.”

Nina dipped into her bag and started pulling out bills—figuring something like this might happen, I had stopped at an ATM on my way to Arden Hills. She gave the bills to the young man, who gave the necklace to her.

“Do you have a Web site?” Nina asked. “Where can I find out about future sales?”

“No Web site. We do have a mailing list, though.”

“How do I get on it?”

The young man asked for Nina’s e-mail account. Nina supplied her personal address, not the one attached to her business.

“I hope to see you again, Nina,” the young man said. Nina offered her hand and he shook it. “By the way, my name’s Mitch.”

Ella’s Mitch?
my inner voice asked.
Ms. Bosland’s brother?

“A pleasure to meet you, Mitch,” Nina said.

He looked at her like he wanted to be friends. Nina turned and moved away. The eyes of the young man followed her until he was distracted by my presence.

“Good afternoon, sir,” he said. “Have you found anything you like?”

His smile had lost most of its luster, but it wasn’t personal. After Nina, I was a disappointing sight.

“A couple of things,” I said.

“We’re here to help.”

He doesn’t know who you are,
my inner voice said.

I bought the juicer so I wouldn’t look suspicious.

*   *   *

Nina didn’t say another word until we were in her Lexus and driving away, with me behind the wheel.

“What do you think?” she asked.

“I think you did very well. We learned a lot without acting like we were trying to. Although, two hundred and thirty dollars? You couldn’t buy something a little less expensive?”

“Says the man who paid a hundred for a toy he’ll use twice a year if that. Besides, pearl is my birthstone. And … and—now they know we’re big spenders.”

“I’m sure that’s what you were going for.”

“Mitch—is he the one who came to the condo yesterday?”

“I think so.”

“Why?”

“One of these days I’m going to ask him. For now, though, I think it’s better that he doesn’t know who I am.”

“It was all stolen merchandise, wasn’t it?” Nina said. “The blouses I looked at—some of them still had the manufacturer’s fold lines.”

“The used stuff on the driveway was probably loot taken in home and garage burglaries. The more expensive products in the garage were most likely shoplifted.”

“I can understand stealing something that you can put in your pocket or a purse, but how do you walk out of a store with an HDTV or a KitchenAid mixer?”

“One way, you buy something, get a receipt, then you grab a product that doesn’t fit easily into a bag and walk out the door with it under your arm while carrying the receipt in your hand for everybody to see. The staff will think you paid for it.”

“What about the stuff with electronic surveillance tags?”

“There are a lot of gags you can pull. One thing, you get a shopping bag—they call them booster bags—that’s lined with aluminum foil. It lets you take the products though the front exit without setting off the alarms.”

“I am so na
ï
ve.”

“Next time you go shopping, watch the people with baby strollers and umbrellas with handles that they can hook over their arms. Watch women with full skirts—they call them ‘crotch-walkers.’”

“Because they carry merchandise out of the store between their legs?”

“Exactly. In fact, watch anyone who’s wearing baggy clothes in general because they might have extra pockets and hooks sewn into the lining. Watch customers wearing bulky coats who seem always to have a hand in their pocket. More likely, only their sleeve is in the pocket. Their hand is hidden beneath the coat and free to snatch items off shelves without being noticed.”

“All the clothes I looked at, none of them had those ink cartridges that the stores attach, not even the expensive sweaters.”

“It’s easy to get rid of those, even if you don’t have a detacher, what the salesclerks use. Depending on what kind of cartridge you have, you can remove them with a hammer and nail, screwdriver, wire snipper, needle-nose pliers, magnets, even a rubber band if you know what you’re doing. I knew this one guy, he’d put the clothes in a freezer and when they got cold enough, he’d just break off the cartridges. Ink can’t spill if it’s frozen.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I used to be a cop for eleven and a half years, remember?”

Nina stared as if she weren’t sure she believed me.

“The people at the garage sale, the customers—do you think they know all the merchandise was stolen?” she asked.

“Probably.”

“Why would people buy stolen property?”

“Because they don’t have the nerve to steal it themselves.”

“You’re being cynical again.”

“Think about it. Shopping is second only to dining out as a way people give themselves a treat. Take it to the next step. Most nonprofessional shoplifters, the ones who aren’t addicted—”

“People get addicted to shoplifting?”

“Sure they do. Anyway, to most nonprofessionals, getting something for nothing is like giving themselves a reward for working hard, for making it through the day. Buying stolen property, usually at a substantial discount—it isn’t the same thing, but it’s close. Besides, you can always tell yourself, ‘I didn’t steal it.’”

“That’s crazy.”

“It’s human nature. Nina, only three percent of shoplifters are professionals and they steal only ten percent of the stuff. The rest—over seventy-five percent are adults who have money in their pockets. Some studies claim that one out of every eleven shoppers is a thief.”