Deadly News: A Thriller (6 page)

She hated it. It was waiting at her old babysitter’s until her mother got off work all over again. Old was apt, since the woman had been in her seventies. Abby often thought, now, as an adult, how risky that was, leaving a child with someone so old. What if the woman had fallen? Abby wouldn’t have known what to do. What if she had died?

Abby went into the kitchen and opened the fridge. She stood there for minutes, then shut the door without taking anything out. She went back up to Ecks ‘secret room’, sat in the chair at his desk. She ran her hand across the top of his laptop. It felt empty, up here. She looked toward the couch. A fact popped into her mind then: Women tend to live longer than men, wives tend to outlive their husbands. What a sad fact of life that someone has to experience the loss. Unless they both go out together. Maybe it wasn’t so bad when you were older.

Then again, maybe an accident wasn’t such a bad way to die, if it’d be together.

Abby wiped at her eyes before anything could get out of hand, and defiantly opened Ecks’s laptop.
Screw you
, she thought.

But after browsing through his files for a while and not finding anything interesting, she started to feel odd, like she was dirty and needed to take another shower, like—

She closed the laptop.

Then she frowned. His laptop was here. But—

Shaking her head at overlooking something so obvious, she pulled up her contact list and tried to find his number. No luck. Thinking back now, she realized she’d probably never called him before, and certainly wouldn’t have saved his number if she had.

She pulled up her work number, but stopped before hitting
CALL
. Was that such a good idea? Maybe they were watching her office.
They
; she was being ridiculous. She shook her head and tapped the button.

“Hey, it’s Abby. Yeah, I kn— Shit.” She exhaled, listening to the speaker on the other end. “Okay, okay, fine. Just, do me a favor. I know! I need Ecks’s number.” A pause. “I wasn’t sure. He didn’t come in at all then? I don’t know. Yeah, I’m fine. Long night. Okay.” She waited as Darla put her on hold to get Ecks’s cell. It took several minutes, and when someone finally came back, it wasn’t Darla.

“Where the hell are you?” Becky asked, not sounding as mad as Abby would have expected.

“I’m at home.”

“Are you sick?”

“Something like that.”

“If you’re not sick, I’m not paying you for today. You only get paid if you’re actually sick.”

“Yeah Becky, that’s fine. Did you get— Is Darla still there?”

“I have his number. What do you want it for?”

“I was looking through my contacts, realized I didn’t have it.”

“What are you some kind of completionist?”

“I guess.”

“If you two are playing hanky panky, don’t go telling the whole office. And don’t play anything at work. My suggestion? Don’t play anything with coworkers. It never turns out well.” She sighed loudly into the phone. “Not in the long run.”

“Thanks. What’s the number?”

“Ah, youth. Fine, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“I won’t. I’ll say, ‘Becky, you warned me, you wonderful woman, and you were right.’”

“Flattery will get you only half way. So don’t overdo it.” Silence. “You ready?”

She put Becky on speaker as Becky gave the number, and entered it into her phone’s contacts.

“Thanks,” she said, phone still on speaker.

“Are you going to be sick tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. I’ll let you know.”

“Because if—” she began, but then there was a knock at the door, and Abby missed it.

“I have to go Becky. I’ll let you know. Bye.” She hit end, then sat in silence. Another knock, loud. Cops knocked loudly, she told herself.

“Abby?” came a muffled voice. “This is Officer Delano. Are you there?”

“Coming,” she called out over the balcony, then went down the stairs fast enough to make herself dizzy. She left the chain in place when she opened the door.

Officer Delano smiled at her through the opening. “That little thing wouldn’t actually stop anyone, you know. Not a full grown man, or a woman who knew what she was doing.”

Abby undid the chain and opened the door fully. “What about finger prints here?”

“You’re just a break-in magnet.” He shook his head. “I can’t do anything yet, unless there’s—”

“Unless there’s evidence of a crime. I know. But how would we know if there’s evidence without looking?”

He opened his mouth, then closed it and breathed out through his nose. “Five minutes. Then we have to go.”

They spent the next twenty minutes scouring the apartment, looking for clues. Abby had long given up hope, but wasn’t going to quit until Robert—Officer Delano’s first name—made her.

But apparently Robert hadn’t given up, and was indeed looking for clues: “Whoa,” he said, placing a hand across her chest.

She looked down at it, then at him.

If she had been topless, she wouldn’t have had to worry about indecent exposure, for his arm rested neatly atop those bits.

He apparently didn’t notice, and was staring at a spot right near the bed, almost under it.

Abby backed up and his hand fell away. “Dirt?”

“A footprint. Could be nothing, but—”

“But it also could be something.”

He nodded. “Yeah. Looks too big to be yours. Where are his shoes?”

Abby gestured to the closet, and he went over and grabbed a shoe from it.

“This guy’s a minimalist. All he had.” He waved the sandal around in the air, then crouched down and put it next to the print. It was close, but off enough to give the impression that it wasn’t Ecks’s.

“Hmm,” he said, still squatting. “Not quite.” He stood. “You happen to have a camera? I’d like to take some photos, just in case, and my phone’s crap.”

“I have my phone. It takes good pictures.”

“Take a few of that, then text them to me.”

She did.

“All right then,” he said when she was finished, looking at the pictures on his phone. “Now we need to go, see if you can recognize anyone.”

“A lineup?”

He let out a laugh as he walked to the closest to put the sandal back. “No, Jesus. Just looking through some photos on the computer, see if any stand out.”

“That seems unlikely.”

“Not statistically. A lot of crimes are committed by someone the victim has seen in the past, or interacts with on a daily basis.”

Abby shrugged. “Lead on.”

She spotted the keys to Ecks’s car on the way out. They were on the floor, to the side of the door. She pointed to them. “Look.”

Robert came back inside to see what she was pointing at. “Keys.”

Abby nodded.

“Keys… near the front door, on the floor. Not a place most people would leave them.”

“What do we do?”

He shook his head. “I don’t know if it’s enough to get someone out here.” He bit his lip as he thought. He looked back through the apartment, toward the bedroom, then let his gaze drift to where the keys were. Finally, shaking his head, he said, “That’s strange. Okay, let’s get to the station. Lock up here—No! Don’t. Leave ‘em where they are.” He twisted the little lock on the bottom door handle. “We’ll leave everything as it is. Once we get to the station, I’ll see what I can do.”

He shut the door behind them as they exited into the hall.

“That’s two things now, plus the fact that we know someone’s after me. How’s that not enough?”

“A footprint and keys on the floor. Not exactly a smoking gun.”

They left the building, and Abby looked around outside as they walked to his patrol car. She didn’t know what she was looking for, and, surprisingly, didn’t find it.

She sat up front, contemplating all that had happened in the past few days as they drove to the station. Summer, Soren had said. Like that summer. What could he mean? Only one thing, really.

She needed to talk to him. As soon as she could get away from Officer Robert, she’d try calling him. But why had he mentioned his phone being out of minutes? Was that a warning? Was she overthinking this, or under? Which was worse?

A few hours later, Abby finished looking at the photos—no one she knew—and recounted as much as she could remember to a new detective, Robert’s shift having ended. Something she had left out before, and which she had only now revealed because she had been distracted worrying about Ecks, was that the only thing stolen was a folder, with some odd contents.

“Odd?”

“Dossiers. I don’t know who they were on, I didn’t have time to investigate before it got taken.”

“Interesting,” the detective interviewing her said. He looked around the station, waved his hand in the air for several seconds.

Abby looked where he was; an office, blinds up, a woman sitting at a desk.

She finally looked up, looked displeased, then stood.

The women that exited the office near the center of the station looked to be forty-ish, thin and tall. Her hair was short and her demeanor, Abby could tell even without hearing her speak, would be unpleasant, at best.

“Lieutenant, Abby here was just telling me about a folder that was taken.”

The lieutenant looked at Abby, eyebrow raised. “I’m guessing that’s not the end of your story?”

“The break-in the other night, near Stevie’s Bar,” the detective clarified.

“The Melcer case?”

“That’s the one.” He held a hand out toward Abby. “Meet Abby Melcer.”

“And this folder, it had something important, I gather?”

“I don’t—” Abby began.

“That’s the thing,” the detective interrupted. “It was taken before she could get a good look at what was inside it. But Abby here is a reporter.”

The lieutenant slowly turned to look at the detective. “Thanks for the warning, Masterson.”

“No problem.” He smiled. “In any case, there might be more to this than there seems. Her source—”

“Friend,” Abby interjected.

“Right, her friend, the one who got that folder to her”—he twisted around on his desk, searching—“uh…”

“Soren,” Abby said. “His name is Soren Hagelin.”

“Right, Hagelin. Anyway, he’s gone missing—”

“What!” Abby stood. “Why didn’t you tell me!”

The lieutenant put a hand on Abby’s shoulder and gently, firmly, pressed down. “Ms Melcer, please.”

“What happened? Hell, you probably know more than I do about what’s going on.” She allowed herself to be pushed back down into her seat.

“Now Abby, I only just found out, just a few minutes ago it was, right before I started taking your statement. It’s why I wanted to go over things again with you. Because you mentioned Hagelin in your statement, but didn’t say why. But then you mentioned the folder, and I got sidetracked. You hadn’t mentioned that in your original statement.” He smiled again, that same satisfied smile. “Now who’s keeping things from whom?”

“I forgot. I was under stress. Have you ever been robbed?”

He sighed, a long sigh. “Matter of fact, I have.” He shook his head. “Five times now? I just have bad luck.”

Abby didn’t know what to say, so she didn’t say anything.

“Okay,” the lieutenant said. “Ms Melcer, Abby. Try to remember everything you can about that folder, Masterson here will take your statement again, and then we’ll see if we can figure this out.”

“But Soren…”

“Masterson, this Hagelin is the abandoned vehicle from third shift?”

“Yep.”

She stuck her tongue in her upper lip. “Hmm. Hell of a lot of coincidence.”

“Exactly what I thought. Why I decided, when Delano brought Ms Abby here in, to see if I couldn’t get a bit more.”

The lieutenant rolled her eyes. “You walked the beat once too.”

“And good riddance.”

She dismissed this with her expression, then looked back at Abby. “Abby, have you made any enemies? People who might not have liked what you wrote about them?”

Abby shook her head. “I write about tech stuff. Geeky college kids. If anything, they’re happy with the coverage.”

“No one you might have pissed off?” the detective prodded.

Abby shrugged. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Fine,” the lieutenant said. “Masterson, take her statement, and try to get everything this time”—she looked at Abby—“and keep me posted. This might be interesting.”

“Will do.”

Abby stared after the retreating form of the lieutenant. Soren too, she couldn’t believe it. Had they read his email? There was that ‘They’ again. Would they figure out what he’d meant? And the keys, how—and when—could he have placed them in her couch? Did he know she would need them? He knew she often fell asleep on the couch, and that she often lost the remote between the cushions; hell of a gamble though. She hadn’t thought things were bad enough to need the keys and what they opened, but if Soren was missing… And there was still the story, God, this was a hell of a story. She just needed to live through it to tell it. Soren’s preparations for the unlikely collapse of the country no longer seemed so superfluous, even if things hadn’t gone to the same hell he’d predicted.

“What’cha thinking about?” the detective asked, grinning at her.

She closed her eyes, shook her head once. “Nothing.”

“That’s what it looked like. How about some coffee?”

“You have tea? I’m trying to get off coffee.”

“Off coffee?” His eyebrows raised almost to his receding hairline.

She flattened her lips together, made a ‘What can you do?’ face.

“I’ll see what I can find, no promises. Wait here, can’t have you wandering around.”

Abby nodded and watched him walk around a corner and out of sight. She looked back in front of her, where the detective had been sitting on his desk. There were folders there, reports. One caught her eye, right near the edge:
HAGELIN
. Her pulse sped up as she glanced around the station. No one was paying her notice. She grabbed the folder and shoved it into her purse.

She immediately regretted it. God, she could lose her job for something like that, maybe even go to jail. What was she thinking?

She was thrumming with adrenaline now, more than that time when her and several girlfriends had gone on a trip to Canada during college and, in the pitch black night, gone streaking past the oblivious crowd of revelers on the other side of the bay.