At the Quiet Edge(25)

It was password protected, but he’d sat at this desk next to his mom often enough, smelling the bitter coffee smell that always wafted from the mug next to the keyboard. He knew she used the same password they used on their personal computer.

“Yes,” he whispered when it fired up. But his victory quickly deflated into cold defeat. He’d expected a helpful app with the storage company logo, but at first all he could find were spreadsheets. He finally found an icon for something called Star Logistics, but it only opened a primitive program asking for codes and IDs he couldn’t puzzle out.

“Shit.”

Everett turned to the metal filing cabinets instead. The top drawer seemed filled with mostly blank forms, but the second yielded better results. He immediately grabbed the file labeled B Building Leases—Current and slapped it open on the desk.

“B8,” he muttered as he flipped through the dozens of sheets. “B8, come on.” And there it was, finally. The last page in the file.

Lease Application was typed across the top of the form. The lessee name was filled out in blocky blue ink: Alex Bennick. He recognized his mom’s handwriting below that, naming the unit as B8 and listing the monthly and annual rent charges. That application was stapled to a signed one-page contract. The third sheet was a photocopy of a driver’s license.

An old man.

Everett stared at the unsmiling face for a long time, hoping for a hint. The guy did look like he could be a murderer. And he was right here among them. He’d stood in this room a few feet from their home; he’d spoken to Everett’s mom. Everett shuddered as he looked at the man’s pale skin and narrowed eyes. His flat, hard mouth and short white buzzcut. The copy was grayscale, so Everett couldn’t see the color of his eyes, but the license said blue.

Were they in danger?

Everett blew out a hard breath. Probably not. He could be a bad guy. But he could also just be one of the grumpy old men who got coffee at McDonald’s on school mornings. A grizzled farmer. A bitter retired cop. The guy they brought in to drive the school bus when the regular driver got sick.

Then again, he supposed any of those men could be murderers too. That was the point, wasn’t it? They were always neighbors and fathers and coworkers.

Everett winced when a distant bang of hollow metal chimed from somewhere deep in the complex. He darted to the window to look through the blinds, but the only movement was the nub of a stray dandelion bobbing from a crack in the sidewalk.

He quickly slipped the page into the copier and waited for the flash before stuffing it right back into the folder. One second later, he’d slammed the file drawer, grabbed the copy, and strode straight back to safety. When he got to the desk in their apartment, he hurriedly jotted down the date of the lease agreement before he forgot. It had been rented only two years before.

With his mom out of the office, he could check absolutely anything online, because he’d have plenty of time to close windows and delete history before she made it all the way inside the apartment. Hunching over the keyboard, he began his search.

Alex Bennick was still alive as far as Everett could tell, and he’d been in the Herriman paper multiple times. Not for anything criminal, but he’d been an associate superintendent for the school district. That was incredibly creepy because instead of a cop investigating disappearances, he was a school employee obsessed with missing girls. Yikes.

Everett immediately opened his text app and typed out everything he’d found for Josephine.

OMG! Did these girls all go to school here??? she wrote back immediately.

Not sure. There are three high schools in the county??? I’ll try to check it out.

First things first, though. He looked up the man’s address online. He knew the names of only a few streets in town, and as he zoomed out, he didn’t recognize anything. After shifting the map around a bit, he finally spotted a highway down the road. From there, he found his own street.

Frowning, he glanced back and forth between the two spots, then requested directions from his address to Alex Bennick’s. Weird. It said the drive time was fifteen minutes, but on the map it looked so much closer.

He zoomed out again, tilting the map in a different direction, and suddenly he saw it. “Holy shit,” he whispered before racing into his mom’s room for the phone. “Josie,” he panted as soon as she answered his call. “This guy lives on the other side of my field! Less than two miles away! He’s right there!”

“No way. And he’s still alive?”

“I think so.”

“Everett, he’s so close to you! That’s scary! What if there are bodies in his house? Oh my God, what if there are bodies in the storage unit?”

Everett blinked in shock, then blinked harder. “No. There were some boxes, but I’d be able to tell, I think. There’d be a . . . smell?”

“Yeah, that’s true. We’ll find out more tomorrow, for sure. Send me everything you find on the missing girls. I’m in full detective mode now.”

He hung up the phone, then stood there, caught off guard by Josephine’s renewed insistence on helping investigate. He didn’t really want to go back into the locker. What if this man actually was a killer? But if he was, shouldn’t they find out? Tell somebody? They could solve a half-dozen cases. They’d be famous. Maybe there were even rewards.

When the phone blared in his hand, Everett dropped it, then jumped back when it hit the floor with a hard crack of plastic. “Oh no,” he whispered, crouching down to examine the damage. But only the battery case had popped off. The ringer kept going. When he turned it over, an unknown number appeared. It wasn’t Josephine. He snapped the case back on and set it on the charger. It finally stopped ringing, though it started again before he left the room. Everett closed the door and backed away.