She paused. Considered. “You know? That might just work.”
“Could we all focus on the dead body, please?” Bob the security guard suggested.
We all looked at each other, abashed.
Grimal got back to work, taking some more photos and then asking Bob to take us up to the catwalk. He led us to the rear of the store, through an employee break room and office, and to another door. It stood open with one of the policemen standing guard.
“We checked upstairs, sir. There’s no one. My partner and the other security guard are checking the grounds.”
“Did you dust for fingerprints?” Grimal asked.
“Yes, sir. Got a bunch, sir, as one would expect from a commonly used door.”
“That’s going to be a pain for the lab,” Grimal mused. He turned to Florence Nightingale. “We’ll need to get fingerprints from every one of your employees.”
“We have those on file.”
Grimal cocked his head. “You fingerprint all your employees?”
“Reduces the chance of workplace theft.”
“But not murder,” I said.
Grimal turned to the officer. “You stay here. We’re going up.”
We ascended a long flight of concrete steps, Bob huffing and puffing, me huffing and puffing almost as much, Florence Nightingale cursing and having to take off her heels, and Grimal grumbling. I couldn’t make out the words. Then I realized it wasn’t his voice grumbling but his stomach. It was about time for lunch. Those sweet-and-sour sauce stains must have been from yesterday’s lunch.
The stairway opened up onto a small landing of steel mesh and a labyrinth of catwalks spreading out every which way. It was open to the store below, and we could see dozens of aisles of shelves piled high with goods, drones flying above and along them.
“This place is huge,” Grimal said.
“The largest retail store in the state,” Florence Nightingale said proudly.
“What are the chances that the body would fall right into my shopping cart?” I said.
“Pretty close to zero,” Grimal said. “You think someone is targeting you?”
“Now who would target little old me?” I said in as innocent a voice as possible. I tried to keep the irony out of my tone. Really, I did.
“I can think of a million people,” he grumbled. “Let’s work through this place systematically and make sure no one is up here.”
It didn’t take as much time as the size of the store would suggest. The catwalks were all clearly visible to one another so as soon as we got away from the landing we could see the entire network. No one was up on this level. There was nowhere to hide and no back way to escape through.
I pointed to an area of the catwalk.
“The body fell from somewhere over there.”
We headed that direction until I could see my shopping cart down below, the body of poor old Sir Edmund Montalbion lying slumped inside, a drone hovering next to him. From far below, we heard its tinny voice say, “Sir, I must ask you to get out of the shopping cart. Shopping carts are for SerMart products only.”
We got right above the spot. The light was rather dim, the main fluorescent lamps that illuminated the shop floor hanging below the catwalk. We only got the reflected light. I suppose this was to make the work area less visible to the shoppers. Indeed, I hadn’t noticed it in my peripheral vision until I had looked up to see where the body had dropped from.
Grimal pulled a Maglite out of his pocket and flicked it on, shining it all along the catwalk. There was nothing there. I didn’t see any traces of blood. We peered closer.
“Look at that,” Grimal said, pointing.
There were several scrapes along the railing at the spot from which the victim had fallen. The metal was shiny, like it had been scraped with another metallic object.
“You see lots of scrapes like that up here,” Bob the security guard said. “The night crew is always carrying loads around. Makes a big racket when they bang against the railings.”
“Do you know which employees were doing this?” Florence Nightingale asked him. “They should get a written warning.”
Bob paled. “I, um, I didn’t see, ma’am.”
“These look fresh,” I said, bending close to the marks. My back twinged in protest.
“They’re always moving heavy objects over the side,” Bob said with a shrug.
“How do you get them down to the shelves?” I asked. The middle shelves were a long way down.
“We have ladders with adjustable platforms that you can make go up and down with an electric motor,” Florence Nightingale said. “We have crews working up here and down at the shop floor. But they only move the boxes that weigh more than 30 pounds. The lighter boxes are lifted by drone. That makes everything move quicker. It’s an innovative and cutting-edge method of stocking the shelves.”
“Everything Serengeti.com and its associated companies do is innovative and cutting-edge,” I said before she could.
“That’s right,” Florence Nightingale and Bob the security guard said, their heads nodding in unison.
I got right above my cart. There were several scrapes on the railing for a patch of about five or six feet. They did, indeed, look quite fresh. I moved along the catwalk for a time. Bob was right, there were scrapes all along the railing. Some fresh, some not. But that cluster of fresh scrapes right above the body made me wonder.
I peered down again and noticed something.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing. A white bit of paper was stuck to one of the metal struts holding up the bottom of the catwalk right beneath my feet.
Four
“I don’t see anything,” Grimal said, leaning out and trying to look where I was pointing.
“That’s because your belly keeps you from leaning out far enough,” I said.
“Hey, that’s fat shaming,” the police chief objected.
“Do be quiet.”
Florence Nightingale leaned out, her thin frame bending over the railing.
“Oh, that’s a label,” the manager said.
She lay down on the catwalk and reached down. She had to stretch to reach, with Grimal hovering in the background with his arms out, worried she might slip over
