The person who was siphoning gas from service stations
was her problem. The obvious answer to the gas investigation was that it was an inside job. Lucy didn’t like obvious. Obvious was usually a waste of time. But in this case, she’d started there. By Wednesday afternoon, she’d not only cleared all the delivery drivers and station workers, but she’d put in requests for surveillance tapes. And Thursday morning she spent a couple of hours watching eye-glazing videos on a screen at her desk.
By ten o’clock, she had a warrant for the arrest of a suspect: a farmer who had a wife and young kids and not enough money to support any of them, but who also had his own approved, in-ground gas tank on his property. The man had been selling off what others believed to be his own unused gas at lower prices before it evaporated.
No one knew quite how much gas the farmer had been selling. No one knew that it was gas he was stealing, twenty-five gallons at a time in the dark of the night, in order to make enough money to keep his family afloat.
Lucy was having the guy arrested and now he wouldn’t be able to help his family at all.
“You got a minute?” At thirty-eight, Amber Locken looked better than Lucy felt at twenty-seven.
Lucy swung around, facing the redhead as she stood beside Lucy’s desk. “Of course. What’s up?”
“First, good work on Tuesday. Wakerby put in a request to see his lawyer.”
The meeting with the captain and Amber first thing Wednesday morning, to report on her m
eeting with the prisoner, had been short and to the point. Lucy had given the facts and excused herself, not waiting around for the reactions to her report. Or for questions.
“He’s going to confess?” Her voice squeaked. She couldn’t help it. She was stunned.
“I’m not sure what he’s doing. But it’s clear you’ve shaken something loose.”
She had to calm down. To remember the job. Not because she gave a whit at the moment about how she looked to her peer—or to her boss, either, for that matter—but because if she didn’t stay calm and focused she could miss something critical.
“When’s the meeting?”
“Monday morning.”
Four days away. So maybe she should pay the man one more visit over the weekend. Just to make certain that he didn’t have time to start feeling safe again.
“Thanks for letting me know.” The woman was only acting on Lionel’s orders, keeping Lucy informed, but she was still grateful.
Amber didn’t immediately move on her way. “I had a call yesterday afternoon,” she said after a pause. “A woman who claims that Wakerby lived with her for a couple of years. She says she just heard that he’s in jail on a rape charge.”
Another victim. Lucy braced herself.
“She said that she has a box of his things. She’d been keeping them in the hopes that he might show up again, but now she wants nothing to do with them. She called to ask what she should do with them.”
Heart pounding, Lucy held her tongue, waiting. This was Amber’s show. “I had them picked up last night and they were couriered this morning. We should have them sometime tomorrow. If you’d like to go through the box with me, I’ll call you when it arrives.”
“I would really appreciate that, yes,” Lucy said. And this time when she thanked her colleague, she smiled, too.
And then she zipped off a text to Ramsey. Just to keep him informed.
Ramsey was not in a good mood when he made it to the station on Thursday. He’d spent the morning looking at a dead body in a hotel room down at the docks—until he found a suicide note. The deceased was a financier from Boston who’d driven to the ocean to end his life after being indicted for misappropriation of funds to the tune of a few million dollars.
He’d tried himself, delivered a guilty verdict and handed down the death sentence all in a day.
Ramsey wondered about the wife and kids, glad that telling the family didn’t fall to him. The family were out of his jurisdiction.
Jack Colton wasn’t. Ramsey called the man and requested an in-person sit-down, just to go over what the man remembered, one more time.
Or so he told Colton.
The long-haul semitruck driver agreed to meet with him on Saturday, at the end of an East Coast run.
After paying a visit to Colton’s former employee, with a request—not a warrant—for Colton’s delivery-route logs for the three years he’d worked there, Ramsey set out for a holein-the-wall bar not far from the docks, where he could sit in a corner, have a burger and a beer and study Jack Colton’s moves twenty-five years before.