Weapons of Mass Distraction (20 page)

“Oh, sugarlumps!” I snapped as I realized she was right. But then, a brainwave hit me. My car was in the parking lot, and in the trunk, was a magical receptacle called my gym bag, and inside that, was a spare t-shirt. With that lightbulb flashing, I hightailed it around the corner and down the ramp, jogging to my car. The t-shirt was there all right, and after a swift change in the backseat, I edged out, walking straight into Delgado.

“Are you sleeping in your car?” he asked.

“No. I’m just… oh, nothing.” I tossed my bag in the trunk and slammed it shut. Sometimes the best defense was switching topics. “Are you going to Lily’s rehearsal dinner tonight with Serena?” I asked.

He grinned, his mouth a shining beacon of white teeth. Did he get his teeth done? I wondered. Did my sister make him? Personally, I always thought he had nice teeth, but I wasn’t the one doing the horizontal fandango with him. “Sure am,” he confirmed. “We went shopping for Victoria’s dress for the wedding. It’s the cutest thing. Pink ruffles.”

“You went to the baby store?”

“I went to seven. I didn’t even get bored. Everything’s so tiny.” Delgado held his hands inches apart to demonstrate.

“Oh, sheesh. You’re broody, aren’t you?” I asked as he held the parking garage door open and I passed him, entering the stairwell.

“Don’t you get broody around your niece?”

I had to admit I did. It was hard not to. She was a plump, scrumptious baby, but I wasn’t at that stage yet. I was still at the “hold them and give them back” stage of life.

“You’ll make a good daddy,” I told him.

“Do you think I’ll make a good brother-in-law too?”

“In all fairness, Delgado, there’s not a lot to compare you to,” I said, remembering my sister’s now ex-husband, “but I think you’ll do just fine.”

“I appreciate that. And I just want you to know that I really care about your sister. She’s a very special woman.”

“I’m glad to hear it. Please keep her as happy as she is now. The entire Graves family appreciates it.” I wasn’t even being sarcastic. Serena was a changed woman. Of course, it wasn’t totally down to dating Delgado, but he was definitely a good thing in her life. I got extra points for sending him to her one day when she needed a security system installed at her home. Heck, I practically set them up. Good for me! Now I just had to concentrate on my own life.

“So… are you bringing a date tonight?” Delgado asked as we ascended the stairs.

“Maybe,” I said, wondering just when I should spring the dinner on Solomon and what he would say. So much for keeping things just between us. Now, I was going to push him to reveal our relationship to everyone in my world.

“Just for the record,” Delgado said as we reached the top. He placed a hand on the door, preventing me from exiting the stairwell. “I’ve known Solomon a long, long time, and he seems really happy. And on the record, item number two, you seem happy too. I hope it works out for you both.” Then he pulled the door open and disappeared through, leaving me flapping my mouth at nothing. After a moment, I took a deep breath and followed him inside, wondering who else noticed the happy-meter rising around here.

~

Solomon assembled our small band of merry PIs in the boardroom. where yesterday’s whiteboard beckoned me to use it again. After extracting my case files from my desk, they sat in a neat pile in the center of the table. “We need to get our heads together on this one,” he said. “Lexi and I visited Simonstech yesterday and we were asked to leave. Working on a hunch, it’s appears more and more likely that this has nothing to do with Fairmount Gym, and very likely that something happened at Simonstech. Take a case file. I want you to go through the histories of each of our victims again and find out what happened right before they left Simonstech. Lucas, I want you to hack Simonstech and get me the employee files.”

"There isn't a ton of information," I told them as each reached for a file. "Jim Schwarz didn't have any close relatives so I only spoke to his neighbor. Karen Doyle's family were out of town, except for her sister and her fiancé couldn't speak. Lorena Vasquez's brother didn't return my calls, nor has her daughter. Our victims don't have many people in their lives."

I looked at the files we currently had as they were opened. Delgado had Jim Schwarz. Fletcher got Karen Doyle. Flaherty had Lorena Vasquez. “Who’ve you got, boss?” I asked Solomon as he opened his file. “Carter Simons Junior,” he said.

“Oh, boo. I wanted him.”

“No you don’t,” said Solomon. “I want you to stay away from him for now.”

“Why?”

“Because of yesterday.”

“What happened yesterday?” asked Lucas, who had his laptop set up.

“We spooked him,” I told him, realizing I didn’t have a folder. I got Solomon’s point. Yes, Junior did get angry, but I could hardly stay away from our current number one suspect. How could I do my job by ignoring a man that could be an important player in this murder game? “And he threw us out of the building. Where’s my file?”

“I want you to get your Google-Fu on and start checking through the
Gazette’s
records. Find any mention of Simonstech, especially in the months prior to each victim leaving the firm. It’s a longshot, but you might find something suspicious. Something that can account for all of this.” Solomon waved his hand over the table, and the murder files. “I think we can give the gym enough proof that what happened there was not because of them. I have a meeting with MPD later to discuss the case.”

“What happens then?”

“Depends; as soon as we clear the gym, we’ll turn our files over and let them take it from there.”

“That’s not fair. This is my case,” I protested. “I’ve done a ton of legwork, including going undercover, which, by the way, is hard work at that gym, and I nearly got caught naked by two suspicious-sounding employees.” I quickly realized what I just said as the room went quiet and four heads looked up.

“Naked?” repeated Fletcher, ducking his head when Solomon shot him a look, before turning to Delgado and Flaherty who also swiftly looked down, although smirking.

“I’d just finished taking a shower when I overheard the employees talking,” I mumbled. "Solomon, I told you about it."

“Were you alone?” asked Fletcher. “Any other chicks?”

I threw a pencil at him. “Shut up, Fletch.”

“Just askin’. Setting the scene…” He looked up and caught Solomon’s stony gaze. “Okay, I’ll shut up.”

“Our directive was to clear the gym of any foul play, not solve the murders,” said Solomon, indicating we should get our heads down and do just that.

Before Fletcher got into it, he leaned over and said in a low voice, just the right volume for everyone to hear, “No offense intended, Lexi.”

“None taken from your pervy mind,” I whispered back with a roll of my eyes. Delgado laughed, and the atmosphere went back to normal, even though Solomon took another glance around, but his eyes were dark and unreadable.

I set up my laptop on the table, and for a while, enjoyed the benefits of having the agency put their heads together to help solve the case. I still didn’t agree with Solomon that we shouldn’t go that extra mile to catch the killer too. To me, that was the ultimate way to put the gym completely in the clear. Probable doubt simply wasn’t enough. All the same, we took turns taking coffee runs and raising pointers in our victims’ lives for debate, occasionally adding something to the whiteboard. I’d eaten three donuts by the time I looked up from my screen.

“Guys, I think I’ve got something.”

“Shoot,” said Solomon, pausing. I noticed no one else did. He was the only one not reading, instead adding a series of photos to the whiteboard. I tried not to look when he pinned a photo of the mark found on Lorena's head but I couldn't help myself. It looked familiar, like I had seen it somewhere before.

“Avril Sosa, twenty-seven, a lab assistant at Simonstech was reported missing fifteen months ago. She attended an office party, but never made it home. There’s a small report here about it. I think I saw her name somewhere else—”  I tapped her name into my search engine and a few more local newspaper reports popped up. “Yeah, I did, but those reports didn’t mention Simonstech. That’s why I nearly missed it.”

“A missing lab tech,” mused Solomon. “Jim Schwarz was head of a lab.”

“She went missing right before all three of our victims left,” I said, scraping my chair back so I could move over to the whiteboard and point to the office party photo. “This could be from the same event. What if they all knew something about her disappearance?”

“Find out what else you can about the missing woman and her disappearance,” Solomon instructed me, “and put in a call to your contacts at MPD. See if they’ve got anything. Maybe she’s been found. Guys, look out for the name Avril Sosa while you’re doing background checks.”

“I got through Simonstech firewalls,” announced Lucas. “Want me to grab her file too?”

Solomon nodded. “If you can do it without setting off any alarms, yes.”

I printed the few short reports I found in the
Gazette
before returning to the browser’s search page. Nothing else came up for an Avril Sosa so I excused myself, and left the room to place a call.

“Hi, Garrett,” I said when my oldest brother picked up his desk phone.

“What’s up?” he asked. “What do you need for me to do, and more importantly what are you prepared to pay for it?”

“Er…” I burbled, stumped, having only mused through the questions I wanted to ask. “What’s with the cold questions?”

“It’d be nice if you just called to say ‘hi,’ you know,” said Garrett with a sigh.

“Hi!” I said. “That’s twice now. What makes you think I want something?”

“Past experience.”

“Oh, fine, well… you’re not wrong,” I said, deciding to go with the truth. “I wanted to know if you had any background on a missing person.”

“What’s her name?”

“Avril Sosa.”

“Give me a minute while I try not to think about what rules I’m breaking.” Garrett paused and I listened to the tap of his keyboard along with the calls flying across the squad room. “Okay, it’s still an open case, but it’s gone stale. What’s your interest in her?”

“She came up in connection with a case I’m working. What can you tell me about her?”

“Not a lot. The detectives looking into the case drew blanks at every turn. Seems this woman just disappeared without a trace.”

“How could that happen?”

“It can’t. It just looks that way. Things like this happen all the time, unfortunately.” Garrett spoke with the jaded tone that reflected too many years of missing people, and victims, and cases that went didn’t turn up any viable leads.

“Avril Sosa was a twenty-seven-year-old lab tech, not a teen runaway.”

“All the same, no one saw anything. Says here they interviewed a bunch of people the night she apparently disappeared, and no one saw anything. Her car was found dumped and burned out off the interstate thirty miles away, which indicated foul play. Says here her boss saw her leave in her car around midnight, but no one else remembers seeing her after eleven-thirty.”

“Anything else?”

“Not much. The detectives assigned to her case followed up a bunch of the leads, but everything resulted in a dead end. Her bank account was never touched. She didn’t show up at any hospitals. They even checked the homeless and women’s shelters. They had nowhere left to turn and the case got iced.”

“What about her family?”

“They’re adamant something happened to her, but they couldn’t tell us much. I’m just looking through the interview notes and it says she was quiet, shy, and didn’t have a boyfriend since splitting up with her college boyfriend after she graduated. She’d just gotten her first apartment and didn’t have many friends. She spent a lot of time at work, apparently on some secret project, but when they asked, no one at Simonstech knew anything about that.”

“So she was hiding something,” I concluded.

“Could be.”

“Who was the lead detective on the case?”

“Ah, well, you’re not going to like this.”

“Who was it, Gar?” I asked, hoping he wasn’t about to say Maddox.

“Couple of old timers called Martin and O’Hare. Martin died of a heart attack a year ago and O’Hare retired to Florida.”

“Great.” My heart sunk. That was no help.

“Speaking of detectives, I hear you’re working an angle on the Vasquez murder.””

“Yeah? Who said that?”

“Maddox.”

“Oh, great. Since when did you two get friendly?”

“Always liked the guy, except for the brief moment that I didn’t,” Garrett explained. “Plus, the Schwarz and Doyle murders passed my desk. Just for kicks, I gave them to Maddox too.”

“I think they’re connected.”

“He briefed me. I’m a step ahead of you here, sis.”

“Pfft,” I replied rudely. “I don’t see you catching the murderer.”

“Twenty bucks says we get there first. Want me to get your ex to call you?”

“No. I’ll call him.”

“I don’t mind.”

“It’s fine, really. We’re friends,” I told him. “We chat.”

“So long as he respects that you’re just friends.”

“He does. Anyway, it’s not your business. It’s mine. Thanks for your help. I’ll take it from here and that twenty is mine!”

“Before you go, the price is…”

“I know, I know! When do you want me to babysit? You can’t say tonight because it’s Lily and Jord’s rehearsal dinner.”

“I was going to say you have to come to the range with me. I’ve got time tomorrow.”

“Oh.” I was taken aback. I didn’t mind babysitting at all — I loved hanging with Garrett’s kids — but that was usually Garrett’s price for feeding me information. Shooting was a new thing and I liked it. I could already shoot, but Garrett made sure I got my license and a gun when I first got involved in police business. It had been several weeks since I went to the range, however, and I appreciated him looking out for me. “Okay,” I agreed.

“When was the last time you fired a gun?” he persisted, not just taking my ready agreement at face value.

“Er…”

“Deliberately.”

“Well…” I had to really wrack my brains. Unfortunately, I came up with nothing.