by Rose, Kristi
But I wasn’t so naïve to believe that everyone in Wind River was upstanding. My one-time experience as a forensic photographer intern had taught me that cold, harsh truth. Discovering people I’d known most my life and trusted were scamming auto insurance companies and robbing local businesses had been a pivotal moment in my life. The experience left me with a big decision. Have a life where I saw the darkness or one where I saw the light. I’d picked the light. Jokes on me, I guess. Darkness followed me anyway and asked me to marry him.
“What do the papers say?” I asked Precious as I sped through the last of the roundabouts that would lead over I-5 to the other side of Wind River.
“Looks to me like Carson has had the business license and lease for almost two years. It was put in your name right after you married.”
Two years? That sounded about right. When we’d met, Carson had told me he’d grown tired of city life and had moved to Wind River, specifically for the small-town appeal. He’d even gone so far as to say meeting me had been the icing on the cake.
Yeah, probably because he’d discovered a patsy in me. I clenched the steering wheel, wanting to rip it from the steering column and beat it on the ground. He’d played me from the beginning.
Precious held out the paper and pointed to my signature on the document. I couldn’t recall ever signing such a paper. Blind faith. Look where it got me.
“The license is for a private investigation firm with under ten employees. That’s the standard number for a small company and how Washington designates company size.” Precious thumbed through more paper as I overtook an eighteen-wheeler headed in the same direction, the pages whipping in the wind. She shot me a frustrated look. “There’s a bill of sale to you for the business for one dollar.”
I whipped through the last roundabout, taking the second exit toward the strip mall and row of small repurposed houses. The strip mall was to our right, the houses to our left. Carson’s was the third house of five. It dawned on me then that I’d never been inside. The times I’d come to Carson’s office, he’d met me in the driveway. I hadn’t given it a second thought then.
Toby was sitting on the ground, leaning against a car shaped like a cap eraser, a Honda Fit, his vape pen in his mouth.
He tipped his head when I got out of the car but didn’t stand. “Were you able to get in touch with Carson?” he asked and blew a light cloud of smoke. It smelled like cherry cola.
The front door of the office had a window, which was smashed in, leaving in its place a gaping opening. I peered through the hole. Scattered on the old wood floor were chunks of glass held together by the vinyl lettering I assumed was once the business’s information.
The door was closed and locked. I reached over the broken glass, careful not to nick myself, and unlocked the door. A second later, the lock reengaged.
“The keypad is going to keep locking it,” Toby said and pointed to a keypad on the wall. “That’s how Carson set it up. It’s a failsafe in case the keypad breaks.”
The keypad had also been smashed.
Toby continued, “The backup system will keep the lock engaged until I code in the password.” He waved his phone.
I gestured for him to do so. The lock disengaged.
“You’ll have fifteen seconds to open the door. That’s not the password to keep it unlocked. I have to do that at the main system. Not here,” Toby said while pointing to the smashed keypad. “I have to override that.”
As if I had any clue what he was talking about regarding the main system. I just needed the lock to not reengage. I took a rubber band out of the front pocket of my bag and wrapped from one doorknob to the other, crossing over the latch bolt to keep the lock tucked, hoping it would be enough of a hack to trick the system.
I pushed it open with my foot and gingerly stepped inside, careful not to walk on glass and to minimize messing up the crime scene. TV had taught me that much.
“Don’t touch anything,” I told the others.
“Duh,” Precious said.
We stepped into the lobby. It contained a row of four folding metal chairs and was lit by a large plate-glass window that looked onto the street. Holmes Security was written on the large front window in the same royal blue vinyl letters that were on the floor. I stepped farther inside to scope out the place.
Beyond the lobby were three rooms to the left. One was an office and the other a supply room. The office was as meagerly furnished with a desk and two chairs in front. No filing cabinets. The supply room was just as sparse with two filing cabinets and a card table, under the table was an unopened box of fifty-four-count variety pack of chips.
The rooms were separated by a restroom. In each room, the folding chairs were upended, as if whoever broke in had knocked them down on their way out. Likely in frustration or anger. Toby had said the place was trashed, but I’d say it was messy. Other than the window, it would be an easy cleanup. The filing cabinet drawers were open, but no files had been tossed because there were none. The drawers held reams of paper, boxes of pens, and Post-it notes.
Toby stood in the doorway. “The house is divided into two offices. We share the building with a dance and yoga studio.”
“Did they clean you all out?” Precious asked.
The place had the vibe that business wasn’t done here, but I could be wrong and the thief had taken more than I assumed.
Toby shook his head. “That’s the thing. I can’t see that anything was taken. That’s why I didn’t immediately call the cops.” He stuck his hands in his pockets.
He reminded me of Shaggy from the old Scooby Doo cartoon. He wore his hair long with bangs side-swept over his face that had a few scars from acne. He was tall, but his shoulders stooped inward as if standing straight required too much work. He wore camouflage cargo shorts and a T-shirt with a giant cannabis leaf.
Precious chuckled. “I’ll admit when you told me about this place, Sam, I pictured a sleek office like Remington Steel or maybe lots of mahogany and lamps with yellow light.” She grabbed my arm and squealed in excitement, “This place needs a complete makeover.” The girl loved to redecorate.
“Can we get through this first please?” I gestured to Toby and the broken glass.
Precious scoffed. “Please, whoever did this took one look at this place and moved on. Probably cursing their rotten luck for picking such a dud.”
She’d nailed it. The office and the break-in were both enigmas. Who would buy a security system while sitting in this outdated environment? Now I understood why Carson had met clients at their home. What didn’t make sense was why bother having this office at all? And what was someone hoping to score by breaking in? I surveyed the room. The thief was obviously looking for something and hadn’t found it. My gut told me this break-in wasn’t random.
Hopefully Toby could help make sense of everything. “Explain to me everything you do for Carson.” I waved my hand around in the air as if it would help me understand what exactly the business did.
“Being the tech guy, I research the clients and stuff.” Toby made like he was typing on a keyboard. When Carson said he’d hired Toby, I’d assumed it was to manage things like his website and stuff. I honestly hadn’t given it a second thought.
“Where’s the…?” I made like I was typing as well. There weren’t any computers in the office. “Were they stolen? Do you work normal office hours?” I had no idea how this business ran.
Toby lifted his vape pen to his lips. “I bring my own tech and come in when Carson texts me and tells me to. He did that a couple days ago. Otherwise, I work remotely.” He took a puff. “Today I got an alert on my phone that the building alarm had been activated so I came over to check it out.”
I scanned the waiting room for a second keypad or something to give me more information. “Where’s the alarm?” I asked.
Toby pointed to some wires that ran along the inside of the door. “Here. They’re on the window, too. You manage it by using an app on your phone.”
&
nbsp; I nodded, though I was clueless. I felt as if I’d fallen through a slit in the time-space continuum. I recognized the people, the scenery, and understood the language, but I had no clue what was going on. “You said Carson texted you?”
“Yeah, few days ago. He had a new client and wanted me to do the preliminaries on them.”
“Preliminaries?” So much to learn.
“Background check basically.”
Precious came to stand by me. “You’ll need a police report if you want to make any claims for insurance.”
I set aside my questions and slid the phone from my bag. I called the non-emergency police line, reported the break-in, and was told to wait for a responding officer and not to disturb the scene further.
We went outside and waited at the side of the office.
I tried to get a handle on the situation. “Let me get this straight, Toby. You and Carson are the only employees?”
Toby slouched against the outside wall. “Yep.”
“Who sits here and waits for customers?”
Toby rolled his eyes. “They aren’t customers; they’re clients. Carson says that all the time. We work for the client. They are the job. The job isn’t helping a customer and moving on. It’s helping a client so they can move on.”
I blew out my frustration with a sigh. “Okay, so who waits in the office for clients?”
“No one. Carson has his number on the window.” He gestured to the broken pane. “Oh, guess you can’t see it. They call the number, and he meets them here or somewhere else.”
And here I’d thought my husband hung around his office all day unless he was out doing quotes. I was a dumb-dumb. That much was clear.
“The background checks? Was that part of the security business?” Precious asked and leaned against the building next to him.
Toby nodded. “Both, but yeah mostly the PI part. You’d be amazed at how many of the cases Carson got were solved simply by doing some deep web searching.” He drew from his vape pen.
“Carson rarely talked about the PI part of his job,” I lied.
Toby nodded, not surprised by my statement. “Because we keep that on the down-low. People who buy security systems want others to know they’re safe. People who hire a PI don’t want others to know they’re vulnerable. Carson had a real knack for finding people who needed his service.”
I asked, “Did you do a lot of PI business?”
“Couple people a week. Missing people, pets, money shots for divorce, but the money is in Carson’s home assessments and setting up security systems. He does those a lot.” Toby offered Precious his vape pen, but she declined.
I caught Precious’s eye over Toby’s head. She arched a brow and looked at Toby. An easy guess as to what she was trying to tell me. Toby needed to know about Carson. I moved to stand next to him and Precious did the same on Toby’s other side.
“There’s something I need to tell you.” I stared ahead at the house next door, focusing on a large spot where the paint was peeling. My throat spasmed as I tried to say the words.
“Carson’s dead,” Precious said and patted Toby’s shoulder. “But we need to sit on this information. Sam only found out yesterday, and she has to tell her family.”
Toby slid down the wall then fell on his butt. “Man, are you serious?” His attention volleyed between me and Precious.
“As a heart attack,” Precious said.
Toby’s jaw dropped. “He had a heart attack? He was so young.”
“No,” I shook my head. “He was in a car accident.”
“A heart attack while driving. That’s awful,” Toby said sadly.
“No heart attack,” I said. “Just a ginormous tree falling on his car when he crashed into it.” Said the Washington Department of Transportation article I’d read online last night. It hadn’t mentioned Carson by name, but the description of the car on fire had been awful. I shuttered. To think about someone you knew had died a horrible death was awful enough, but when it was the person you’d married and loved. Well…
“You work for Sam now Toby,” Precious said. “No one else. If someone else comes around and says otherwise, you call Sam right away.”
Man, was I glad Precious was thinking ahead. If the person who inherited Carson’s estate was trying to get me evicted, why not try and take this office, too? Our conversation ceased when a large white SUV pulled into the drive.
“Popo is here.” Toby stood and made like he was going to split.
I grabbed his arm. “You need to stick around. The police will need a statement from you.”
Toby glanced at his watch. “Well, technically, I have the time. I start my job as an on-demand private driver in an hour.” He pointed to his Honda Fit. Two stickers bearing the names of two on-demand car companies were in the window. “And look, I had these made up recently.” He dug in his back pocket, pulled out a business card, and handed it to me.
One side was his contact for the on-demand driver job and the other was for his IT services for Holmes Securities. I stuck it in my bra since I had no pockets.
“Folks,” Leo Stillman said as he strolled toward us. He surveyed me, his attention lingering on my hair before sweeping down my body. He raised his brows. “You call this in? Were you here when the break-in happened? He rough you up?”
“No,” I said bitingly. “I wasn’t here. Toby is the one that discovered the break-in. I’m here because I’m the owner.” I’d said it with a bravado I didn’t have and planted my hands on my hips for good measure.
Leo glanced at his watch. He wore one of those manly dive jobbies with a thick black band and large face that could be seen in any weather condition. “I’ll make this quick, Toby, so you can get to your other job. Why don’t you tell me what happened? Start at the beginning.”
Toby recounted the events that brought me here.
“Let’s walk through, and you can tell me if anything is missing,” Leo said.
I fell into step behind them. Leo gave me a questioning look.
I put my hand up in protest, not giving him a chance to speak. I wasn’t about to wait outside. “This is my company. I’m going, too.” I gestured for him to start moving.
“Just don’t get sick or anything that might jack up the crime scene.” His lips twitched in amusement.
I rolled my eyes. “Ha. Ha.”
Toby took us through each room. Drawers had been jimmied opened, but apparently Carson kept nothing of significance in the drawers, only the standard office equipment like a stapler in one, paper clips in another. We circled back to the waiting room.
“Where do you keep the files? The ones on the clients? And maybe a schedule of what’s to happen when?” I was a paper person, especially pretty paper. I liked planners of all shapes and sizes, and if a planner came decorated beyond the plain white with a flower or scrolled designs, then all the better.
“On the cloud,” Toby said in a tone that implied duh should end the sentence.
“Do you back up the cloud?” This from Leo.
“Duh,” Toby said.
Leo had the patience of a saint. “Where?”
I was wondering that myself. There was only a printer, nothing else. No cords except the power one that fed the printer.
Toby looked uncomfortable. His glance darted between me and Leo, his lips pressed together tightly as if he didn’t want to spill the secret.
“Spill, Toby,” Leo said. “Carson is dead, and we need answers.”
A heavy sigh escaped Toby. “You aren’t going to like this,” he said and pointed to the ceiling. “It’s up there.”
Leo and I both craned our heads back and stared up at the ceiling.
“The cloud’s in heaven?” I asked, thinking Toby was referring to Carson and the information had died with him, so I’d essentially inherited a building and some old furniture.
6
Saturday
Toby snorted. “Heaven. That’s a good one.”
Leo crossed his arms, narrowed
his eyes at me, and shook his head in disappointment. I was familiar with his expression. It was the same look he’d always given me, the one that said he thought I was more annoying than a mosquito. “Heaven? Really?”
Toby still chuckling, said. “I was pointing to the attic. Carson made it a control room of sorts.”
“Where’s the access door?” I looked down the hallway, thinking I overlooked it.
“We share a small corridor with the dance studio next door. We have to go outside to get there.” Toby led us out the front and around the corner to the back.
I paused before turning the corner. The hairs on the back of my neck were raised. Like they did when you knew someone was there but you couldn’t see them. I suppressed the urge to look around. Instead, I stepped to where Precious was waiting by my car, messing with her phone.
I whispered, “Can you secretly video the street.”
Her gaze met mine, her eyes narrowing. She had an amazing sense of adventure. She didn’t need an explanation. “Consider it done.”
I caught up with Leo and Toby as they approached the back door to the dance studio. The door was solid wood, the name of the studio affixed to the door using the same type of vinyl letters that Carson’s office had used. Toby was digging in his pocket, for a key I assumed.
“Wait,” I said and butted to the front. I knocked on the door.
“But I—” Toby started.
“I know,” I said.
Leo searched my face, his gaze bouncing to my hot mess of a hairstyle before he looked away. He scanned the area behind me while tapping his small notebook against the palm of his hand. “You see something?” he whispered.
If he picked on me for my behavior at a crime scene nearly a decade ago, how was it going to go if I told him my gut said someone was out there? Learning to listen to my intuition was something Carson had harped on. When he read the paper, he constantly would point out stories of women who had been victimized. He’d even told me to take a self-defense class, something I’d been meaning to do but hadn’t got around to it.