Game On: Tempting Twenty-Eight (Stephanie Plum #28)(60)

“I’m Catherine,” she said. “Mary Jane Kuleski is my mom. She sees your grandmother at bingo sometimes.”

“Grandma said she ran into your mom at the deli, and she said that you knew Gerard Gouge. I’m looking for a man who might have visited Gerard.” I showed her Oswald’s photo.

“I think I saw him two days ago except he didn’t have a ponytail. The police cars and crime scene van left and about an hour later, this man went to Gerard’s door. The yellow crime scene tape was across the door and the man stood there for a minute staring at it and then he turned and went back to his car. I was outside, pushing Sara in the stroller, so I noticed him.”

“What kind of car did he have?”

“A blue sedan. It looked new. It was clean.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I appreciate the help.” I stepped outside. “This looks like a nice neighborhood.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It feels kind of creepy knowing what happened to Gerard. It’s hard to forget something like that. We’re thinking of moving.”

I was about to knock for the second time on the last apartment door when I saw Diesel come around the side of the building. I joined him in the parking lot, and we walked to my car.

“Did you break in?” I asked him.

“No, but the crime scene tape had been partially ripped off.”

“I met Mary Jane Kuleski’s daughter. She thinks she saw Oswald two days ago. She said he went to the door, stared at the yellow tape, and left. He got into a blue car.”

“And then maybe he came back at night and let himself in through the porch slider,” Diesel said.

“Hard to believe he would try to live here.”

“Easier to believe that he came back looking for something.”

“Gerard’s laptop,” I said. “The one I took from the bedroom.”

We got into my car and sat for a moment.

“Where do we go from here?” I asked.

“Lunch,” Diesel said.

I drove out of the apartment complex, got onto the highway, and five minutes later I pulled into the parking lot to Lumpy’s Diner. The name wasn’t great, but the menu consisted of seven pages of classic diner food that was absolutely edible.

We were lucky enough to get a booth by the window, giving us a view of the highway. Bucolic waterfalls, cows grazing, and fields of wildflowers are okay if you’re on vacation. If you’re a working girl eating in a Jersey diner you want the urban energy of traffic.

I ordered a vanilla milk shake, grilled cheese, and fries. Diesel got a burger.

“A lot has happened in a week,” Diesel said. “Two grotesque deaths, two geek rescues, you almost got run over by a train, and Lula got shot.”

“We haven’t made any progress on capturing Oswald.”

“We’ve kept him from killing the last two Baked Potatoes. He was having fun in the beginning, but I imagine he’s grinding his teeth down to nubs now. He can’t get to Melvin or Charlotte. And while he’s preoccupied with this he doesn’t seem to be moving forward with his global threat.”

“It’s global?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it’s not global. Maybe it’s just international.”

“Is the system he hacked back to running normally now?”

“My understanding is that the area of weakness still exists but hasn’t been exploited. The longer Oswald waits to make his big move, the more time my employer has to fix the issue.”

“Okay, that’s sufficiently vague but I get the gist of it.”

“It’s what I know,” Diesel said. “The less I know, the less I can give away if I happen to be in a drunken stupor.”

I finished my grilled cheese and fries and reached for my messenger bag. “We’ve hit up all of Oswald’s known haunts except his rental.”

“The bat house?”

“We assumed it was just being used for a phony address, but what if he decided to move into it? It’s close to town. It probably has good cell service and internet. We never checked back on it.”

Forty minutes later we were on Dugan Street. I parked in front of the two-story house, and we looked up and down the street. A couple of junker cars were at the curb but there were no Porsches or newly washed blue sedans. Diesel and I walked to the door and into the house. We climbed the stairs to the second floor, and I knocked on the door to Oswald’s apartment. No answer.

Diesel opened the door and I softly announced bail bonds enforcement. Always good to cover my ass and go by the book. We walked through the rooms, and it was clear that someone had recently been there. A couch cushion that was misplaced, the television remote left on an end table, a cardboard Starbucks coffee cup in the trash. The bed looked like Goldilocks had tested it out. The pillow wasn’t perfectly plumped, and the quilt was slightly wrinkled.

“There’s nothing personal left lying around,” Diesel said. “No clothes, no bathroom stuff, no computer, no food in the fridge. But someone has been here.”

“I can have Ranger set up a surveillance camera.”

“That would be useful,” Diesel said.

We went downstairs and took the hallway to the back door. There was a small patch of dirt that served as a yard and a three-car garage that opened to the alley. Two of the garage spaces were filled with junk being stored. The third was occupied by a blue sedan.