by Diane Kelly
I checked in with the pretty, honey-haired clerk and she retrieved my dress, which was zipped up inside a fancy vinyl bag for protection. She led me to a sizable dressing room and stepped inside with me. I felt like a classy woman from the Elizabethan era, with a lady-in-waiting to tighten my corset and tell me how beautiful I looked.
As the clerk hung the dress on a hook and unzipped the bag, I removed my blazer and draped it over the back of a chair. When the young woman turned around, she gasped and her hands instinctively went up.
I followed her wide-eyed gaze to the holster at my waist. As a fed, I was around guns all the time and I’d forgotten how disconcerting they could be to civilians, especially when they were brandished unexpectedly. I raised my hands, too, in a calming gesture. “It’s okay. I’m in federal law enforcement.”
She put a hand to her chest. “I didn’t mean to overreact. It just surprised me is all.”
Still, I could tell the sight of the gun was making her uncomfortable. I removed the gun from the holster, unzipped my purse, and slipped it into the special concealed-carry compartment inside. Out of sight, out of mind, right? Maybe now she could relax and focus on me instead of my weapon.
I removed the rest of my clothing, draping it over the chair. Once I’d stripped down to my bra and underwear, the clerk held the dress up for me to wriggle into. I fought a sigh. The dress was so pretty, so perfect. I couldn’t wait for Nick to see me in it!
As she carefully slid the wedding gown over my head, she asked, “What did you decide about the lace gloves?”
I eased my head out of the neck hole. “Gloves?” I had absolutely no idea what she was talking about.
“The lace gloves,” she repeated as she gently tugged the dress into place over my hips. “When you called the other day to check on your appointment I suggested that lace gloves might be a nice accessory for this dress.” She set my shoes out in front of me and held out a hand to help me balance while I slid my feet into them. “We have some gloves that match the lace on the dress perfectly. You said you’d think about it.”
“That wasn’t me,” I said. “I didn’t call.” She must’ve gotten me confused with another bride, maybe one who’d purchased the same dress as me.
The clerk looked befuddled, but she didn’t belabor the point. “Well, I can show them to you now, if you’re interested. See what you think.”
“Why not?”
She opened a small, flat box that had been resting on a side table in the room and showed me the contents. Inside was a pair of lace gloves with ruffles around the wrists. While they’d merely get in the way during the ceremony, when Nick would need to have access to my ring finger to put the wedding ring on it, they would definitely be an unusual and pretty accompaniment for the dress later in the evening at the reception.
I plucked them out of the box one by one, slid my hands into them, and looked into the three-way mirror, turning to and fro to admire myself in the dress and gloves. “They add a nice touch, don’t they?”
She smiled at me in the mirror. “Told you so.”
I checked the price tag. The gloves weren’t cheap, but they weren’t outrageous, either. “I’ll take them.”
“Wonderful.”
We carefully checked the hem and the places where the dress had been taken in, namely the bust. Yep, I’m a 32A. Some girls get breasts, others get brains. I was the latter type. Of course some girls got both, but we hate those girls, so let’s not talk about them.
The clerk helped me out of the dress and, while she carefully bagged it up again, I changed back into my work clothes. When she carried the dress out of the fitting area for me, Eddie stood. “Can I help with that?”
“That would be great, Eddie. Thanks.” As short as I was, I’d have to hold the hanger over my head to keep the dress from dragging on the ground. But as tall as Eddie was, he could easily handle it.
I followed the clerk to the cash register and handed her my Neiman Marcus card to pay for the gloves. My parents had already paid for the dress and shoes, God bless ’em. They’d probably taken out a second mortgage or sold a kidney to do it, but that’s the kind of parents they were.
Once I’d signed on the electronic pad, the clerk handed me a bag with my shoes and the boxed gloves tucked inside.
I took the bag from her, as well as the receipt. “Thanks.”
“Enjoy your wedding day, and best wishes!” she called after me.
Eddie and I headed back to the escalator to ride down to the first floor. I stepped onto the moving stairs, and he stepped on a second or two later, ending up on the step two back from me. As we rode down, my eyes spotted a tall man standing near the bottom of the escalator. He wore a cowboy hat that shielded his face from view and was looking down at his phone, using a finger to scroll across the screen. While he didn’t appear all that unusual, when he glanced up at me and I noticed he was wearing dark sunglasses—inside—my nerves went on full alert. He’s the same guy from the stadium, isn’t he? He reached into the front pocket of his jeans and pulled something out. I saw a glint of metal.
Holy crap! Is that a knife in his hand? Or just some spare change?
The escalator continued to carry me toward what felt with each inch to be a more certain doom. My heart thudding in terror, I turned and tried to run up the escalator, but Eddie and my wedding dress blocked my way.
Instinct told me to move and move fast. It told me that by the time I dug my gun out of my purse, the man would have slashed me into bloody, fleshy strips. It also told me to grab the rubber railing in both hands and fling myself over it.
So I did.
Stupid instinct. Didn’t it know the cosmetics counters lay below? Surely I’d crash through a glass countertop and be sliced to death with the shards. Either way, it looked like my manner of death would be similar.
I looked down as I plummeted to the first floor. A makeup stool barreled toward me. Or rather, I fell at it. No doubt about it, we were destined to collide. I did the only thing I could think of. I spread my legs.
An instant later I landed backward on the stool, spread-eagled, momentum causing my torso to flop over the low back. WHOMP!
Now I know why trapeze artists never work without a net.
The woman standing behind the makeup counter shrieked in surprise and flailed her arms. I shrieked too, though my cry was in pain. I felt like I’d been punched in the gut, like my pelvic bone had shattered.
Eddie hollered from above me, looking over the railing as the escalator continued to bring him down to the first floor. “What the hell, Tara? Are you okay?”
“No!” I squeaked out. I think I broke my vagina!
My wedding dress swinging out behind him, Eddie ran down the rest of the steps and circled around to me. “Are you crazy? Why did you jump?”
I gestured in the direction of the man, though I couldn’t see him from where I sat atop my splintered nether regions. All I saw now were sparklers burning at the edge of my vision as if it were the Fourth of July. “There was … a man!” I grunted out through the agony. “At the bottom … of the escalator!” I gasped again for air. “He had a knife!”
“A knife?” Eddie threw my dress onto the counter and sprinted back in the direction from which he’d come.
At that point, I had no fear. Heck, I almost hoped the man would come and put a quick end to me, put me out of my misery.
Slowly and gingerly, taking a deep breath against the pain, I eased myself back off the stool and stood bent over with my legs wide apart as the cosmetic clerk frantically paged for assistance. “Security to the Lancôme counter! Security to the Lancôme counter!”
chapter twenty-two
Private Screening
The saleswoman’s hysterical voice brought three well-muscled security guards running. When they stormed up, she gestured to me. “This woman just jumped over the side of the escalator!”
The men looked my way and stepped over, forming a ring around me to prevent my escape, questioning
looks on their faces. They probably thought I was a shoplifter who’d been spotted and was trying to make a desperate escape.
“I’m federal law enforcement,” I spat through teeth gritted against the pain. “I’ve received death threats recently. There was a suspicious-looking man at the bottom of he escalator.” I paused a moment to breathe. “I think he had a knife.”
The saleswoman’s eyes widened again.
“What did the guy look like?” asked one of the men, a burly guy with a balding head and an electronic earpiece.
“Caucasian,” I said. “He was wearing a cowboy hat and sunglasses.”
“Clothing?” he asked.
I couldn’t remember, dammit! My focus had been on the metal object in his hand. “I don’t know.”
“Was he alone?”
“As far as I could tell.”
Two of the men rushed off to look for the guy, while one stayed with me and the saleswoman.
Eddie returned a few minutes later. “I didn’t see anyone in a cowboy hat,” he said. “I checked both floors.”
“He probably bolted,” the security guard said. “Ran out the doors.”
Slowly, I straightened up, grimacing against the pain, wooziness causing me to sway. Eddie reached out a hand and grabbed my upper arm, stabilizing me until the sensation passed.
Now that I was upright, I looked up and scanned the ceiling and walls for security cameras. Retail stores, especially upscale ones, tended to have a lot of them. It helped deter shoplifting and provided evidence of the crimes for use in court later. My eyes spotted several cameras that could have picked up the man who’d been waiting at the bottom of the escalator. “Can we see the security-camera footage?” I asked the guard.
“Of course.” He jerked his head to indicate the far corner. “Let’s go back to my office.”
Eddie lifted my wedding dress off the counter as we went to follow the man. The cover was spotted with colored powder from the eye shadow testers displayed underneath.
The saleswoman took one look and said, “I’ll call up to the bridal department. They’ll get you another bag.”
“Thanks.” The last thing I wanted was my beautiful dress getting stained with makeup.
We followed the man to the security office in the back corner. Inside, he took a seat behind his desk. Eddie sat in one of the other chairs, while I remained standing. My crotch hurt too much for me to risk putting any pressure on it.
The man worked his computer keyboard and mouse and pulled up video footage. He turned the monitor so that we could all watch it at once and started the feed from one of the cameras.
This particular camera was angled to look down the escalator. As we watched the screen, we saw Eddie and me step onto the moving staircase, our backs to the camera. Down below, the man in the hat sauntered up and stopped, looking down at his phone. We could tell more about him now. He wore jeans and a basic white button-down shirt. Typical attire that would blend in, make him easy to overlook.
He held the phone in his left hand and fingered the screen with his right. As we watched, the hand that had been working the phone’s screen went into his pocket. It was clear he clutched something shiny in his hand when he pulled it out of his pocket, but the camera was too far away for us to tell what it was. A tall, thin, dark-haired woman in a salmon-pink dress with a stand-up collar stepped onto the escalator behind me and Eddie, partially blocking the view of the man and me. A couple of seconds later, there I went, up and over the side of the escalator, falling out of sight. The man’s head whipped to the side as he watched my improvised acrobatic stunt. But instead of coming to my aid or running over to gawk like most people might do, he instead stalked quickly off.
The security guard was able to track the man’s movements through the store by switching to different camera feeds. The guy took long, quick strides out the door, moving fast, but not so fast as to garner attention. On the screen, we saw a security guard bolt past him, no doubt responding to the cosmetic clerk’s frantic call for help. The outside camera showed the man in the cowboy hat hurrying off down the street and out of sight.
“Can you go back earlier?” I asked the guard. “To when the man entered the store?”
“It’ll take me a minute or two,” he said, “but I can do it.” He swiveled the screen back his way and worked his computer, leaning in to consult the screen. When he’d found the footage, he turned the screen in our direction again.
The monitor showed a view of the sidewalk outside. The time stamp in the bottom corner told me the recording had been taken two hours earlier, well before Eddie and I arrived for my appointment. As we watched, the man in the cowboy hat walked up and entered the store, keeping his sunglasses on. He veered toward the men’s department, which sat near the bottom of the escalator. After sorting through some shirts on a rack, he pulled his phone from the chest pocket of his shirt, as if he’d received a call. He listened for a moment, then looked up the escalator as if eyeing something at the top. He ended the call shortly thereafter and slid the phone back into his chest pocket.
He spent the next hour and a half meandering around the men’s department, not trying anything on and not buying anything. If I hadn’t been sure whether he’d been after me before, I was now. He wasn’t shopping. He was lying in wait.
To move things along, the security guard sped up the feed so that the picture moved at ten times normal speed. We watched until the camera showed him pulling his phone out of his pocket once again. He didn’t put the phone to his ear this time. Rather, he appeared to be reading a text. Phone in hand, he stepped into place near the bottom of the escalator. Once again we saw the footage of him playing with his phone, pulling something shiny from the pocket of his jeans, and stalking off after witnessing my crazy leap over the side of the escalator.
Eddie pointed at the screen. “It seemed like he looked up at someone when he got that first phone call. Can we see the footage from the second floor?”
The guard once again played around until he found what we were looking for. Sure enough, at the same time the man had looked up from downstairs, the woman in the pink dress had stopped at the railing next to the escalator entrance on the second floor. She, too, was on her cell phone. It was difficult to tell much about her face with the phone and upright collar obscuring her cheeks and her long, loose bangs lying low across her brows. But there was one thing we could tell for certain. The woman sported a pair of watermelons on her chest, just like Leah Dodd, the stripper Noah Fischer had an affair with.
She looked down the moving staircase, no doubt at the man, though he was offscreen. She strolled off a few seconds later. She’s the woman I saw at the stadium, isn’t she? Something told me she was.
We watched the rest of the footage. Just as the man had roamed aimlessly around the first floor, she milled about the second, picking up and examining stemware in the china department, checking out the towels, waving off every offer of assistance from the sales staff. Just browsing.
As the time for my appointment drew closer, she slunk into the bridal department, positioning herself behind a pillar. No wonder Eddie and I hadn’t seen her.
The video showed me and Eddie arriving, my partner flopping down in the chair to wait. The guard sped things up until I exited the fitting area and went to the register to pay for my gloves. On the screen, the woman whipped out her phone and sent a text. It had to be the one the man waiting downstairs had received.
As Eddie and I stepped onto the escalator, she fell in behind us. When I went up and over the railing a moment later, she gave herself away. She waved her arm, signaling to the man in the cowboy hat to get the hell out of Dodge.
Yep, the two were together and that shiny metal object in the man’s hand had to be a knife, just as I’d thought. They must be the same two people who’d been in the silver coupe that had followed me and Nick to the gas station, the same couple I’d seen putting mustard on their pretzels at the Cowboys game.
But who the hell are th
ey?
“Can you zoom in on the woman’s face?” I asked the security guard.
When he did, the screen went blurry, her features fuzzy. Dang it! Was she Leah Dodd wearing a dark wig to cover her reddish hair? The one time I’d seen the woman in person was a mere glimpse from across a parking lot last year, and it had been nighttime, too dark to tell much. Other than that, I’d only seen her in photographs. If I could have gotten a closer look or if the resolution of the security-camera footage had been better, maybe I could say for sure. But as it was, I was uncertain. After all, she wasn’t the only woman with large breasts, and without a clear image of her face I couldn’t verify whether this woman had Leah’s telltale lip mole.
I turned to Eddie. “Do either of those people look familiar to you?”
He shook his head. “Can’t say that they do.”
“Can you save those clips to a jump drive for me?” I asked the security guard.
“Sure thing.” He seemed happy to oblige, glad to be part of this investigation. An attempted murder in the store had to be much more exciting than the routine shoplifters he usually dealt with.
When he finished, he handed us the drive. “We’ll keep an eye out for those two. I’ll let you know if I see them again.”
“I’d appreciate that.” I handed him my business card.
After rounding up my dress, safely zipped inside a clean bag, we headed outside. Every step was excruciating, sending sharp pains through my midsection. “Ouch! Ouch! Ouch!”
Eddie walked and I ouched down the sidewalk to the car. We stopped a few feet away.
“You think it’s safe to drive?” I asked.
Eddie looked around. While there was still a number of cars and people in the area, it was a much smaller crowd downtown than during the morning and evening commute times. Besides, in my experience, people didn’t pay much attention to what anyone else was doing. Humans also had a tendency to normalize things. Even if anyone had noticed someone sliding something under a car, the person’s first thought probably wouldn’t have been, He’s planting a bomb. It would have been something like, He must be checking his tires or He must have dropped some loose change. Heck, normalization was one of the reasons people failed to react immediately in dangerous situations, such as those involving an active shooter. When people heard the pop-pop-pop, they convinced themselves the sound couldn’t be gunfire, that it must be something else, something benign, like popcorn or fireworks.