The Hard Way: Taken Hostage by Kinky Bank Robbers 5

by Annika Martin

  “He didn’t put it on the truck—he walked it right into the Pig!” I told her about what we’d learned. The tape at the store. Hank and Nancy Zietlow.

  “That’s why your…um…other friend asked if Andy would ever go for Nancy Zietlow.”

  I nodded.

  “Motherfucker,” Vanessa said. “Hank engineered the whole situation. That is totally Hank. And he somehow fucked with the cheese…”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The cheese wasn’t bad, dude! It was perfectly good. I held some back from the garbage and brought it home. We’d been eating it. I didn’t even refrigerate it. The cheese was fine.”

  “Oh my god,” I said. “That’s what I’ve been saying. That even warmed cheese—if the cheese started good—”

  “Oh, hell, you know that cheese was fine.”

  Odin was hanging back, following along. He seemed to be enjoying himself, just watching us.

  “We ate a lot of it,” she added.

  “I thought that was weird!” I said. “That he’d do that and just happen to get a bad batch.”

  “We run a clean shop. Cleaner than ever.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Cleaner than when I was there?”

  She grinned. “Did I not say cleaner than ever?”

  “She did say that,” Odin said.

  Vanessa shot him an appreciative look. It warmed me right to my cockles.

  “Did you tell this to the FDA?” I asked her.

  “Of course. Do you think they believed me? And now we’re shut down. And there was this storm last month where some of the southwest facing panels in the barn came down and we don’t have the funds to fix it. And the rain has been so evil this year. Andy and I put tarps up, but water’s been getting on the pumps.”

  “You can’t let that happen.”

  “That whole side is tarps.” Something came to her. “You know what? I bet you anything Hank’s giving the Millers a loan to buy us out.”

  “I agree.”

  “Hank and Nancy Zietlow,” Vanessa said. “Whoa.”

  “We have a motel clerk who identified them,” I continued. “We have footage of them at the Pig together the day she bought the cheese that killed Tim Zietlow.”

  “He kills Tim Zietlow with our cheese, gets Nancy Zietlow, and then in two years he calls in the Millers’ loan the way he called in the loan for Mom and Dad. And he gets twice the farm.”

  “Not if we can help it,” Odin said, and I think even Vanessa keyed into the threat in his voice. And she one hundred percent loved it, just like I did.

  “You have all this proof now, so…” She raised her eyebrows, hopefully, expectantly. I so badly wanted it to be that easy, my heart nearly burst.

  “It’s not enough,” Odin grumbled. “All circumstantial. Nothing we have ties Hank to the cheese.”

  “Except we know now that he had to directly infect it,” I said. “That’s something.” I looked over at Vanessa. “This was totally helpful. Let’s think this through. I’m Hank. I want to get rid of Tim Zietlow and crash the farm, all in one fell swoop. I do this whole unplugging thing, because I know you’ll toss the cheese. But I need to be sure the cheese is actually contaminated. What do I do? I need to get salmonella to smear on it and then I wrap it back up. Because I don’t see him capable of growing salmonella.”

  “Hell no,” Vanessa said.

  “Is it that difficult?” Odin asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” I said, “you really have to work at it.”

  “But the university,” Vanessa said. “The universities order it from a lab to do experiments with. I learned that during this whole mess—I was reading up on it, and there are only two labs in the country that supply strains of salmonella for experiments, and they’ll only send it two-day air to researchers at universities.”

  “So we look for Hank’s university connections,” I say.

  “No,” Odin said. “A man like Hank isn’t going to ask some researcher buddy for a deadly toxin and have the buddy find out Hank’s lover’s husband is dead from that exact toxin. No. He’s more careful than that.”

  I thought about Odin at the Cobblestone. The way he wanted to look in Hank’s eyes. Odin was using that information, that knowledge now.

  “We’re looking for a break-in,” he continued. “And it wouldn’t be a break-in at the local university. Too obvious, too easy…”

  Vanessa hung on Odin’s words. She seemed as enchanted with him as I was. It made me feel happy for her to meet and appreciate him.

  “It would be a lab in another county, somewhere outside of the range of this outbreak. Outside of your distribution range,” Odin said. “Somewhere where nobody thinks to connect the dots. It still doesn’t give us Hank…”

  “It’s a lead, though!” I called Thor and left a message about what we’d discussed. If they were still at Hank’s place, maybe they could look for something…I don’t know what. I wasn’t one of the superspies in the equation.

  “We’re going to get you out of this,” I said to Vanessa as soon as I hung up.

  “What are you going to do?”

  “Investigate the fuck out of it,” I said.

  “And if that doesn’t work?”

  “We’ll fucking-g work it out another way,” Odin said.

  Vanessa turned to me. “Come back. Come be alive. We won’t tell. It would mean so much.” To Kaitlin and Candace, she meant.

  “It’s dangerous,” I said. “They’ve already gone through my death once.”

  Vanessa looked ashen. “What does that mean? You’re in that much danger? You think you’ll die…”

  “Over my dead body,” Odin growled.

  She took this in. “But those people who are your enemies…you worry about them.”

  “A lot,” I said. “And I’m not willing to saddle those two with any kind of knowledge that puts them in their sights. You shouldn’t even know.”

  “Fuck that,” Vanessa said.

  “We have to go,” Odin said. “I don’t like you out here without your disguise.”

  “You have a disguise?”

  “You don’t even want to know.”

  “I like your bright hair,” she said. “God, look at you.”

  Odin was moving toward the steps. “We need to…”

  “I know.” I straightened Vanessa’s jacket. “Come on.”

  We headed down, Odin first, Vanessa next and me last. We started making our way back to the car. Odin went first. That was better. We definitely couldn’t risk anybody being out here and especially not anybody recognizing me.

  “Give me your phone,” I said.

  She handed it over. “Code’s one-two-three-four.”

  Odin snorted from ahead.

  “You should change it. The girls don’t ever answer this, do they?”

  “Not unless I ask them to.”

  I called it on my phone and punched in a fake name. “This’ll be me. It’s a burner, so I won’t have it forever.”

  “Wait, am I going to see you again? What’s the plan?”

  “The plan is to solve the shit out of this. We have to work fast, though.” I thought about Odin, how he felt like we were being watched. How he’d promised me twenty-four hours of not going dark on Hank. “It’s likely Hank knows somebody’s looking into him. And we’re really far. We can’t let him know how far. Okay?”

  “You solve it, and you leave? I can’t not see you again.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have to come home with me. At least see the farm. See what we’ve done. See the herd. See Petey.”

  “I want to, but…” I wanted all that so badly, I could barely form a coherent sentence. Odin turned and walked backwards, eyeing me. He felt how deeply I wanted that.

  “I can’t never see you again,” Vanessa said.

  “We’re going to handle this problem, and we’ll see.”

  “Melinda—”

  I hooked an arm in hers. “I’d better not see you parked in a stu
pid place.”

  She struck a tear from her cheek. “No, but I probably parked you in.”

  In fact she had. I squeezed her tightly, telling myself it couldn’t be the last time I saw her—it just couldn’t.

  She got into her car, and Odin and I watched her drive off. He wrapped his arms around me from behind. We were silent for a while, there in the whispering wind.

  “Will I ever see her again?” I asked.

  “I can’t answer that.”

  “We have a lead, though. That’s something.”

  He kissed the top of my head. “That’s something.”

  We were silent for a bit longer. I had to lose her again, but maybe we could save her.

  “Good thing you held off on the whole bloodbath thingy. Nothing worse than a whole bloodbath for nothing.” It was a stupid joke. Nothing felt funny.

  “I won’t lie to you, Ice,” he said after a bit. “I very badly want to punish him. It’s gotten into my blood.”

  “It’s what you want to do to Mahfoud. He’s not Mahfoud.”

  “Your parents died because of what Hank did. He should feel guilty for what he did, but instead he keeps going at your family. He won’t stop. That girl could go to jail. You know she still could.”

  “We won’t let that happen,” I said.

  He didn’t respond. Because things didn’t always work out. Bad people did sometimes get away with bad things.

  Right there, some little part of me suddenly opened to Odin killing Hank. I forced the possibility out of my mind, but I couldn’t unthink it. Killing Hank after making him confess would solve a lot of problems, including saving my sister.

  “She’s awesome,” Odin said.

  “I know. I’m so glad you got to meet her.” I listened to the wind, imagining I could still hear her car, needing to hold onto some scrap of her. Needing for that not to have been goodbye.

  Chapter 11

  We reconvened at cupid central. Margie was out. I wanted to sit in the nice living room and talk over clues, but my guys couldn’t deal with the cupids and classical music-from-an-unseen-source combo.

  Banks invest billions in security every year, but it turns out the combination of cupids and classical music is the ultimate bank robber repellent. Who knew!

  The four of us trudged upstairs and squeezed onto my and Zeus’s bed. This bit about the cheese being perfectly fine had turned out to be a huge break.

  Thor and Zeus had been in Hank’s place, in the process of downloading copies of his calendar, when my text had come through.

  “We’d already looked at his deleted browser history,” Thor said. “We’d found some good stuff—he’d definitely been researching foodborne pathogens, and he’d definitely visited websites of academic research labs, but we thought it was just to study up on salmonella. We didn’t understand the significance of it until your text.”

  “Wait, you got into his deleted stuff on his computer?”

  “Nothing’s ever deleted on a computer,” Odin said. “The only way you can really ever delete anything is with a sledgehammer.”

  “Um…” I said. “Okay. So we have him researching foodborne illness before it happened.”

  “Yet it’s still circumstantial.” Thor pulled up shots he’d taken of the screen with his iPhone. “Check this shit out. These are research facilities across the region. But this one, Wilbur College of Medicine, was visited by Hank often and last. It seems like he was very interested in news of a break-in there—a break-in that happened a month before the cheese incident. Unsolved.”

  Odin smiled. “Or as I prefer to put it, not yet fucking-g solved.”

  “Whoa,” I said. “So we were right. That’s how he did the crime. He used stolen research strains of salmonella to infect the cheese.”

  Thor pulled me onto his lap. “He got the strains and infected the cheese, and then he probably let it incubate—probably put it in the sun.”

  “You think Hank did the break-in? Because I don’t see him breaking and entering. He’s a motherfucker, but to do an actual break-in…”

  “He probably hired somebody. Climbing in the window at your sisters’ farm is one thing, but breaking into a lab, he needed a seasoned criminal for that, and he probably paid a lot of money to that person. That’s who we need to find. We find him, and we turn him against Hank. According to the articles, there were no suspects, but they did get prints. Whoever pulled the job isn’t in the system. We need to get the prints and find the guy.”

  “How do we steal fingerprints from the police lab? You aren’t thinking about a B&E on the police, I hope.”

  “Nah,” Zeus said. “Our guys at Guvvey’s have a few dirty cops on the line. For enough money, they can put a call into the investigating department and say they’re experiencing a string of similar crimes and want to cross-check with this one. Cop shops share evidence all the time. No cop would pass up the chance to get a case cleared for free.”

  I nodded, feeling hopeful for the first time since reading that newsletter in that Roman hotel. We might just pull this off. “They can take away our detective agency, but they can’t keep us from being the most badass detectives ever.”

  Zeus smiled. “That’s right, bitches.”

  “But even if we get the prints,” I said, “how do we figure out who matches the prints? If the cops couldn’t find a match for the prints, how can we? God, this is kind of a hard case.”

  “Oh, it would be a hard case…” Thor crossed his legs, looking all suave, blue eyes sparkling, “if we weren’t the kind of detectives who are also criminals.”

  Zeus grinned. “According to Hank’s online banking account, which autofilled—we didn’t even need a password for it—he took out fifteen grand in cash just before the break-in. That’s about right for a B&E. His calendar had a lot of appointments in the days after that withdrawal. Most of them were businesses. We took down the ones that had numbers and called, and they seemed legit. But there were two really vague appointments. One just said ‘Chas 2 p.m.’ It was the only Chas the whole year.”

  “Wait—Chas, Chas. I know him. Chas Landers. He’s a handyman. He did handyman work for the bank!”

  “Could he do a B&E?”

  “Hmm. He’s a little sketchy, but…I don’t know. He’s kind of a lush—he would sometimes show up smelling of alcohol.”

  “Was he any good as a handyman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He could do it,” Zeus said. “The other appointment just said Z. It said ‘Z—noon.’”

  “Could it be Nancy Zietlow?” I asked.

  “We thought so, but there are only three Zs in the whole calendar—two before the B&E and one after, and then they stop. It doesn’t feel like Nancy.”

  Since I knew pretty much every family in town, and I was personally acquainted with most of the people who were under forty—at least the ones that had lived in the area two years back—we sat around running through Z first names of guys. Zach, Zeb, Zander. Nothing stuck out or at least no Z guys who were the types to do crimes for Hank. “If I had a few high school yearbooks…” I said.

  “Wait! I know what’ll jog Ice’s memory.” Thor grabbed a bottle of scotch and four little styrofoam cups from the coffee maker area and led us down to the guest living room, setting the bottle and cups onto the table. “During breakfast yesterday, I noticed these.” He went and crouched down at a far bookshelf. “Check this shit out.”

  I went over and crouched next to him. It was a row of about twenty phone books—white pages and yellow pages from the five little towns in this area. There were many sets of them stretching back a decade. “I thought it was funny that towns around here still even make phone books. What the fuck is that?”

  I pulled out the Baylortown ones. Hank lived in Baylortown, and people in Baylortown tended to know other people in Baylortown. I flopped them onto the coffee table.

  “We go through the Zs.” Zeus poured the scotch into the cups.

  Thor sat down on the couch wi
th the phone book. “I’ll read the Z names aloud to you. I think it’s better if you hear them.”

  “Okay.” I downed a cup and laid on the couch with my head in Odin’s lap and my shins in Thor’s lap. He propped the phone book on my calves and began to read the Zs of Baylortown.

  Zeus sat on the floor in front of us with the laptop open.

  I’d stop Thor now and then and ask for an address, because sometimes that helped me remember. There was a Ron Zimmerman who was a notorious bad kid, but then Zeus looked him up on Facebook and found out he was in the army.

  “Knowing Ron, that’s probably for the best,” I said.

  We Facebook-investigated a few more names, and the guys drank more scotch. Odin had his phone, and sometimes he’d get a Google satellite image of an address that sounded familiar so that I could see the house. Because sometimes you remember people from their houses. .

  It was kind of fun being the one who knew things for once. Usually I was five steps behind my guys. I let myself have another shot of scotch and then lay back down, half on Thor and half on Odin. We weren’t turning up any more suspects, but I had a feeling we were on the right path.

  I opened my mouth. “More scotch, please.”

  Odin dribbled some scotch into my mouth so that I wouldn’t have to sit up. Things were almost feeling normal.

  There was one guy, Mark Zebold, whose house had been a big party house in high school and who was a definite fuckup, but then Zeus looked him up on Facebook and discovered he was running a successful microbrewery in Green Bay.

  “Zebold? Are you shitting me? Show me his picture,” I said.

  Zeus turned to me and held the laptop up like an offering so that I could see Zebold’s face on the microbrewery about us page without lifting my head from Odin’s lap.

  Because I was feeling lazy like that. And a bit tipsy.

  “God, that is him! I can’t believe Mark Zebold pulled his shit together like that. Though I guess for our purposes it would be better if he was a loser.”

  “Just as well we rule him out,” Odin said, stroking my hair.

  I opened my mouth. “More, please.”

  Odin dribbled in a tiny bit more scotch while I tried not to laugh.