Friday, 10:45 a. m.
The glass-topped, gleaming white expanse of Tower City Mall seemed relatively sedate in the middle of a weekday. Three floors, plus a basement where the Rapid Transit trains came and went, it had fountains, a food court, both pricey and not-too-ridiculously-pricey shops, and an eleven-screen movie theater.
Where, it turned out, they had never heard of Evan Harding. The manager on duty, a friendly, competent, and skinny black kid who didn’t look old enough to see some of their current attractions scoured his computer and even called the corporate offices to confirm: no one named Evan Harding worked there. Not now, not previously. Jack showed him the cell-phone photo he had taken of the picture of the victim with Shanaya. The only other photo he had was one he’d taken at the crime scene, with the reddened shirt and the open, staring eyes—show that to a witness and they wouldn’t see past the blood. But the manager didn’t recognize Evan Harding, and neither did any other employee currently on duty.
Their name tags, Jack noted, didn’t look anything like the plain white plate the victim had pinned to his shirt.
Back out in the atrium, Jack said, “The girlfriend lied.”
“Or he lied to the girlfriend,” Riley said, crunching popcorn from a bag he’d bought at the concession stand.
“I don’t know. How often does the live-in girlfriend know so little about a guy? Girlfriends are usually kind of nosy, aren’t they?”
Riley gave him a look—that what does she see in you? look—and Jack backpedaled before his partner could ask the question aloud. The only thing more difficult than maintaining a real romantic relationship was maintaining a fictional one. “I’m saying I’m suspicious of her inability to tell us anything useful. The dead guy had no family, no friends—there’s no sign in that room that either of them were ever students. Maybe it’s shock and a minimalistic approach to possessions, or maybe he was into something shady and she’s covering for him.”
Riley crumpled up the paper bag. “Possibly. But when did you last see a drug dealer wearing a name tag?”
Jack considered this as Riley pitched his balled-up bag into a rounded garbage can for a perfect nothing-but-net score. “Shady jobs don’t issue name tags. But if it wasn’t shady, why not tell the girlfriend about it?”
“Do staff at strip joints wear tags? There’s a job he wouldn’t want to tell her about, how he’s surrounded by the scantily clad all day.”
“I don’t know. About the tags.”
“We could stop in at a few and check it out,” Riley said, currently between girlfriends and only half joking. Then a toddler somewhere behind them burst into a screeching peal, which echoed and grew as it bounced off the marble and the glass, piercing eardrums with the ease born of practice. “Either way, let’s get out of here.”
As they exited onto Public Square, Jack noted aloud that they would have to get a search warrant for the victim’s phone. He had already called the homicide unit’s administrative assistant to see if Sprint could get the phone located on the chance the mugger had kept it. Technology could only triangulate to an area and not a pinpoint on the map, but anything would help when they had so little to work with.
Snow kept falling, a few desultory flakes at a time. The tall buildings occasionally sheltered them from the wind and other times turned the street into a tunnel that funneled and concentrated it to a biting, shoving force of frigidity. “We have a car, you know,” Riley grumbled. “We don’t actually have to walk everywhere.”
“It’s only two blocks.” Jack didn’t like the cold but liked moving in and out, from cold air to overly warm buildings or cars and back again even less. And he hated driving in the stuff, the sickening lurch of the frame as the tires fought for traction. He hadn’t been raised in a cold climate and couldn’t figure out why, though he had a decent furnace, his house always felt chilly to him. He should get an electric blanket. If he planned to stay.
Riley continued to grouse. “Two blocks in June is one thing. Two blocks in December is another.”
“Didn’t your doctor recommend exercise?”
“No,” Riley said. “No, I have never discussed my doctor visits with you. You’re like a whole freakin’ two years younger than me so don’t—you’re going to get killed like that, you know. Speaking of health.”
Jack had been tapping on his smart phone with one thumb, nearly stepping into the path of a passing car. “I figure we got one other clue.”
“A to Z Check Cashing?” Riley guessed.
Jack covered his surprise. He really shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking Riley wasn’t that sharp just because Jack had managed, so far, to keep his extracurricular activities off Riley’s radar. Overconfidence would take Jack out much more easily than a speeding automobile. “Uh—yeah. It’s on the next street from our crime scene. Might as well check it out. That’s near where the car’s parked anyway,” he added as an incentive.
“That’s more than two blocks,” Riley grunted, and Jack let him have the last word on the subject.
A to Z Check Cashing did, indeed, exist in a storefront in the triangular building where Bolivar met Prospect Road, one street over from where the victim had been found. A loud set of bells jangled from the pneumatic arm of the door when they entered, giving an old-school alert to the cashier that a customer had arrived. Not that there was much storefront to keep an eye on—the customer area consisted of an empty, ten by fifteen square of dingy linoleum facing a solid, chest-high counter area. Perhaps five inches of space existed between this counter and an upper wall of clear but not clean plexiglass. There were cameras in each corner of the customer area, more visible in the ceiling behind the plexiglass. Employees must have to enter via the rear—no door or opening existed to get a human being to move from in front of the counter to behind it, which must go a long way toward discouraging robbers.
The air smelled a bit like a greenhouse tinged with both mildew and despair, but was blissfully warm. Riley let out an audible sigh. Compared to the city streets, they had walked into a sauna.
A paunchy, middle-aged man with thick black-framed glasses emerged from the back and took them in with one sweeping glance before his face stilled into a look of utter neutrality, having pegged them as cops. Cops who would probably be annoying him with questions about his less than upstanding customers. Cops who might scare those customers away if they hung around long enough. Before the man even opened his mouth, Jack knew he would sound brisk, businesslike, and ostensibly cooperative, and all with one motive: to get them out of there as quickly as possible.
The man said, with the barest trace of an accent Jack couldn’t identify, “How can I help you?”
Jack waited for Riley, always better at putting potential witnesses at ease, but his partner said nothing, staring instead at the man’s name tag, crookedly pinned to a red polo shirt. A plain white badge with rounded edges and red letters spelled “Ralph.”
Jack said, “We’re here about Evan Harding.”
The man’s eyes widened in surprise and something like fear. “Well. I see.” He straightened a bit; his chin came up, and he spoke more firmly. “I’d like to know where he is, too. He’s forty-five minutes late.”
Jack hid a smile. Finally, they might be getting somewhere. “He works here?”
“For me, yeah.”
“How long?”
The guy shrugged as if relaxing slightly. Something they’d said had reassured him, and Jack couldn’t guess what that had been. “Four, five months. Real reliable.”
In response to further questions he told them that he, Ralph, had owned the business for over ten years, he had five employees, that Evan had been a cashier working the front desk, and nothing else. He’d never had a problem with the kid’s work, no money missing, no customer complaints, forms always filled out properly. He didn’t know anything else about Evan Harding, not family, friends savory or un-, hobbies, vices. He didn’t come out and say that he didn’t care, but strongly implied it. He had last seen Evan about six p.m. the previous evening when he, Ralph, had left. Evan would be closing up that night.
“Did he often close?” Riley asked.
“Yeah, plenty times.”
Jack said, “You have cameras.”
The boss hesitated as if he might deny it, then realized the futility. “This is a cash business. Yeah, I got cameras up the wazoo.”
“Good. We’ll need to see those. And his employment application.”
Another hesitation while he calculated the futility. “Okay.”
He instructed them to walk around the building to the other side and find the entry door, which he would open for them. This time when Jack plunged back into the cold, it felt like a relief. “I see why the guy didn’t wear a heavier coat.”
“Yeah, but he didn’t go straight home from here,” Riley observed, and Jack stopped to orient himself. Across the street sat a medieval building and on the other side of that, the Erie Street cemetery. The student housing building could be found a few blocks directly east. From his workplace, Evan should have turned left on Prospect, away from the cemetery.
“He could have picked up some groceries or something, which the mugger helped himself to along with his money and phone. Or he grabbed a beer with a buddy. Could be anything.” But Jack kept staring at the building as if he could see through it to the cemetery on the other side. A large, squat fortification of red brick and sandstone, it would have looked at home in Morocco or Prague. “What is that?”
“Huh? Oh. Grays Armory.”
“An armory?”
“Yeah . . . the Grays were a civilian defense militia, kept their weapons there, but they were also a social organization like a Moose Lodge or Elks Hall or whatever.”
“When was this?”
“Like a hundred years ago, one-twenty, one-thirty. It’s a museum now but you can still rent the place out—I went to a wedding there once.” He kept walking, the stored warmth from the storefront having quickly worn off.
Jack caught up. “Looks pretty—solid.”
“Iron bars with spikes on the windows, and that gate in the entryway comes all the way down. If there’s ever a zombie apocalypse, that’s the place you’re gonna want to hole up.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.” They reached the tip of the triangular building, stepped from Bolivar onto Prospect, and found the unlabeled employee’s entrance to A to Z Check Cashing. Jack knocked, half expecting a tiny door to open and Ralph’s olive face to peer out and demand a password. But these were modern times and yet another camera gazed at them as they heard the locks being thrown.
“This might be my second choice,” Riley said, “when the zombies come.”
Ralph hustled them inside. The rear of the store wasn’t a whole lot bigger than the front, but held two safes with both electronic and keyed locking mechanisms, shelves full of forms, and a messy, dusty desk with mysterious gaps in its surface, as if some items had been hastily placed out of sight while they walked around the corner. There was nothing wrong with a check cashing service, Jack knew. A healthy percentage of U.S. citizens did not possess a bank account and without one, of course, direct deposit was not possible. This made cashing their paycheck or reimbursement check more difficult. The service cost, fees were deducted, but as ATM fees, shipping and handling charges, and turnpike tolls proved, Americans were willing to pay for convenience.
But Ralph didn’t have it easy. A sign proclaimed the store open from six a.m. until midnight, six days a week. Obviously robbery remained a realistic and constant threat, not only from the baseline criminals assumed to exist around an inner-city location, but from his own customers. Many people might use check cashing services because they were in a hurry, didn’t trust banks, didn’t feel a need for banks, or were in transition from one town to another. But many others didn’t have a bank account because they couldn’t stay mentally or physically stable long enough to get one. And yet others were trying to cash checks that weren’t quite kosher—those for faked medical conditions, the social security payments of deceased parents, or ones stolen out of other people’s mailboxes. Those customers could become desperate and unpredictable.
Nor was foul behavior restricted to the public side of the counter. Check cashing fees might veer from reasonable to usurious—and any business that saw large exchanges of cash could be easily tweaked to include fraud and money laundering.
Either way, Jack could guess a number of reasons why Ralph would be less than enthusiastic to see cops on his doorstep. At the same time he had a vested interest in finding out what had happened to his employee, just in case it related to his job.
“Is there any money missing?” Jack asked the A to Z boss.
A gruff no. Ralph checked exactly that every morning, and all seemed to be as it should. Evan had closed up, leaving the paperwork tidy, all locks turned, overhead lights out. The man stood as he spoke, awkwardly using a mouse on the back of a clipboard to flick through screens displayed on a forty-inch flat screen mounted on the wall above the desk. Apparently he didn’t feel comfortable sitting with his back to the two detectives. “I used to keep all the lights on all night, hoping it would discourage burglars. But the drunks, they see the lights and they think we’re still open, so one, two in the morning they’d be banging on the door. Once people were leaving a party across the street and called the cops. Another time one of them broke the door, so I started turning the lights out. Same reason there’s no chairs in the lobby. I put chairs out there, the homeless guys hang out here all day just to stay warm.”
“It is toasty in here,” Riley agreed. He had already shaken out of his parka.
“Yeah.” Ralph grinned at the TV screen, the first smile they’d seen on him. “My one indulgence. I don’t care if it snows outside, I’m not going to shiver all day to save a few bucks on the gas bill. Here. That’s Evan.”
The display screen split into fourteen equal-sized boxes. Four each showed the public area, the counter area, and the office, and one each hung above the outside of the front and rear doors. The time stamp read 18:15—six-fifteen p.m.—the previous evening. The victim, very much alive, worked the front counter, processing customers’ checks and forms and dispensing cash from a drawer built into the counter. As they watched in fast-forward mode, he restocked the drawer during slow times, taking cash from a small safe in the office.
“I stock that little one before I leave for the day. No one can get in the big ones except me,” Ralph explained.
In between customers, Evan disappeared into the tiny restroom, snacked out of a bag he kept in the office mini-fridge, surfed the apps on his phone, and used the cashier computer to check what appeared to be his social media pages and online shopping sites.
“They’re not supposed to do that,” Ralph growled. “Damn Facebook.” However, he seemed cheered that his employee had not been up to anything untoward, and asked how much the officers wanted to see. The time stamp now read 20:05.
“Let it run,” Jack said.
He didn’t expect to learn much. Evan Harding had left the business in its usual condition, and therefore hadn’t been robbed or abducted. But they were there and the tape was queued, so they might as well watch all of it rather than risk missing something that might explain how Evan Harding had come to be dead in the snow, one street over.
Customers came and went. Most turned over their form, endorsed their check or showed a receipt on their phone, took their cash and left. Some, as the owner predicted, seemed to enjoy the warmth or simply having something to do and hung around chatting. Evan Harding would lean against the counter, arms crossed—polite but not encouraging.
When no customers were present, Evan spent time on his phone—hardly unusual in today’s world. He also used downtime to tap at the keyboard. “What’s he doing?” Jack asked, when Ralph did not seem interested in this activity.
“Online transfers.”
“What does that mean?”
“We have a website. Just like Western Union. You can go on the site and transfer money to another person’s bank account, as long as you have their name and account numbers. Or to your own account, of course. We receive the request, make sure everything is filled out and that the account the money come from is legit, and put the transfer through.”
“So you have access to people’s bank account numbers?”
“No, no. The site encrypts that part. It’s like when you put your password in to get your e-mail—all you see is row of dots? Same thing here. So we can’t see bank account numbers.”
“Then how do you know they’re legit?”
“Because funds go through.”
During another quiet period on the recording as Evan Harding typed some more, double-checked his work on the screen, and then opened the cash drawer and counted out a stack of bills. These, he put in his own pocket.
Again, his boss did not seem concerned. When Jack asked, he shrugged. “Probably cashing his own money. I let my guys do that, cash their checks, welfare, reimbursement. Why would I want some other boss getting my percentage?”
“But he didn’t have a check.”
“Online, then.” His head swiveled as he took in both cops’ expressions, sighed, and said, “I can look it up.”
“Yes,” Riley said. “Please look it up.”
He sat at his desk and used another mouse to search the previous day’s transactions, narrowing things down by the time stamp on the video. “Credit card.”
“What?” Riley asked.
“He took a cash advance on a credit card. Five hundred dollars.” He checked again. “Visa.”
“Do your employees do that a lot?”
One hand gave a short wave. “Sometimes. They need money and I don’t give advances.”
“Did he have money problems? In need of cash for some reason?”
“I don’t know. They’re my employees, not my friends. We don’t chat about personal things. I do that, they get comfortable. Start asking for more hours, less hours, more raises, bonus, that sort of thing.”
Plainly, Ralph didn’t care what his employees did—so long as the books balanced at the end of the day.
Jack had been keeping an eye on the video as they spoke. With the video running at two times normal speed, he saw Evan Harding once again take cash from the drawer after a computer entry. This prompted another check of the ledger, Ralph now more pensive. This cash withdrawal had been paid for by another credit card, a Discover. Four hundred dollars.
They didn’t bother asking Ralph what his employee needed all the cash for.
“So our victim left the store with nine hundred dollars cash in his pockets,” Riley said. “He might as well send a smoke signal to the Murphy’s Law gods saying, Now would be a great time for me to get mugged.”
On the surveillance tape the time stamp now read 21:48, nine forty-eight p.m. Evan Harding had been learning on the counter, chin on one hand, staring at nothing in particular, when the door opened and a young woman entered. Black skin, light-colored coat, a knit beret posed to keep her ears both warm and stylishly attired. She immediately crossed to the counter and began to speak. Forcefully, to judge from her unwavering gaze, the taut knuckles of each hand gripping the counter, the way she leaned so close to the plexiglass that her breath occasionally caused a faint sheen to appear on its surface. She had a purpose, and right then it focused on Evan Harding.
From the cameras behind the counter, Jack watched Evan straighten, take one step back, eventually raise both hands in weak protest. He responded to the woman, though whatever he said neither appeased nor much slowed her torrent of words.
Riley had been watching, as well. “Unhappy customer? Or psycho ex-girlfriend?”
“Without words, it’s hard to tell.”
She didn’t produce any paperwork to bolster a claim of funds gone awry, but Jack couldn’t quite see her as an ex, either. Evan hadn’t raised an eyebrow when she first walked in, hadn’t lifted his chin off his hand until she reached the counter. Jack had seen enough domestic disputes to know they usually involved a great deal of gesturing, with hands to the heart, head, stomach, sweeping angry swishes of the arms, back to the heart—all the places in which wounds were felt most deeply. This woman didn’t gesture much at all, though she was clearly very, very angry. So much so that, safe behind his plexiglass wall, Evan Harding took another step back.
But no inching toward a phone or panic button and the woman had no weapon, so not robbery. Something personal.
Finally Evan began to speak up. From his breathing and the tension in his neck he didn’t shout like the woman had, only spoke fast, pouring out words.
Whatever the confrontation had been about, it had not been resolved. The woman kept shouting, Evan kept up his weak defense, and it ended when she marched to the exit, tossed one last thought over her shoulder, and threw the door open so that it bounced against the adjacent window and rebounded with such force it would have hit her had she not been moving so fast.
Evan watched her go with a worried, wide-eyed expression, arms hugging himself.
But he did nothing, didn’t call the police, didn’t—appar-ently—leave a note or an e-mail to inform his boss of the incident. Just watched her go. It took some time before his posture relaxed again.
There were only two more customers after the woman, two men an hour apart, cashing routine checks. The first came and promptly went, the second wandered the lobby a bit, chatting, perhaps enjoying the last warmth he would feel that night, until it got too much even for him and he took his leave. About eleven forty-five Evan Harding began what must have been his closing routine, straightening stacks of forms, counting the cash in the drawer and locking same, exiting the building to go around and lock the outer door, and reentering the back to shut down the counter computer and turn out the lights.
Then he left.
The rear outside camera showed him stepping out onto the sidewalk, giving the knob one last shake to ensure the security of the door, and walking off to the west, the opposite direction of his apartment. The camera’s bubble eye caught only the portion of the sidewalk directly outside the door, but it appeared to be as deserted as one would expect at midnight on a very cold weekday.
The cameras continued to record their dark, empty rooms.
“Huh,” Riley said. “Where the hell was he going at midnight?”
“And who was the woman lambasting him up one side and down the other?” Jack asked, then said to the boss, “Can we download a copy of that video? From the woman’s visit on?”
Ralph had been typing on his computer, intently enough that Jack had to repeat himself to get the man’s attention. When he glanced over the boss’s shoulder the screen showed columns of numbers . . . he had been double-checking his stores, making absolutely certain that no money had gone missing, that Evan’s cash advances had been legitimate. The man turned with a satisfied sigh and said, “Sure. Only to USB, though. I don’t have a DVD burner in it.”
“Okay. Do you have a spare USB drive?”
Ralph scowled as if Jack had asked to date his teenage daughter. “No.”
“Can you e-mail the video?”
“No-oo. I tried that once, and it was too big.”
“Can you break it into smaller videos?”
“I look like Bill Gates? Or that Zuckerberg kid? I don’t know how to do that.” Ralph was losing patience, and Jack couldn’t entirely blame him. Evan Harding’s death didn’t appear, so far, to have anything to do with his work at A to Z. It wasn’t Ralph’s job to investigate, and no crime had been committed against the check cashing store. On top of that he now needed to hire a new employee, and finding someone he could trust around stores of cash would not be easy.
“Okay,” Jack said. “I’ll call Maggie.”
