“You have no idea,” he said.
He caught on quickly. A few customers knew him from morning bread deliveries, and he chatted easily, showing no sign of the nerves I’d detected in his interview.
Back in the shop, my phone buzzed with a pair of texts. From Tariq, the line cook working for Edgar’s rival: Hot on the trail.
Just what I needed. A hot-headed rogue chef who fancied himself my detective sergeant.
The second came from Tim Peterson. Maddie had been asking for me. Could I come up to the hospital? He couldn’t be sure how long she’d be awake and alert enough to talk.
I couldn’t possibly go. But I had to.
As luck would have it, that meant Cody and I were headed in the same direction at the same time, on the same bus, me to the hospital, he to hang out with a friend on campus.
“We’re hoping to get a place together,” he said as we slipped into seats next to the back door. “Maybe next semester. I need to get away from my parents and all the fighting.”
“I’m sorry. That’s rough.” Across the aisle sat the young barista from the Montlake coffeehouse, and the three of us acknowledged each other.
“It’s all about money,” he said. “She blames him for losing his job—a guy who worked for him got in trouble with the feds and Dad had to shut down his company, even though he hadn’t done anything wrong.”
Not how I’d heard the story, but it’s gotta be hard to confess your screw-ups to your kids.
“So she went back to work, but it’s boom and bust, you know? Everybody thinks real estate agents make boatloads of money, especially since the housing market’s so hot, but half the time, they work their butts off for nothing.”
Though he wanted to get away, he clearly loved both parents and sympathized with their troubles. We were nearing my stop, but I stayed put. Better to give my new employee a sympathetic ear. “Your mom must have been pretty upset when the plans to develop condos on the corner grocery lot fell through.”
“Yeah. This other developer, a woman, pulled a fast one and tricked them all. My mom had invested most of their savings into the project and poof! Gone.”
As I looked at Cody, I noticed the barista eavesdropping.
“That’s the woman who was shot,” I said, and Cody nodded.
“I know, man, it was awful,” the barista said. “I just came back from the police station. That’s why I’m late.”
“The police station?” I said.
“Yeah. Last Thursday, when it happened, we’d been swamped. Morning rush was over and I was out in the alley, wiping off tables and cleaning up. It was a pretty day—the rain didn’t start until Friday.”
“Did you see something?” I asked.
“I heard a loud noise. I thought it was somebody dropping the lid on the metal Dumpster at the end of the alley. I didn’t see anybody, so I just kept working. A couple minutes later, I saw movement.” He raised a hand and waved it alongside his face. “You know, how you know something is moving, but you can’t actually see anything? Anyway, I looked up again and that’s when I saw the guy.”
“What? You saw the shooter?”
“They think so, the cops, but all I saw was a guy in a dark rain jacket and a ball cap rushing down the alley away from me. Medium height and build—about your size,” he said to Cody, and I felt him stiffen. The barista blew out his breath and continued. “The cops had me look at a bunch of pictures, but I couldn’t identify anyone. I didn’t even know anything had happened until I heard the ambulance maybe twenty minutes later. They say she’s going to be okay, thank God.”
No wonder he’d seemed so upset when I stopped in Monday afternoon.
The bus drew into the curb at Broadway and Madison, the corner of the compact Seattle University campus. Cody stood. “Sorry for running my mouth, Pepper. This is my stop. See you next week.” Then the door opened and he bounded down the steps and out of sight.
I glanced over at the barista, who’d put in his earbuds and was staring out the window. I got off at the next stop and backtracked the few blocks to the hospital. The barista’s description of the man he saw behind the corner grocery was too vague to be useful. But to Cody, upset by his parents’ bickering, had it come too close to describing his dad? Without a job to go to, Bruce Ellingson was home during the day and could easily have been in the alley at the time Maddie was shot. And you don’t change the locks on a building you plan to tear down. Had Deanna still had keys?
The Ellingsons were grudge holders, and grudges can lead to murder. Bruce’s beef was with Patrick Halloran, Deanna’s with Maddie Petrosian. Certainly Bruce could have blamed Pat for their current troubles, and Pat’s participation in the protests against the Byrd’s Nest had benefitted Maddie, at Deanna’s expense, but not until long after his death.
I was back where I started, trying to find a connection between a dead man and a woman who could barely talk. An affair? Laurel claimed not to have suspected one until after Pat’s death. It gave her a motive to go after Maddie, but she had an alibi. Plus, if she’d tried to kill Maddie, she’d have thrown the lipstick in the trash or off her dock into Lake Union and kept her suspicions to herself.
And if she’d attempted murder on Maddie, who had killed Pat?
Near the hospital, I scanned the crowded for Smoking Man. He was an expert at blending in. I couldn’t be sure I’d recognize him.
One of the many things I didn’t know—that apparently no one
