I twisted my hand as far as I could, though the gap was too small for me to angle my wrist just like I wanted to, and I tried to run my thumb over Jesse’s lower lip. Mostly I poked him in the chin, I think.
“Okay,” I promised. “I’m getting you out of there.”
16
ALEX’S COLOR WAS ONLY slightly elevated when I got done telling him everything. Even about the note I’d wrapped around a wad of gum so I could throw it away. He nodded very slowly, as if he was working one of his copier-repair flowcharts. Step 1 branching into 1a, 1b, 1c, and so on, as he tried to figure out every possible way the fiasco could end. “Okay,” he said, finally. “But if we figure out your boyfriend’s the only one who could’ve possibly done it, I’m not gonna lie to Kathy and tell her otherwise just for your sake. Got it?”
My boyfriend? I managed to keep from smiling by forcing my face into an expression of grim concentration.
Alex and I both suited up in khaki, him with the backup pepper spray and me with the backup flashlight so that neither of us looked suspicious with totally empty holsters, and we took a long, winding route to the Center.
There was a single cruiser outside the east entrance. My blood ran cold. “This is crazy,” I said. “We’re gonna get caught.”
“We’re not gonna get caught. One car means there’s only two cops here. Until they call in the state police or the feds, they haven’t got enough staff to have the Center crawling with uniforms like they did yesterday. Even if they stop arresting drunk frat boys and give up manning the speed trap at Ridge Road, there’s still not nearly enough of ’em to keep an eye on this place.” He whacked me in the shoulder—I’m guessing in a way that was meant to be reassuring. “Besides, no one knows their way around this building like you.”
“It’s not exactly a labyrinth, y’know.”
“But you’ve got the key that’ll keep the alarm from going off if we sneak up the emergency exit stairs.”
I did. I had the keys that would get us everywhere.
We wrapped our shoes in plastic wrap, pulled on some latex gloves from Alex’s toolbox, and approached the back west entrance. Our feet crinkled with every step we took. I fished out two keys from my packed keyring: the big, sturdy key to the emergency exit, and the small key that would deactivate the alarm panel. I was overtired, my nerves were frayed, and I wasn’t sure when I’d last eaten anything with nutritional value. While I wasn’t in the habit of chatting with George, I did ask him to keep quiet when I was messing with the locks. I had thirty seconds to deactivate the alarm before it would alert three square blocks of New Faris to our location.
I unlocked the outer door. The lock was stiff. It took some jimmying to finesse it open. Alex slipped in between me and the alarm panel. “Move it,” I whispered.
He looked wounded. “What?”
I gave him a shove and pointed to the dusty blinking panel, and he backed away from it like it was a diet soda.
Calm down, I told myself. Deliberate, controlled movements. Thirty seconds is actually a good stretch of time to fit the key into the—
The bottom of one of the other keys snagged my latex glove, and the whole thing jingled to the floor, landing in a big, bristly heap of brass.
“Shit!” Alex loud-whispered. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.”
“This would be a lot easier without you pogoing around.”
Alex clamped his arms to his sides and stopped jumping.
I held up my keyring and let it fall open. The key to the panel was short, like the keys to the rare artifact cases. Rock River beaver, Driftless Region Geodes....
“Oh shit,” he breathed, like it was too difficult to control both his jumping and his voice.
Finally, the control panel key. My hands were a bit clumsy in the latex, but if I was good for anything, it was that I knew my way around a keyring. I plucked out the key and the others shifted away. I put the key in the lock and turned. Three seconds to spare.
“Oh shit,” Alex said gratefully.
“What’ll they do if they catch us?” I whispered. Not that I thought anyone inside the Center could hear me from the back stairwell, but I didn’t want to take any chances.
“They won’t catch us.”
“But what if they do?”
“A slap on the wrist. Don’t worry about it.”
Does anyone ever worry less just because they’re told not to? “Right, that’s why you were just doing the ‘Oh Shit’ dance. What if you got Kathy in trouble?”
“We’re smarter than that. Stop thinking about getting caught and start thinking about where we should start. The basement?”
Why did I have to be the one to figure out where to go? Maybe, technically, I was security. But in reality, I didn’t feel like I knew anything beyond the bare minimum—locking and unlocking, and checking the perimeter with my flashlight. Jesse’d been right—I didn’t see me as a security guard either. God damn it. Jesse, sitting in that stupid boardroom waiting for Reggie Stillwell to come back from his fishing trip, or the Mall of America, or wherever the hell he was.
“Web? Are you still here?”
“Yeah, I’m here. I’m just thinking.” About everything except who killed Luke. I told myself to focus. The basement? Logical, if we were to start there and sweep our way up. But if the golf club had been dangling from the grate, it must have meant the killer ditched the club from the first floor, probably fast, on their way to the parking lot. “I don’t think there’s anything to find in the basement.”
“Okay. Where, then?”
“Second floor. That’s where he was killed, that’s where he was found. If there’s anything left to see, that’s where it’ll be.”
Alex started up the stairs. “So that guy Jesse. Is he really a snake handler?”
“He was kidding.” Probably.
“Too bad. That’d be wicked.”
We walked up the stairs, and I found the key that would let us in from the stairwell. While those doors didn’t lock from the inside of the building, since being emergency stairs, you couldn’t keep people out, it was perfectly legal to lock them from the stairwell side and keep people in. Alex held his finger to his lips (as if I didn’t know to stay quiet) then slowly, excruciatingly slowly, eased open the door. The second-floor lights were on, but other than the gentle ripples in the sluggish fountain, there was no movement. We stood there stock still for at least a minute, but there was no sound other than the blurble of the fountain and our slow, measured breathing. “Okay,” Alex whispered. “Coast is—”
Alex’s cell phone rang, cutting through the silence like a tornado siren.
We ducked back into the stairwell, and Alex slammed the door behind us. “Well, if they didn’t hear the phone,” I said, “I’m sure they heard the door.”
Alex gave me a casual “fuck you” look, then held up an index finger for me to wait a second, and took the call. “Hello? Hey. Oh, well I don’t know. I’m not at home.” His brow furrowed. “Shopping. Uh-huh. Looking at grills.”
Grills? Was the home center even open this late?
“Right, they’re on sale. Yup. I’m sure he’s fine. He’s perfectly capable of walking home from the station.” He rolled his eyes at me. “No, I’m not gonna go see if I can find him...well, maybe he let the battery run out...even if they did sell batteries here, I don’t know what model his phone is. Kath, would you stop? Leave a message and I’m sure he’ll call as soon as he gets...yeah, okay. So, I’m just gonna—”
I pointed at the phone and mouthed “Bobby.”
“—uh, so you guys figure out who did it yet, or what?”
I heard Kathy’s voice loud and clear saying, “You know I can’t talk about that here.”
“Well, what’s Bobby doing? He’s gotta be flipping out right about now.”
Kathy’s voice dropped down to a semi-audible rise and fall of words.
“Uh-huh. Well, uh, maybe I will go look for Web, and then I can ask him. The grill I want is out of stock.
Okay-love you-goodbye.” He hung up, looked at me big-eyed, and said, “Bobby’s on his way back here. If we’re gonna look at those offices, we’ve got to do it right now.”
We opened the stairwell door and listened hard for footsteps, but only for a few seconds this time. “This is ridiculous,” I whispered. “We have nothing to gain by poking around for two minutes then running away again. All we’ll do is get ourselves caught.”
The sound of two voices wended up the weird acoustics of the sycamore stairwell. The cops were on the first floor. Hopefully they’d stay there.
We skirted the Denizens of the Sky and came around to the Admin door. It was ajar. Alex pressed his ear to the crack, then took a deep breath and hauled the door open. “And Bobby wants to talk to you,” he whispered.
“What’d I do now?”
“Nothing—he just thinks you might know why no one smelled the pepper spray. Pepper stinks, right? And if it got sprayed in an enclosed area like this....”
I was marginally familiar with pepper spray. I’d trained all of fifteen minutes—a year and a half ago—to minimize the likelihood of shooting myself in the face with it. “No, it doesn’t stink. It’s made of red pepper, not black.” I closed the Admin door behind us so we could stop whispering. “I mean, it’s got a definite smell, but it’s mostly the propellant. Kind of like lighter fluid.”
I eased open the bathroom door and Alex and I peeked in to see if it was crisscrossed with crime scene tape. It wasn’t—but I imagine whoever gathered the evidence hadn’t seen that much blood residue in a while.
As I closed the door, a voice made me jump half-out of my skin. “Mr. Weber! You startled me.”
Bridget.
I think if Marvin had been the one to come back and look around, he’d be dead on the floor of a coronary. But it was me and Alex, and we both had a few years before we were in danger of being startled to death.
And even luckier, Bridget didn’t seem surprised to see me. “I’m sorry to be the one to tell you, but it’s better to do it in person. The board of directors decided the Center will be closing temporarily, and so all of us—including me—are laid off. It’s indefinite, so we should start the unemployment paperwork right away....”
Her gaze fell to my gloved hand, and then my plastic wrapped foot. She looked at me as if she’d just realized I wasn’t there for anything work-related.
I saw that the door to her office was shut, but the door to Luke’s office was open. I looked at her and realized that she wasn’t on the clock, either.
“What were you doing in there?” I asked.
“I don’t know what you’re impl—”
“You. You made the popcorn.”
Her bland, neutral expression slipped, and I caught a glimpse of fear in her eyes. Only for a second, though, because she turned and dove for the Admin door before I even registered that I was right about the popcorn.
Why on earth would she run from me over the stupid popcorn? She knew something, that was for sure, given the look I’d seen fleeting across her face. But what if it was more than that? What if she’d actually done something?
My gut feeling was that she wouldn’t be running unless she had a damn good reason. If I accused her of killing Luke and I was wrong, though, I might as well kiss my health insurance goodbye. I hesitated, but when I remembered the way Jesse had looked at me through the window at the police station, I said, “Fuck it.” And I chased.
Alex and I both scrambled to get around the lunchroom table. Alex would normally have beaten me to the door, since he was in great shape, while I’d scaled back my activity level to sedate walking once George started visiting me with seizures. But Alex’s mental flowchart had already taken him past the “chase the running person” option to the “call the cops” solution, and he was trying to take off after Bridget, maneuver around the table, and dial his phone all at the same time.
After only a brief hesitation to assess that I wouldn’t collide with Alex, I darted the other way around the table and out the Admin door. Which way? The second floor was suddenly as full of hiding places as ever, and the motion of the gasping fountain drew my eyes toward the Denizens of the Sky. There was nowhere for her to run along that wall. The atrium? Nope, all clear. So, where?
A familiar noise gave her away, the rubber-on-hardwood basketball court sound of her sensible shoes on the floor—which was then promptly drowned out by Alex, who’d burst through the door behind me, yelling on his cell.
“Kath? Don’t talk, just listen. Radio the cops at the Center and tell them to seal the exits. Right now.”
Good plan in theory, but if the cops were near the main entrance, they’d never make it to the emergency exit in time. Bridget was already sprinting toward the stairs on the opposite face of the building.
“Come on,” I called back to him, and I barreled toward the emergency exit. Maybe I felt responsible, because if Alex and I hadn’t been messing around back there, Bridget would have set off the alarms by trying to sneak out that way. Or maybe I was a better security guard than I thought, and when I saw someone running, I felt obligated to at least attempt to chase her.
And, of course, there was the popcorn. I couldn’t just let that go.
Bridget had shorter legs than I did, but she also had a few seconds of a head start. The door to the emergency stairwell slammed shut behind her as I rounded the bird wall, and while I ran full out to catch up, I prayed the plastic wrap that made weird, sticky, raspy sounds against the floor wouldn’t come unwound from my shoes and trip me. The squeaky plastic sounds multiplied, and Alex, with his wrapped feet, overtook me. He bodyslammed the door, tore it open, and bellowed, “Go high.”
I wanted to balk—but a dozen summers of touch football had trained me otherwise. In all likelihood, Bridget was heading down toward the parking lot to hop in her hybrid and drive as far as it would take her—pretty far, without stopping for gas, either. But things were happening so fast, when Alex called a play, I didn’t question it; I ran.
He was faster than me, I told myself as I pounded up to the third floor. And stronger. And it wasn’t as if my security training actually included anything like Jujitsu or Tai Kwan Do, or even knowing how to grab someone so they couldn’t knee me in the balls.
The plastic wrap on my shoes dragged against the industrial rubberized treads of the stairs as I took them two by two, and swung around another banister. My hand was on my key ring to get me into the third floor—obviously, not thinking too straight, since a locked door was as far as I’d need to go before I could head down to Alex and catch the tail end of the action in the parking lot...and then I rounded a second banister and found Bridget hauling at the locked door for the third floor. Her eyes met mine, then dropped to the keyring in my hand. “Unlock it,” she demanded.
“Tell me what’s going on.”
“Unlock the door. Now.” Her voice trembled. She’d never needed to tell me to do anything twice.
“Why would you make that sick popcorn on the morning the MAHPS guy was coming? Were you actually trying to screw up the grant? You were the one who was always complaining about the stink....”
The stink.
Easily strong enough to cover the telltale smell of pepper spray propellant.
As unlikely as it seemed, I was starting to really believe she’d actually swung that golf club. Why? I had no idea. I couldn’t seem to move past the part where she left Jesse Ray holding the bag—and if Alex thought I was pissed off about Luke trying to cash in on Jesse’s insurance, he hadn’t seen the half of it.
If I had my own Pepper Shot I would have sprayed first, filled myself in on the details later. Unfortunately, my main canister was somewhere in an evidence locker, and my backup was hanging from Alex’s belt. I could hardly try to take her down unarmed—for all I knew, a good whack to the head would be the end of me. And if Bridget was the killer, she had no problem aiming for the cranium.
But she didn’t know I knew, right? Maybe I could stall her until
Bobby and his pals showed up. To buy myself a few more seconds, I played along, pulled my keyring and began to sift through the keys. Bridget said, “I knew you’d come through for me.” Really? Either she thought I was incredibly loyal, or remarkably amoral. Probably the second thing.
I recognized the shape of the key I was looking for right away, and deliberately picked a different one to jam into the keyhole and wiggle.
“Come on...” she whispered.
I rattled the key as if I really thought I’d had it right, then jammed another wrong key in. My hands were still surprisingly steady. “What happened?” I asked her as I wrestled with the key. The jingle of the keyring nearly drowned out our frantic whispers. “What’d Luke do to make you—”
“What do you mean? Weren’t you the one who left that letter in my office? Of course you were. You were the only one here. And it’s not as if anyone else cares about the Center.”
“You saw that?” I asked. Because I already knew George enjoyed rifling through Luke’s garbage, and maybe, if I got her to say a little more, I could figure out what the hell she was talking about. The tactic usually worked out for me when I blacked out at the dinner table, anyway.
“I’m glad you confided in me, Web.” She called me Web, not Dan. She even patted my shoulder as I picked out another key and fumbled it into the lock. “And I’m so, so sorry Mr. Jones was caught up in all of this. I never meant for that to happen.”
So she knew damn well Jesse was taking the rap. My face felt hot; it was probably redder than the cardinals in the Denizens of the Sky. I couldn’t control that, but I kept my voice passably calm. “So clear him. Tell Bobby what happened.”
“He won’t understand—not like you. It’s about family.”
Family? What family? Other than a painted turtle, Bridget lived alone. My pathetic brain scrambled to piece together what I knew. A letter. Family. Was it something to do with the benefit package? Because I was pretty sure Luke couldn’t have cut Bridget’s health insurance without losing his own.
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