Deadly Pasts (Agent Nora Wexler Mysteries)

by CR Wiley

  “Wow, that is so helpful of you. It means a lot to me that you would take time out to fit this into your busy schedule. Here, let me jot down my number for you. That way you can give me a call as soon as you know. It’ll be a good excuse to come back here,” she said, grabbing a pen and scrawling out her number. Although being girly wasn’t her ordinary MO, she traced a heart around the phone number and slid the paper over to him.

  “Sure thing,” he said. None of it seemed to faze him, and Nora turned to leave with Caroline, but with any luck it would sink in sometime later and he’d get on it.

  “What’s next?” Caroline asked as they left the building and rejoined Stephanie.

  “If you don’t mind, I’d like to head back to the scene of the crime to get a look around in broad daylight, and check on the neighbors,” Nora proposed.

  They got in the car and headed across town, catching glimpses of the bay as they passed intersections. Once they’d parked and made it to the alley, Nora spotted a bank with an ATM across the street. She chewed her lip as she considered the surveillance camera and whether it could catch anything at the right distance and angle. Pulling out her phone and running a quick search, she found the bank had only been there for two years.

  “It doesn’t look that different from last night,” Stephanie said. “But if we stay here long enough, the killer might return to the scene of the crime!”

  Nora knew when she was being mocked, but she wasn’t about to let that crack her resolve.

  “Come on. Let’s head into 3250, where there are at least six apartments facing the alley. Then there’s Jasper Shorn to look for.”

  The building had a musty smell wafting off of a pea-green carpet. Some of the residents had 49ers stickers or decorative signs hanging on their doors. It turned out there were eight apartments against the east wall. Half of them were vacant or did not answer, three of them had been there for less than four years, and only one was there long enough to have any recollection of Maria’s murder.

  “You do?” Nora asked, her eyes wide. The little old woman appeared to be at least eighty years old and lived on the top floor, making it doubtful that she’d been able to see anything in the alley below at such a sharp angle.

  “Oh, yes. What a racket that was. And the flashing lights kept me up straight through till the morning.”

  Nora nodded. At least she had a clear enough memory of what had happened.

  “Can you say what exactly it was that woke you up? Did you happen to hear or see anything that was going on at the time of the murder?” Nora asked.

  The older woman lowered her eyes and adjusted something on the wall next to the door, a thermostat maybe.

  “The first thing I remember is the sirens blaring. Scared me half to death, and I’m already almost halfway there anyway,” she said.

  Nora’s heart sank a little. “What about Jasper Shorn? Does that name ring a bell?”

  The elderly woman’s face immediately took on a sour grimace.

  “Yes, it does. He’d play his guitar at full blast all the livelong day. There were petitions to get him thrown out of the building. Wasn’t until the third one that we finally succeeded,” she explained.

  “Oh,” Nora said, feeling the loss of another possible lead. “I guess that’s all then. Thank you for your time.”

  Sighing, Nora watched the door close in front of her.

  “So that guy is gone then?” Caroline asked. She sounded sorry to be asking the question.

  “Gone from here, but not out of touch. Let’s see if social media can give this investigation a boost. You don’t mind, do you?” Nora asked, pulling out her phone.

  “If you’re asking me if it’s fine to spend a little time fooling around on our phones, I can blow five or ten with the best of them,” Caroline said.

  “Are you talking about blowing minutes or something else?” Stephanie asked. “Nora, the police talked to these people and got just as far as you. I thought you said you had some magic tricks or whatever.”

  “There he is,” Nora said, flashing them her phone that displayed a picture of a guy with his hair in cornrows. “Looks like he moved to Oakland.”

  “We’re not going to go all the way there, are we?” Stephanie moaned. It was clear she wasn’t cut out for this kind of work.

  “No, I’m just going to friend him and send him a message. We’ll see if he gets back to me. But even if he doesn’t, there’s one other way to try to track down the guy she left with that wasn’t available to the police four years ago. We just need to get his picture.”

  “And how are we going to get that?” Caroline asked, smiling.

  “From the security camera in the bar.”

  “Didn’t the police have access to that too?” Caroline asked.

  “They did, and you know what they did with it? They posted the image to a billboard in the middle of campus. The FBI has facial recognition software that can search through millions of faces and provide addresses, phone numbers, social security numbers, and more. That’s our best chance to reel him in,” Nora explained, feeling optimistic.

  “But you’re not in the FBI anymore,” Stephanie pointed out.

  Nora swallowed her pride and nodded.

  “There’ll be some minor details to work out.”

  CHAPTER 6

  GOLDEN BEERS ALE HOUSE

  1745 DELAWARE STREET

  SAN FRANCISCO, CA

  The three women entered the establishment where they had last seen Maria alive. Nora conjectured that Maria had been on her way back to her dorm and had made it about fifty percent of the way when she’d been attacked, but that would indicate that she’d never gone anywhere with the guy she had left with. What happened between these wooden swinging doors and that alley was one of the biggest puzzles that Nora had to solve.

  “You here for lunch?” a chipper waiter asked.

  “Yes, actually we are,” Stephanie said. Nora didn’t argue, knowing that the fun of following up on these juicy details was mostly lost on her friends.

  “Can I see the manager?” Nora asked.

  “Yeah, he’s right back there in the office. It’s the one with the brown door. Make sure you knock first. Just between us, he’s been caught with his pants down a couple times in there,” the waiter said.

  Nora took his cue and knocked on the door, which opened to reveal a fully clothed man in his mid-thirties. He gasped and attempted to shut the door, but Nora charged forward to keep it open.

  “Holland, don’t fight with me. You know you can’t win,” Nora said. Eventually the man relented and gave up his resistance. In the office behind him were beer crates, a desk covered in papers, and a couple of monitors linked to cameras in the building.

  “What do you want?” he asked. The man was maybe an inch or two shorter than Nora and had an even slimmer frame.

  “Do you still have the tape?” she asked. While Maria’s investigation had been going on, she’d spent a lot of time with Mr. Holland attempting to sort out the identity of Maria’s mystery man. Most of it had been spent grilling the wait staff if they remembered anything from checking his ID when he bought beer. They’d only been attentive enough to notice the card was a rectangle.

  “We didn’t throw out anything since then,” he said. Nora nodded begrudgingly.

  “Give it to me,” she said.

  “No, and I think the last time I saw you I said something about you not being allowed in here again,” Holland said. Nora had been trying out some tough tactics that didn’t go over well. She considered those bumps a part of her studies.

  “Print me out a still,” Nora said. “I’m with the FBI now and this investigation is being officially reopened. You can either cooperate or you can come in with me for obstruction of justice.” Nora even went so far as to reach into an empty pocket as if she were about to pull out her creds before he relented. It was a good thing too, because nothing about her yarn would hold up to a whiff of scrutiny anymore.

  “Give me a
minute to find it,” Holland grumbled, shaking his head. He started digging through a crate of tapes set against the wall, tossing some onto the floor. Not finding what he was looking for, he moved on to another crate and finally produced a tape with a label reading April, 2010.

  He gave Nora another cold look as he went to a player and jammed the tape into the slot.

  Once he hit fast forward, the tape raced through the nights of that April, with people zipping all about. The viewpoint was of the bar by the register, and it struck Nora how many people flung money at the bartender on a daily basis. The date appeared in the bottom left corner, and it took almost ten minutes to get to the 17th. Holland stopped the tape right when Nora, Stephanie, and Caroline appeared on the screen.

  It was only a few years ago, but a profound sense of how happy they used to be overcame Nora. This was the night that changed it for good.

  “There he is!” she said when the dashing man pulling Maria in tow swung by the bar. “OK, stop it right here.”

  Holland hit pause, freezing the young man who had leaned over to drop a one-hundred dollar bill by the register. The frame perfectly captured his chiseled and handsome face. She could see hints of the suave gray jacket he wore. Nora peered closer to the screen in the hopes of seeing something in his eyes that would give away what was about to happen, but he wore the look of a lucky dude about to score with the hottest girl at the bar.

  A printer turned on in the corner, and in another minute she had a still of the image from the monitor in decent quality.

  “That’s all I’ve got for you. We don’t know a thing about this guy,” Holland said.

  “It’s great. Really,” Nora said, thanking him. She returned to the tables by the bar and found her friends munching on deep fried jalapenos.

  “It’s good the baby will be getting used to them early,” Steph said before downing half a glass of water.

  “Look at what I’ve got,” Nora said, flashing them the picture. Caroline took it and tried to squeeze his head.

  “How do I reach through the paper and strangle him?” she asked. Maria’s face was just inside the edge of the camera’s field of vision. She and Steph were laughing about something.

  “Do you remember what he said to us before he left? Have fun. It’s like he was preemptively rubbing salt in the wound,” Nora said.

  “I hope he’s already dead and burning for this,” Caroline said.

  “I hope he’s not. I want to see him pay for what he did,” Nora said. “And the way for me to make sure that happens is by snapping a picture with my phone of the image, like so, and getting it into the facial recognition system. If you’ll excuse me, I have another call to make.”

  “Taking my time with the nachos won’t be a problem then,” Caroline said.

  Nora went to the door and exited onto the street. It was embarrassing to have to look up the number on her phone and call the front desk for assistance. Putting the phone to her ear, she navigated the annoying automated message system until finally she got to a real person.

  “Hi, I’m trying to reach Agent Angkor. I’m a friend of his, Nora Wexler,” she said, closing her eyes in the hopes that he’d get on the line. He was really the one friend she’d made in Seattle, and if he wouldn’t help her she wondered if she’d have to have Travis stick his neck out for her once again.

  “A little early for a booty call, don’t you think?” he said when he got on the line. Nora laughed, remembering his innocently flirtatious side.

  “Angkor, what a relief it is to hear your voice. I’ve been having a rough time lately and I need some help,” she said, wary of saying more in case it somehow got back to Boffman.

  “Sorry to hear that, but things have been a mess up here as well for the past week. It looks like Johnson is leaving the bureau and Meron is going to take over,” Angkor said.

  “What?” Nora put her hand to her forehead. “He’s going to be Special Agent in Charge? I shouldn’t be saying this, but Meron’s part of the problem I’ve been having.”

  Angkor’s tone became hushed.

  “Yeah, he seems to be part of everyone’s problem. The change was so abrupt—we still don’t even know the reason for it—and he’s starting to tamper with active investigations. Everything seems fine on the surface, but inside everybody is freaking out. But what do you need help with?”

  Nora took a deep breath.

  “I hate to ask, but an old friend was murdered a few years ago and I’m looking over the investigation. I’ve finally got a still of the last person she was seen with, a man none of us know, and I was hoping you could run it through the system and get an ID for him.”

  She heard a few clicks of a mouse. Lucky he came in on a Saturday.

  “Go ahead and send it to me in an email and I’ll get it in ASAP. If you ever need anything, I’ll find a way to make it happen.”

  “You’re seriously my hero, Angkor. I’ll send it right now. Let me know as soon as you hear anything. This is one murder that can’t stay unsolved.”

  “If he’s in here, I’ll find him.”

  Once the call ended, Nora returned inside, feeling even more optimistic about her prospects.

  “Between the messages to Jasper Shorn, the fingerprint check, and the face ID, we’re bound to come up with something,” she said. “Is it too late for me to order?”

  The three of them had whiled away a couple hours at the Golden Beers Ale House before heading to the game against UCLA. As expected, traffic in town slowed to a halt and walking to the stadium was not an option because of Stephanie. A few shirtless guys were starting the party in the back of a pickup truck right in front of their car.

  “I’ve never had a better time stuck in traffic,” Caroline said, tapping on the horn and waving to the young men.

  Nora’s phone buzzed.

  “It’s a response from Jasper! He says he remembers walking home that night, finding Maria’s body, and calling the cops. I’ll send a follow-up question about anything else that sticks out in his memory,” Nora said. Her thumbs had never typed so fast in her life. Fortunately, Jasper seemed to have time to chat on Facebook.

  “He says he didn’t realize it until after, but there was some noise coming from the alley before he got there that might’ve prompted him to look. That wasn’t in the police report, but it might indicate there was more of a struggle than we thought. He may have just missed it and the killer escaped deeper into the alley,” Nora relayed.

  “Does that really change anything, Nora?” Caroline asked. “She put up a fight and then got hit in the head by a crowbar.”

  “It’s something new,” Nora said, trying to remain optimistic.

  There was nothing else from Jasper. If only Maria had inflicted some damage on the killer that would’ve left blood on the ground. That would’ve changed everything. Maybe knowing in which direction the killer fled would give them a better chance of finding him.

  Finding a parking spot near the stadium was even more difficult than getting there. Stephanie flagrantly used her baby bump to elicit sympathy from other people in the form of a parking spot, and they made it out of the car and joined the throngs heading to their seats.

  “Pregnant women should get automatic handicap signs. Or better yet, there should be some sort of fetus in a uterus sign you put on your car that lets you get away with anything,” Stephanie said.

  “Maybe you should go ahead and invent that,” Caroline said.

  Everyone around seemed to be in the highest of spirits, with an emphasis on high or spirits depending on the person. Still, Nora couldn’t get over the anxiety about the lack of progress. Between the fingerprints and the facial ID, she estimated there was a ninety percent chance that they’d either both come back with hits or neither of them would. They were two sides of the same coin, heightening the risk she’d come back with nothing.

  Stepping into the massive stadium, which was already about half full, they marveled at its beauty. So many people had their faces painted wi
th blue or gold, the school colors. Blue was for the ocean and gold for the gold rush that had drawn so many people west. They came looking for opportunity and something new, for a lucky strike that would change everything forever. Nora felt she was hoping for the same thing just as naively.

  “I hope our old seats aren’t taken,” Caroline said, leading them a few sections up and past one of the 40-yard lines.

  “Why didn’t they rope them off for us?” Stephanie moaned as she climbed the stairs. “I did scratch our names into the concrete underneath before graduation so everyone knew to whom they belonged.”

  “Did you really?” Nora laughed, shaking her head. She couldn’t wait to check. Sometimes Stephanie’s outrageous antics were too awesome to deny.

  “Why don’t you look for yourself?” Steph said as they reached their row and the empty metal bench set into the concrete. Nora and Caroline laughed themselves silly when they bent down and saw their names. They took their seats and watched the stadium fill up and the marching band come out and perform.

  When Nora’s phone rang in her pocket, she nearly tore off her pants trying to get it out. She didn’t recognize the number, but the area code was 510, which she knew was local to Berkeley.

  “Hello?” she said, straining to hear over the noise. “Officer Plevy, thank you so much for calling. OK, I’m listening. Uh-huh. That’s amazing that you were able to check so fast. Thank you for doing that. I see. You’re absolutely sure? I got it. Thank you. No, I guess that’s fine. Goodbye.”

  Caroline took one look at her and then threw an arm around her shoulders. “No luck?”

  “Not a thing. Those fingerprints could belong to a Martian for all we know,” Nora said.

  “I am so sorry to hear that,” Steph said, her hand on her belly. She reached into her bag and pulled out a bottle of sunblock for her face, which already appeared a little red.

  Nora sighed, wondering if it’d been dumb to take this on at all.