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  PRAISE FOR

  Die Buying

  “One hell of a great novel! This novel will crack you up with DiSilverio’s humor and razor’s-edge wit. A great book to curl up with over the weekend. You won’t be able to put it down.”

  —Suspense Magazine

  “This is a wonderful start to a new series with likable characters, lots of humor, and a swift-moving story that will grab anyone who has ever stepped foot in a mall… I’m adding Die Buying to my cozy favorites for the year—even though I hate to shop.”

  —AnnArbor.com

  “Charming, fun, and refreshing.”

  —Seattle Post-Intelligencer

  “Laura DiSilverio has come up with a unique hook whereby she reels in her readers… I’m eager to read the next installment in this offbeat series.”

  —Mystery Scene

  Berkley Prime Crime titles by Laura DiSilverio

  DIE BUYING

  ALL SALES FATAL

  All Sales Fatal

  Laura DiSilverio

  BERKLEY PRIME CRIME, NEW YORK

  THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada

  (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) • Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL,

  England • Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of

  Penguin Books Ltd.) • Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia

  (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.) • Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community

  Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India • Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive,

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  (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s

  imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business

  establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over

  and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

  ALL SALES FATAL

  A Berkley Prime Crime Book / published by arrangement with the author

  PUBLISHING HISTORY

  Berkley Prime Crime mass-market edition / May 2012

  Copyright © 2012 by Laura DiSilverio.

  Cover illustration by Ben Perini.

  Cover design by Rita Frangie.

  Interior text design by Laura K. Corless.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or

  electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of

  copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-58070-7

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME

  Berkley Prime Crime Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  BERKLEY® PRIME CRIME and the PRIME CRIME logo are trademarks of

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that this book is

  stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the

  author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

  ALWAYS LEARNING

  PEARSON

  In gratitude for the friendship of women

  who made and make my life richer:

  Dawn Taylor, Linda Petrone, Sally Logan,

  Cindy Stauffer, Katie Larsh,

  and Jill Gaebler

  Acknowledgments

  As always, I want to thank Michelle Vega and all the Berkley Prime Crime crew for their insight and attention to detail that make my books so much stronger. Thanks also to my agent and friend, Paige Wheeler, and her folks at Folio Literary Management. Finally, thank you to the mystery writing community that encourages me and motivates me by believing that stories are important and by writing excellent books that illuminate my world, move me, and show me what it’s possible to achieve with words. They inspire me to work harder at my craft. They include Elaine Viets, Hank Phillippi Ryan, Reed Farrel Coleman, Marcia Talley, Brad Parks, Sophie Littlefield, Hallie Ephron, Tracy Kiely, Margaret Maron, and many, many others.

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-one

  Twenty-two

  Twenty-three

  Twenty-four

  Twenty-five

  Twenty-six

  Twenty-seven

  One

  In my more profound moments, I think of malls as cathedrals to capitalism, airy sanctuaries filled with sunshine and optimism, embracing all comers with warmth and light, and offering cookies and Orange Julius in place of the wafer and the wine.

  This was not one of those moments.

  Hands balled on my uniformed hips, I regarded the middle-aged man in front of me gripping the handle of a kid’s red wagon, upon which rested a large leather ottoman. With the complexion and girth of someone who thinks a Quarter Pounder is a light appetizer, he gave me an affronted look when I asked if he had a receipt for his purchases.

  “Are you implying I stole this, miss?” he asked, patting the ottoman with a beefy hand. “I have the receipt right here.” He fumbled in his suit pocket and thrust a crumpled slip of paper toward me.

  “Not the ottoman, sir, the wagon. The manager at Jen’s Toy Store notified mall security that you had forgotten to pay for it.” In the year plus that I’d been working as a security officer at Fernglen Galleria, “forgot to pay” had become my favorite euphemism for “shoplifted.”

  He snorted. “How else was I supposed to get this to my car?” He thumped the ottoman again. “It’s damn heavy.”

  “I’m sure the furniture store could arrange for delivery, or—”

  “Yeah, for fifty bucks. I’m not paying—”

  “The point is, sir, that if you want to use the wagon as a cargo dolly, you have to pay for it first.”

  He goggled at me as though I’d suggested he do the hokey pokey. Nude. In the parking lot. “Fine, just fine!” He bent and wrapped his arms around the ottoman, lifting it off the wagon. His red face grew redder with the effort. “If I get a hernia, I’m going to sue the mall and you personally for every penny you’ve got.” He nodded his head firmly, thunking his chin against the ottoman so hard his teeth sn
apped together. “Ow!”

  “I’ll get the door for you,” I said politely, zipping to the exit on my two-wheeled electric Segway and dismounting to push the heavy glass door wide. A slight breeze riffled my bangs. Without so much as a thank-you, the man stomped past me, breathing hard. Giving him a cheery wave and a “Thanks for shopping at Fernglen!” in my best chipper, flight-attendant-like voice, I let the door close.

  The radio clipped at my left shoulder crackled as I returned to the Segway. “EJ, Captain Woskowicz needs to see you on the double.” The southern-accented voice belonged to Joel Rooney, the youngest officer on the mall’s security team. As low man on the totem pole, he frequently got stuck with dispatch duty.

  “I’ll be there in five,” I said, retrieving the wagon and heading toward Jen’s Toy Store with it trundling behind me. My brother Clint and I had had a wagon just like it when we were kids. I still had a half-moon-shaped scar under my chin from when he’d lost control of the wagon with me in it and I’d careened down our steep driveway before crashing into a neighbor’s Lamborghini parked at the curb. I’d gone flying and scraped my chin on the asphalt. The cut had needed six stitches. What had I been—three, four? I ran my index finger over the scar as the Segway purred smoothly over Fernglen’s tiled halls. The tiny ridge of tissue was nothing compared to the massive scarring around my knee, the result of an IED that had killed two of my unit in Afghanistan and gotten me medically retired from the military.

  After leaving the wagon with the grateful toy store manager and suggesting that, if she didn’t want it to disappear again, she not park it outside the store as an advertising gimmick, I sped up and cut through the food court on my way to the security office, tucked into a side hall near Sears. An ill-lit hallway lined floor to ceiling with white brick tile, its narrowness and dinginess dissuaded most shoppers from venturing down it. A soda vending machine hummed quietly near an emergency exit at the far end. Glass doors fronted the security office, and I pushed through them, leaving the Segway outside. Small, dank, and smelling vaguely of pizza, the office boasted a couple of desks that belonged to whoever was on shift, filing cabinets, and a coffeepot. A short hall led to my boss’s office and a storeroom in the back. The office’s most prominent feature was a bank of monitors displaying views from the hundred-plus cameras in and around the mall. Actually, only about half the cameras were hooked up, a cost-saving measure I’d fought strenuously. The director of security, Captain Woskowicz, had said, “The cameras are mainly deterrents to shoplifting, Ferris, so as long as the general public doesn’t know they’re not working, they’ll still work.” That’s what passed for logic in Wosko World.

  Joel Rooney, twenty-three years old and thirty pounds overweight, swiveled his chair away from the screens to face me as I came in. A smear of cream cheese shone on one chubby cheek. Soft brown hair curled around his ears. His ironed white uniform shirt was tucked into his black pants, but he somehow still looked rumpled. Correctly interpreting my raised brows, he raised his bagel and said, “It’s not as bad as a donut!”

  “A bagel’s got just as many calories and not much more nutritional value,” I said. Joel was trying to lose weight and get in better shape. I’d been helping him by swimming with him a couple afternoons a week. Swimming was the only form of aerobic exercise my knee could take now.

  He stared wistfully at the bagel. “It’s whole wheat.”

  “Where’s Cap—”

  “Is Ferris on her way? Didn’t you tell her to haul her sorry ass—” Captain Woskowicz stomped from his small office into the main room and cut himself off when he saw me. “It’s about time.”

  With the personality and fashion sense of a third-world dictator, Woskowicz stood well over six feet tall and wore a khaki-colored uniform decked with enough medals and insignia to make Noriega look under-accessorized. The rest of the security team wore standard uniforms—black slacks with a white shirt and black Smoky-the-Bear-type hat—but Woskowicz said that as director of security he needed to stand out. He’d recently started growing hair back on his shaved head, and a quarter inch of grizzled fuzz now covered his lumpy skull.

  I fought the urge to drop a curtsy and say, “You rang?” and contented myself with a lifted brow and a quiet “What’s up?”

  Woskowicz waited a beat for me to add “sir,” but he wasn’t going to live long enough for that. I “sirred” or “ma’amed” people unless they proved they didn’t deserve it. You do the math. After a second, he popped a breath mint in his mouth and said, “We got a call from the loss-prevention officer at Nordstrom. They’ve got their eye on a man behaving suspiciously, and they requested our assistance.”

  “Suspiciously how?”

  “How the hell should I know? I’m not there watching the perv, am I?” Woskowicz scowled. “Just go check it out.”

  “Will do,” I said. “Oh, and I called the camera repair company again. They didn’t seem to have a record of the service request from when you called earlier. They—”

  “You what?” Woskowicz’s scowl deepened. “Who asked you to?”

  I stared at him. In most jobs, one got kudos for displaying a little initiative. Not, apparently, if one worked for a control freak like Woskowicz. It wasn’t hard to figure out why some security officer before my time had christened the director of security “Captain Was-a-bitch.” “I thought—”

  “Well, stop it. You don’t get paid for thinking.” He wheeled and tromped toward his office, stopping halfway to glare at me over his shoulder. “When are they coming?”

  “It’ll be later in the week before they can get here. Something about completing a system upgrade for some bank branches.”

  He grunted and disappeared into his office, slamming the door behind him.

  Joel and I exchanged an expressive glance. “It’s good that you called the camera company, EJ,” Joel said.

  I sighed. A whole wing of cameras had gone black on the midshift two nights ago, and it made me uneasy to have no camera coverage. Woskowicz, who’d been the sole officer on duty that night, swore that nothing unusual had happened, that all of a sudden the screens just blanked out, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that he’d spilled a cup of coffee on the computers or something similar. Still, there hadn’t been a break-in or any vandalism, so I had to assume the outage was an accident. I watched the parade of shoppers on the screens for a moment, focusing on a young woman arguing with a man outside a boutique and then on a little boy trying to wiggle his fingers through the mesh of the pet store’s puppy pen.

  Joel followed my gaze. “You need a dog.” Joel, the proud owner of two shelties that he trained for agility competitions, thought no household was complete without a canine.

  “Fubar would disagree.”

  Nordstrom lay at the opposite end of the mall from the security office, and I glided down the wide central hall on my Segway, enjoying the relative quiet of the mall on a Tuesday. Set out in a large X with anchor stores at each end of the X, the mall had two levels, multiple garages and parking lots, a food court, and a fountain on the lower floor. Large planters overflowed with greenery that grew well in the natural light streaming through the glass-paned roof, giving an almost greenhouse effect. Located off I-95 in Vernonville, Virginia, we picked up a lot of customers from the bedroom communities that fed both Richmond and the D.C. area. The bam-bam of hammers broke into the quiet, and I looked over the railing to the level below to see workers adding a white picket fence to the enclosure that would house the Easter Bunny for the next few weeks as he—she?—posed for expensive photos with fussily dressed boys and girls. A dolly laden with potted tulips and other flowers waited nearby.

  I passed my friend Kyra’s store, Merlin’s Cave, and Segwayed into Nordstrom. Wending my way through racks of ties and men’s socks, I found Dusty Margolin, head of the store’s loss-protection division, talking to an employee near his office.

  “EJ!” He broke off with a smile when he saw me and dismissed the man he was talking to. In his m
idfifties, with graying hair and a banker-style suit, Dusty looked like a stuffy businessman until he smiled; then, he looked like someone you’d want to have a beer with at a baseball game.

  Getting off the Segway, I said, “You’ve got a shoplifter problem, Dusty?”

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t think so. Maybe a pickpocket. I’ll show you.”

  Taking my arm, he guided me around a stack of Spanx for men—who knew?—and pointed out a tallish man casually studying a display of novelty boxers near the dressing room. His back was to us, but I noted improbably black hair and cuffed slacks showing a half inch of white sock above scruffy sneakers. “Looks harmless,” I said, crossing my fingers behind my back.

  “Watch.”

  After a moment, an unsmiling man with a blocky build emerged from the dressing room, a blazer and shirt tossed over his arm. He marched to the nearest cash register, paid with a credit card, and lumbered toward the exit. After a moment, the black-haired man moved nonchalantly after him.

  “He’s been tailing that guy ever since he came in the store,” Dusty whispered.

  I had a bad feeling about this. “I’ll take care of it,” I told Dusty, and then moved swiftly to intercept the potential pickpocket as he reached the outer door. “May I have a word with you, sir?” I asked.

  “Not now, Emma-Joy,” my Grandpa Atherton muttered out of the side of his mouth. “I’m on a job. Don’t want to lose my target.”

  I’d known the stalker was my grandfather from the moment I saw him move. Eighty-two years old, retired from the CIA for over a decade, he still did contract work for various agencies around town and liked to “keep his hand in” between assignments by tailing people at the mall and trying out listening devices or other spy gadgets he got off the Internet or God-knows-where. It was a practice I tried to discourage.

  I kept pace with him as we stepped out of Fernglen and into a chilly March day. “The loss-prevention guy at Nordstrom figures you for a pickpocket,” I said, wincing at the contrast between the black wig and Grandpa’s seamed face.