Color Blind (8 page)

Thadius approached, afraid to speak. He needed answers first. There’d be time for the rest later.

When the guy realized Thadius was heading toward the counter, he spoke up. “Help ya, sir?”

“You Marley?” Thadius asked, even though he already knew the answer.

“That’s me,” the pawn shop owner replied. “What can I do ya for?”

Thadius had the SIG out faster than Marley could react. He let the pistol linger in the air a second longer than he had to before laying it flat on the counter. “You sell a lot of guns like this?”

Marley squinted, tipped his glasses down to look over them. “Yeah, fair amount. Looking to sell?”

This guy had no idea
.
“Not exactly. How many of these you sell, would you say?”

Marley’s eyes trailed up from the gun to Thadius’s face. “Eh, decent few, I guess. Maybe one every couple months, depending on what comes in. What’s this all about?”

The air trapped in Thadius’s chest wrenched his breaths, making them fast and heavy. He cocked his head toward the gun. “What kind of waiting period you got on something like that?”

Marley flinched, but his face recovered in the next instant. “Standard, of course. Three days minimum.”

Moron thought he was a cop.

Thadius lifted his other hand, peeled open the manila envelope, and removed a DVD. He laid it on the counter next to the SIG Sauer. “Guy bought one of these guns here a few years ago. You sold it to him. I need to know who he is.”

“Sorry, man,” Marley replied. “Can’t help you. Client confidentiality and all.”

Marley’s face wasn’t on Thadius, but rather, on the counter where Thadius’s hand now gripped the SIG. Marley shifted, and Thadius jolted the SIG level with his forehead.

“Uh-uh, cowboy. No alarm buttons or funny business. All I need is anything you can remember about the guy on this video footage, and we’ll be square.”

Marley lifted his hands, which shook like an alcoholic’s days off a binge. “Man, I don’t know what you want from me! I can’t read DVDs with my palms, ya know! And I don’t got a way to watch it here!”

Thadius brought up the envelope and dumped the contents on the counter. He’d stopped by Kinko’s on his way here to print out images. “Lucky for you, I brought pictures. Talk fast. And put your damned hands down, for crying out loud.”

Marley blinked rapidly. He slowly lowered his hands, tilted his glasses again. Thadius watched Marley pick up the stack of the photo stills taken from the video, flip through them. Toward the end was a zoomed-in shot of the guy in the AC/DC T-shirt.

The guy who’d killed his Emily.

“I don’t . . . God, that was a long time ago,” Marley stammered, eyeing the date stamp in the picture’s right corner. “I don’t remember him, really. Do you realize how many people come in here?”

“Yes, and I also realize very few of them scare my daughter into letting them into her apartment waving around a gun
you
sold them before
killing
her. A gun you sold him without a waiting period. It’s only
one
guy, come to think.” Thadius jabbed his pointer finger hard onto the picture on the table. “
This
guy. Now, Marley, you’ve gotta remember something. Can’t be every day a college kid comes into your store wanting to buy a military-grade handgun with no bullets but can’t seem to wait three days. Give me
something
.”

Thadius leaned forward. The barrel of his own fully loaded SIG touched Marley’s forehead, and the shop owner slammed his hands on the counter at an awkward angle, trembling.

“All right, all right. I don’t remember much, though. He was average height, average build, just like in the video. Didn’t say
that
much. Said he needed the gun ASAP as a prop for a film he was shooting. One of the local art students. That’s why he didn’t need bullets. Made sense to me, so I tried to throw the kid a bone.”

And instead, you helped out a murderer and got my daughter killed.
“Okay, what else? Name? Records of a name? You have to have records . . .”

Marley started shaking again. “Dude, I wish I did. We had . . .” Marley stuttered, shook harder than a pine twig in a twister.

Thadius pressed the butt of the pistol into his head. “Keep talking!”

“Okay, okay, okay! We had a . . . a . . . a fire, and it wiped out a lot of our records. Lot of trouble with the authorities after that. Managed to pull out all right, but only by the skin of our teeth. But no records—”

Marley stuttered more, faster as Thadius pushed against his head with the gun. “But but but I do remember him asking me if I knew where around here he could buy some fireworks. Said he was having a New Year’s party, wanted to shoot some off. He must not’ve been from around here, come to think, or he’d have known they sell fireworks everywhere from stands on the side of the road to Walmart. I pointed him to a friend of mine up the road a piece who sells. Pretty sure he was planning to visit the guy.”

Thadius’s throat went bone dry. This ignorant scum on the bottom of his shoe wouldn’t know, of course, that Emily’s house was in shambles when the police finally got to her. The coward who killed her had used a black powder explosive to demolish the house and cover most of the evidence.

The same black gunpowder used in many fireworks.

“Guy’s name?”

Marley sweat fat droplets now, which ran down his cheeks, soaked his neck. “Woody. Name’s Woody.”

Thadius shoved Marley’s head onto the counter with the SIG. “You’re shitting me, Marley.”

“I’m not!” Marley screamed at a high pitch, eyes shut tight. “That’s his name! Now please, just leave me alone!”

At this, Thadius wrenched the gun away from Marley’s head, knocking Marley backward into the wall behind the counter. He leveled the SIG with the pawn shop owner’s face. “He didn’t have
any
waiting period, and you saw the news stories about a young college girl murdered the next day, didn’t you? You
had
to have. Why didn’t you call the police, Marley? Say
anything
to
anyone?
Didn’t want to get in trouble? Didn’t want anyone to know you weren’t following rules?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

But Thadius wasn’t listening anymore. The anger and pain building inside him were taking over, the disease that had festered in his heart for years. “You wouldn’t have to worry about shit like that if you hadn’t done something wrong, Marley. If you hadn’t
sold
it to him!”

“I . . . I . . . I made a mistake! People make mistakes! I didn’t mean to—” Marley cringed, hands over his face, pulling at his own hair.

“Yeah, well, mistakes slide sometimes. Other times they get corrected.”

He pulled the trigger twice, but the first time was enough.

Thadius’s head pounded, blood pressure up. He rounded the counter and stepped over Marley’s body. He didn’t look at the guy’s face, just bent to his side and took the key ring from his pocket, stepped back over him toward the side office.

Nothing could make this better, he knew. None of this would do anything to bring back Em or Narelle.

He pressed eject on the old-fashioned VCR recording the shop events, stuck the tape in his pocket. He could only live a pseudo-life for so long, pretend victim support was helping. Imagine he could ever move on.

At least this way, if there was a life after death, he’d see Em, see his wife if
she
wanted to see
him
. And when he saw his family, they wouldn’t have to ask why the people who did this to them got to live when they had to die. Nope. This way, he could look Em in the eye and tell her he took every single one of them down with him.

“S
o are you thinking this Grogan guy could be the second shooter?” Richards asked as they climbed back into the SUV.

“No,” Jenna replied. She knew what his next question would be.

“Why?”

First of all, Isaac Keaton had called
him
. Not directly, but he had to have known they’d follow that call straight to Grogan. He wouldn’t give away the other shooter that easily. Not to mention, Grogan didn’t fit her limited vision of the other shooter. Not even close. Keaton was type A, and Grogan, however different, seemed to be, too. Their motives might be different, but they had a similarity, as well. Red and red—regardless of the differences between the connotations the colors pulled up—wasn’t a likely combination. She was keeping an open mind, but in a pair like this, the combination of red and blue was far more likely. Thadius came nowhere near that submissive, cool blue.

“Too alike.” That’d suffice.

“But if Grogan isn’t the other shooter, why do we care what he is?” Richards asked.

Million-dollar question. “Keaton wanted us to find him. While I don’t think letting Isaac run the game is a good thing, it’s the only lead we have right now. Not to mention, we have a possibly volatile man being provoked by a psychopath. If we
don’t
intervene, we’ll probably have a lot more to answer for later.”

Hank hung up the call he was on. “Detective on the Emily Grogan case was Jerry Hardeman. He’ll meet with us in the morning. Irv’s looking into the cleaning woman and whoever placed the phone call from Howie Dumas’s pretend office. Cops in the vicinity checked the office building. Cleared out completely. Neighbors said no signs or people were ever there. Dead end. Getting phone records, Thadius’s web history, all that good stuff. APB out on Thadius Grogan’s vehicle. In the meantime, you ought to go home and rest. This’ll be a long week.”

“I want to talk to the shooting victims,” Jenna replied.

“They need sleep, too, Jenna. Saleda didn’t turn up anything of note, and she’s good. Besides, you know as well as we do that they’re out of it. They need some simmer time.”

“I can take another crack at Keaton.” She couldn’t put this down. Not right now, when she knew he was toying with them.

“
Or
you can go home and see your little girl.”

Jenna bit back her retort. As if she were the only one ever to put the job—the lives they were trying to save—ahead of Ayana. She bowed her head, closed her eyes, and took a deep breath, remembering how as she was laboring to deliver that precious little baby girl that was somehow made of equal parts of her
and
Hank, she’d asked the nurse to call Hank just
one
more time. The phone had rung and rung, but no answer.

Hours later, he would show up, hold the pink bundle in his arms. He would coo at her, make funny faces, and tell Jenna she was the most gorgeous baby he’d ever seen. But at the end of the day, she hadn’t been his priority. Never would be.

Richards hummed uncomfortably in the backseat.

I can go home and see your little girl.
“Fine.”

•   •   •

A
few hours later, Jenna turned her key in the apartment door, facts still rustling around in her head. Grogan, Keaton. Keaton, Grogan. What would
her
father do if he were Thadius Grogan? What was her mother’s effect on his mind-set?

Jenna swung the door open. “Hey, Da—”

Charley’s face met hers. He grimaced, finger to his lips. His eyes held hers. His finger drifted from his mouth, and he jabbed it toward Ayana’s bedroom.

“Really?” Jenna whispered in disbelief. “At ten p.m.?”

Most toddlers fell asleep by eight, but Ayana’s body clock worked in reverse from every kid Jenna had ever met. She was usually just getting started at ten, and every night was a battle royale.

Charley nodded once. He gestured to the hallway, and they filed out. Her brother could read her so well.

“Need to talk?” he asked as he pulled the door to.

Jenna leaned against the wall, crossed her feet. “Ay never goes to sleep this early. What gives?”

Charley mirrored her on the other side of the hallway. “The usual. I was writing a new song, she’s an eternal critic. Fell asleep before I hit the first chorus.”

“And Dad?”

“Boredom is contagious? He went to bed, too,” Charley said, shrugging. “Must be some case if you’re heading it off talking about the nocturnal habits of the Ramey family.”

Jenna folded her arms. “Gemini killers.”

Charley’s eyes widened. “No shit?”

“Yep. Theme park killings? It was them. One in custody, the other, who knows. We have a random lead concocted by the devil himself, and a bunch more bodies on the way, I’m guessing.”

Charley nodded. “Sounds all in a day’s work. What am I missing?”

Before she had a chance to answer, a ring cut the air. Both she and Charley leapt for the door, but Charley’s hand reached it first. He dashed across the living room toward the cordless, but already, Ayana was crying.

Her brother swore under his breath as he punched the on button of the phone. “Earplug Factory, how can we help you?”

He listened, then stretched the phone toward her. “It’s for you. Shock and awe.”

Jenna took it. “Yeah.”

“Sorry to call you so late.”

Hank.