“Could you tell if the two of them were together?”
“No. He came in first. She was in-line behind him,” Tasheka advised.
“You sure?”
“She be in here all the time. I never saw him before.” Tasheka looked at Shameka. “You seen him before?”
“Not that I remember.”
I showed them the picture that Mrs. Phillips gave me. “That her?”
Both ladies looked at the picture. “That’s her,” they both said almost at the same time.
“You ever seen her with anybody?”
“She meets some guy here, but it wasn’t the guy who got killed,” Tasheka said.
“If she was here he was coming. She always orders the food and be waitin’ for him at a table,” Shameka told me.
“Did you see him that day?”
The ladies looked at each other. “Nope,” Tasheka said.
“I didn’t see him,” Shameka agreed. “Dag, you ask more questions than cops, don’t he, Tasheka?”
“He sure does.”
“Maybe I’m more interested than the cops.”
After I thanked the ladies for their help, I went in the back to see what Al had for me. He handed me a disk and had the video cued up to the point where the bandits came in the place, then he left me alone in his office. I watched as it happened just like the ladies said it did. Watching made me wonder about something. I rewound the video and watched it again.
If neither Zakiya, or the other guy did or said anything to provoke them, why did they shot them?
The bandits were smart enough not to look directly into either camera. Then why risk a murder charge, over a hundred and fifty dollars?
It didn’t make sense.
Not to me anyway.
Could the cops be right and Mrs. Phillips be wrong about Zakiya? The shooter stepped right up to her and put one in her chest. Then he shot the guy.
I turned off the player and went back in the restaurant. After I thanked everybody for their help, I assured them that I was going to get security up in there soon.
I left the restaurant and drove back to Zakiya’s apartment. On the way there I called and left a message for Tamia Adams to call me. I wanted to know everything they had on the guy Zakiya was killed with. My thinking was that even though they didn’t come in together, that this whole thing might be about him. But if that was the case, why did he shoot Zakiya first?
I had a lot of questions and hoped I could find answers in her apartment. There was one other thing I had to know about. Who was the man she usually met at Paradise? It was probably the married man that Dee told me she was seeing.
Once I let myself in, I went straight for her computer and went on-line. I searched her Internet history to find her e-mail provider. I hacked the password to her account; a trick my old partner Jett Bronson showed me. I began reading her e-mails and it wasn’t long before I found an e-mail for somebody with the e-mail address [email protected]
In that e-mail Zakiya and whoever it was made plans to meet at Paradise. I sorted the e-mails by sender and read the next few. It was obvious from reading them that this was definitely the married man she was seeing. I printed the e-mail with the details and turned off the computer. I would take it to Monika to see if maybe she could find out the real name of the user or from where it was sent.
Chapter 9
On the way to Monika’s house I thought about Jett. We’d all been a part of a special operations unit in South America killing drug dealers, blowing up drug plants and seizing their financial records. My specialty was weapons, commando tactics. Jett’s specialty was electronic surveillance, computers; if it was high tech, Jett was on it. Monika’s specialty was munitions. We were small teams, each working independently. But all of a sudden, the entire unit is needed to take out one plant. Then boom, everybody dies-except us.
The only reason we didn’t die, too, was Monika fell on approach to the objective. Her ankle was broken and she couldn’t continue. She wanted us to leave her, but Jett refused. “You can go if you want to, Nick, but I’m not leavin’ her,” Jett told me that day.
While Monika and I tried to lecture Jett on the need to follow orders and proceed to the objective, the objective blew up. I remember the three of us with our mouths wide open, watching it burn to the ground.