by Stacia Kane
Traffic wasn’t too bad at that time of day, either, so Will was able to gun it up to the corner and follow. Another, better glimpse of the sedan’s rear led to a left turn, but not much else.
Will swerved around a boxy beige van full of kids and fast-food wrappers that hugged the white line as it galumphed along, oblivious to everything but the choruses of “Ninety-Nine Bottles of Beer” that were probably going on inside. “Chess, will you call this in? Can you make out the plates?”
“I can’t,” Blue said. “The first letter might be a B, but it could be just about anything else, too.”
“It’s too dirty.” Chess tried to catch a better look as the car zipped around another corner, but it was gone before she could get any kind of fix on it. “Can you get out your flashing light or something, do you have one of those?”
Will gave her a sour look in the rearview. “Oh, why didn’t I think of that. No, I don’t have one. This is my personal car. I don’t think it would make much difference, anyway.”
He was probably right. Chess had been in a couple of car chases both with and without lights and sirens, and she couldn’t remember that they’d ever helped that much. She shrugged, and pulled out her phone. “Just a thought.”
She called the Squad’s direct line and gave a quick run-down as Will passed another car, hopped the curb, and bounced and jittered across forty or so feet of gravel to bypass the corner. That gave them another brief sighting of the sedan as it made a left. This was a shorter block, which meant they might be able to gain on him, and being off the main roads helped. In fact, Chess was just starting to think they might have a chance when they followed him around that corner and found nothing.
No sedan. No other cars at all.
“Fuck,” Blue said, echoing Chess’s thoughts.
A horn honked off to their left somewhere. Maybe a block away, maybe two? Either way, it might be their new nameless friend, the excellent shot, and Will stomped the gas so hard Chess almost fell backward. The coupe’s rear tires skidded over the pavement as he accelerated into the turn; if he’d been going faster they probably would have spun out.
Down the street they sped, past office buildings and restaurants whose full parking lots seemed like nothing more than enormous hiding places for inconvenient vehicles. It would be so easy to slide into one of those spots, dump a car, and wander into one of the buildings. Hell, Chess had done similar things herself. “Blue, check out the parking lots.”
“What do—oh, you think maybe he abandoned the car?”
“It’s possible.” What was impossible—or almost so—was trying to determine the model of even one car as they zoomed past. “He probably didn’t, but we should look anyway.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Will’s voice was dark, angrier than she’d ever heard it—of course, she didn’t have a ton of experience with him to draw from, but still. He sounded really, really pissed. “We’re not going to find him. I don’t know where the fucker’s gone, but he’s gone, all right. Damn it.”
Blue touched his arm. Hmm. Maybe she liked him more than she’d let on. “So what do we do now?”
No answer. He just sat there, glaring out the windshield with his jaw clenched. They were still moving, but at a slow pace now, doing little more than idling down the road—well, the investigation had slowed to a crawl, so why shouldn’t the car? Made sense to Chess. She’d think there was nothing worse than the frustration of hitting a dead end on a case if she wasn’t well aware that there were worse things. Much worse things. Things that gave her nightmares and flashbacks, things she spent fuckloads of money trying to forget but which still refused to disappear from her memory.
Dead-end frustration sucked a lot, though. If it was her case—exclusively hers, that was—she’d go back to the beginning, look over her original notes and see if maybe—oh, right. “Let’s head back to the Stop Shop. The Squad’s going to meet us there, and maybe you can get something from the jewelry, or somebody will have information about Leanne and her boyfriend.”
☠
MR. HARVEY’S SAD DISCARDED BODY still lay prone on the cement; a few random Squad members milled around, and they’d put up red tape to block off the area, but no one had moved him or anything else. They hadn’t put the tape close to him, probably because of the danger posed by the jewelry but maybe just because they were lazy. They were Squad, after all. Chess had yet to spend time with one who actually wanted to dig in and get their hands dirty.
To be fair, she’d only worked with a few of them, and one of them had actually been Lamaru. To be even more fair, Will wasn’t exactly packing it in and going for a beer. Still. This was one subject—almost the only subject outside of their work itself—about which she agreed with her fellow Debunkers: the Squad were a bunch of pedantic dullards.
One of those pedantic dullards, a stocky guy with a dark buzzcut and a ruddy complexion, approached as Blue, Will, and Chess climbed out of Will’s car. Terrible would probably have something to say about the ticking emanating from under the coupe’s hood, but whatever. She was more interested in what the Squad member had to say, and in ignoring his double-take when he saw her. The smirk that followed was like a blinking ASSHOLE sign across his face.
He didn’t say anything to her, though. He spoke directly to Will, which was probably appropriate since it was his case. And better for her, anyway. She sure as hell didn’t want to chat with him. “No one’s been near the body or the box. The clerk said he’d get the day’s security footage cued up, so whenever you want to take a look at it you can. He didn’t see or notice anything.”
Will nodded. And damn it, indicated her. She could do very well without some sort of pally we’re-all-one-big-Church-team lip service. “This is Chess Putnam, she’s a Debunker. She’s been working with me on this. Chess, do you know Kurt Phillips?”
Well, damn, she hadn’t expected “working with.” Chalk another point up for Will, even if he only said it to make Blue think he was a good guy. No, she didn’t have any proof that he’d said it for that reason, but even if he had it was still nice.
Nice enough that she ought to be nice, too, damn it. She’d just started hoisting the corners of her mouth up—it was an effort, like cranking a winch—when Kurt gave one of those trademark schoolyard bully laughs and said, “Uh-oh. Are you sure you’re really Will, and not some terrorist in disguise? I hear Chess isn’t always too good at telling the difference.”
Yeah, ha ha, fuckface. It would be more fun than she usually had outside of bed or the pipe room to punch Kurt in the mouth. She rolled her eyes instead, and jerked her chin toward the growing crowd behind them, random citizens gawking at the scene through sunglasses or squinting and shielding their eyes. In the two or three minutes since Will had driven into the parking lot, it had grown quite a bit. Bad news and good gossip traveled awfully damn fast, and Mr. Harvey’s death qualified as both. “Did you talk to any of them? Maybe some of them were in the store or looking out a window or something, and saw what happened?”
“A couple of them saw you,” Kurt said. “And they saw Will and his girlfriend there. They saw you guys get shot at. That’s really it. The usual traffic. It’s been a slow day, I guess.”
Had Will been making threatening faces behind her back or something? That was a decent answer. Not that Kurt deserved credit for it, and not that she would give him any even if he had. “Did the clerk say anything about people coming to see Mr. Harvey?”
“Who’s Mr. Harvey?”
“The victim,” Will said. Good thing he spoke up before Chess, because she wouldn’t have been able to keep herself from sounding just as irritated as she was. How the hell did the Squad deal with constantly having to defer to somebody else and share all of their thoughts and information? She did that when she and Terrible worked on things together, but that was different. Aside from the obvious facts that doing anything with him was fun and that she loved him, he shared his thoughts and information, too, and listened to what she had to say.
Confusion sat all over Kurt’s face. “Why would anybody come see some bum?”
This was ridiculous. Kurt was like a caricature, the sort of douchebag dudebro bastard who filled the lower ranks of the Squad because they never managed to advance any higher—okay, maybe they didn’t fill the ranks, but they were the stereotype anyway.
She turned to Blue, who was eyeing Kurt with the same raised-brow disdain Chess was feeling. “Want to come with me? I’m going inside to talk to the clerk.”
“Am I allowed?”
Chess shrugged. “I don’t think they’ve cordoned off the store, so anybody can go in.”
Blue glanced at Will, who was explaining the whole backstory to Kurt and looked like he knew that was going to take a while. “Okay, sure.”
The crowd had grown larger despite the miserable heat. Hopefully the clerk inside had some experience, because a steady stream of people walked in and out of the building; they must have been slammed in there.
Actually… She stopped walking. “Does it seem to you like people are going in and out of there kind of fast?”
“What do—huh. Maybe, yes. You think they’re shoplifting while the clerk is distracted?”
They stood and watched for a minute, which was as long as it took for two teenagers to walk into the Stop Shop and emerge with two cases of beer. Chess wasn’t the greatest judge of age in the world, but no way were those guys old enough to buy cases of beer, and no way had they managed to buy them that quickly. “I think something’s going on. Come on.”
6.
NO CLERK. NOT BEHIND THE register, not in any of the aisles, not behind any of the people wandering around the store. A few of those people saw Chess’s tattoos and sped out of the store, but most of them were too intent on grabbing things off the shelves to even notice her.
Blue leaned over the counter to look at the floor behind it. “He must be in here somewhere. Right?”
“I don’t know.” Was he in the bathrooms, maybe? Chess opened the doors of both, but they seemed to be empty. “The Squad talked to him a few minutes ago, I guess, so he can’t have gone very far.”
Or he could have gone really far, far enough that he could never come back—like to the City of Eternity, for example. Which was exactly what had happened. When Chess pulled open the door of a small storage closet, his bloody body tumbled out onto the dingy linoleum at her feet. She barely managed not to yelp. “Blue.”
“Yes?”
“Go get Will. Tell him to come in here, okay?”
“Why, what’s—” Blue popped her head around the door. Her face paled. “Oh, shit.”
“Yeah. Just—get Will in here.” No one in the store had noticed yet, but that wasn’t going to last. There were too many people, and people were too nosy, and there was no fucking way Chess was going to touch the body to stuff it back into the closet even if doing so wouldn’t have fucked up the evidence.
Blue nodded, swallowing hard. She hadn’t spent quite as much time around dead bodies as Chess had. Lucky. Her hand shook a little as she hit the buttons on her cell; calling Will, Chess assumed.
The clerk had been stabbed or shot, Chess wasn’t sure which. She was sure, though, that the knife or bullet had gone into the clerk’s right eye, and a thrill of foreboding ran up her spine. Mr. Harvey had been shot in the right temple. Could mean nothing, sure, but it could also mean that their killer had some sort of fetish or ritual, and his aim had been a little off with Mr. Harvey.
She was also sure that the clerk’s shirt—a green-and-white short-sleeved button-down with green epaulets on the shoulders and the Stop Shop logo above the right chest pocket—had been put on the body after it was dead. Not only was the shirt unbuttoned, but the blood which streaked down the clerk’s face stained the white t-shirt he wore but had not touched the uniform shirt at all. Well, it had soaked through in one spot on the left, above the embroidered “Craig” there, but it hadn’t touched the collar. Chess wasn’t a forensics expert, but she knew enough to know what that meant. Blood hadn’t run down into that uniform shirt.
Blue’s voice cut into her thoughts. “Sorry, the bathrooms are closed.”
Shit. Customers. Having one of them get a look at the dead clerk would not be a good thing; the store was full enough that if they all decided to come a-goggling she and Blue couldn’t possibly hold them back. The Squad were generally a bunch of dicks, but she wouldn’t blame them for getting pissed off at her if she let a horde of random strangers play slip-n-slide in the victim’s blood. Plus, Will wasn’t a dick, and he’d be the one held responsible if the evidence was tainted. And his brother was an Elder Chief Inquisitor, so having him think well of her…well, it wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it?
Insensitive, perhaps, but no one had ever accused her of being sensitive. Besides, that thought was nowhere near as horrible as the mean little tingle of pleasure that came when she thought about what might happen to her new buddy Kurt out there, if a murder had been committed right under his stubby nose.
“How do you know?” a voice demanded. Oh, right, duh, customer. Maybe not leaving Blue to handle it alone would be good. She stepped back around the door, and held up her Church ID, fast so the woman wouldn’t see that she wasn’t with the Squad.
“Sorry, Ma’am. You can’t come back here. We’re—we’re conducting interviews.”
The woman—fiftyish, perfectly coiffed, expensively dressed—took in Chess’s jeans and t-shirt in one smooth glance. Her eyebrows rose. “In the bathrooms?”
Shit, that did sound stupid, didn’t it? Oh well. She’d said it, she had to stick with it. “There are bathrooms in the deli next door.”
“Ma’am, I need you to leave this area.” Thank fuck, it was Will. She never thought she’d be so glad to see a Squad member.
Too bad Kurt was right behind him, but she couldn’t have everything, could she? Or, well, she personally never seemed to have much of anything—whatever could go wrong tended to do so, catastrophically—so she should just be glad Will was there at all, instead of Kurt turning up with a bunch of photographers and demanding a drug test from her, or something.
Kurt was the one who came around to look at the dead clerk, while Will finished arguing with the woman and started clearing the rest of the crowd out of the store. So Chess was right there to witness the change in Kurt’s expression when he saw the body, the way his face went white and his eyes widened. He looked up at her, and she knew the half-formed suspicion in the back of her mind was right on the money. “That’s not the guy you talked to, is it?”
He shook his head. His voice was barely above a whisper. “That’s not the guy I talked to.”
She let that statement ride for a minute or so, long enough that her silence made the “So…who has the problem with mistaken identities here?” point that she couldn’t make verbally. A horrid blush spread over Kurt’s skin. Yeah, well, he should be embarrassed. She’d been fooled by a glamour so strong it had also fooled the Grand Elder himself—the former Grand Elder, anyway, but he’d still been Grand Elder then. Kurt had been fooled by a fucking name embroidered on a shirt. Or he’d just been too lazy to ask to see ID the way he was supposed to. Either way, he was a dumbass.
And she wasn’t going to show him any mercy. She let the knowledge of his fuck-up sit in her eyes, on her face, as she said, “So who did you speak to, then?”
Kurt didn’t answer.
She pressed harder. “Did you actually see the surveillance tapes, or did the person you thought was the clerk just tell you he’d get them ready for you?”
No answer.
“I’d like to know that one.” Will stood right behind Kurt, with his arms folded over his chest. “Did you at least look through the rest of the building here, to make sure there aren’t any other bodies shoved anywhere?”
Finally Kurt said, in the sulky tone of a bratty child caught in a lie, “He said he’d get everything ready for us. He was very cooperative. I didn’t think I needed to sit in here and
babysit—who the hell would pretend to be a Stop Shop clerk, anyway?”
“The murderer would,” said Will, saving Chess from having to say it herself.
☠
THEY FOUND LEANNE’S BODY LYING in a sticky pool of dark blood in the back corner of the cooler, stuffed behind a chest-high wall of twelve-packs. The security camera footage had been erased. The cash box and the money in the register had been removed. Their killer had been very busy indeed.
“How did he get all of this done before we got back here, though?” Blue asked, when they finished scanning the endless static on the videotape in the store’s cramped, ransacked office. “And the Squad got here before we did, right?”
“We weren’t chasing him, probably,” Chess said. “Either that car wasn’t related to the crime at all, or he had an accomplice lead us away.”
Will nodded. “He would have had plenty of time to do it, really. If he was waiting at the deli or something, he could have just zipped over here when we left, killed Leanne and the clerk, then put on his shirt and waited for the others. It wouldn’t have taken him ten minutes. He could even have been inside already, for that matter.”
And then he stood there answering Kurt’s questions, cool and calm as anything, while he had two bodies stowed away. Damn, that was pretty terrifying.
“So,” Blue said, “what happens next? What do you do?”
“We check for prints, which we probably won’t find. We look for witnesses, which we probably won’t find.” Will sighed and rubbed his forehead. “This one doesn’t look like a winner. The guy is gone. We don’t know his name or have any identifying details.”
“Did you try the jewelry’s energy?” It was probably pointless to ask—if he’d felt something he would have said—but Chess asked anyway. The frustration of getting this far and not finding an answer was one of the worst things in the world, almost as bad as the withdrawals she was starting to get anxious about. She really needed to find a private spot to down a couple of Cepts, and with the Squad crawling all over the place that was not going to be easy. “I mean, did you get anything usable from it?”