Guilt By Degrees

79

It was dusk by the time we reached the storage facility, and darkness was quickly spreading across the sky, squeezing out the last rays of sunshine. Our destination, U-Store Lockers, a big concrete-and-beige box of a building, was at the edge of town, where real estate was cheap and ugly warehouses proliferated. Surrounded by a high fence of black steel, the place had the desolate look of a vacant house on a deserted lot. Very few people who had to rent lockers were in a good place in their lives. The building seemed to give off an air of disappointment, loss, and rootlessness.

Claire was standing at the keypad that operated the gate when our little entourage drove up. She punched in some numbers, and the gate slowly swung inward, reminding me of a door to a haunted house that opens with barely a touch-hinting at dark, unseen forces. A sudden shiver of foreboding pushed me back in my seat, an unconscious effort to resist the car’s forward movement as Bailey drove through the opening.

“Any thoughts on how big this locker might be?” I asked, just to hear myself say something-anything-to take my mind off the very bad feelings I was starting to have about this whole operation. Bailey shook her head silently. I stole a look at her out of the corner of my eye and saw that she was having a few misgivings of her own. But, of course, us being us, neither one would admit it.

We parked in the lot and followed Claire up the road that separated the rows of buildings. She stopped at an entrance on the left.

“It’s on the second floor,” she said. “You have to take the elevator.”

You know what’s worse than a storage locker? An elevator to a storage locker.

The elevator was large and empty, and Claire had to punch in her code to operate it. The security measure reassured me…sort of. We stepped out on the second floor into a freshly painted but eerily quiet and dimly lit hallway. The floors were concrete, and our shoes clacked flatly, the only sounds in the entire building. Claire stopped at the last unit on the left, inserted her key, and pulled the door open.

The locker seemed to be the size of a small room. Seemed, because the darkness in that room was so dense, it felt like a solid mass.

“No lights?” I asked.

“It’s not a living space, so you bring your own.”

Gary had a police-issue flashlight-the big, heavy kind that doubles as a weapon. He turned it on and slowly shined it around the airless unit. It was as big as a bedroom, and large pieces of furniture were piled on top of one another. A bulky object under a sheet that looked like it might be Simon’s potter’s wheel was standing in the far corner, and boxes were stacked in rows that reached almost to the ceiling.

“Are all these boxes from Simon’s apartment?” I asked.

“All except the five up front here,” Claire replied, pointing to some cardboard boxes stacked near the wall to our right. “Those are the things he left in our house.”

Gary dispatched one of the investigators to fetch the rest of their flashlights, but Claire stopped him.

“You’ll need this,” she said, handing him a yellow Post-it note. “That’s the keypad combination. It’s for the elevator and the outer gate. The exit’s to your left as you leave the building.”

Gary handed the Post-it to one of the younger investigators, who trotted down the hall toward the elevator.

“You’re not staying?” I asked her.

Claire shook her head. “No,” she said. She dropped the locker key into Gary’s hand. “Just let me know if there’s anything else you need. You can drop off the key whenever. We don’t come here, so no rush.”

“Thank you for all your help, Claire,” I said. “I know this hasn’t been easy.”

She turned to go, then stopped and looked at me, her eyes wet and bright. “I’ve made my peace with the fact that Lilah got away with…Zack,” she said, her voice intense and strained. “I don’t want to have to do it again. Whoever this monster is, he took my last baby.” She blinked rapidly for a moment. “Get him.”

“I will,” I replied. And I meant it.

Claire left, and her footsteps echoed down the hallway. We looked around as best we could with just one flashlight while we waited for reinforcements.

“That’s a lot of boxes,” Bailey remarked.

Gary nodded. “But there’re six of us,” he said. “We’ll make pretty fast work of this.”

And he wasn’t kidding. Box by box, including every drawer of Simon’s dresser and desk, every possible space where evidence could be hidden, was explored within an inch of its life.

Bailey and I focused on the five boxes Claire had identified. In the fourth one, I found a few brochures of services and shelters for the homeless. Simon had scribbled some names and numbers on a couple of them. I figured they were probably contacts at the shelters. I showed them to Bailey.

“Take those. They’ll at least give us another place to search.”

And another place to find nothing. I hadn’t expected to unearth a gold mine, but we were coming up completely empty on every front, and it was getting to me.

Gary came over to us. “Anything?” he asked.

Bailey and I still had the papers from our last box spread out on the floor, where we could shine the flashlight directly at them. I cleared some space and showed him the brochures.

“We might have a lot more here,” he said, playing his flashlight over the other boxes that were being searched by the investigators. “But it’s mostly paper with scribbles, and it’s too hard to read in this light. I say we take them back to the office, where we can spend some time and see what we’re doing.”

I was down with anything that’d get us out of there sooner. “Good idea,” I said heartily.

Gary told them to pack up all the boxes they hadn’t finished searching and take them down to the cars. Each of the investigators hefted a couple of solidly packed containers and moved out into the hallway.

“I’m going to carry those out,” Gary said, pointing to the last two boxes. He gave me the key to the locker. “And since you’re going to see the Bayers, you may as well lock up and take it with you.”

I took the key. “We’ll pack up and be right behind you,” I said.

I tucked the brochures into the pockets of my jacket and helped Bailey reassemble our last box. I’d just picked up the final sheaf of papers in front of me when she tapped my arm and held out a newspaper article. It involved a case that’d been prosecuted in Riverside. The defendant had been acquitted in state court of the murder of his business partner. The federal prosecutors had taken the case and won it. The article was underlined and highlighted, with names circled and notes written in pen in the margin.

“Now we know how Simon got the idea,” Bailey said.

I nodded. We both scanned the article. I wanted to see why the case had gone south at the first trial and what had made the Feds pick it up. But halfway through the story I suddenly became aware that a heavy silence had settled around us. I looked up. We were alone.

“Come on,” I said with some urgency. “We can read it in the car.”

We threw the rest of the papers into the box, and Bailey carried it out. I yanked the door shut and nervously fumbled the key into the lock, but it stubbornly refused to turn. I had to pull it out and jam it back in twice before I finally got the damn thing locked.

Quickly we moved to the elevator, and I held the door open for Bailey. Inside, I punched the combination into the keypad. The door closed and we began to descend, but before we could reach ground level, a deafeningly loud clang reverberated through the walls. My stomach lurched. Bailey and I looked at each other, our eyes wide.

“What the hell was that?” I asked.

Bailey shook her head. “No idea.”

She unsnapped her holster. I took the hint and pulled my gun out of my purse.

The elevator came to a stop at the first floor, and the doors slid open. Bailey picked up the box, and I motioned to her to stay there. Heart pounding, I peered out into the hallway. Nothing. I stuck my hand out to hold the elevator door open and looked around to my right. Nothing. I looked to my left. And saw where the sound had come from. I blinked, trying to clear my vision, in the hope I was wrong. I wasn’t. I turned to Bailey.

“We’re locked in.”