6
Love Not Lost
She returned to their apartment and headed straight for the bedside table where she opened a single wad of bubblegum. The sugary sweet scent had always been soothing to her nerves and had long since been her only vice.
She stuck the wad between her teeth and groaned at the blast of flavor. Even with time, her sweet tooth had not faded, and now she was ready for business.
She sat on the bed, there being limited furniture inside the apartment, and retrieved her phone from her bag. Blowing a bubble, she snapped her gum back and forth between her teeth as she absentmindedly sifted through the hidden camera footage.
Twig in the breeze. Twig in the breeze. Parent dropping their kid off. Kids playing outside. She cursed as she scanned through each video and found that not a single one contained her culprit. She was beginning to wonder if she had placed the camera in a good spot. She thought that was where he had been standing before she had chased him.
She blew another bubble, but sucked it back in before it could pop in her face, her brow furrowed in concentration. Surveillance had never been her favorite, a lot of waiting and watching and not much action, but it was necessary that she be patient; so she would be, for a while, then she would try to find an alternate method to catch this creep.
Luckily, patience did pay off. After a few more false alarms, Cora leaned into the screen and smiled in triumph. There he was, facing away from the camera. She recognized his back from running after him, the familiarity startling. He was wearing a baggy sweatshirt, a ball cap shading his features so that all she could distinguish was a scraggly beard and long, thick hair with a slight curl where it flowed from under his cap.
She wrote down how tall she believed him to be: five ten at the most. How heavy: about two hundred pounds, all muscle she guessed, even with his baggy clothes. She even wrote down the brand of jeans she believed him to be wearing, and then waited for him to turn around. If she could get a logo or something off of the ball cap or hoodie he was wearing, she would have a great starting point on where to look for his name. Any clue could be the key to finding him, so she wrote down every detail.
“Turn around,” she grumbled at the monitor.
He did. As if hearing her command, he spun slowly and gave her a good view of his profile beneath the ball cap, then a good view of what was written on it. The ball cap read, “D’Angleterre.”
Squinting to make out each individual letter, Cora copied it down onto her notepad and waited. It took about an hour for the kids to be let out of school, and when they were, many of them flocked straight to him. They excitedly approached him with no tact as he held out a fist full of white cylinders and each youngster took one with the enthusiasm of getting candy.
“Sick,” she spat, disgusted, although also suspicious. She saw no money exchange hands.
When all the children had dispersed, he also left and the camera was again only focused on an empty courtyard. Cora sat back, puzzling over her notes. A healthy-looking man was not exactly selling cigarettes, just handing them out outside of a school. What was the incentive in doing that?
She tapped her pen against her bottom lip and pulled up Google. When it came to finding out information, Google was Cora’s best friend. The only thing in her notes that really jumped out at her was the logo on the hat. “D’Angleterre.”
Maybe it was a gym, or a favored café, or... a hotel chain?
An expensive one. What is someone supposedly selling cigarettes to kids doing with a hat advertising one of the most expensive hotels in Copenhagen, Denmark?
She puzzled over this, googling the hotel and taking a virtual walkthrough to try to make sense of it, when the front door opened and both she and Asher jumped.
“Shit,” she grumbled. “Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”
“I could say the same to you.”
Cora turned back to her notes. “I quit today.”
To Asher’s credit, his eyebrows only raised a fraction of an inch in response. Though Cora supposed that that was his equivalent to full shock. “What do you plan to do then?”
“Catch this asshole for starters,” Cora said, holding up her notes. “I got him on camera and he was wearing a hat that advertised this swanky hotel. Kind of a fancy place for such a degenerate, but now I’m not really convinced he has been selling the kids anything.”
“What makes you say that?” Asher asked.
“The footage. I didn’t see any money exchange hands. Plus, I know scum and this guy didn’t seem so scummy.”
“But if he wasn’t scummy, why did he run from you?” Asher pointed out.
She blew another bubble between her chapped lips. “Well, if you haven’t noticed, I am quite menacing.”
Asher smirked at this, as she stood and pulled her jacket tighter around herself so she could zip it. “Where are you off to now?”
“To the only lead I’ve got, to this hotel to get some answers on who this dude might be so I can ask him myself if he is scum or not.”
“And what do you intend to do if you catch him?”
She answered by slipping some zip ties from her pocket to show him. “Catching bad guys is like riding a bike, once you know how to do it you never lose the talent.”
“May I remind you that we are trying to keep a low profile?”
“What good has that done?” Cora asked.
“Kept us alive.”
Cora snorted. “You call
