Coco yawned and stretched as we pulled into her driveway after leaving Valdis and Fabritzia with the police. We’d been quite rudely dismissed after they arrived, and the way Justice pointed to my car with an angry finger and his lips in that thin line, I’d decided I’d better not disobey.
“I’ve had enough excitement to last me a lifetime, and all in one night to boot. I’m going home, slathering my puffy face with a mud mask, having a nice glass of Chianti à la Hannibal Lector, and then I’m going to bed. You’ve aged me at least ten years tonight, Lemon Layne.”
I leaned my forehead on the steering wheel and moaned at the sting in my wounded forehead. “I’m sorry, Coco-Puff. I didn’t mean to drag you into this.”
She turned to me as she got out of the car, the light from the ceiling glowing on her tired face. Grabbing the top of the door, she peered at me. “Do you really believe they didn’t whack Myron? Like, really?”
I lifted my head and looked up at her. “Do you really believe they did?”
“I’ll tell you this, I’d believe they did it before I’d believe Mama May did.”
“That’s not the question I asked, Coco. We can’t just accuse people unjustly, no matter how suspicious they look.”
“Yeah, yeah. Justice and all that honorable stuff you’re so into. I get it,” she said with a sigh. “So anyway, the answer to the question is no. I don’t think they did it. Something just didn’t feel right about them—even if they have the perfect motive and I’m thoroughly disgusted with the idea that Fabritzia married Myron out of spite.”
“She did say she cared very much for him,” I hedged.
She planted a hand on her hip in saucy Coco fashion. “Yep, and I care a lot about our RoboCop, Justice. But it doesn’t mean I’d marry him if the love of my life and I broke up.”
“You have a point, but I really did get the sense this wasn’t just so she could come to America. I think she really did have deep feelings for him.”
Coco’s lips went flat. “I have deep feelings for my moisturizer, Lemon.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Okay, fine. I’m sure she did. It’s still not a reason to get married.”
“You know what that means, right? I’m fresh out of suspects again.”
“You’re fresh out of brains, too, but when has that stopped you?” she teased with a smile.
“So, see you tomorrow?”
“Do us both a favor? When you go home, go to bed, young lady. It’s way past your bedtime, and whatever you found at Myron’s can wait until you’ve had some sleep.”
“How can you be so sure I found something?” I knew I was being facetious, and I knew I’d have to fess up eventually, but for now, I wanted to keep this to myself.
“Because when you came back from the bathroom, you looked like you’d seen the entire senior center naked and bent at the waist. White as a sheet. That’s what you were.”
I spewed a laugh but evaded her question and the possibility she’d dig any deeper into what I’d really found so she could then talk me out of looking into it any further. “I’m out. Talk to you in the morning.”
I waved a hand and pulled away before she could sink her teeth into my flesh and probe me for answers. It was going to be a long night as it stood, and I had a bunch of pictures to blow up and go over with a fine-tooth comb.
* * * *
Sitting back in my chair in my upstairs office, I stroked JF’s back as she snoozed while curled around my shoulder. It was too cold tonight to sit out by the koi pond, where I do most of my serious thinking so my office—formerly my dad’s—would have to do.
The office was all him, in deep, rich colors of taupe and brown with the occasional splash of red. I sat at his dark walnut desk, still as well maintained as the day he’d bought it, in a thickly padded office chair surrounded by pictures of all of us hanging on the four walls.
Goodness knows, Chains Forney Layne had loved to document every move we made as a family.
Now, seeing the picture of me in a blow-up kiddie pool, my hair in pigtails, my chubby body in a tutu bathing suit, made me smile. As a kid? Not so much.
The room even smelled of him. Every once in a while, right out of the blue, I’d get a whiff of his aftershave, and it never failed to bring me comfort.
Which brought me back to what I was doing. Scrolling the pictures from Myron’s secret room, I blinked at what was in front of me. I’d downloaded every last one to my computer and blown parts of them up to reveal snapshots of newspaper clippings from a crime scene.
At a bank. The First National Bank of Seattle, to be precise.
The very bank where a man, whose name wasn’t released to the press, was shot in the head during a robbery, and as a result, left with a brain injury.
Huh. I’m going to assume from this point on, Myron was the unidentified victim shot in the head during a bank robbery. The wound in his head, the face blindness, the neurologist appointment all points to Myron. Keeping that in mind, I continued to scour pictures.
JF stirred on my shoulder when I shifted to get a closer look at the crowd and outlying buildings surrounding the yellow crime scene tape. There wasn’t much to see but the usual gawkers, swarms of police and detectives. Nothing unusual at all, in fact.
Except, the crime had never been solved and had little to no leads even now, ten years later.
JF lifted her head and peered into my eyes as though she were asking me why the heck I hadn’t put her in her cage for bedtime yet.
I chucked her under the chin and smiled down at her with affection. “Because I need someone to bounce ideas off of, and Coco’s so fed up with me she went home to bury herself in a mud mask. So tag, my little primate—you’re it.”
She chirped up at me, tugging at my lip.
Leaning back in the chair, I sighed. Maybe talking it out would help. “So here’s the score, Miss Fletcher. Ten years ago, there was a bank robbery at First National of Seattle. Two armed robbers dressed in black masks and gloves entered the building with guns, and according to several eyewitness accounts, made everyone get down on the floor and bury their heads in their arms, including the four tellers on duty, the security guard, and the bank manager. But I guess not everyone listened, because one of the hostages, Joshua Forbes, was certain it had been a carefully planned heist—he claims he watched the whole thing.”
JF huffed in response as if to say, “so what?”
“Okay, I’m boring you with the details, but listen to this. One Henrietta Spalding gave testimony stating the perpetrators must have known where all the security cameras were because they ‘moved around the place like they were in their own living rooms. You know, very comfortable-like,’ she said. Also, as per the security company, no silent alarm sounded, which another hostage suggested meant they had someone on the inside cut the alarm before the robbery. But the investigation—one lasting over a year—turned up nothing. So no fingerprints, no DNA, nothing?”
Jessica tucked her head under my hair and sighed—still bored.
I used the mouse to zoom in one more time on the front of the bank, scanning the faces of the crowd as the victim was carried out on a stretcher. “According to all the newspaper reports, the man was shot in the head, and the perpetrators escaped. The shooting left him unable to recall any of the events leading up to the incident—which is definitely convenient for the bad guys, don’t you think?”
Holy cats. I blinked and reread the last paragraph of the article once more. They had gotten away with two million dollars from the bank’s vault.
Rubbing my grainy eyes, I yawned and looked down at Jessica. “So a bank full of people, two armed men in masks, a security guard, and Myron. Why did they choose to shoot Myron, and not Henrietta or Joshua, or any of the hostages, for that matter? Luck of the draw? Did he try to be a hero? Maybe he tried to stop them?”
I flipped through to another article dated a week after the shooting and found my answer. “Louellen Parsons, bank teller, gave eyewitness testimony to the police that at the time of the robbery, the victim was in a room directly across from the bank’s vault with his safety deposit box. The assumption was that he’d walked out just as one of perpetrators exited the vault and was shot.” Pausing a moment, I stroked Jessica’s back, my fingers tingling. “But that still doesn’t explain why they shot him. Why didn’t they send him out into the bank’s lobby with everyone else? Maybe he saw them? But if they had masks…”
Okay, so the only logical explanation had to be he’d either seen them, or he’d attempted to stop them, but no one seemed to know what happened after the perpetrator went into the vault until the victim was shot. The next bit of testimony from the security guard says the next thing everyone in the lobby heard was a gunshot.
JF, still completely unimpressed, let out an even lengthier, dramatic sigh. She reached a tiny hand up to my lips and mushed them together, suggesting she wanted me to be quiet so she could sleep.
But now I was wide awake, so I ignored her and instead left the scarce crime scene photos and thumbed through the pictures of sticky notes, trying to read Myron’s poor handwriting for any clues as to why he’d dedicated an entire bedroom to this case. He’d scribbled all over them with random words that were absolutely undecipherable.
That’s when I sat up straight, my spine stiff.
Two things troubled me: the energy Myron put into investigating this crime and a pink sticky note that read “Bullet.”
“A bullet? What the hellfire does that mean? Yeah, so he was shot. Bullets are usually what one uses when shooting. Maybe he meant a specific type of bullet?”
Pinching my temples, I fought off a tension headache and continued to sift through the last of the articles, looking for anything that mentioned a bullet.
And lo and behold…
“Listen to what this says, Jess. It’s an update on the unnamed victim’s condition two weeks after the heist. ‘The neurologist, a Dr. Adam Leedy, reported they were unable to remove the bullet from the patient’s head due to its proximity to his occipital lobe and the possible risk of permanent blindness. Dr. Leedy expects the patient to make a full recovery.’ That’s it? Argh!” I shouted into my empty office, frustrated by the lack of detailed information.
Though, it made sense they’d release very little to the public—especially to protect the victim from the press. But the result the doctor spoke of, the permanent blindness? That definitely tied into the face blindness. The Wiki page had said face blindness could occur after an injury. So Myron chose not to take the risk of going blind and ended up with propagnosia. That had to be it.
I had to wonder if Fabritzia could help at all with details, considering Myron wasn’t terribly forthcoming about his condition. I’d also bet my mother knew nothing of the incident either. Which left me where?
A big, fat nowhere. But I wasn’t ready to give up just yet.
I went back to the sticky notes, squinting to try to get a better picture of what Myron had written. Maybe Mom could read his chicken scratch?
And that’s when it hit me like a ton of bricks.
Myron had written the word bullet. He’d been shot in the occipital lobe. When I’d found him, he had a hole in the back of his head in the area of the occipital lobe.
No. No way. That was too twisted to comprehend.
Horror washed over me in waves.
I hopped up from the chair, taking a very displeased JF with me, and began to pace the length of the walnut hardwood. “Oh, yes! I’d bet my right arm Myron was the victim of that bank heist! And I think I know why Myron had that hole in the back of his head, Jess. If they couldn’t remove the bullet, that means it was still in his head, floating around. Maybe it was even the cause of his recent headaches, and surely the cause of his face blindness. But worse? I’d bet a year’s worth of tourist-season brisket sales, whoever killed Myron was the person responsible for shooting him at the bank. You know why?” I almost yelped as the thrill of one more piece of the puzzle coming together set my insides aglow.
Now Jess flopped backward, clinging to my bathrobe with only her tiny feet.
But I scooped her up and tugged her close to my chest. “I know why—because that bullet means something, Jess. That’s why! I don’t know what. I don’t know how. But the person who killed Myron is the same person who pulled off that heist, and that crazy room he has at his house that he’d never let Fabritzia into is proof he was onto something about the day he was shot. Maybe he remembered something or someone from the day of the shooting—or after all these years, he was just trying to figure it all out. But for sure, the killer wanted that bullet, and he was bold enough to dig it out of Myron’s head. Now the question is, who the frizzle would have the guts to yank a bullet out of his head and how close did Myron come to figuring it out?”
Jess had clearly had enough when she did something she rarely does. She hopped down from my shoulder, stumbled out of my office and made a direct left toward my bedroom. The next thing I heard was the clanging of her cage door as she climbed inside.
Glancing at the clock, I noted it was two a.m. Six in the morning was going to come awfully early—which meant I needed to get some sleep. With reluctance, I ran after Jess to keep her from waking Mom, but when I caught up with her, she was already tucked deep within the vee of a limb on the fake tree in her cage, her tiny chest rising and falling.
As I threw my bathrobe on the hook on the back of my door, I got that tingle again. I was close.
So close I could taste it on the tip of my tongue.