Die Buying

by Laura Disilverio

  Joel came in before eight and plunked a bag of baby carrots on his desk. I bit into one, appreciating the crunch. Helping myself to another carrot, I filled Joel in on the night’s events and watched his eyes get rounder.

  “And Woskowicz never even showed?”

  “He said he had a cold and his meds knocked him out,” I said neutrally.

  Joel blew a raspberry. “It’s good to be king,” he said. “If one of us fell asleep on duty, he’d fire our butts faster than a speeding locomotive.”

  “As well he should,” I said. “Look, my knee aches, so I’m going to do dispatch today and keep an eye on the cameras. You take a turn at the patrols.” Low man on the totem pole usually got stuck with the boredom of dispatch duty, so Joel’s face brightened.

  “Wilco,” he said, standing and tucking his uniform shirt more securely into his slacks. “Who else is working today?”

  I checked the schedule. “Tracy and Harold come in at nine thirty. It’s just you and me until then.” Our staggered schedule ensured an overlap of officers on duty during the peak hours when the mall was open.

  “I’d better get to it, then,” Joel said, self-importantly.

  “Yeah, keep an eye out for the python.”

  Joel bustled out, and I scanned the screens for fifteen minutes, not seeing anything of interest except a news van parked outside the garage. An idea hit me and I took advantage of my solitude to slip back to Captain Woskowicz’s office. The desk was bare of papers, but I took that as a sign of work avoidance rather than efficiency. His computer was off. Glancing over my shoulder to ensure I was still alone, I zeroed in on my target: Woskowicz’s metal trash can. Brimming with used tissues, it looked like a certain source of plague or worse. Unwilling to fish through it with my bare hands, I found a ruler in Woskowicz’s desk drawer and used it to sift through the can. Sure enough, halfway down, I came upon two empty NyQuil bottles. Not proof that Woskowicz had told the truth, but enough to allay my worst suspicions.

  Returning to the front, I turned on the small television mounted high on the wall that kept us abreast of news. A perky reporter was relaying the details of Robbie Porter’s death, ending with, “Unless you have a fancy to die buying, you might want to avoid Fernglen Galleria where this is the second death in a week. Rumor has it that a giant python is also at large in the mall. I’m—”

  I muted the television with an internal groan, hoping Curtis Quigley hadn’t been watching.

  No such luck. Quigley burst through the door on the thought, radiating outrage. Today’s paisley bow tie quivered with the force of his emotion. He pointed a stiff finger at the television. “Did you see that? Did you hear what she said?”

  “No one will pay any attention to that,” I said soothingly. “They—”

  “Nothing of this sort has ever happened to me before,” he said, pacing. “Two deaths in one week! A homicide and a drug overdose! Three deaths if you count Officer Wembley—”

  “Wedzel.”

  “—who at least had the common decency not to die at Fernglen. I will not countenance all this dying in my mall. Only once before has someone died on one of my properties and that was a man who suffered a heart attack while his wife tried on St. John suits.”

  And who could blame him? The price tags on the designer knitwear would give anyone a coronary.

  “You need to fix this, EJ,” he said. “The chairman of the board of Figley and Boon Investments”—the conglomerate that owned Fernglen—“has been on the phone with me already this morning, wanting to know what I’m doing about all this. Please contact the investigators in charge of the case and tell them I want an update. And tell Captain Woskowicz—” He broke off and looked around. “Where is Captain Woskowicz?”

  “He worked the night shift,” I said, “and went home sick this morning.”

  “Well, tell him that I want to see a plan to prevent further incidents of this kind. On my desk first thing Monday morning.” And with an emphatic nod of his sharp chin, he returned across the hall to his office.

  I jotted a note for Woskowicz—“Submit plan to prevent mall murders”—then crumpled it to write something less facetious. As I turned back to the security log on the computer screen, intent on compiling some statistics for our weekly report, weariness caught up with me. Using the sink in our small unisex restroom, I poured out the sludge Woskowicz had left in the bottom of the coffee carafe and brewed another pot. Maybe caffeine would kick-start me. Steaming mug in hand, I kept an eye on the cameras for a while and then briefed Tracy and Harold when they showed up for their shift. The mall opened soon after that, and I stayed busy answering calls about Agatha spottings, a lost toddler, a soda spill in the Dillard’s corridor, and a fire in the wastebasket in the movie theater men’s room.

  I filled in the time between calls by researching “animal+ rights+activists+violence” via Google, and Jackson Porter’s development projects. The first search generated a results list that would take a full-time staff of twenty people a week to sort through. Near as I could tell, roughly every fifth citizen in the United States was willing to burn a puppy mill to the ground (after removing the dogs, of course), shoot scientists who used lab animals for experiments, or booby-trap construction sites to discourage development. Such acts were officially called “animal enterprise terrorism,” a new one for me. On a whim, I printed out photos of people identified as belonging to some of the more radical groups, thinking I’d run them by Kiefer and Monica on the one-in-a-billion chance they might recognize one of them.

  The Jackson Porter list was more manageable, although still lengthy. He had a lot going on, especially considering the current state of the economy. I clicked through some of the articles, stopping when a familiar face startled me. Under the headline “Protestor Arrested for Assaulting Developer” was a three-year-old photograph of a very angry-looking Dyson Harding, Kyra’s college friend, beaning Jackson Porter over the head with a placard. I skimmed the article and then stared at the black-and-white photo for a long moment, trying to figure out if it was just coincidence that Dyson Harding had led a protest against one of Porter’s projects three years back and was now at it again, or if he had a vendetta against the man.

  Only one way to find out. I called Kyra and asked if she could set up a meeting with her old buddy. “Today would be good,” I told her.

  She called back minutes later. “He’ll meet you at noon,” she said. “At the museum on campus. He’s only got an hour between classes, so don’t be late. Want me to come with you?”

  “Thanks,” I said, “but I think I can handle it on my own. What’s he going to do if I piss him off? Chuck a pot shard at me?”

  She laughed, but said, “Be careful. Dy’s got a temper.”

  Fifteen

  Two hours later, with Joel back in the office as dispatcher, I took my lunch hour and drove to the Vernonville Colonial College campus on the western edge of Vernonville. A pond complete with ducks and fountain for aeration fronted the combined student center and administration building, a newish edifice built to look old with red brick salvaged from the destruction of a nineteenth-century warehouse. I knew this because of the handy college brochure I picked up just inside the sliding glass doors that gave way to a maze of halls and offices. I stopped a passing student and asked for directions to the archaeology museum.

  “I’m a math major,” he said, staring at me as if I’d asked for a lemonade recipe.

  “Right,” I said, as if his non sequitur made sense.

  A girl’s voice piped up from behind me and I turned. “It’s out the door to your right, down that walkway, and behind the building that looks like a pyramid.”

  “Great, thanks,” I said, smiling at her. She smiled in return and continued on, weighed down by a backpack that looked like it held enough supplies to climb K2.

  I followed her directions, wishing I’d worn a heavier jacket, and found myself in front of a small, square building with smoked glass windows and metal letters over the d
oor spelling out “Richard D. Ruxton Museum of Archaeology.” I figured old Dick Ruxton was a big-time donor. A muddy green SUV was the only vehicle in the small lot that fronted the museum. Pushing through the glass door, I found myself in a dimly lit space with a linoleum floor. Glass display cases lined the walls, and what looked like an Indian encampment of some kind, complete with teepee and canoe, sprouted from a display in the center of the room. Dr. Dyson Harding, half-eaten sandwich in hand, gestured to me from the far side of the room. He had on the same jacket he’d worn at the mall, and bread crumbs dotted his soul patch. He looked professorial and soft, not like a radical primed to take violent action to protest overdevelopment.

  “I thought you might like the chance to see our museum while we talked,” he said, swallowing. “Kyra said you’re interested in archaeology.”

  Only when it provided a motive for murder. “I haven’t been into it very long,” I hedged. “I got interested when I was in Afghanistan. Some of the sites there are fascinating.” Not that I’d been to any of them. We were strictly confined to base when not on patrol.

  His eyes lit up. “What a fabulous opportunity. My area of specialty is early paleo-Indian settlements in Virginia, but I wouldn’t turn down the opportunity to visit the BMAC.” He chuckled.

  At my blank look, he said, “The Oxus Civilization?”

  I nodded in an “oh, yeah” kind of way, as if that had clarified anything.

  “Right. So, Kyra said you were interested in helping with my petition drive?” His brown eyes, magnified by the glasses, studied me.

  Damn Kyra. “I was hoping to find out more about it. What exactly are you protesting?”

  His face darkened. “The destruction of hugely important archaeological sites by profit-driven developers.”

  “Specifically . . . ?”

  “On that site by the mall, where Jackson Porter Developments wants to put up a golf resort—as if there weren’t enough water-hogging golf courses in the county already—there’s evidence of a pre-Clovis settlement. I’ve found unfluted bifacial tools on that site!”

  Sounded like something used in prehistoric spa treatments.

  “It needs to be protected, excavated, mined for the richness of historical, anthropological, and archaeological data it undoubtedly contains, not destroyed to cater to the recreational whims of the tiny segment of society that can afford to pay two hundred bucks to chase a dimpled ball around.” He caught my upper arm and dragged me to a display case. “Look!”

  I looked. What appeared to be chunks or bits of stone sat under the smudged glass, attended by labels with incomprehensible phrases like “flake blanks,” “flint-working,” and “refined biface preforms.” My eyes glazed over. “Fascinating,” I murmured. “And are these similar to the artifacts you were trying to protect when Porter’s company broke ground for that Hyacinth Hills shopping center?”

  Harding stiffened beside me. His voice when he spoke no longer sounded like that of an enthusiastic professor going on about his favorite subject. It held an undertone of menace. “What are you really here for, Ms. Ferris? I get the feeling you’re not quite the amateur archaeologist Kyra made you out to be.”

  “She exaggerates.”

  He blinked his eyes slowly, studying my face in unspeaking silence.

  “I read that you were arrested for assaulting Jackson Porter three years back,” I admitted. “And I was curious how it came about that you were protesting another of his developments. Surely there are other developers despoiling the landscape?”

  “Are you mocking my work?”

  “No, I’m not,” I said truthfully. “It seems like important work, and I can see you take it seriously. I’d just like to know where you were last Sunday night.”

  Harding’s lips thinned to a straight line. “You mean when some public benefactor killed Porter?”

  I nodded, casually taking a step back from Harding, who was leaning uncomfortably close.

  “You may be wearing a uniform, Ms. Ferris, but it’s not one that gives you the right to question my movements.” A fleck of spittle appeared at the corner of his mouth, but he didn’t seem to notice. “You spend your days protecting the Mecca of crass consumerism, making sure spoiled shoppers have a pleasant experience lapping up the products that greedy corporations make them think they need. Do you know what life was like in this area fifteen thousand years ago? What people had to do to survive?” He was almost shouting.

  “No,” I said.

  “No. You don’t.” An eerie half smile spread across his doughy face. “Are you married, Ms. Ferris? Do you have kids?”

  The abrupt change of topic caught me off guard. “That’s none of your business.”

  His gaze shifted to my left hand. “No, you don’t. Pets?”

  Something in my reaction pleased him because his smile grew. “When someone threatens what’s important to me, I strike back.”

  I faced him stonily, unflinching, thinking that his soft exterior covered an iron will, and wondered what his coworkers thought of him. My mind flitted to the biology professor in Alabama who had opened fire at a department meeting, killing three of her colleagues. “Are you threatening me?” I asked, squaring my shoulders.

  “Not at all,” he said. “Just making my position clear.” He blinked mildly.

  “Well, thank you for your time, Harding,” I said, deliberately omitting his title. I started for the door, angling toward it so I could keep an eye on him.

  “Any time, Ms. Ferris,” he called after me with fake bonhomie. “Any time. Tell Kyra I’ll be by early next week to pick up the signatures she’s collected.”

  If it were up to me, I’d bar him from the mall, but I just said, “I’ll let her know.” The door was only two steps in front of me and I burst through it into the weak February sunshine, feeling like I’d emerged into fresh air after weeks spent below ground in some dark, noxious cave. Dyson Harding was a nutter, a psycho, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all to learn that he’d graduated from framing professors he disliked to murdering developers who stood in the way of his academic priorities.

  I was in a burger drive-through, getting lunch before returning to the mall, when my phone rang. I recognized the number. “Grandpa!” I answered. “Where have you been?”

  “Sorry, Emma-Joy,” he said, sounding chipper. “I just got your messages. Can you come pick me up at the hospital? Confounded doctor says I can’t drive for a couple of days.”

  Cold clutched at me. “The hospital? What—?”

  “Nothing serious. I’ll tell you when you get here.” He gave me directions to a hospital about halfway between here and D.C.

  I phoned Joel to let him know I’d be late getting back to work, grateful that Woskowicz wasn’t around to grouse about it. “Anything going on?” I asked.

  “Nada. We’ll hold the fort until you get back. I hope your grampa’s okay.”

  “Me, too.” I hung up and headed for I-95, munching my burger as I drove. Visions of heart attacks, strokes, and hip-breaking falls whizzed through my head. Pulling into the hospital lot twenty-five minutes later, I took a deep breath. I walked as quickly as I could, my knee complaining the whole way, up the path to the hospital lobby. A hugely pregnant woman, whooshing air in and out as her husband counted, waddled by me, blocking my view. When she passed, I saw an old woman sitting at an information desk, a confused-looking couple studying a hospital directory, and Grandpa Atherton, standing near a window, his hands swathed in gauze with his fingers peeking out. His carriage was as erect as always, although his white hair was mussed and he wore what looked like a painter’s white overall.

  “Grandpa!” I rushed to him and hugged him. He smelled like charred rubber. “What on earth—”

  “Let’s talk in the car, Emma-Joy,” he said. “I’ve had enough of this place. It’s full of sick people.”

  Laughing, I took his arm and we proceeded to my Miata. “When are you going to get a real car?” he asked, stooping to get into the passen
ger seat. “Something with four doors?”

  I slammed his door, climbed into the driver’s side, and wended my way back to the interstate. “Now,” I said, once we were cruising along at seventy-five, “spill it.”

  Grandpa awkwardly adjusted the heater to a warmer setting and said, “An old colleague got in touch yesterday—he needed my help with a little op he was running in Georgetown—and I’ve been strictly incommunicado. By the time we finished debriefing and they dropped me at the hospital, my phone battery had died—”

  “What’s wrong with your hands?”

  “Just a first-degree burn,” he reassured me. “No worse than a sunburn. Those incendiary devices are tricky.”

  “What—?”

  “If I told you, I’d have to kill you,” he said, interrupting my question.

  I’d heard that quip a thousand times before, both from Grandpa and my friends in the military intelligence community, and I just rolled my eyes. “Doesn’t the CIA have anyone under eighty they can use in their ops?” I asked.

  “The CIA doesn’t run ops on U.S. soil, Emma-Joy,” he reminded me.

  “Then who—?” I cut myself off. “Yeah, yeah, I know . . . you’d have to kill me.”

  He chuckled, but his voice was serious when he asked, “What’s this I hear about another body at the mall? It was on the television at the hospital. A drug overdose?”

  I told him about Robbie Porter’s contacting me and last night’s adventures. “You need to back away from this one, Emma-Joy,” Grandpa said, surprising me. “That’s three bodies in a week, assuming young Porter was the victim of foul play.”

  “You’re advising me to be cautious, Mr. Incendiary Man? Is this a ‘do as I say, not as I do’ situation?”

  “I’m a professional. I trained—”

  A flash of anger whooshed through me. “So am I! Present tense. You retired twenty-some-odd years ago.”

  A wounded silence filled the car.

  I sighed. “Look, Grandpa, I’m sorry. The situation is getting to me. I got my butt chewed by Detective Helland this morning, and Curtis Quigley pitched a hissy before I had my first cup of coffee. Then I met with a nut-job activist who might have killed Porter and who practically threatened to turn Fubar into kitty litter. I’ve had about four hours sleep in the last thirty-six and I’m cranky. I’m sorry. Please?”