“Down the hall. Gotcha. And take that drink with you, will you? I hate bananas. The smell makes me gag.”
She saluted him with the now half-empty drink and set off down the short, narrow corridor that ran behind the stage until it hit the exterior wall and ended at an exit. (DO NOT OPEN EXCEPT IN CASE OF EMERGENCY read the red-and-white security bar mounted across it.) She stopped right before that door and opened the one to its right.
This was Matt’s office, though he didn’t use it much. Sometimes he tallied up the till in there, but usually he did so in Ben’s office—since Ben had the good calculator and his computer was the one with the payroll software. Matt’s office was Matt’s office because it was a largely empty room that was otherwise used for storage, and Matt had wanted an office.
It worked out well for Leda, because like she’d told Ben, she didn’t want to keep the murder board at home. The board was a midsize model that fit on the large easel in the corner. The easel was left over from Niki’s last run at an art degree, and Leda had supplied her own note cards and magnets to hold everything in place. This meant that even the more gruesome details were held up by adorable novelty magnets, picked up on Leda’s travels—or at her favorite coffee shops, or the neat old florist at the end of the block, or a gas station in Ballard.
The whiteboard was presently turned to the wall. The backside was plain brown corkboard, completely nondescript and perfectly uninteresting. The employee schedules had been printed out and affixed with brass thumbtacks.
But when Leda turned it around, the murder board was revealed in all its terrible, sloppy glory. The very sight of it gave her a weird, sad little pang—but also a gentle lift of hope.
She’d picked up a pack of one hundred index cards in assorted neon colors, and in the beginning, she’d had plans to color-coordinate the information. Those intentions evaporated fairly quickly, as she realized how little she knew and understood.
At the top of the board in royal highlighter yellow, she’d written: TOD SANDOVAL, 30 years of age, RIP.
Below that, on the far left: a tree of newspaper clippings, starting with one that declared him missing. Then another, from several days later: his car was found in a culvert, over on the east side of the city. And the next day: “Body Found in Sunken Car Believed to Be Missing Columbia City Man.” That one was held up by a magnet that advertised the possibility of bigfoot sightings in Olympic National Park. The next one was from three days later, announcing that a second body had been found and the police were not prepared to state for the record that the new body was connected to Tod’s in any way.
She’d left out Tod’s obituary. She couldn’t stand to look at it, and it wasn’t like the little paragraph of smudged newsprint offered any additional information about his death.
In the next column, on index cards so bright they made her squint, she’d listed Things We Know About Amanda Crombie, 27 years of age, RIP.
The top card read: Killed with the same gun that killed Tod, probably around the same time. Body was discovered later. She wasn’t in the car when it went into the water.
The next cards read, in descending order: An accountant with a small firm called Probable Outcomes. PO was an advertising group(?) that went under a year after she died.
No known enemies. Survived by parents, two brothers, and a cat.* (*Parents adopted the cat.)
Might have met Tod at a gas station a couple of miles away.
Leda had argued with herself over where to put that last card, since it applied to Tod as much as it applied to Amanda—but Tod’s row was getting full, so she’d stuck it down under Amanda’s name.
Video surveillance at the time showed that Tod had stopped at a BP station for gas that night, about ten minutes after a woman matching Amanda’s description had been hanging around it. The cashier wouldn’t swear that she was the woman he’d seen, and the footage from security cameras was so grainy as to be nearly useless… but he thought the mystery lady had been hiding from someone. She’d never come inside to ask for help, and she was never positively identified.
Leda would have bet her life that the woman at the gas station was Amanda Crombie. It might have been her psychic senses tingling, or it might’ve been the coincidence, or it might’ve been a blind grasp at narrative straws. But she believed it all the way down to her bones.
Next column: Things That Don’t Make Sense.
She read from the top down.
Why was Tod in the back seat of his own car when he was found? Police insisted that he hadn’t somehow floated back there when the car sank; he seemed to have bled out there. The killer either shot him there or tossed him inside before he’d run the car into the water.
“He?” she second-guessed herself out loud. “Or she, I guess.” She took a pen and added a question mark to the pronoun.
“Any idiot can fire a gun. No reason it had to be a dude,” she muttered.
Next card.
Did Tod know Amanda from somewhere? She’d never heard him mention her, but that didn’t mean they weren’t acquaintances. She could’ve been someone he recognized from his usual bus route, or from a restaurant he frequented, or any of a thousand places he went without Leda along for the ride.
Next card.
Everybody loved Tod, and nobody wanted to kill him.
She sat on the edge of Matt’s desk and scowled at that last card through eyes that were getting damp. She stared at it, long and hard. Every letter written thereupon was absolutely true, but someone had killed him anyway, and one way or another, Leda was going to find out who. Now that she had the interest of a real-life detective, she was flush with optimism and renewed determination. She was going to do it with Grady Merritt’s help, or without it. He had the badge, but she had the psychic powers.
Right?
She downed the last of her death by bananas and went to the ladies’ room to freshen up.
“One thing at a time,” she told herself. “First we sing. Then we use our powers for more than mere good. We use them for justice.”
13.
Grady Merritt had lied, but only a little.
The truth was, he’d already decided to go meet Whiteside without Leda, for all the reasons that Leda had stated and then some. Whiteside wasn’t a bad guy, but he’d talk to a fellow dude more openly and honestly than he’d talk to any given woman. He was only in his sixties, but he somehow seemed older than that—like he belonged back in the 1950s from whence he came.
Grady knew Leda would not take such exclusion lightly, but he figured she’d get over it quickly—especially if he got any useful information out of the older man. So rather than ask for permission, he’d decided to beg forgiveness.
And the next day, he took a long lunch break to go see the retired detective.
The drive north to Lake City didn’t take long when rush hour wasn’t in play, and soon he’d found his way to the tasteful split-level house on a hillside. He pulled up into the driveway next to a fence that had been dug beneath and reinforced so many times that it looked like a WWI trench.
As Grady was getting out of the car, the house’s front door opened to reveal a heavyset man in a Hawaiian shirt, with a wagging wiener dog tucked under his arm.
“Merritt!” he hollered. “Come on in, you ol’ son of a bitch—it’s good to see you!”