The Night Shift(8)
“You know I won’t try to—”
“I know you won’t. But let him figure that out on his own. Between the two of you, maybe you can solve this thing before they give me my gold watch in June.”
“You’re retiring?”
“Put in my papers a few months ago,” Hal says with zero nostalgia. “Arpeggio will come around, particularly if he gets no leads, but short-term, I want you to focus on Vincent Whitaker. But if Arpeggio needs your lab or anything, I’d appreciate the assist.”
Keller nods. It’s likely a fool’s errand. She pulled the UFAP file on Vince Whitaker that morning; the case is ice-cold, the file razor-thin. The Feds are being brought in for their resources, that’s it.
“One of our detectives, the closest we have to an expert on the Blockbuster file, he’ll ride shotgun if you don’t mind.”
Keller frowns.
“Don’t worry,” Hal says, “he’s a good kid, gonna be a helluva detective.”
Good kid? Just how old is he? The Union County Prosecutor’s Office is unique in that it has more than two hundred employees, including its own squad of detectives. Back in the day, Keller interned with UCPO’s Homicide Task Force. She considers arguing against being coupled with a rookie. But she knows Hal well enough to understand that he’s not asking permission.
“He’s in office four-thirty. You know the way.”
Keller’s office when she was an intern.
And with that, she knows the meeting is over. She thanks him and heads for the door.
“Sarah,” Hal says, his voice softer than before.
She turns.
He motions to her belly. “Congratulations, dear.”
CHAPTER 7
ELLA
Ella sits in her car in front of a boarded-up structure with a giant FOR LEASE sign plastered on it. When she was in high school, she’d take the long way to avoid seeing the familiar blue-and-yellow sign shaped like a movie ticket. In college, when she came home on breaks and convinced herself she needed to face her fears and all that nonsense, the old video store building housed a Sizzler steakhouse. The thought of people eating low-end beef on that site felt sacrilegious.
Ella tugs at her dress top. She needs to get home and change. She glances at her cleavage and her mind flashes to Candy. On Ella’s first day on the job at Blockbuster, her coworker took scissors to the hideous uniform, the blue polo with the bright yellow collar, so that the front plunged nearly to Candy’s belly button. Their manager—Stevie they all called him—nearly fainted when he saw her.
Ella needs to stop. She’s twisting her hair again. A habit she once thought was cute that had morphed into a compulsion after that night. She would twist at the roots, leaving tiny bald spots. Her parents sent her to a specialist on trichotillomania. Talk therapy, making fidgets for her hands, habit-reversal training, but the truth was, they had no idea what caused the compulsion or how to stop it. That’s what drew Ella to work in the trauma field: how little all the well-meaning therapists understood her. Maybe, just maybe, she hoped, she could unlock the secrets of the mind and help other victims. And maybe even herself.
She looks over to the corner of the lot. That’s where a witness saw His car. Near the video-return receptacle, long since removed.
She puts her face in her hands, and she weeps.
CHAPTER 8
KELLER
Keller makes her way to the office of Atticus Singh—yes, that’s his actual name. He has brown skin, doe eyes, and wears a nice suit with a skinny tie over expensive shoes. Like Hal said, Atticus is young—he has to be just out of college. No degrees hang on the wall but she notices a coffee mug inscribed with a single, powerful word in blue: YALE.
“Special Agent Keller,” Atticus says, reaching out his hand for an eager shake. “It’s an honor.”
Keller nods and looks around the office again, taken back to her summers as an intern in the same miserable space. The investigative unit must have vastly expanded to stick this poor kid in the interns’ closet.
“This used to be my office,” Keller says. “I interned for the county in college.”
“How funny,” Atticus says. “It’s small, but it could be worse. My friend Brian literally is in what used to be a storage closet in the basement.” He smiles.
Keller eyes the bulletin board that takes up nearly the entire wall. It’s a crime board, the Blockbuster case, by the looks of it. Photos of the employees of the video store, the victims. A man in his twenties, skinny with acne, and four pretty teenage girls, all frozen in time in what appear to be high school yearbook photos. Under them, an unnerving black-and-white picture of the Blockbuster parking lot, empty but for a cluster of cars in the employee section. At the top of the board, a mug shot. She recognizes the photo. It’s of then-eighteen-year-old Vincent Whitaker. He has a swollen eye and cut lip—courtesy of the cops who busted down his door and picked him up the night of the massacre. He’s handsome in that bad-boy James Dean way, the dated photo adding to the mystique.
“Impressive work. I understand you’re the resident expert on the Blockbuster case,” she says.
Atticus nods earnestly. He clearly takes pride in his work, and Keller likes that.