Trouble in Paradise(6)

It didn’t seem worth arguing that this girl’s identification of Erica was the least of her problems. “Send Tammy Susie’s photo to my phone. Right now.”

Erica backed out of the store, and I approached the salesgirl. “We’re looking for a girl, about so tall.” I gestured four feet in height. “She was wearing a red-and-pink scarf on her head and she tried on some clothes here a couple of hours ago?”

The salesgirl’s brow wrinkled, and she stared off for a moment. “You mean Tammy Susie?”

I didn’t need her blabbing that the little celeb had dropped off the radar, so I tossed out the first lie that came to mind. “Yes. We’re working on the show, and Tammy Susie lost her uh… scarf. We need it for the episode we’re taping now. Can we check out your dressing rooms?”

“Sure, no problem.” She led us to the back of the store, where drapes closed off the fitting area. She pulled them back and gestured to the dressing rooms. We checked every room, looked behind mirrors and under chairs… no Tammy Susie. Bailey moved back toward the draped archway and pointed to a door that was next to the first dressing room on the left. “Where does that lead?”

“Just to the office.” The girl opened the door and showed us a small room that held a chair, a sofa, and a dusty computer sitting on a wooden table.

I walked around behind the table and scanned the room. A full-length mirror on the wall to my right looked a little askew. Crooked hanging things always make me nuts, so I went over and straightened it. And that’s when I noticed the mirror was actually hanging on a door. The mirror was large enough to hide the knob and obscure the seam where the door fitted into the wall. “What about this?” I asked.

“I never saw that before,” the girl said. “The owner’s the only one who uses this office, so I hardly ever come in here.”

I turned the knob and pulled, taking care not to knock the mirror down. It led out of the store and into another side of the mall. I stepped through and studied the knob from the outside, searching for pry marks or some evidence of forced entry. It looked pristine to me. I waved Bailey and Toni out to give me their opinions.

“Looks clean,” Bailey said.

“Yeah,” Toni said. “But what’s that?” She bent down and picked up a little red beaded bracelet with a silver smiley face in the center.

We all exchanged looks. It appeared to be a kid’s bracelet. If it was Tammy Susie’s, the theory that she’d just wandered off on her own or even sneaked away on purpose could pretty much be ruled out. No way would a nine-year-old have discovered that office door, let alone the door behind the mirror. The possibility that we were dealing with a kidnapping had just been upgraded into a likelihood. I leaned down to examine the area for blood, hair, or some other signs of a struggle. “What’s that?” I pointed to a smudge on the door frame.

Bailey peered at it. “Hard to tell just by looking. Might be blood, but it could be dirt.”

Toni called out to the salesgirl through the doorway. “Where’s the store owner?”

As the person most likely to know the layout of the mall and where all the doors were in this store, the owner made for an attractive suspect.

“At home, probably. She doesn’t come in much.”

She. A woman was less likely to be a kidnapper, but then again Tammy Susie was a pretty small target, even if she was, as Erica intimated, a tad chunky. “Why not?” I asked.

The girl shrugged. “It’s hard for her to get around. Grieta’s pretty old.”

Old. But to this girl that might mean thirty-nine. “How old?”

“We just threw her a party for her eighty-first birthday.”

Eighty-one was a little too old to handle the kidnapping. At least, without help.

“Does anyone work here besides you?” I asked.

“No. Not anymore. Renzo, that’s Grieta’s nephew, used to work on the weekends, but he just left for school up in Amherst.”

“How’s the store doing? Sales good?” Bailey asked.

I knew she was fishing around for motive. If the store was going under, an owner might get desperate enough to collaborate in a kidnapping scheme for some quick cash.

“Sales are okay…”

The way she trailed off told me sales were nothing to write home about. Maybe we were onto something.

“Okay… but not good,” I said. “Is Grieta maybe a little strapped for money?”

“Grieta? Strapped for money?” The girl laughed. “Her husband left her a fortune. This store’s just a hobby.”

I won’t lie. The owner wasn’t looking like our best suspect.