At Wick's End - Tim Myers [35]
Heather said, “Harrison, surely you know that Southern women don’t sweat. But boy, do we ever glow.”
Instead of veering off to The New Age, she followed me up the steps.
“Okay, now you can’t deny it. You’re stalking me,” I said.
“Easy, big guy, the lockers are upstairs. Didn’t anybody tell you about them?”
I shook my head. “If they did, I forgot all about it. Why do you need a storage locker away from your store?”
“It was Belle’s idea. There’s a shower that locks and a changing area too. This way we all have a reason to say ‘hi’ in the mornings if we have one central place to congregate. Just about everyone here uses a locker. You need one of these to get in,” she said as she held a key up.
“I’ll have to get one from Pearly,” I said.
“Belle had spares in her apartment. I lost mine three weeks ago and she replaced it with this new one.”
Heather unlocked a door I’d ignored earlier and said, “Come on, the lockers are all in here.”
She reached inside and flipped on the light switch.
Someone had gotten there before us. Every last locker had been broken into, the cleanly cut locks lying on the floor amid all the personal items that had been stored in them. The perpetrator had vandalized the contents of the lockers, smashing perfume bottles, aftershave lotion and deodorant containers among the clothes, leaving everything with a wretched smell that would take dynamite to remove.
I wanted to call Sheriff Coburn before Heather touched anything. “He may need to look for fingerprints,” I said. “Don’t let anyone mess with this.”
I raced to Belle’s apartment, dialed the sheriff’s number and got him on the fifth ring.
“Coburn here,” he said.
“Sheriff, there’s been another break-in at River’s Edge. We need you down here.”
Morgan said, “Was a store hit this time?”
“It’s not a shop, it’s the employee locker room. The locks have all been cut and the contents thrown on the floor.”
“Sounds like simple vandalism to me,” the sheriff said calmly.
I said angrily, “You need a key to get in. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“Harrison, Belle herself complained to me that folks were losing their keys all the time. Most likely some kid found one and thought he’d make a quick score.”
“Did this ‘kid’ also just happen to have a set of bolt cutters on him? Those locks were cleanly sheared off.”
“You’d be surprised by the kind of junk we pull off them. It’s likely a harmless stunt. I can’t imagine anyone crazy enough to store valuables up there.”
“Does that mean you’re not coming?” I couldn’t believe his unwillingness to investigate.
“Gee, Harrison, I’d love to drop everything to come over there and pat your hand, but I just had a hit-and-run on Elm, and I was kind of on my way over to that.”
“At least stop by on your way back to the station,” I said, understanding his position a little better.
“Clean up the mess, post a note about the keys and forget it, Harrison.”
When I walked back to the locker room, Heather asked, “Is he coming?”
I shook my head. “No, he claims he’s too busy.”
“Typical,” Heather snorted. “We’re not all that high a priority for him, especially now that Belle’s gone. They were friends, but since she died, I haven’t seen him around River’s Edge.”
I admitted, “He came by to offer his condolences, but everyone else was gone.”
“Well, he gets a point for that, I guess.” She scanned the mess and asked, “So what do we do now?”
“I guess I’ll clean it up,” I said as I started shaking broken glass out of a shirt on the floor.
As we worked side by side, Heather said with disgust, “I just can’t imagine someone doing this. What were they looking for?”
“The same thing they were hunting for in Belle’s apartment,” I said, forgetting for a moment that Heather was still one of my suspects.
“Harrison, I loved Belle dearly, but I can’t imagine that she owned anything worth stealing, can you?”
“Something’s going on around here,” I said, “and if the police aren’t going to do anything about it, I’m going to have to find out myself.”
Heather swept up the last of the glass, and I