All Sales Fatal (2 page)

“I’ll be there in five,” I said, retrieving the wagon and heading toward Jen’s Toy Store with it trundling behind me. My brother Clint and I had had a wagon just like it when
we were kids. I still had a half-moon-shaped scar under my chin from when he’d lost control of the wagon with me in it and I’d careened down our steep driveway before crashing into a neighbor’s Lamborghini parked at the curb. I’d gone flying and scraped my chin on the asphalt. The cut had needed six stitches. What had I been—three, four? I ran my index finger over the scar as the Segway purred smoothly over Fernglen’s tiled halls. The tiny ridge of tissue was nothing compared to the massive scarring around my knee, the result of an IED that had killed two of my unit in Afghanistan and gotten me medically retired from the military.

After leaving the wagon with the grateful toy store manager and suggesting that, if she didn’t want it to disappear again, she not park it outside the store as an advertising gimmick, I sped up and cut through the food court on my way to the security office, tucked into a side hall near Sears. An ill-lit hallway lined floor to ceiling with white brick tile, its narrowness and dinginess dissuaded most shoppers from venturing down it. A soda vending machine hummed quietly near an emergency exit at the far end. Glass doors fronted the security office, and I pushed through them, leaving the Segway outside. Small, dank, and smelling vaguely of pizza, the office boasted a couple of desks that belonged to whoever was on shift, filing cabinets, and a coffeepot. A short hall led to my boss’s office and a storeroom in the back. The office’s most prominent feature was a bank of monitors displaying views from the hundred-plus cameras in and around the mall. Actually, only about half the cameras were hooked up, a cost-saving measure I’d fought strenuously. The director of security, Captain Woskowicz, had said, “The cameras are mainly deterrents to shoplifting, Ferris, so as long as the general public doesn’t know they’re not working, they’ll still work.” That’s what passed for logic in Wosko World.

Joel Rooney, twenty-three years old and thirty pounds
overweight, swiveled his chair away from the screens to face me as I came in. A smear of cream cheese shone on one chubby cheek. Soft brown hair curled around his ears. His ironed white uniform shirt was tucked into his black pants, but he somehow still looked rumpled. Correctly interpreting my raised brows, he raised his bagel and said, “It’s not as bad as a donut!”

“A bagel’s got just as many calories and not much more nutritional value,” I said. Joel was trying to lose weight and get in better shape. I’d been helping him by swimming with him a couple afternoons a week. Swimming was the only form of aerobic exercise my knee could take now.

He stared wistfully at the bagel. “It’s whole wheat.”

“Where’s Cap—”

“Is Ferris on her way? Didn’t you tell her to haul her sorry ass—” Captain Woskowicz stomped from his small office into the main room and cut himself off when he saw me. “It’s about time.”

With the personality and fashion sense of a third-world dictator, Woskowicz stood well over six feet tall and wore a khaki-colored uniform decked with enough medals and insignia to make Noriega look under-accessorized. The rest of the security team wore standard uniforms—black slacks with a white shirt and black Smoky-the-Bear-type hat—but Woskowicz said that as director of security he needed to stand out. He’d recently started growing hair back on his shaved head, and a quarter inch of grizzled fuzz now covered his lumpy skull.

I fought the urge to drop a curtsy and say, “You rang?” and contented myself with a lifted brow and a quiet “What’s up?”

Woskowicz waited a beat for me to add “sir,” but he wasn’t going to live long enough for that. I “sirred” or “ma’amed” people unless they proved they didn’t deserve
it. You do the math. After a second, he popped a breath mint in his mouth and said, “We got a call from the loss-prevention officer at Nordstrom. They’ve got their eye on a man behaving suspiciously, and they requested our assistance.”

“Suspiciously how?”

“How the hell should I know? I’m not there watching the perv, am I?” Woskowicz scowled. “Just go check it out.”

“Will do,” I said. “Oh, and I called the camera repair company again. They didn’t seem to have a record of the service request from when you called earlier. They—”

“You what?” Woskowicz’s scowl deepened. “Who asked you to?”

I stared at him. In most jobs, one got kudos for displaying a little initiative. Not, apparently, if one worked for a control freak like Woskowicz. It wasn’t hard to figure out why some security officer before my time had christened the director of security “Captain Was-a-bitch.” “I thought—”

“Well, stop it. You don’t get paid for thinking.” He wheeled and tromped toward his office, stopping halfway to glare at me over his shoulder. “When are they coming?”

“It’ll be later in the week before they can get here. Something about completing a system upgrade for some bank branches.”

He grunted and disappeared into his office, slamming the door behind him.

Joel and I exchanged an expressive glance. “It’s good that you called the camera company, EJ,” Joel said.

I sighed. A whole wing of cameras had gone black on the midshift two nights ago, and it made me uneasy to have no camera coverage. Woskowicz, who’d been the sole officer on duty that night, swore that nothing unusual had happened, that all of a sudden the screens just blanked out, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he’d spilled a cup of
coffee on the computers or something similar. Still, there hadn’t been a break-in or any vandalism, so I had to assume the outage was an accident. I watched the parade of shoppers on the screens for a moment, focusing on a young woman arguing with a man outside a boutique and then on a little boy trying to wiggle his fingers through the mesh of the pet store’s puppy pen.

Joel followed my gaze. “You need a dog.” Joel, the proud owner of two shelties that he trained for agility competitions, thought no household was complete without a canine.

“Fubar would disagree.”

Nordstrom lay at
the opposite end of the mall from the security office, and I glided down the wide central hall on my Segway, enjoying the relative quiet of the mall on a Tuesday. Set out in a large X with anchor stores at each end of the X, the mall had two levels, multiple garages and parking lots, a food court, and a fountain on the lower floor. Large planters overflowed with greenery that grew well in the natural light streaming through the glass-paned roof, giving an almost greenhouse effect. Located off I-95 in Vernonville, Virginia, we picked up a lot of customers from the bedroom communities that fed both Richmond and the D.C. area. The
bam-bam
of hammers broke into the quiet, and I looked over the railing to the level below to see workers adding a white picket fence to the enclosure that would house the Easter Bunny for the next few weeks as he—she?—posed for expensive photos with fussily dressed boys and girls. A dolly laden with potted tulips and other flowers waited nearby.

I passed my friend Kyra’s store, Merlin’s Cave, and Segwayed into Nordstrom. Wending my way through racks of ties and men’s socks, I found Dusty Margolin, head of the
store’s loss-protection division, talking to an employee near his office.

“EJ!” He broke off with a smile when he saw me and dismissed the man he was talking to. In his midfifties, with graying hair and a banker-style suit, Dusty looked like a stuffy businessman until he smiled; then, he looked like someone you’d want to have a beer with at a baseball game.

Getting off the Segway, I said, “You’ve got a shoplifter problem, Dusty?”

He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Maybe a pickpocket. I’ll show you.”

Taking my arm, he guided me around a stack of Spanx for men—who knew?—and pointed out a tallish man casually studying a display of novelty boxers near the dressing room. His back was to us, but I noted improbably black hair and cuffed slacks showing a half inch of white sock above scruffy sneakers. “Looks harmless,” I said, crossing my fingers behind my back.

“Watch.”

After a moment, an unsmiling man with a blocky build emerged from the dressing room, a blazer and shirt tossed over his arm. He marched to the nearest cash register, paid with a credit card, and lumbered toward the exit. After a moment, the black-haired man moved nonchalantly after him.

“He’s been tailing that guy ever since he came in the store,” Dusty whispered.

I had a bad feeling about this. “I’ll take care of it,” I told Dusty, and then moved swiftly to intercept the potential pickpocket as he reached the outer door. “May I have a word with you, sir?” I asked.

“Not now, Emma-Joy,” my Grandpa Atherton muttered out of the side of his mouth. “I’m on a job. Don’t want to lose my target.”

I’d known the stalker was my grandfather from the moment I saw him move. Eighty-two years old, retired from the CIA for over a decade, he still did contract work for various agencies around town and liked to “keep his hand in” between assignments by tailing people at the mall and trying out listening devices or other spy gadgets he got off the Internet or God-knows-where. It was a practice I tried to discourage.

I kept pace with him as we stepped out of Fernglen and into a chilly March day. “The loss-prevention guy at Nordstrom figures you for a pickpocket,” I said, wincing at the contrast between the black wig and Grandpa’s seamed face.

“Damn,” Grandpa said, shooting me a sheepish look from bright blue eyes.

“What exactly are you doing?”

“A little job for a friend at State. Can’t tell you more, Emma-Joy—it’s classified. But that man”—he nodded to the man levering his bulk into the backseat of a waiting Mercedes—“is a Moldovan diplomat.” Without another word, he jogged toward a tan Toyota I’d never seen before, folded himself into it, and pulled out after the Mercedes, giving me a beep from the horn and a mischievous grin as he passed.

I made no attempt to stop him and was merely grateful that whatever trouble he might get into with his Moldovan diplomat wouldn’t involve my mall.

The rest of
my shift passed uneventfully, although I kept an eye on three teens sporting gang colors of red, green, and white. Two youths of eighteen or so squabbled as they strolled, while a tough-looking girl of fifteen or sixteen walked between them, carrying a stuffed animal. When I first signed on at Fernglen, gangs weren’t an issue at our
suburban mall. In the past two months, though, we’d seen more gang activity both at the mall and in the town proper. The Vernonville Police Department had gone so far as to set up a gang task force, and they had invited security personnel from nearby businesses to partake in a two-hour seminar. Captain Woskowicz had stuck me with attending, and I learned a lot about gang names, colors, symbols, and rituals, but not a whole lot about how to keep them from meeting up at Fernglen. So far there hadn’t been any big trouble, but our maintenance crews were busier than they used to be scraping gang-related graffiti off the bathroom stalls and repainting. I sometimes thought that if I could invent a surface too slick to write or paint on and too hard to carve into, I’d be the richest woman in America overnight.

I swam at
the YMCA when I got off shift at three o’clock, gradually relaxing as I did laps—mostly freestyle and butterfly—in the deserted pool. Still self-conscious about the way my knee and leg looked since the IED tore into me, I preferred to swim when there was no one around, and the middle of the afternoon was perfect. After showering, I beat rush-hour traffic returning to my one-story, brick-front home with forest green trim in a community that featured a pool, lush landscaping, and reasonable HOA fees. I tipped my head up to let the sunshine play on my face as I walked up the stepping-stone path from my parking spot to my front door. A glimpse of rusty red gave me warning, and I didn’t even jump as a blur of fur leaped out of the shrubbery and attacked my shoelaces. I bent to scoop Fubar into my arms before he could wreak havoc with his claws. Untying shoelaces was one of his favorite games—not one the neighbors thought highly of.

“Stop that,” I said, giving him an affectionate shake as
he lay cradled in my arms, face turned toward me so his mangled and mostly missing left ear was evident. The ear and his truncated tail, products of abuse or a run-in with a car or coyote, had prompted me to name him Fubar—the military acronym for “fouled up beyond all recognition”—when I found him slinking around my house shortly after I bought it. Having just been released from the hospital after several surgeries and many hours of physical therapy, I guess I’d felt a kinship with the beat-up cat. He wiggled to get down—cuddling was beneath his dignity—and zipped into the house when I unlocked the door.

The house had served time as a rental before I bought it, and I was hiring handymen to tackle repairs as my budget allowed. I hadn’t yet hired anyone to sand the hardwood boards in the small foyer, which looked like someone had practiced Irish step dancing on them, in golf shoes. I’d hidden the worst of it with a pseudo-Oriental rug in blue and white that echoed the colors in the attached living room. Making my way to the kitchen, I found Fubar standing proudly over the remains of a sparrow inside the cat flap cut into the back door. Stifling my distaste, I praised him for his hunting ability, picked the bird up in a paper towel, and deposited it in the outside trash bin.

“I guess this means you won’t be wanting dinner.” I realized with dismay that I sounded like a mother chastising a kid for snacking too close to dinnertime. Fubar gave me an inscrutable look and wedged himself back through his cat door. “Don’t forget your curfew,” I called after him.

I experimented with a new ancho chili rub for my pork tenderloin, teased Fubar with his feather toy when he reappeared, chatted via phone with my mom (vacationing with my dad in Cannes), and played my guitar for a while before bed. All in all, a routine evening that gave no hint that a dead body lay in my immediate future.

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