Dark Streets, Cold Suburbs

by Aimee Hix

  The parking lot was sparsely populated and the night sky dark against the multitudes of lights in the parking lot. I loaded the bags into the truck and cranked the engine to get the heat going. I checked my burner phone for messages from anyone besides Seth and came up with a big, fat blank screen. Damn. I scrounged in the glove box for the charger I knew Ben made sure was available and plugged it in to charge.

  I didn’t want to sit in the parking lot too long after getting in my car. I was sure no one in the big box store cared but I knew each of the dozens of light poles had cameras on them and I was leery of ending up on some footage that the chain’s corporate security had running through filters looking for suspicious activity. As I pulled out and pointed the truck toward the back of the lot to exit, I saw a car parked in the farthest corner spot. It had been there when I came in. I’d noticed because it was in the weird corner that wasn’t a spot. It had likely been designed with the intention of making it a cart corral but it had just ended up empty. It was also at the bottom of the steep hill coming down from the corner light so people would cross the street from the townhouses and use the corner to walk down.

  The nearest light was pretty far back in the lot, as if the designer had also misjudged how many needed to be ordered. That meant the spot and the car were in a dark hole with the evergreen pines, the corner, and the lack of light being thrown from the lot. Who would park there? Surely a store worker would park in much closer. I was even fairly certain there was a back lot for them.

  My headlights lit up the mud gathered all around the tires under the car. It had rained pretty hard the day Damian died and the hill was bared of grass thanks to the winter full of snowstorms, leaving a wash of mud. The car had been there a while then.

  I pulled in a spot near the car, a black BMW, and got out to take a look. I was no longer worried about the corporate security because they clearly hadn’t tipped to this car. Using the flashlight on my keyring I looked inside. I saw nothing out of the ordinary. A gym bag on the back seat spilling out clothing. A fast food drink cup in the holder between the seats. The ashtray compartment was open and, like mine, sporting a phone charger.

  I got down on my knees and got a good look at the dried mud and debris under the car. It had definitely been there too long for a cheap commuter not wanting to pay for parking at the VRE lot behind the store.

  That got me thinking about Damian’s car. They had searched the surrounding neighborhoods and had found nothing. Could this black BMW be the one the cops were looking for? Could it had been that easy? Could I have just found the possible linchpin of the whole damn investigation while on a junk food run?

  “Jan, I’ve got a license plate. You ready?”

  I read it off to her and waited while she ran the search. It wasn’t Damian’s but when I explained to her my thought she said she’d dispatch black-and-whites to local store parking lots, of which there were at least a dozen. I reminded her to get the high school’s parking lot too. There was a massive amount of blacktop surrounding the building and, having gone to the school myself, I knew there were places to effectively hide a car. I didn’t explain how I knew that detail and while she didn’t ask I heard her smirk through the phone.

  “I’ll keep you updated since it was your idea, after all. How’s Mandy’s case going?”

  I got back in the truck and shut the door before I replied, “It’s nowhere. I’ve got nothing, Jan. There’s no way you could have solved this case back then.”

  I heard her blow out a hard breath. I knew she was frustrated. “I need to wrap this up, kid. I … hang on a sec.”

  I heard her push back her godawful squeaky chair. A door opened and swung shut.

  “Listen, kid, I haven’t told anyone here but … I’m retiring.”

  I froze, my hand halfway toward the steering column, keys in hand.

  “What? Retire? Why?”

  She laughed. “I’ve been in Homicide almost twenty years, Willa. That’s a long time chasing murder and I was in Burglary five years before Mandy Veitch’s death. It’s time. It’s past time. I should have left the game a long time ago.”

  I sat in the truck like an idiot. If she’d said she was a brain-sucking alien, I would have been less stunned. I’d never considered that Jan would retire. Ever. She was the cop. She was Homicide to me. I don’t think I’d ever considered her life. I’d never even thought about what she did when she left the station. What she did when she went home. What her house looked like. Did she own casual clothes? Did she have a cat? I was a shitty person.

  “I don’t know what to say. I guess I just figured you’d always be there.”

  She laughed again. “I’m not going to drop off the face of the planet, kid. I’m still going to be around. We’ll still meet for coffee.” But her voice had taken on a hesitant note. She was unsure. And I’d been wrong. Jan Boyd being uncertain was the one thing that surprised me more than her retiring.

  “You’d damn well better be sticking around, Boyd. I’m going to need someone to bitch to when my dad forgets he’s my supervising investigator and starts acting like my dad.”

  “I can’t wait.”

  Then she hung up on me. I guess it had gotten too mushy for her. I stared at the phone for a minute, my stomach churning. In case it was hunger, I grabbed the bag and tore into the box of peanut butter toaster pastries. I knew it wasn’t hunger though. Things were changing, things beyond my control. I should have meditated instead of eating my feelings. I knew my therapist wanted me to, in her words, utilize more appropriate stress-coping measures. But I was tired and there were two murders I wasn’t solving. And Seth was apparently having his own nervous breakdown. Aja had left. Ben wasn’t too far behind her and I was still pissed with him. I didn’t like change. I wasn’t good at it anymore. I pretended I was, but I’d grown set in my habits. I’d become comfortable being able to control things. And people.

  My phone binged and for a second I thought Seth had somehow figured out I was using the burner but picking it up I saw the text was from Jan.

  Because I know you.

  Then the make and model of the car registered to Damian along with the license plate number.

  I had snacks. I could check a few of the parking lots too. And if that delayed me from having to have an uncomfortable conversation inappropriate for the text format then so be it.

  I found Damian’s car in the lot for the Asian market only a block from the school. It was a short walk to Aja’s place too, just cross the road, duck down into the parking lot of the next business park, over the train tracks, and through the woods to the swanky neighborhood where people could afford the soundproofing needed to deal with the commuter train blasting through five times an hour. It was the only place for miles around open twenty-four hours. It should have been the first place I checked. Across the intersection in the other direction was the dojo. Adam mentioned shopping at the Asian market for Theo sometimes, but I’d completely forgotten about it.

  I sat in the truck under one of the weird sulfur lights that bathed everything in a sickly yellow glow and waited for Jan, fiddling with my temporary phone.

  A sharp rap on the window made me jump and drop the phone. Jan’s face smirked at me through the glass. I glared at her for a second then unlocked the door. I got out and bent back in the truck to retrieve my phone from the floor of the driver’s side.

  “You were expecting me, right? You seem surprised to see me,” she said, loping away from the truck faster than her, frankly, stubby legs should have carried her.

  I scampered after her, trying to appear as if I wasn’t a child chasing after her mom in a store. “I was thinking. I do that sometimes.”

  “Sorry I disturbed you, Einstein. I thought you might want to participate in the search since you found the car.”

  I swallowed my smartass reply and kept pace with her. I’d made sure I parked as far away as I could so w
hen they marked off the perimeter I wasn’t accidentally trapped inside. The uniforms get testy when they have to redo the tape, like it’s some kind of damn art project they were having to alter.

  She took a pair of gloves from the uniform and tilted her head toward me. The guy handed me a pair too. How I hated those gloves. The feel of them in my hands like a deflated balloon sliding on itself and the powder inside them drying out my skin even though my hands always sprouted sweat the second I’d snapped them on, making that noise that set my teeth on edge. Another thing I hadn’t escaped when I tossed away my FCPD pension.

  “You start in the trunk, Pennington.”

  The other uniform popped the compartment using a pry bar and I sent up a silent prayer, as I did every time anything I hadn’t locked opened in front of me: Please do not let there be a dead body in here. Logically, and aromatically, I knew there was nothing deader in the trunk than probably some batteries, but it was something I did subconsciously and I doubted I’d stop any time soon. My training officer had once found a dead body in a community pool’s equipment storage chest and that visual had stuck with me—the lifeguard, still in her uniform one piece swimsuit, folded in on herself, bruises almost black on her face and neck, murdered for the small amount of cash still left in the snack bar’s lockbox.

  I braced myself as the trunk popped open. Body-free, just like I wanted. Otherwise, it was a mess. The space lit up and I looked to see the cop next to me holding his regulation flashlight up. I dug my keys back out of my pocket and added the meager light stream from my keychain light. I heard him chuckle.

  “I have a real flashlight in my truck. I just didn’t think I was going to get to search too.” I was a little too defensive, apparently, because he dropped the smile and nodded curtly.

  “Sorry, ma’am.”

  See? Shitty. Person. I was a shitty person. He’d helped me and enjoyed poking a tiny bit of fun at my tiny flashlight and I acted like a prima donna because I hated looking unprepared for a job I was just learning how to do. I sighed.

  “No, I’m testy. I haven’t been sleeping well.”

  “Well, I think that’s to be expected, Miss Pennington.”

  Great. He knew who I was. And that’s why he’d dropped the friendly attitude the second I’d acted like a whiny baby.

  “Murders to be solved. No time for me to be a five-year-old. Thanks for having my back with the light, Officer.”

  “If you’re done winning friends and influencing people, Pennington, maybe you could get your ass in gear and look for some clues.”

  I didn’t need to see Jan to hear her words yelled from inside the car. Knowing the trunk lid blocked any view she’d have of me I risked pulling a funny face at the uniform. The cop covered his laughter with a coughing fit that was remarkably convincing.

  New friend won, I settled into the trunk with my stupid latex-covered hands sweating like I was breaking into the damn thing.

  There was a car kit full of the usual crap parents made sure their teen drivers had just in case they were ever stranded in the wilderness where the WiFi was sketchy and it might take them an extra three minutes to get the GPS signal solid.

  Backpack full of textbooks that he hadn’t been using, notebooks with only a few pages used, pencil bag full of brand-new supplies.

  The gym bag was more interesting. There were one … two … six packages of unopened hand wraps. Okay, that was weird. I had two pair just to give them a break to dry out and let the elastic rest, and I worked out every day. They weren’t the most expensive fitness equipment but they weren’t cheap either. Not the good ones, anyway, which these were. So why would the kid need this many?

  “Can you bring the light down a little? I want to dig in this bag and don’t want to find any surprises the hard way.”

  He obliged as I tugged the opening of the bag wider. Since we were fairly certain Damian had been using steroids, I didn’t want to end up on the business end of any used sharps.

  I pulled out the packages and dropped them on the trunk floor. Underneath the fresh packages was an unraveled hand wrap. I pulled it and its mate out.

  “Uh, Jan? Found one.”

  “One what, Pennington?”

  “A clue. And it’s covered in blood.”

  Her head popped around the trunk lid. “That beat the microSIM card I found?”

  MicroSIMS went in phones. I knew this because I had several for my phone. Ben insisted that it was the best way to go incognito. I preferred the burners because they were easier than popping the little tray out and then trying to fumble the tiny cards out of and into place. Not only did I know what they were, I knew Ben had a tool for reading them.

  But while blood didn’t beat data, it still was evidence so I held up the wraps and Jan bagged them. I had one more fun little detail to add.

  “Blood’s on the outside.”

  Jan held up the baggie and looked at the wrap dubiously. “You sure?

  “Positive. You wrap them around your hands and secure with the velcro on the wrists so there is an inside and outside. The way the blood’s soaked in closer to the ends with the velcro means it’s on the outside upper layer of the wrap. Unless Damian was wrapping his hands and then hitting himself, this is someone else’s blood. We should take an unopened package for comparison.”

  She nodded and bagged a new package too. “Good job, kid.”

  “And I think I can help with the microSIM too. Ben has a reader. I can grab it and we can pull the data.”

  “What does that mean? Looking at zeros and ones is not how I want to spend the rest of my night.”

  I laughed. “But we could make popcorn and braid each other’s hair.”

  Jan’s horrified expression convinced me there were no movie nights in our future. Not even a shoot ’em up action movie.

  I let her off the hook. “Nope, the reader is COTS but the software is all Ben.”

  “I’m afraid to ask … COTS?”

  “Sorry, common term in our house. Commercial Off the Shelf. So that any slob can buy one and use it. I’m sure the Computer Forensics Section has their own. You think any of them are on shift right now? Because we can wait until morning if you’d rather.”

  I cocked an eyebrow. It was Pennington Investigations listed as the official consultants to the FCPD. Therefore, Ben was included in the consultation agreement as our official IT resource. That meant it didn’t matter if anyone was on shift with the CFS. And my house had cookies. Hell, my truck had cookies.

  “We can break in my new coffeemaker too.”

  “I draw the line at braiding your hair, Pennington.”

  Chapter

  20

  After sitting through a lecture from Ben about the differences between mini, micro, and nanoSIM cards and the correction that what we had was a nanoSIM card, which was the standard in current cell phones and a bunch of other stuff I, and I hoped Jan, tuned out, the reader was handed off. We loaded the itsy-bitsy card into it after only dropping it three times and plugged the reader into my laptop. It was so easy to use I was a little worried about how many idiots were running around with these things and realized that regular people were probably more worried about the cops and people like me having them. If they even realized things like this existed, which was unlikely. Technology ruled our lives and we had no idea how deeply it reached.

  The program sifted through the data, windows popping open as it segregated the data into classifications. Contacts, IP addresses, photos, and texts all flew from the bottom of the screen to the windows that popped up when a new category was found and created.

  “This is creepy,” Jan said, watching the screen while I fumbled with getting the new coffeemaker out of the box and then freed it from the additional packaging.

  “Why do you think I’m doing something else? It’s easier if you don’t think about it all.”

&
nbsp; “And he just knows how to do this kind of thing?”

  I stuffed the wrappings back in the box and kicked it out of the way. “This kind of thing was something he threw together for my dad a few years ago when he was lamenting getting locked out of his cell phone. He won some kind of tech fair with it. He was twelve, maybe. We’ve been offering it as a cheating spouse forensic deep dive service. If you think they’re cheating, bring us their phone and we’ll take a look, no charge.”

  “I’m so glad I don’t have to deal with cheaters.”

  “Yeah, at least not until one of them ends up dead.”

  “That happens less often than movies would have you believe.”

  I handed her a cup of coffee, black, and doctored mine to perfection. My mother hadn’t blinked an eye when I walked in carrying bags of junk food and a coffeemaker trailed by Jan and merely watched as I awkwardly fumbled it all to steal mugs, creamer, and sugar.

  I knew she had an opinion about the sugar-laden empty calories. She just wasn’t going to waste her time talking to someone who wasn’t going to listen. I had reached that point of stress where I had to self-soothe—like an animal escaping to its den to lick its wounds. She knew me well enough, in fact, to not even offer to help me carry anything. A cornered animal often bit and was capable of worse. As I escaped with my loot, in my peripheral vision I had caught her smiling at Jan, adding a little shrug.

  The program gave a helpful chime, indicating it had read all the data and finished categorizing it all.

  I gulped down a mouthful of coffee and settled down to make Jan printouts of the text data, call logs and contact list. The pictures, of which there were only a handful, went onto the flash drive Ben had left waiting for me along with the card reader. It pays to call ahead and get your IT resource working before your mom sends him to bed.