“Hotchner.”
“It’s Rossi. We need to find Bobby Edels’s car. It went missing when he did.”
Hotchner was ahead of him. “The local cops up there ran it when he disappeared. They came up empty.”
“Well, hell, let’s put Garcia on it. We need to know what happened to that vehicle.”
“I’d like to know myself, but we don’t gather the evidence, Dave.”
“With all due respect, Aaron, remove the stick from where you’re sitting and get reaclass="underline" Bobby Edels disappeared. Wherever he disappeared from, he got there in his car. That car is a clue that we need to find so we caninterpret it.”
“Agreed,” Hotchner said. “I’ll get Garcia on it right away. Anything else?”
“Not yet,” Rossi said, “but you’ll be the first to know when there is.” He clicked off.
With a curious frown, Mrs. Edels asked, “If the police haven’t been able to find Bobby’s car, what makes you think you can?”
Rossi gave her a half smile. “Because we have a secret weapon.”
Named Penelope Garcia.
Supervisory Special Agent Derek Morgan and Detective Tate Lorenzon had spent the last three hours interviewing Fix-It Mate employees.
They started with the assistant manager and worked their way slowly through coworkers of Bobby Edels. The assistant manager, highest-ranking person on duty, had shown them security videos of the parking lot. They had watched Bobby Edels get behind the wheel of his Honda Civic and pull out of the parking lot.
Then Bobby disappeared down the road, out of sight and, seemingly, off the planet.
Even after twenty-two employee interviews, the agent and the detective knew no more than what they’d seen on that video.
They were in the employees’ break room now, where they had conducted the interviews, and Lorenzon got up to pour them what seemed like their twentieth cup of coffee. Or maybe thirtieth.
“Do we know anythingnew?” Lorenzon asked as he returned to the table and set their cups on the table.
“Sure,” Morgan said, sipping the coffee.
“Such as?”
“We know that Fix-It Mate coffee sucks ass.”
They both laughed. As they drank the wretched brew, young, dark-haired Stan Schultz, assistant manager, wandered into the break room. He wore a blue Fix-It Mate shirt and navy blue slacks. The slightly taller, middle-aged man who followed him in wore khaki shorts and a white Cubs T-shirt. He had brown hair, pale skin, horn-rimmed glasses and a small beer belly under the shirt.
Schultz said, “Officers, this is Alan Bellamy, our store manager—he’s come in on his day off.”
Introductions were made and hands were shaken all around.
Then Bellamy said, “Bobby was a good employee— hell, everybodyliked him. How can we help?”
Lorenzon listed what they had already done at Fix-It Mate.
Bellamy’s eyebrows rose. “I don’t know what else I can add. Kinda hoped, comin’ in like this, I could do Bobby’s cause some good.”
“Maybe you still can. We’ve talked to people about how he got along with his fellow employees—how did he get along with customers?”
Bellamy didn’t hesitate. “In the store, he was great. First-rate people skills, that kid—surprising, since he was on the quiet side, kept to himself. Far as customers go in the store, I never heard a complaint about him.”
“You said, ‘in the store’ twice,” Morgan said. “Does that mean there were complaints outsidethe store?”
Bellamy shrugged. “Bobby was part of our installation staff—part of the team that does everything from layin’ carpet to building garages. He’d been doing that for us, oh, hell, ever since he graduated from high school, for maybe two… two and a half years? I mean, every team had complaints. Some customers are… hard to please.”
“Were any of these complaints in writing?”
“Sure.”
“May we see them?”
Bellamy’s smile was a frozen thing that just hung there for a while.
Finally he said, “Normally, we keep those to ourselves. We dispose of the letters, and any phone message and such, but we do keep a list of customers who’ve said they were dissatisfied with a team’s work, with a little write-up of their specific complaint or complaints.”
“It might help, as you said, Bobby’s cause.”
“Well, if it can help you find the son of a bitch who did this thing, hell—we’re glad to help any way we can, here at Fix-It Mate.”
That little commercial made Morgan smile, but he merely said, “Much appreciated, Mr. Bellamy.”
Bellamy led them up to his office, printed off the list and, ten minutes later, the agent and the detective were back in the car. Lorenzon pulled out of the parking lot as Morgan snapped on his seat belt and glanced over the list of only eight names. Nothing familiar stood out.
“Anything good?” Lorenzon asked as he wove through traffic, headed back toward the expressway.
“Eight names,” Morgan said. “Abbott, Benavides, Denson…"
“Wait a minute,” Lorenzon interrupted. “ Denson?”
“Yeah.”
“ JakeDenson?”
“There’s a Jacob Denson. You know him?”
“He’s the Wauconda detective who didn’t want you guys helping him. I was with Hotchner when we visited the PD up there. The guy’s a complete and utter asshole.”
Morgan felt a chill. “He’s more than that, Tate.”
“Yeah?”
“He’s a complete and utter asshole with a connection to at least three of the victims.”
Morgan’s first call was to Hotchner to tell the SAIC what they had learned. Hotchner ordered them to Wauconda to talk to Denson. His second call was to Garcia.
“Office of Omnipotence,” she said.
“Love of my life,” Morgan said, “I need some help.”
“Do I have to say you’ve come to the right place?”
He grinned at the phone. “No. Hey, I need you to find out all you can about a Wauconda, Illinois, detective named Jake Denson.”
“Checking up on one of the good guys?”
“Checking to see if he isa good guy.”
“Gotcha,” she said.
“Catch you later, sweetheart.”
He clicked off.
Lorenzon, behind the wheel, glanced over at Morgan. “Was that intelligence you called, or your latest girl friend?”
“Best computer tech on the planet. We’re just friends. We kid around.”
“That kind of kidding around gets you written up where I come from.”
Morgan gave him a look. “Tate, this serial killer is an aberration in your life, right? Not saying you don’t face tough stuff, day in and day out, but this is off the rails, wouldn’t you say?”
“Way off.”
“Well, that brilliant and gentle soul I was just talking to? She needs a little TLC sometimes, to take the edge off the horrific garbage we face day in and day out."
Silence.
“So, then, she’s just a friend?” Lorenzon asked lightly.
Morgan and Lorenzon had been needling each other since they were kids.
“She’s a good friend.”
Lorenzon grinned. “Damn, if I had a nickel for every time I heard you say that over the years…”
“Hey, hey, I picked that up from you, baby.”
The detective’s eyebrows shot up. “When did Iever tell you some woman of mine was just a friend?”
“How about… every woman I ever saw you with?”
Lorenzon laughed. “You know, come to think of it? That’s right. That’s right.…”
Traffic being what traffic always was in Chicago, the better part of an hour dragged by before they got to the Wauconda PD HQ.
Morgan had spent the time reading the Fix-It Mate report of the complaint Denson had made against Bobby Edels’s construction team. The complaint had no allegations against Edels per se, but Denson had claimed that the team, at his house to construct a two-car garage, had practiced shoddy workmanship and left behind a mess in his yard. Not the sort of thing that would normally draw a red flag, but in a city of over three million, one detective having ties to three of five murder victims in different jurisdictions certainly was. Flags did not come much redder.…