Your first instinct in usually right. Except, of course, those times when it isn’t.
I know she could have put the necklace on as she was driving home, or when she was walking up to her apartment. It was completely possible. But I didn’t think she would have. Not knowing what is was. Oh, I believed she’d keep it on her, so I’d be able to find her if I needed to, but I didn’t believe she’d ever wear it again. And I didn’t blame her, considering all it represented. I’m sure the lies and mistrust would be a lot to put aside, though hopefully some day she’d forgive me. But if it hadn’t been around her neck, why had it been broken? The only reason I could think of was to make it look like even more of a hit, the tracking device left behind.
Which would make sense if, as she believed, it was official. Then everyone at the crime scene would see it as an inside job, someone who knew what that meant and knew to leave it behind. But no one else knew. It was something I’d done to ease my conscience after breaking up with her. A way to keep an eye on her, and as a means to possibly be able to clear her name if anything ever came down. It wouldn’t be much evidence, but perhaps enough to cast doubt. I thought the risk had been worth it, though I honestly never thought she’d find out. And, I admit, if she hadn’t, and I’d been able to get back together with her, I never would have told her.
And it had been worth that risk, and even the consequence, since Sandra had been able to evade those following her so many times. We’d lost track of her a lot the last few days, leading others in the department to believe she was involved in whatever shady dealings were going down. But I knew where she’d been, and it didn’t add up. I went back to my office and sat at my desk, running through all the places I know she’d been. The one that kept popping up with a little red flag was the vamp club. She’d been there the night it burned down, the night Robert and John had been sent in to retrieve the blood. The night they screwed up, getting John, the superior, busted back down to background-check duty. The night they brought back the wrong blood. Blood. The dreams, the blood and the freezer. My subconscious hadn’t even been subtle in trying to tell me something.
With a groan my head hit the desk. It couldn’t be that simple. She couldn’t have. I refused to get my hopes up. I looked back through the evidence, shuffling the bits of the file and combining it with the things in my head that only I knew. The places she’d been when they’d lost track of her. And there was that brief stop on the way back to her apartment the other night…
I grabbed my coat and headed out the door, yelling a quick, “I need decent coffee, I’ll be back,” as I went. No one batted an eyelash at that, as the sludge they served in the break room had more in common with used motor oil than with coffee. You only drank that if you were desperate, or it was late at night and nothing else was available. Late. That was the key. She’d driven home very late at night. There couldn’t have been many places to stop. I retraced the route, keeping my eyes open. The tracking device wasn’t exact, but it gave me a fairly good idea within a block’s radius where she’d momentarily stopped. And there, smack-dab in the middle of that block, was an all-night big-box store. A place you could buy any number of things in a single trip. Including men’s clothing and rubber gloves.
I pulled into the parking lot, not sure how to approach this. I couldn’t leave a trail, because if anyone at the agency found it, all her hard work would be for nothing. But I had to know. Suddenly, I had an idea. Not a good idea, probably, but maybe just good enough to work. I whipped out my laptop and quickly hacked into the store’s credit card processing computer. Because of the need to approve the cards, a lot of information was flying around and available if you knew how to use it. This store’s security was particularly lax, and I was even able to hook into their live video feed. I couldn’t get any older information, though, so I had to take it to the next step. I poked around the digital info until I found the name of their computer security company. I slid into a logo-ed button-down shirt and went in to talk to the manager.
He wasn’t happy to see the list of credit card numbers I’d pulled off of his under-secured network, and he quickly agreed to my offer of giving his store security an overhaul. The company they were using had been recently highlighted in a new story about identity theft, and while the manager had meant to upgrade the security, he’d never gotten around to it. I gave him my schpeal about being a small, one-man operation, flourished my credentials (all those jobs and training courses finally paid off), and named a decent price, and he was more than willing to hire me.
To be fair, I did get him a very good system upgrade. Very few people would be able to hack into the system I installed. And I made a pretty penny on the side. But most importantly, I got unfettered and untraceable access to the records. I narrowed down the video tapes to the hours or so she would have been there, and saw her checking out. I brought up the register she checked out through and found what I believed to be her purchase. If it hadn’t been clear enough on the video, there it was in black and white. Men’s sneakers, jeans, flannel shirt, trash bags and rubber gloves. It was then I allowed myself to hope. She’d managed to fake her own death better than we had. Well enough that, as far as everyone working for the agency, she was dead. Even without a body.
It was the lack of the body that sold it, though it seems counter-intuitive. It had been brilliant. And if I hadn’t known about her visit to the vamp club, or her stop on the way home, there’s no way I would have been able to put the pieces together. I headed back to the office, happier than I’d been in a long time and trying not to show it. I had two objectives now: find out who was behind it, and make sure Sandra stayed dead. I had the power to confuse any investigation, and the more I put forth the belief that she was still alive, the harder they would try to prove to me that she was dead. And in the end, they’d build a cast-iron case for it and they’d believe it, regardless of their initial doubts.
I swung by my boss’s office on the way in. He knew about my computer side-business, and that I’d kept it up since the assignment three years ago. I wouldn’t go so far as to say he approved, but it kept me busy in my spare time and the extra income kept me from pushing too hard for a raise, so he tolerated it. As long as it didn’t interfere with my official duties.
“Yo, Nate, just wanted to let you know I worked a computer job this afternoon.” I took a deep breath. “It just… helped to clear my head, and take my mind off…” I trailed off convincingly.
He nodded, looking as sympathetic as I’d ever seen him look. That wasn’t saying much, since he had the empathy of a rock, but it was touching. “I completely understand. If you want to take time off, or get re-assigned, I’d understand.”
That threw me. We’d all swear Nate would make you work a case if your own grandmother had been killed, and here he was, willing to excuse his best (I’m not being vain, it was simply true) investigator because the victim was an ex-girlfriend? That seemed out of character.
“No, I feel like… I feel like I owe it to Sandra to find her killer. If, in fact, she’s actually dead.”
Nate gave me a pitying look. “She is, and while I have no doubt you’d manage to do a fine job, if you need off, Mike is more than ready to step in.”
I nearly choked. Mike? Nate’s pet lackey, Mike had the intelligence of a turnip. He was good at following orders, but not much else. Anything Mike was in charge of, Nate was directing. And that set off alarm bells in my head. If the problem was at the top, it would make it a lot harder to stop, and almost impossible to prove. I’d like to say I’d always suspected Nate of being up to something, but the truth is, up to that point, it’d never crossed my mind.
Nate was dry, humorless, and an asshole, but he never came across as corrupt. Good criminals usually have a smidgeon of creativity to help wiggle out of tough situations. Even the most meticulous plan goes awry now and then, and if you can’t roll with the punches, you’ll sink. And it was universally joked that if it wasn’t written down as standard operating procedure in some manual, Nate didn’t do it.
“No, no, I’m good. I intend to get to the bottom of this. If she’s dead,” I emphasized the word ‘if’. “If she’s dead, I’ll catch the bastard that did it.”
It might have been my imagination, but I fancied I saw a glimmer of fear in Nate’s eyes.
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