At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(88)

When Addie reached the far side of the store, she turned right again and started down the first aisle. She maneuvered around a family—a mom and three kids—then an elderly man examining LED bulbs. She went around the corner and down the next aisle, trying to look like an afternoon shopper in a bit of a hurry.

No one paid her any mind.

Not until the fourth aisle. This one held camping gear—stoves, camp chairs, cook pots, and ignitors. And a man with the hood of his sweatshirt pulled up, standing with his back to her. He held a folded-up tarp in plastic wrapping. She was sure she’d also seen him slip something into his pocket.

She edged past him. He jumped when he sensed her presence and angled away from her, keeping his face hidden. Just like Talfour’s attackers, she thought. She removed a heavy-duty flashlight from the shelf and pretended to read the fine print on the package.

The man fit Raven’s height and build, roughly speaking. He wore jeans and sneakers and a dirty ski jacket pulled over the hoodie. Gloves covered his hands. She couldn’t see his face. If he were Raven, he’d be careful to avoid being seen—by customers and by cameras.

The man tucked the tarp under his arm and headed away from her, toward the back of the store. She returned the flashlight to the shelf and followed at a discreet distance, tapping out a text for Patrick: possible suspect aisle 17

The man shot a glance over his shoulder as he turned the corner into the aisle that ran along the back of the store. Was that a tattoo on his forehead?

She set her shopping basket on a nearby shelf, unzipped her jacket, and placed a hand close to her hip and the gun holstered there. Patrick was now approaching from the other direction, moving toward them in a studiously casual way. He seemed to be raptly focused on the board games that filled the shelves on the back wall.

The man picked up his pace. Addie did the same.

Suddenly he spun on the balls of his feet and pushed through a door. Addie took off after him, vaguely aware that Patrick was now also running. She caught a glimpse of a sign declaring the area was for employees only; then she was through the door and in a cavernous space filled with shelves of overstock.

She paused. The target was nowhere in sight.

Patrick came through the door behind her. She held up a hand for silence.

They caught the sound of footsteps thudding on the concrete floor, moving away.

Addie broke into a run, darting down an aisle, Patrick right behind her. A pair of employees looked at them in surprise and jumped out of the way. There came a gust of cold air and a flare of daylight; then she heard a door slam shut.

“He’s outside,” she said.

Patrick skidded to a stop. “I’ll call for backup.”

She kept running, slapping the door handle and bursting into the open air. Rain spattered on her face. She was standing on a raised platform—a loading dock. The target was racing down a set of stairs toward the lane that ran between the store and a high stone wall. She spotted a gap in the wall and knew if the man made it there, he’d melt into the surrounding area where there were a million places to hide.

She leapt down the stairs, taking them three at a time and landing smoothly at the bottom. The man was halfway to the gap in the wall.

She whipped out her gun.

“Police! Stop!”

To her surprise, he did.

“Hands up!” she shouted.

He dropped the tarp and raised his hands.

“Now turn around. Slowly!”

When the man complied, Addie’s disappointment hit her like a fist. The man wasn’t Raven. He wasn’t in his twenties or even vaguely Viking-like. He was a middle-aged white man, breathing hard from the run and looking utterly miserable.

On his face was a tattoo of a tiger.

She hadn’t found a serial killer. She’d caught a petty thief.



The evidence techs found Raven’s fitness tracker half an hour later, tossed under a dirty T-shirt on the floor of Helskin’s pickup. Thirty minutes after that, Lieutenant Criver arrived—no doubt alerted by Dispatch that they might have found the Viking Poet. He’d parked a short distance away and was now striding across the parking lot in their direction, for once missing his oily sidekick, Billings.

His face looked like a thunderclap.

“Ah, Saint Jude spare me,” Patrick muttered. “You think he’s here to praise our ingenuity?”

“And to thank us for our hard work,” Addie said darkly. “Right after he eviscerates us for the latest leak to the press.”

She was watching the evidence techs, who were carefully sifting through the rest of the truck’s contents. They’d cleared out the parking area immediately adjacent to the vehicle and set up a perimeter. Outside the tape, a small crowd had gathered. Two patrol officers kept watch.

The wind was a constant slap, but the rain had fizzled out. At least they had that.

“A shoplifter?” Criver said when he drew close.

Patrick glanced at her, and she gave him a small nod. Since the lieutenant preferred to work with a man, she decided to let Patrick handle it. She was too worried to deal with misogynist jerkwads.

While Patrick began to fill Criver in on the latest developments, Addie turned her back and kept her attention on the truck and the techs.

The seats and footwells of Helskin’s vehicle were filled with the detritus of a life lived without any care for the usual borders between one’s home and one’s vehicle—maybe Helskin spent a lot of time in his truck. Dirty shirts and socks, wadded-up food wrappers, two sets of work boots, twenty-three empty plastic bottles bearing the logo of a sports drink company. Two empty bottles of rotgut whiskey. An unused pair of running shoes still in the box. What looked like a month’s worth of mail—nothing but bills and advertisements. In the bed of the truck, a bolted-on toolbox held a shovel, garbage bags, a hammer, and assorted other tools.