Greywalker - Kat Richardson [26]
“Hi,” he said. “I was starting to get worried. There were a couple of two-legged rats scratching around your door when I came up, about half an hour ago. When they figured out I wasn’t going to leave, they slunk off, but I thought they might have been waiting for you downstairs. Did you see them?”
“No,” I answered. “What did they look like?”
“One nondescript in a very concentrated sort of way. Very beige, very bland. Very spooky. The other was scruffier, but nothing unusual for this neighborhood,” he added as I unlocked my door.
I nodded. “Probably the same guys who tossed my office. Either that or tax collectors.”
He nodded. “Yeah, I thought they were thugs.”
I raised an eyebrow at him. He grinned back.
“I’ve got everything I should need to get this job done in a couple of hours at the most,” he said, putting his pack down carefully by the file cabinet.
“I’ve still got some work to do,” I warned. “You’re not going to need me to leave or anything, are you?”
“I don’t think so. I need to drill a couple of holes and I’ll need to work on your phone line at some point, but I should be able to do the installation without much noise or mess. Oh, I’ll need to load some software onto your computer, too, but that’ll only take a minute, right at the end.”
“Let me know when you need the phone line. I need to make calls.”
“No problem,” he agreed and began to scramble around in his pack.
I settled myself behind the desk and called the Shadleys’ bank. It took a few minutes after I introduced myself and explained my business to get me connected to the person with the lowdown on ATMs.
The ATM expert asked me for the numbers. I read them to her and she clacked away on her computer.
“Hmm . . . some of these are other companies’ machines, so I can’t give you any more information than I have right here. They all appear to be in Seattle, looks like downtown. Of the ones that belong to us—let me see—there’s the First and Cherry location, Main, Pine and Seventh, and the South Industrial.”
“Where are the Main and South Industrial ATMs, exactly?” I asked.
“Main is around the corner from the Pioneer Square branch at 300 Occidental, and the other is First Avenue South at South Forest, just down from the baseball stadium.”
I thanked her and wrote the information down. Then I pulled out my laminated map of Seattle and dotted all the known locations on it in whiteboard marker.
I got out of Quinton’s way for a moment while he did something to my desk; then I called a few more major banks and got the same information from them, adding more dots to my map. Most of the dots were in downtown, clustering around Pioneer Square. If I could figure out what Cameron was up to, or get a line on his car, I’d stand a chance of finding him soon.
“I’m going to be working on the phone line now for a minute or so,” Quinton said from somewhere near the floor in front of the desk. “If your computer hiccups, let me know.” His head popped up for a moment, adorned with a pair of headphones and some dust kitties. “OK?”
I pulled out the papers Sergeyev had sent. “OK. I’ll be reading. Let me know when the lines are back up.”
He nodded and disappeared again.
I read. The parlor organ was about six feet tall and three wide, made from carved European walnut, according to the description. Built by the Tracher Company of Bavaria in 1905, it had a lot of bits and stops and railings with ivory and gilt decoration, a built-in cabinet for storage behind the music desk with a plate glass mirror, and red and blue tapestry covers over the pipes, which matched the mats on the pedals. Sounded pretty garish.
An incomplete shipping bill was included with the description. The date had been torn off and some lines of information were too blotched and stained to read. It looked as if the organ had been shipped to Seattle by boat