She peeled it off, stood, and held it out to Grimal. It was a small label about the size of two postage stamps set side to side with a bar code on it. The back was sticky. Sticky enough, in fact, that she had some trouble getting it off her finger. Before I could say anything, she had mangled the thing, smearing her fingers all over it and obscuring any fingerprints that had been on it previously.
Grimal put it in a plastic evidence bag, but I doubted he’d learn anything from it now.
“It probably just fell off a package,” she said.
“Yeah, probably,” Grimal agreed, “but we have to look at all angles.”
We looked around and found nothing more of note, except for a few drones floating around with small boxes clutched in their set of four little mechanical pincers on the bottom of their bodies.
Bob then showed us a freight elevator that led to the loading dock. It was turned off at the moment, the main switch secured behind a locked electrical panel. Only management had the key. The loading dock was also locked and empty.
“Let’s go back to the office and scan that bar code,” I suggested. “Then we can watch the security video.”
“All right,” Florence Nightingale huffed. “But let’s make it quick. We need to reopen.”
“We need to check the crime scene for any significant details and then take the victim out before that can happen,” Grimal said.
“Indeed,” I agreed. Grimal looked askance at me.
At the back room we’d passed through previously, Bob grabbed a scanner and checked the bar code. It was for a ten-pack of gold bracelets, because doesn’t everybody want to buy their gold bracelets in quantities of ten? The retail price was $199.99, so I had to wonder how much gold was actually in these gold bracelets.
That was neither here nor there. It wasn’t a very expensive item compared to some of the other bulk jewelry boxes I’d seen in that aisle, so it wasn’t something that was likely to have been stolen. Perhaps it really had fallen off a box.
We checked in the aisle. Out of the twenty boxes of gold bracelets, all of them had their bar-code stickers.
“Must have been stolen by one of the night shifts,” Grimal said.
“They get searched on their way out,” Bob said.
“Searched?” I asked.
The manager nodded. “Oh yes. We have male and female security guards on staff during every shift. That way we can strip-search everyone.”
My jaw dropped. “I’ve never heard of someone having to get strip-searched while working a retail job.”
Florence Nightingale gave me a haughty look.
“The employees like it. If they get strip-searched, there’s no suspicion of theft. That way the employees can go about their duties with a clean conscience, knowing they won’t get falsely accused, like what happens at so many other retail outlets.”
I glanced at Bob to see what he thought of this ridiculous statement, but he was staring into space, as if imagining himself somewhere far, far away.
“How about we go look at the security camera footage?” Grimal said.
We tromped over to the security office, which was clear on the other side of the store. As we passed the cash registers, Florence Nightingale frowned at the cashiers standing huddled, wide-eyed under the watchful gaze of one of Cheerville’s finest.
“Why aren’t you working?” she demanded.
They looked at each other and back at her.
Florence Nightingale tapped her foot, hands balled into fists on her hips. “Well?”
“There are no customers,” one ventured.
The manager waved her arm dramatically at the shelves. “Then work on stock! Clean up the shelving. Make sure the boxes are straight. What is the motto?”
“There’s always something to do at SerMart,” they intoned. “Idle hands pull down profits.”
I exchanged glances with Grimal. He looked equally appalled.
The police chief cleared his throat. “Just avoid aisle six. That’s where the body is. And no one goes upstairs to the catwalks. You”—he pointed to a police officer—“stand guard at the murder scene.”
“Yes, sir,” the policeman said, moving away. The employees moved away too. There wasn’t a straight back in the entire crowd.
The security office was a high-tech affair, what the employees of Serengeti.com would call “innovative and cutting-edge.” A large bank of computer screens showed various points in the store. Unlike most security cameras, these were high quality, with crystal-clear images. I’ve never understood why people feel safe with bargain-basement cameras that give such grainy images you can’t recognize anyone on them. I’ve actually seen defendants go free because even though they were caught on camera, the picture quality was so poor that their lawyers were able to make convincing cases that it wasn’t them.
Not so with these cameras. As they tracked the employees going about their tasks, I could recognize every feature. I could practically read the lips of the ones speaking to each other.
As Bob fiddled with the computer files to find the moment when the body made its unwelcomed entry into my shopping cart, I looked around the rest of the office. There was a male and a female “changing room”—a pleasant euphemism for being forced to take your clothes off in front of a coworker—a line of walkie-talkies on a shelf, and a state-of-the-art burglary alarm. I noted the make and model.
“Here we go,” Bob said. I turned… and was treated to an image of myself talking to a drone.
“You two seem to be getting along,” Grimal said with a chuckle. “Is there sound on this thing?”
“The state wouldn’t let us rig the store with mics. Something about the right to privacy,” Florence Nightingale said. She almost sounded disappointed.
Just at that moment, the body of Sir Edmund Montalbion plunged into the cart.
Seeing myself from a remove, I could tell I did not react well. I jumped back, hands waving in the air, my mouth forming an O as I let out a silent scream. I spun around, screaming in all directions,
