Simon Says_. Walk (Kate Morgan #6)(14)
Author: Dale Mayer

She shook her head. “Oh, I don’t know,” she muttered. “This just feels so very wrong.”

 

“In what way?”

 

Kate sighed. “Why would the kidnapper tell Patricia that, if she delivered the message, she’s off the hook? Yet, if she doesn’t deliver the message, he’d find out. And she’d wake up one morning to find him at the edge of her bed, and the game would start again. This isn’t a game,” she declared, throwing her arms out at the apartment. “This is a slaughter. This is …” She stopped, winced, looked over at Rodney and added, “This is a you-lose kind of shit.”

 

*

 

With a text response from Kate, Simon tucked his phone in his back pocket and headed to his first building. He was rehabbing three buildings downtown at this point. Some of these projects seemed to go on forever, and a couple he had more or less dove into with his heart rather than his brain, and he was still paying the piper for those.

 

On the other hand, he’d never lost money on a project yet, and he wasn’t about to start. It was just a matter of appealing to the correct audience and letting people know what was available and why something was special. As soon as people saw what made a building unique, they often bought into the whole emotional side of the property, and it wasn’t then just concrete, wood, and marble.

 

He walked up to the first project on his route today, and his foreman paced on the front steps, arguing on his phone.

 

Simon stopped and winced. That was not a good start. He approached slowly. His foreman, now seeing Simon, quickly ended the call. “Problems?” Simon asked cautiously.

 

He snorted. “Nothing more than usual.” He waved his cell phone around. “Things are stuck at the docks. Supplies can’t come on time. Two men are down sick.” He added an eye roll.

 

“And yet sick could be a euphemism for It’s a sunny day,” Simon noted, with a questioning look.

 

“It probably is. But they do good work, when they work, and it’s damn hard to get them to work if their heart is not into it.”

 

“Right. We’ve got way too many of those sometimes, don’t we?”

 

“We’re also spread thin. Lots of people are struggling right now, and they don’t want to work.”

 

“Right.”

 

Since the pandemic had washed through the world, everything had shifted, causing supply chain issues, staffing issues, constant issues, and more issues atop that. There were always issues in this industry. Meanwhile, Simon wanted to take something old and turn it into a renewed beauty, but he also wanted function over form. He wanted both if he could get it, preferably at a price that was doable—and that was where the challenge often came in.

 

Still, turning his mind back to his foreman, Simon said, “Let’s see where the problems are and see if we can find a way around them.”

 

“You have to be a miracle worker to find ways around these headaches,” his foreman muttered. But he turned and sent him a hard smile. “Come on. Let’s go take a look.”

 

*

 

Great, Simon was up ahead.

 

To a casual passerby, when they saw a nondescript man, most won’t interact. He smiled, tugged up his collar against his neck, being that nondescript man. Even though it was a warm day for late September in Vancouver, it helped to hide him, kept him feeling a little bit more secure. Besides, he didn’t know whether Simon could tell who he was or not, and so, keeping quiet, keeping hidden, was even more paramount.

 

Simon’s stalker shifted to the other side of the road and watched his prey, kept it up for several hours, picking up a few groceries as he went, even picked up a coffee, knowing that it was foolish to do this, but many people were in Simon’s life and yet, in many ways, not enough.

 

He now watched the foreman and then another employee join the foreman, as soon as Simon left. A harsh interaction ensued between the man and the foreman.

 

He listened for tidbits. Seemed the employee was reaming out the foreman pretty good, called him a waste of space, stating that he, the employee, was so much better than everyone.

 

The stalker sneered. The asshole. He was hardly better than anyone. That’s not fair, but guys like that were everywhere, and he knew lots of them. Instead of following Simon, his stalker eyed the verbal altercation, felt that familiar instinct, that killer instinct, rise again, and chose one of the two men, still arguing before him.

 

He continued watching the abuser, who’d been yelling at the foreman, now take a left turn and head down a separate street. The stalker quickly followed him. If he was lucky, maybe this asshole wouldn’t be quite so bright. Watching him head into a pool hall, the stalker smiled with quiet joy. This would be almost too easy.

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 4

 

 

 

 

 

Answers were very slow in coming. As it was, Kate would have to wait days, if not weeks, for forensics. Multiple sets of fingerprints were in Patricia’s apartment, and they needed to bring Terry back in, her brother, for fingerprint testing to exclude him. Kate did, however, have a printout of their victim’s history. The stepfather had sexually abused Patricia at a young age, soon after he’d moved into the family home.

 

He’d done his time and was living in Toronto, a hell of a long way away from Vancouver. Kate would have to hunt down the pimp no matter what, just to ask some questions about Patricia and Terry. And, with that thought in mind, she phoned the brother. When he answered, she identified herself.

 

As soon as he heard the name, he sighed, and his tone was weary when he spoke again. “Do have any news for me?”

 

“No, not yet. I’m sorry,” she said, although knowing that she had no reason to apologize when his sister was barely in the morgue. “I do need the name of the pimp you bought her from. Then I’ll go talk to him to see if he’s had anything to do with this.”

 

Terry seemed surprised. “You’ll really go talk to him?”

 

“Absolutely. Chances are he’s well-known to our department already, and that’ll make it a little easier for me to go there.”

 

“If you say so,” Terry replied, his tone curt. “I’d just as soon never see that asshole’s face again. The only name I know him by is Stone.”

 

“As in stoner?” she asked.

 

“I don’t know. When I saw him, he wasn’t drugged out. I never heard anybody call him by that name. However, Patricia only called him Stone anytime I ever talked to her about him.”