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  Despite that, I found the Segway taking me to the wing with the malfunctioning cameras. The cops were gone. The reporters had moved on to other stories. Customers flowed in and out of the stores. The wing was down a side hall, not one of the major spokes ending at an anchor, and it only held eight stores, four on either side. Down the left were Nailed It, a mani-pedi salon; the Herpetology Hut, a reptile store; Rock Star Accessories, which catered to the teeny-bopper crowd; and Pete’s Sporting Goods, a comprehensive sporting-goods store with everything from canoes to pedometers, guns to basketballs. On the other side were the Make-a-Manatee store, which allowed kids to pick out the “skin” of a plush animal and have it stuffed just as full as they wanted it; a sunglasses emporium; a dress boutique called Starla’s Styles; and Jen’s Toy Store with the cheery red wagon still parked out front holding a sign that read “50% Off All Games!!”

  Leaning forward a tad to set the Segway in motion, I traveled the length of the short hall down to the doors and then back up the other side. Plate glass windows gleamed, an acrid smell drifted from the salon, and my friend the bearded dragon, Dartagnan, scrabbled at me through the display window at the Herpes Hut. Business as usual. I didn’t know what I was looking for… nothing, really. I wondered if the dead young man had exited the mall this way, possibly with his two friends. Had they been surprised outside by a robber? Members of a rival gang? I wrinkled my brow. Probably not, since the victim had been moved after he was shot. I couldn’t come up with any reason why someone would go out of their way to drop a dead body at the mall, so I sped up and returned to the main hall.

  Joel summoned me on the radio then, suppressed excitement in his voice, and told me to report back to the security office, stat. He’d been watching too many medical dramas. Minutes later, I parked the Segway and pushed through the glass doors to find Detective Helland standing in front of the camera screens talking to Captain Woskowicz. The contrast between the two men went deeper than the difference between Helland’s razor-cut, white-blond hair and Woskowicz’s stubble, or the detective’s elegant (expensive) suit and my boss’s dictator-wannabe uniform. They were roughly the same height, but Woskowicz was much bulkier; he had help from steroids, I suspected. Helland had a confidence Woskowicz lacked; he took it for granted (annoying man) that people would respond to his orders and didn’t need to resort to the bluster and threats Woskowicz employed. I’d worked for a colonel once with the same natural air of command.

  Helland turned as I came in, and I thought I caught the merest hint of an eye roll as Captain Woskowicz said, “We’ve got your back on this op, Helland. Gangs will discover that Fernglen Galleria is not the place to play their stupid-ass games.” He barked a laugh, and I wondered just how he planned to convince gang members not to hang out at Fernglen. Get the merchants to stop selling clothes in gang colors? Close down the food court? Sprinkle anti-gang dust around the perimeter?

  Detective Helland turned to me without replying to Woskowicz’s remark. “We’ve ID’d the victim,” he said, holding out a sheaf of papers.

  I took them automatically and looked down at a younger version of the victim’s face in a formal photo that might have come from a high school yearbook. Brown eyes fringed with thick lashes regarded the viewer seriously, and the closed-lips smile looked perfunctory, at best. His chin rested on his hand in one of those corny poses school photographers seemed to like, and the horizontal cross tattoo was clearly visible. I looked a question at Helland.

  “His name’s Celio Arriaga. His mother’s Nicaraguan, his father Mexican.” Helland shrugged. “The father’s not around. Celio is the oldest of six, according to the mother, and he dropped out of school last year as a junior. His mother has seen him only a handful of times since then. She had some choice words for the Niños Malos.”

  “Bad boys?”

  “Roughly. It’s a gang affiliated with La Gran Familia. We’ve seen an upswing in their activity lately, here and in Richmond.”

  “We ought to shoot ’em all on sight,” Woskowicz broke in, hand going to his belt where a holster might be if the consortium that owned the mall allowed us to carry weapons. “Anyone wearing gang colors or flashing those dumbass hand signals”—he held up his right hand and contorted the fingers into various configurations—“pow-pow!”

  Mr. Sensitivity. “I suppose you want me to show these around, find out if anyone remembers seeing Celio yesterday?” It wasn’t much of a guess on my part—Helland wouldn’t be here showering me with information about the victim if he didn’t want help with something.

  “Exactly.” Helland smiled. “You were a cop—you know the drill.”

  “Funny how you remember I was a cop when you need me for something,” I said drily.

  “Military cops aren’t real cops,” Woskowicz put in. “Standing at a gate saluting generals is about all they’re good for. Officer Ferris, here, though—she’s a hero.” He put a sneer into the word. “Got the medal to prove it. That and a fiver’ll buy her a cup of coffee.” He laughed.

  I was furious, but Woskowicz would delight in any rebuttal I made, and I refused to give him the satisfaction. I didn’t know how he’d found out about my medal—earned in the action that cost me my knee—because I sure as hell hadn’t told him. Helland looked at me with new interest, but I cut him off before he could ask for details. “I’ll spread these around today and get back to you if I learn anything concrete.”

  “Thanks.” Helland walked with me to the door, his long legs covering the distance in two strides. Once the door swung shut behind us, he said, “Sorry about that.”

  I gave him a level look. “Why? You’re not responsible for Woskowicz’s stupidities.” I got on the Segway, placed the photos of Celio Arriaga in the foot well, and took off.

  Figuring I deserved a break, and needing time to recover my temper before interacting with any of the mall’s customers, I headed to Merlin’s Cave, which sold an assortment of magic tricks and magician’s paraphernalia, New Agey crystals and fantasy figurines, and books on everything from alien visitations to feng shui. My friend Kyra Valentine was managing the shop for a year while her aunt Harmony, the shop’s owner, did a sabbatical in Tibet. The store smelled faintly of sandalwood when I entered, and water burbled in a small, countertop fountain. Kyra, six feet tall with smooth dark skin and curly hair that fell to midback, was draping a black cape around a mannequin’s shoulders.

  “Finally!” Kyra exclaimed when she caught sight of me. She let go of the cape, which slithered to the floor. “Damn.”

  “Finally what?”

  “You’ve finally showed up to tell me about the body. I heard it was riddled with bullets, a gang execution.” Her eyes were alight with interest.

  I sighed, not too surprised by this evidence of how rumors got exaggerated until they bore only a slight resemblance to the truth. “It might’ve been a gang thing, or it might not. As far as I know, he was only shot once.”

  “I guess once is enough.” Kyra stooped to retrieve the cape.

  “Huh?”

  “Don’t you remember that old Jacqueline Susann book, Once Is Not Enough? Hold this.”

  I obediently clamped the cape to the mannequin’s shoulder while Kyra secured it with pins. “There.” She stood back to survey the effect. “So, is Detective Helland on the case?” She gave me a sly look.

  “Yes.” Before she could say anything cutesy about how attractive Helland was—if you liked the icy Nordic type—or how long it’d been since I’d been on a date, I shoved one of the flyers at her. “He wants me to pass these around.”

  “Is this him?” She studied the photo of Celio Arriaga. “The dead guy?”

  “Um-hm. Seen him around?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t think so. Good-looking kid.”

  Not anymore. There’s something about death that steals the beauty from even the most classical features and flawless skin. Maybe it’s the lack of vitality. “I saw him yesterday.”

  “Here?”

&n
bsp; I nodded. “He was with another guy about his age and a slightly younger girl. I kept an eye on them for a while, but they didn’t seem to be causing trouble, so…”

  Kyra crossed to the counter and taped the photo to her cash register. “I’ll ask customers about him. This Sunday’s the last bout of the season. Are you coming?”

  Kyra, an Olympic-medal-winning track star, had taken up roller derby a couple years ago in an effort to stave off middle-age weight gain (she was barely thirty) and keep in shape via a routine less boring than running on a treadmill during northern Virginia’s cold winter months. She kept trying to get me into skates, insisting it’d be easier on my knee than I suspected.

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” I said.

  She fiddled with a rack of chains, clinking the crystal pendants together. Fiddling was so un-Kyra-like that I stared at her. “My brother Bobby almost got sucked into a gang,” she said finally, looking at me with eyes darkened by the memory of something ugly.

  “Really? I didn’t know that.” I’d known Kyra since I was eleven; we’d met when my family came east to vacation with Grandpa Atherton, and our friendship had grown during subsequent visits and phone calls. Bobby was several years older than Kyra, so I hadn’t been around him much, but last time Kyra had mentioned him he was a CPA in Boise with three teenage daughters.

  “It happened before I met you. I was little, so I don’t remember all the details—I’m sure I never knew them—but I remember Mama crying, and Daddy and Bobby fighting, and the police coming a couple of times. I do know that Bobby stole Daddy’s car and crashed it, putting himself and a couple of his homeys in the hospital. He was only fifteen. As soon as it was safe to move him, Mama and Daddy sent him off to Boise to recuperate with my aunt Connie and her husband. A couple of scary dudes came around looking for him once or twice—one of them tried to bribe me with a candy bar to tell him where my brother was—but then they went away.”

  “Thank goodness.”

  “Yeah. Did I mention Aunt Connie’s husband was a prison guard?” Kyra smiled.

  We said good-bye, and I returned to showing Celio’s photo to mall shopkeepers and their employees. I did it on autopilot, mentally contrasting my own privileged upbringing in a gated community in Malibu with Kyra’s. If there’d been gangs in our high school, my friends and I had been unaware of them, buffered as we were by our parents’ wealth. Despite high-profile divorces and families as dysfunctional as any you’d see on reality TV, the kids I hung with weren’t drawn to gangs. One girl I knew slightly had run away our sophomore year to join a religious cult, which, now that I thought about it, was essentially a gang minus the emphasis on guns and killing.

  A couple of clerks thought they might have seen Celio in the mall the day before, but they wouldn’t swear to it. The male assistant manager of a cell phone kiosk was more certain.

  “Yeah,” he said, studying the picture. “He was here, hanging around in the early afternoon yesterday. With a buddy and a hot chick. She had on a pair of stretch jeans and a tee shirt that didn’t leave much to the imagination.” He licked his lips. “Hot.”

  Since he was clearly in his midtwenties and the girl had been no more than fifteen or sixteen, I found his fascination with her distasteful. “Did you hear them talking?”

  “Not really.” He shrugged skinny shoulders under a button-down shirt that gaped at the neck, a size too large. “They seemed to be arguing about something, at least the babe and this guy”—he pinged the page—“were getting into it. I wasn’t really paying attention—I had a customer, you know?”

  I thanked him, told him to call the security office if he saw either of the two again, and turned into the cameraless hall. I hit pay dirt in the Pete’s Sporting Goods.

  “He was in here yesterday,” the owner said. His name was Colin Garver, not Pete. In his late fifties, he was only a couple of inches taller than me, but wiry and fit, built like some of the special ops guys I’d known in the military. Deep crow’s feet around his eyes and skin like tanned cowhide spoke to many hours in the sun. I didn’t know him well; he’d bought the store from Pete only a few months earlier. I’d waited while he explained the differences between two brands of in-line skates to a customer and then shown him Celio’s photo.

  “He was looking at the guns,” Colin said, gesturing to the racks of guns—rifles, pistols, shotguns—in locked cabinets behind him.

  “Alone?”

  Colin nodded. “Uh-huh.”

  I wondered where the girl and his buddy had been. “What time?”

  “I don’t know exactly… maybe four thirty?”

  That was considerably later than I’d seen him and proved he’d still been hanging around the mall in the late afternoon. “Anything special about him? Did he say anything?”

  Colin’s eyes narrowed. “He was carrying.”

  “A gun? Are you sure?”

  His thin lips slanted up on one side. “I’m sure. Left-hand pocket of his jacket. He kept both hands dug into his pockets, like he was cold, but I could tell.”

  I believed him. This put a different complexion on things. Maybe Celio had tried to mug someone, someone who also happened to be armed and shot him. That didn’t explain why the someone had bothered to move the body, though. “Do you get a lot of gang types in here wanting guns?” I asked Colin.

  “Not so many,” he said. “They’ve mostly got sheets and aren’t going to pass the background check, or they’re too damn young. I get more hunters, or homeowners looking for a piece for personal protection. I’ve got a nice Beretta here I recommend for women.” He pulled a key from his pocket and made a move toward one of the glass-fronted cabinets, but I stopped him with a smile and a head shake.

  “Thanks anyway.”

  He gave me half a wink that told me he suspected I already had a weapon. I did. I practiced regularly with it at the range, wanting to keep my skills sharp for when I got back on with a police department.

  “What’d you do before becoming ‘Pete’?” I asked.

  “Owned a house-painting company.”

  “Around here?”

  Colin shook his head. “Texas.”

  That explained the complexion like overcooked rawhide, if not his aura of awareness, the feeling he gave off of being half-cocked, ready to explode into action. “What brought you east?”

  “Have you ever tried to use a paint sprayer while swaying atop a twenty-foot ladder in a west Texas wind?”

  I shook my head, mildly amused by his sour expression.

  “Take my advice: don’t. There’s a reason there are more wind farms than ranches in the Lone Star state, most of ’em in the west. Thirty-plus-mile-an-hour winds, six and a half days out of seven. I don’t miss Dumas one little bit.”

  “So, selling guns and basketballs suits you?”

  “It pays the bills,” Colin said somewhat grimly. “It pays the bills.”

  Four

  Going store to store like this reminded me of the house-to-house questioning I’d done a few times as a military cop. Then, as now, it was tedious and largely pointless, but I belonged to the “leave no stone unturned” school of investigation, so I got on with it by Segwaying to the stuffed animal store, Make-a-Manatee. Walking under the huge pink whale just inside the entrance, I looked around for the owner. I spotted him midway back, surrounded by kids clamoring to get their animals stuffed. Mike Wachtel was about five-nine, with male-pattern baldness and his left leg in a cast from foot to midthigh.

  “What happened to you?” I asked as he seated himself by the stuffing machine, a huge glass rectangle full of white fluff. A foot treadle pumped the fluff into the limp skins of soon-to-be-stuffed animals. “Skiing accident?”

  “It’s a pain in the butt,” he said, wincing as a careless four-year-old bumped his leg.

  When I asked about Celio, he apologetically said he noticed children more than adults. Since he had a line of kids waiting to have their animals stuffed, and a rowdy birthday party had reached the cake-an
d-candles stage in the corner, I left. Across the hall, the nail salon’s owner said Celio didn’t look like the kind of guy who went in for mani-pedis, and my friend Keifer at the Herpes Hut looked doubtful. His bead-decorated, midback-length dreadlocks clicked as he shook his head. “This the dude that got killed?”

  “Yes. The police are trying to build a timeline of his whereabouts before he got shot.”

  “Can’t help you, EJ. Sorry,” he said, handing back the flyer. “When are the cameras going to get fixed? I’m tempted to short my rent unless they’re up and running by the first of the month.” A group called Lovers of Animal Freedom, LOAF, had “liberated” all Keifer’s stock earlier in the year, and he was justifiably concerned about the weak security. I told him the cameras should be online later in the week, and he offered to let me hold Dartagnan. I petted the bearded dragon with one finger for a few minutes before easing him back into his terrarium. I hadn’t much liked reptiles when I first started visiting the Herpes Hut, but Keifer had taught me to appreciate them, and I might actually have thought about owning one if it weren’t for Fubar. I suspected my cat would see them as hors d’oeuvres or especially entertaining kitty toys—no batteries needed—rather than as step-siblings or housemates.

  Leaving the Herpes Hut, I tried Rock Star. The clerks in the crowded store pulsing with a loud pop score were too busy trying to keep tweenage girls from shoplifting cheapo necklaces, purses, and hair accessories to more than glance at Celio’s photo. When I insisted, the manager, who didn’t look much older than her customer base, glanced at the page. Her name was Carrie, and she was wearing half her product line, so she jingled, tinkled, and rustled with every movement. “Well, maybe,” she said. “Could he have been with a girl?”