LITMIR.BIZ

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he often close?” Riley asked.

      “Yeah, plenty times.”

      Jack said, “You have cameras.”

      The boss hesitated as if he might deny it, then realized the futility. “This is a cash business. Yeah, I got cameras up the wazoo.”

      “Good. We’ll need to see those. And his employment application.”

      Another hesitation while he calculated the futility. “Okay.”

      He instructed them to walk around the building to the other side and find the entry door, which he would open for them. This time when Jack plunged back into the cold, it felt like a relief. “I see why the guy didn’t wear a heavier coat.”

      “Yeah, but he didn’t go straight home from here,” Riley observed, and Jack stopped to orient himself. Across the street sat a medieval building and on the other side of that, the Erie Street cemetery. The student housing building could be found a few blocks directly east. From his workplace, Evan should have turned left on Prospect, away from the cemetery.

      “He could have picked up some groceries or something, which the mugger helped himself to along with his money and phone. Or he grabbed a beer with a buddy. Could be anything.” But Jack kept staring at the building as if he could see through it to the cemetery on the other side. A large, squat fortification of red brick and sandstone, it would have looked at home in Morocco or Prague. “What is that?”

      “Huh? Oh. Grays Armory.”

      “An armory?”

      “Yeah . . . the Grays were a civilian defense militia, kept their weapons there, but they were also a social organization like a Moose Lodge or Elks Hall or whatever.”

      “When was this?”

      “Like a hundred years ago, one-twenty, one-thirty. It’s a museum now but you can still rent the place out—I went to a wedding there once.” He kept walking, the stored warmth from the storefront having quickly worn off.

      Jack caught up. “Looks pretty—solid.”

      “Iron bars with spikes on the windows, and that gate in the entryway comes all the way down. If there’s ever a zombie apocalypse, that’s the place you’re gonna want to hole up.”

      “I’ll keep that in mind.” They reached the tip of the triangular building, stepped from Bolivar onto Prospect, and found the unlabeled employee’s entrance to A to Z Check Cashing. Jack knocked, half expecting a tiny door to open and Ralph’s olive face to peer out and demand a password. But these were modern times and yet another camera gazed at them as they heard the locks being thrown.

      “This might be my second choice,” Riley said, “when the zombies come.”

      Ralph hustled them inside. The rear of the store wasn’t a whole lot bigger than the front, but held two safes with both electronic and keyed locking mechanisms, shelves full of forms, and a messy, dusty desk with mysterious gaps in its surface, as if some items had been hastily placed out of sight while they walked around the corner. There was nothing wrong with a check cashing service, Jack knew. A healthy percentage of U.S. citizens did not possess a bank account and without one, of course, direct deposit was not possible. This made cashing their paycheck or reimbursement check more difficult. The service cost, fees were deducted, but as ATM fees, shipping and handling charges, and turnpike tolls proved, Americans were willing to pay for convenience.

      But Ralph didn’t have it easy. A sign proclaimed the store open from six a.m. until midnight, six days a week. Obviously robbery remained a realistic and constant threat, not only from the baseline criminals assumed to exist around an inner-city location, but from his own customers. Many people might use check cashing services because they were in a hurry, didn’t trust banks, didn’t feel a need for banks, or were in transition from one town to another. But many others didn’t have a bank account because they couldn’t stay mentally or physically stable long enough to get one. And yet others were trying to cash checks that weren’t quite kosher—those for faked medical conditions, the social security payments of deceased parents, or ones stolen out of other people’s mailboxes. Those customers could become desperate and unpredictable.

      Nor was foul behavior restricted to the public side of the counter. Check cashing fees might veer from reasonable to usurious—and any business that saw large exchanges of cash could be easily tweaked to include fraud and money laundering.

      Either way, Jack could guess a number of reasons why Ralph would be less than enthusiastic to see cops on his doorstep. At the same time he had a vested interest in finding out what had happened to his employee, just in case it related to his job.

      “Is there any money missing?” Jack asked the A to Z boss.

      A gruff no. Ralph checked exactly that every morning, and all seemed to be as it should. Evan had closed up, leaving the paperwork tidy, all locks turned, overhead lights out. The man stood as he spoke, awkwardly using a mouse on the back of a clipboard to flick through screens displayed on a forty-inch flat screen mounted on the wall above the desk. Apparently he didn’t feel comfortable sitting with his back to the two detectives. “I used to keep all the lights on all night, hoping it would discourage burglars. But the drunks, they see the lights and they think we’re still open, so one, two in the morning they’d be banging on the door. Once people were leaving a party across the street and called the cops. Another time one of them broke the door, so I started turning the lights out. Same reason there’s no chairs in the lobby. I put chairs out there, the homeless guys hang out here all day just to stay warm.”

      “It is toasty in here,” Riley agreed. He had already shaken out of his parka.

      “Yeah.” Ralph grinned at the TV screen, the first smile they’d seen on him. “My one indulgence. I don’t care if it snows outside, I’m not going to shiver all day to save a few bucks on the gas bill. Here. That’s Evan.”

      The display screen split into fourteen equal-sized boxes. Four each showed the public area, the counter area, and the office, and one each hung above the outside of the front and rear doors. The time stamp read 18:15—six-fifteen p.m.—the previous evening. The victim, very much alive, worked the front counter, processing customers’ checks and forms and dispensing cash from a drawer built into the counter. As they watched in fast-forward mode, he restocked the drawer during slow times, taking cash from a small safe in the office.

      “I stock that little one before I leave for the day. No one can get in the big ones except me,” Ralph explained.

      In between customers, Evan disappeared into the tiny restroom, snacked out of a bag he kept in the office mini-fridge, surfed the apps on his phone, and used the cashier computer to check what appeared to be his social media pages and online shopping sites.

      “They’re not supposed to do that,” Ralph growled. “Damn Facebook.” However, he seemed cheered that his employee had not been up to anything untoward, and asked how much the officers wanted to see. The time stamp now read 20:05.

      “Let it run,” Jack said.

      He didn’t expect to learn much. Evan Harding had left the business in its usual condition, and therefore hadn’t been robbed or abducted. But they were there and the tape was queued, so they might as well watch all of it rather than risk missing something that might explain how Evan Harding had come to be dead in the snow, one street over.

      Customers came and went. Most turned over their form, endorsed their check or showed a receipt on their phone, took their cash and left. Some, as the owner predicted, seemed to enjoy the warmth or simply having something to do and hung around chatting. Evan Harding would lean against the counter, arms crossed—polite but not encouraging.

      When no customers were present, Evan spent time on his phone—hardly unusual in today’s world. He also used downtime to tap at the keyboard. “What’s he doing?” Jack asked, when Ralph did not seem interested in this activity.

      “Online transfers.”

      “What does that mean?”

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