“You passed it,” she said, pointing behind them, toward the twentysomethings on the scooters. They were still riding in circles, though now a block closer, past a refurbished two-story redbrick building that looked like a trendy bar. No dog dish in front. “He sleeps upstairs,” Lady Rhinestone explained. “Just be careful when you go inside. He’s been known to shoot at white people.”
Zig froze.
“I’m teasing. That’s humor.”
Roddy offered her a fist bump. She took him up on it.
Of course she did. When Zig first met Roddy, he wrote him off as a social misfit, but it was time to admit . . . from the funeral home, to finding Elijah, to tracking him here . . . over and over, Roddy’s eyes never left the prize. Even if Zig didn’t trust him, it was time to stop underestimating him. And to start using him.
Zig headed for Elijah’s, the summer sun fading in the purple sky.
“She liked me better because I’m nicer,” Roddy said, running to catch up. “You should laugh. That’s a good joke.”
Zig ignored it, eyeing the scooter guys, who were still making circles, winding their way closer. There were other people on the streets—nearly all of them young twenty-and thirtysomethings, all of them with a professional veneer. This was a neighborhood on the rise. And Elijah was part of it.
“I need your cop brain. Can we go back to Grandma’s Pantry for a moment?” Zig asked.
“You mean the break-in?”
“I’ve been thinking about it. What if instead of taking something out, well . . . on that night five years ago, what if someone was actually trying to sneak something in?”
Roddy thought about that, the scooter guys now barely half a block away. “Why would someone bring something in?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?”
“I’d bring something illegal,” Roddy decided. “A warehouse with security like that—I’d bring drugs.”
“Drugs are one possibility. Weapons, too,” Zig acknowledged. “But thinking of all the antidotes they keep there—for smallpox, SARS, Ebola—what if someone brought in lesser versions of those, to dilute the real stuff during an actual catastrophe?”
“Or maybe just to create doubt so the government orders even more,” Roddy said, nodding over and over like he was enjoying himself. “If you really want to be destructive, bring a bomb inside—blow up the warehouse itself.”
“Or blackmail it,” Zig agreed. “Gimme fifty million, or the whole place goes boom.”
Zig stopped at the redbrick storefront.
Hopportunities, read the hand-painted sign on the front glass. In the bottom right-hand corner, in one of those trendy typographies that you instantly know is cool but also somehow reminds you of the font of an eye chart, were these words:
Proprietor—Elijah King
The fourth and final member of Mint’s team.
69
Fair Winds, Pennsylvania
Sabrina S. wasn’t any help.
Neither was Gina Castronovo, or Sherri Goldman, or the twins, Rachel and Julia Cohen.
For hours now, Charmaine had been staked out at her kitchen table, using Facebook to track down cell numbers, making phone call after phone call to Maggie’s childhood friends.
As expected, the hardest part was the small talk, hearing that Sabrina S. and Leah were both married with kids, Pamela had gone back to school to be a physician’s assistant, Jodi was running for the local school board, and Melanie had started her own web marketing business—all of them in their late twenties, hopes and possibilities spread out in front of them, while Maggie was forever twelve, forever a Girl Scout.