Robin grabbed a wooden box packed with a couple dozen five-by-ten inch samples of glass and swung it at him. He deflected the blow and knocked the box out of her hand, tearing the second glove on the rough wooden crate and cutting his hand. The contents crashed to the floor, shards of glass scattering in all directions.
Finally he got his arms around her torso, overpowered her, and smashed her head against a pedestal. Stunned, she was barely struggling as he dragged her back into the classroom. He hit her again before dumping her face down on top of Eubie Kane’s body. Grabbing the blood-streaked towel next to Kane’s body, he used it to pick up the handgun. He dispatched Robin in the same way he had the young artist.
Satisfied she was dead, he dropped the gun beside the two bodies and stripped off what was left of the gloves. He closed the lid to the kiln, hit the button Kane had indicated, and doused the one light they had turned on. In the dark, he edged his way toward the front door, the gloves and towel in his hand.
Before he got there he heard someone rattling the front door from outside. A familiar face peered in through the glass. Still in shadow, he paused. As soon as the woman disappeared, he started again toward the door.
But the sound of men’s voices coming from the ramp leading to the warehouse and factory stopped him. Reversing directions, he retreated to the classroom. For what seemed like forever but was probably only five or six minutes, he waited by the door to the delivery area, listening to what was happening in the other part of the building.
Two men had come up from the factory. Using a flashlight to rake dark corners, they moved toward the front door. Then one of them stumbled on a jar of frit and they both crunched across the broken glass. They turned on overhead lights, cursed, and called nine-one-one.
The man in the classroom waited until he was sure they were absorbed in reporting the incident before he noiselessly opened the door and left the building by way of the delivery entrance. The woman who’d banged at the front was standing on the sidewalk when he got outside, backlit from a powerful security light at the business across the street. Hoping to frighten her away, he pointed at her, as if he had a gun. She ran.
When he thought she had driven off, he went to his car and left. It hadn’t gone exactly the way he’d planned it, but it was done. There was only one more thing and he’d be finished for the evening.
• • •
Sam Richardson and his new partner Danny Hartmann caught the case. They were to meet at the Bullseye Resource Center where two bodies had just been found by night staff. It would be their first homicide working together.
When he walked in to the place he’d only heard about from Amanda, Sam’s attention was not immediately drawn, as it usually was, to the yellow crime scene tape. Instead what he saw was Amanda’s studio on steroids.
Glass was everywhere — stacked, stored, shelved, and smashed. Along the south wall were slots of plywood housing sheets of glass in more colors than he knew existed. Each slot was topped with a small, backlit sample of the color, giving that side of the room a border of jewel-like intensity. Hundreds of jars of frit were stacked in bookcase-type shelves. Bricks of glass sat on low display tables, finished objects on pedestals. The shattered pieces on the floor and the police officers combing through them brought him back to why he was there.
Over the next few hours he and his partner interviewed the owners and the security guards who had called nine-one-one. They talked with the crime scene technicians and cops going over the two areas in a grid search trying to find anything that looked like evidence.
By the time the ME took the bodies for autopsy, Sam and his partner knew what little anyone was sure of: First, the security system had been disarmed a few minutes before 8:30 pm using Robin Jordan’s code. Jordan, an employee in the company’s Research and Education Department, was one of the victims. Second, materials had been set out for a class Jordan was scheduled to teach in the morning in a classroom across the delivery entrance from the murder scene. Those preparations were, everyone assumed, why she had been there. Third, something had happened after she set it up to cause a hell of a fight in the retail store and result in two dead bodies.