‘Are you sure? It’s a Coach …’
‘I remember her purse very well, Detective. The day that it showed up in the store, Angela and my other helper just about came to blows over it.’
‘Would you happen to remember if she was carrying it when she left work Monday evening?’
‘No. But I’m sure she was. Angela was well organized; she didn’t forget things.’
‘You know, I really need to ask you several more questions. Could I come and see you at the store?’
‘Too many interruptions here. Why don’t I come to you?’ She knew where the headquarters building was, she said, ‘but now that I’ve lost my one reliable helper, I can’t get away from here during store hours. Give me a couple of days to get somebody in here I can trust. I’ll call you, OK?’
‘Fine.’ To be safe, she wrote down the woman’s name and numbers. She punched end, looking thoughtful. ‘Imagine that. Somebody who actually wants to talk to me.’
‘Be careful,’ Leo said. ‘She must be selling tickets to something.’
Back at the station, Delaney sent out a Need to Locate order on Angela’s purse, putting Oscar on the phone for the description. He agreed they need not go back to the bare apartment, and went looking for somebody to break open the trunk. The detectives went back to their desks and returned phone calls till Delaney called Leo and said, ‘OK, come and see. I recruited a kid from the support staff to make a list for us.’
They all trooped down to the evidence room, where Delaney waited with a legal tablet and a white board. His recruit was pretzeled behind the board, tightening screws and muttering to the legs, which kept threatening to collapse. As the detectives deployed around the board, the recruit dropped his wrench, swore, dropped to the floor and crawled after it as it slid across the tiles.
Leo bent to look under the board and said, ‘Genius Geek! Good to see you. Look what we got here,’ he told the other detectives. ‘This quirky smart-ass finds information that’s invisible to the rest of us.’ At Sarah’s urging, he’d partnered skeptically with the teenaged temp on an earlier case, and been surprised by how fast the noisy kid could pull information out of a computer.
He turned to Sarah now and said, as if the boy he’d just called Genius Geek were not in the room, ‘I can never remember, is his name Scott Tracy or—’
‘Tracy Scott,’ Sarah said. She felt a proprietary interest in the bright temp she had rescued last year from exile behind the file cabinets. Unable to keep from annoying his supervisor, who liked his speed and skill on computers but couldn’t abide his noise, he was frequently sequestered in a remote corner of the support staff room. Sarah had learned to enjoy his outlandishness because she greatly valued his skill and speed.
She bent over the pocked face and super-thick glasses peering up from the floor. ‘Glad to see you, Tracy,’ she said. ‘You haven’t been around much lately.’
‘Dear lady!’ Tracy said. Dust bunnies and hairs cascaded from him as he rose and bowed from the waist. ‘I had to get serious about college applications for a while. Now that I’ve compromised my soul and mortgaged my future to at least a dozen bloated exploiters of team sports, I can work for justice while I wait to get rejected.’
‘Oh, nonsense, they’ll all want you! And I think you’re just what we need right now. Because in the foyer of her apartment we found what we believe to be the decedent’s laptop computer. We did bring it over, didn’t we?’
‘Yes, I’ve got it,’ Delaney said.
‘Reckon I can probably suss out what-all’s inside it if’n ya like, ma’am.’
‘Ah, you’ve been reading the southern novelists again.’
‘There you go, detecting as usual. Soon as I get this evil instrument set up,’ he said, tackling the wobbly legs again, ‘I am yours to command.’
‘Here, let me do that,’ Delaney said. He grabbed the wrench away from Tracy and straightened the legs with two expert motions. ‘Here’s a marker, Tracy. You remember how to write?’
Tracy looked down at it, sniffing. ‘We’re going back to whiteboards and markers? Why not stone tablets and a stylus?’
‘Shut up and listen. Make three columns, label them ITEM, SENT TO, and RETURNED. Got that? We’ll start with the computer – one laptop, Dell. Ollie, you’re doing the search for Angela’s background, you take it. Now, Tracy, write ‘laptop’ in the first column and ‘Ollie’ in the second.’
Tracy watched the transfer of the laptop with glistening eyes. Sarah caught his eye and made a hand motion, wait.