What the River Knows (16 page)

“Amy’s purse was in her locker in the storeroom.” The manager’s voice shook. “She might still be alive if we had a place to keep it up front.” She dropped her head to her desk, shoulders shaking with muffled sobs. “Amy had two little kids, not even in kindergarten yet.” More sobs. “And Mrs. Nice has been coming in here since before I started here ten years ago.” Her hands gripped the edge of the cluttered desk. “Neither of them would have hurt a fly!” Bates reached around Fleming to squeeze her shoulder.

“We’ll go back to that frame, see if the techs can enlarge and enhance it.” Horton glanced down at the manager. The noisy clock on the wall ticked by the next few minutes. Everyone in the room knew that those moments of no action at the counter marked the last moments of life for Helen Nice and Amy Erikson.

Scott forced himself to focus on the details revealed on the screen. The only car visible through the front of the store was Nice’s Olds. No one else moved past the windows. Suddenly the two hoodied criminals sauntered into camera view, one of them munching from a bag of chips. The other grabbed a handful of breath mints from the display in front of the counter and then moved behind the counter. He riffled through the still-open register, then tore off several strips of lottery tickets.

“It’ll be a losing move for him if he turns in any of those as winners,” Horton muttered. “And definite prints.”

The manager raised her head to look at the screen. “We have the serial numbers. We can put them out to all the stores in town.”

“Nationwide.” The ice in Horton’s voice made the manager glance at him.

“Ok,” she mumbled.

The crook with the chips dropped them to the floor, disappeared, then returned to view with a carton of ice cream and a spoon from the hot foods counter. He ate for a few seconds while his companion searched for anything of value behind the counter. Then he tossed the carton and spoon into the second aisle from the door.

“DNA for sure.” Scott itched to get the results.

Fleming glanced at him. “If the lab ever has time or staff to get it processed.” She turned back to the screen. “If he’s even in the database.”

Scott sucked in his breath. Budget woes had cut KBI lab staff, along with staff and equipment from nearly every state agency.

The man behind the counter came from behind it, and both men disappeared from the camera’s view. Seconds later, both appeared on camera, carrying a carton of beer in each hand. They strolled from the store and the video.

“What about the cameras in the parking lot?” Horton barked.

“They’re dummies.” The manager clenched her hands before her. “We’re just a local store, not part of a big conglomerate.”

This time Horton’s voice was arctic. “So for the ten bucks a month it costs to operate those cameras, we have no way of knowing how those killers got in here or which direction they went.”

“Yes,” the manager said softly. “For ten bucks a month.” She dropped her head to her desk and began to sob again.

Fleming drew a deep breath and let it out. “Well, those guys didn’t leave the store the mess it is now.” She leaned forward around the manager to click fast forward. After screens that represented a half hour or so, a group of five tweenagers entered the store. Most scattered immediately toward the back of the store, but one lingered near the counter, studying what he could see. As soon as he moved to where he could see the open register, he turned and began to call to the others. Two came into view. One went behind the counter and went through the register.

“So much for the integrity of the prints,” Bates muttered.

The one behind the counter, too, pulled off some lottery tickets, then grabbed a couple of cartons of cigarettes. The other disappeared into the store. Soon, kids appeared briefly, running from aisle to aisle, while the kid who noticed the register appeared to be arguing with them. He left the store, but the others stayed for what represented about twenty minutes. Then they left, each with bags of snacks and drinks. No one else opened the door to the store until the reporting party entered, stepped in a few feet, yelled a few times, then carefully backed out, cell phone in his hand.

Horton straightened from his hunched pose before the screen. “Let’s get this video out and to our lab.”

“Do you mind making us a copy of it first?” Bates stood solid, his arms crossed over his chest. “I’d like my guys to view it, see if any of them can recognize the perpetrators.”

Horton hesitated, his eyes looking Bates up and down before he shrugged. “Sure, more eyes gives us more chance of catching them.” He picked up the disk the manager handed him. “We’ll email you the enlargements as soon as we get them done.”

“Thanks,” Bates grunted.

Scott stared at the now blank screen. He intended to study the video until he could recognize those thugs by the way they walked.

Chapter 31

Charlotte made sure her hips swayed as seductively as possible while she picked her way slowly to keep from twisting an ankle on the gravel parking lot. When she had to alter her course every few feet to avoid a pothole, she used the pause to glance back at the customers lingering at the back door. A couple of them had pressed scraps of paper with phone numbers into her hands along with their generous tips. The forty-ish assistant coach of one of the out of town teams had even been charismatic enough, with his easy, confident carriage and angular, tanned face, that she was almost tempted to keep his number, despite the wedding ring on his left hand. Ultimately, though, she followed her long-standing policy of hinting she’d call, then dumping the numbers in the trash as soon as she got back to the employee locker room.

Still, the approval and the tips buoyed her spirits. That, and the act of looking sexy, made her tiny black panties wet by the time she bent over to unlock her car door. With one last look back at the men watching as they slowly scattered to their cars, she swiveled her butt into the seat of the low-slung compact, and then drew one long leg at a time into the car. It was a hell of a well-practiced show that should bring many of them back tomorrow night.

She faced herself in the rear-view mirror as she inserted the key in the ignition, and the image that surfaced in her mind was not the confident coach, but the earnest face of the young detective, as he touched her arm and met her eyes. She felt a warm surge run through her body, reliving the tender way he looked at his woman the first night she saw him, the intensity that radiated from his green eyes, the fullness of his lips, his warm hand on her arm. She shivered. That was the kind of man she was looking for: gentle but strong, protective but passionate, manly but boyish.

She sighed. Too bad this particular man could never be THAT man. Not only was he a cop, but his face looked familiar as well. She couldn’t afford to get mixed up with cops or anyone from her past. Except Mags.

She closed her eyes, but a hot tear squeezed out past the mascara. Just when she had finally been able to let Mags know how important she was to her, it had all ended.

She sniffed back the tears and turned the key. The parking lot was now empty of all cars except Harvey’s as she idled out. She had to do something to take the edge off this tension within her. Tonight, Devlyn would have to do. And Devlyn would never know that, when Charlotte closed her eyes tonight, it would be the young cop’s touch and not Devlyn’s she felt.

Chapter 32

Scott stood silent just inside his apartment door, keys still in his hand, trying desperately to pull his mind back from that freezer, that video, and into his own home. He and Bates had watched KBI interview the patron who called in the alarm on the store, combed the store for any potential evidence that could have been missed, written up reports and reviewed evidence with KBI and the street officers who had initially responded to the scene. Finally, at 1:30 a.m., there was nothing more that could be done until the most likely fingerprints were processed through IAFIS (Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System) and the DNA through CODIS, the FBI’s Combined DNA Index System. And that would be tomorrow afternoon at best.

He took a step further into the room. The corner streetlamp threw enough cool mercury light through the mini blinds that he could see to walk around the coffee table and toward the kitchen without bumping into anything.

At the kitchen island, he hesitated. He knew, from the way his mind kept racing to potential methods to narrow the clues, to possible suspects, to what Amy’s little kids would remember of their mom, that his tossing and turning to escape those images would simply wake Rica if he went to bed at this moment. And taking a shower to calm down would also wake her. Though waking her, and keeping her awake for a good long time, had been his intention when he left her at the bar, now he didn’t want to deal with her, didn’t want to confront the fact that the faces tumbling in his mind right now seemed more real than the hot flesh and blood woman sleeping in the next room. Try as she might—and she had tried—she couldn’t understand how they called to him, begged him to win them justice, how hard he had to work to shut them out when he failed them. It was as if, when they lost their lives, they took over his. And now this case consumed him almost as much as Delia’s, and in letting it consume him, he failed her, too. Again, her wide blue eyes met his just as they had on the banks of the river.

He stepped further into the kitchen and silently took a wine glass from the cabinet. He’d have a little more of the merlot they had left from their anniversary celebration. He opened the refrigerator and tried not to bump any condiment bottles together as he rummaged for the wine. He pulled the bottle from the refrigerator and held it up against the fridge light. Not much left, less than a third of the bottle. He set the glass back down on the counter. He’d just drink what was left in the bottle without dirtying a glass. He moved back into the living room with the bottle in his hand and sank into the recliner.

He shook his head and swallowed a long pull of the wine, trying to blur the faces and silence the begging. Rica, his marriage, and his future all deserved at least as much of his time and devotion as did the clamoring horde. He tried desperately to center on Rica, on the plans they had made, on the children they had talked about having from almost their first date. Yet the effort of staying focused on her felt as difficult as holding onto a life preserver in a choppy sea. If he let his guard down for even an instant, he lost his grip on the life preserver. If he let it get too far away, he might never be able to grasp it again.

Chapter 33

“Scott, what the hell are you doing?” The screech woke him, and for an instant, he couldn’t understand where he was and who was yelling at him. He looked around, and the bright sunlight boring through the window made him squint against it. He put up a hand to block the sun.

“Rica?” Slowly, he realized she was beside him, kneeling on the floor, scrubbing at the carpet.

“You might have at least set the bottle on the table, instead of letting it tip over on the floor.” She sprayed a dark red spot on the rug. “What did you do, drink the whole bottle?”

He lowered the footrest quietly. “There wasn’t much in it.” He stood and stretched. Maybe a shower would take out the kinks the chair had put in. “I thought I might as well save dirtying a glass.”

She met his eyes. “Then why didn’t you put the clean glass back in the cabinet?” She looked down at the carpet again. “Damn it, Scott, this isn’t going to come out, and we won’t get our deposit back when we move out.”

“Try salt.” He didn’t know where that tidbit of information came from. Sometimes his mind catalogued the damnedest things.

“Oh, so now you are not only a lush, but you’re an expert on cleaning up after yourself?” She stood up, her anger making her seem taller than she was. “You’d rather sit in here alone and drink yourself into a stupor than come to bed with me?”

He sighed, wishing he could explain to her what that one sigh conveyed. “Last night was pretty rough.” He passed his hand over his eyes, the women holding hands in the freezer once again what he saw with more clarity than Rica’s angry face. “It was one or two when I got in and—to tell you the truth, Rica.” He hesitated, groping for words. “I didn’t even want to be with myself when I got home, much less lie next to you with all that ugliness and violence sticking to me.” He stood before her totally drained. If she slapped him or shot him or hugged him at that moment, he wasn’t sure he could register an emotion.

“So you thought you could wash off the violence with wine?” Her eyes still flashed, but he could see a softening in them. Maybe she would try to understand.

“There wasn’t much in the bottle, Rica, maybe not even a full glass.” The observer in him came awake, seeing doubt in the slight droop to her shoulders. “I’ve read wine helps you sleep, though I didn’t think I could.” A question came to him. “Have you seen the news yet this morning?”

“No, Scott, I woke up and realized you weren’t there and came in here and found you passed out.”

He reached for the remote beside the chair, turned to the TV and flipped it on. He had to switch through a home improvement and a shopping channel to find the news, but then suddenly, there was the too-familiar Quick Shop, with side-bar photos of the two women he remembered so differently. His stomach clenched as he un-muted it to hear, “Brutally shot and left in the freezer for a robbery that officials say netted them less than $100 in cash.” Then he saw the video he had imprinted on his memory, the hoodied thug glancing toward the camera, his face an invisible blob.

He turned back to Rica, reading shock on her face. “That’s where I was till midnight or so, then we were at the station processing evidence and reports.”

“Oh, Scott!” Her face softened into empathy, though she didn’t reach for him. “How horrible!”

He didn’t respond to her, his attention given to the TV screen. The announcer begged the audience to call the toll-free hotline if they had any information.

“Do you have any leads, Scott?”

“Leads?” Her voice brought him back from the scene. “Not much. Fingerprints, but a lot of people touch things in a convenience store in a given day. Nothing that stands out.” He faced her and tried to voice his frustration. “Those ladies didn’t do anything to anyone, didn’t do anything different than millions of people do every day, but they just had the bad luck to be in the way when someone wanted to take.” He looked down at the floor. The red spot was nearly gone as the carpet cleaner did its work. “And he not only took money that wasn’t his, he took their lives and their futures. And took a mother away from two little girls.”