THIRTY

A chill swept over me. Had this key been buried in the flower bed for the purposes of letting someone get inside to murder John Sweet?

I pulled out my phone to call Tex.

Tex. The kiss. I’d taken off and driven away, and now things would be weird. Just that thought was stupid. I was forty-nine years old. I wasn’t supposed to delay calling the police because I’d kissed one of them.

I called Tex and held my phone to my ear. He answered, and I talked. Fast. “It’s Madison,” I said. I rushed ahead before he could get the wrong idea about why I was calling. “I found a key. Well, Rocky found a key. In the flower beds outside the pajama factory.”

“You’re at the pajama factory?” he asked. His voice was tense.

“You released the building, right? It was on the news.”

“The building gets released to the owner. Did I contact you to tell you it was released?”

“No, but it was on the news.”

Tex cursed. “Yes, the building has been released. I was going to tell you earlier today, but—”

I rushed ahead so he wouldn’t talk about the kiss either. “I need to get some pajamas out of the storage cage for an event at The Mummy. They’re my pajamas, and I expect to be in and out before—hold on.” Rush-hour traffic from the highway drowned out the conversation, making it impossible to hear. I unlocked the door and stepped inside to block out the noise. Rocky followed. I closed the door. “I’m inside, and I’m going to get what I need and be gone before you know it. Do you want me to drop the key off at the station?”

“I’m at your place. You can give me the key when you get here.”

“Why are you at my place? You didn’t expect…” I’d been all mixed up, but apparently, Tex switched more easily between gears than I did. I let my voice trail off, not wanting to put into words what I was thinking.

He was silent for a moment. “Doesn’t matter why I’m here. Get out of there, Night.” He hung up.

Tex’s tone both angered and scared me. I didn’t much like being told what to do, but I couldn’t escape the creepy factor of being alone in this rather large building where someone had recently been murdered. Richard could shell out for store-bought pajamas. I’d planned his whole event and rolled with the punches when he and Dax had mixed things up—assuming it had been a mix-up and not a clear effort on Dax’s part to undermine me and get into the building despite my protests.

“Rocky?” I called. Where had that little dog gone? I heard a yip from across the factory floor. He peeked his head out from behind the sliding doors that separated the sewing room from the inventory and George’s office. “Get over here,” I demanded. He took a few steps toward me and then turned around and went back into the cage. “Rocky!” No response.

I crossed the wooden floor of the pajama factory, weaving between sewing stations. My pant legs swished against each other. The cart where I’d tossed my cookies the day Tex and I found John Sweet’s body was gone. For some reason, the consideration of Tex having taken care of that tiny detail in the midst of a homicide investigation was touching, until I realized the police had likely collected the contents of the cart as evidence. I looked around the floor of the factory. The sewing machines had been stripped of their spools of thread. The other small signs that had made the factory appear to have been closed mid-workday were gone, making it look more like a ghost town than a time capsule.

I pulled my phone out and called Tex back. “Hey,” I said.

“Can’t get me out of your head, can you, Night?”

“You’re the one waiting at my house while I go about my life.”

“Are you on your way?

“No, I told you I’m at the pajama factory. I’ll leave in a minute.”

“I told you to get out of there.”

“God! This is never going to work if you insist on telling me what to do.”

The second it was out of my mouth, I froze. Had I just said that? To Tex? Had he heard me? I stood still, waiting for his response. Maybe the call had cut out. Maybe a car had driven by. Maybe he hadn’t been paying attention.

When Tex spoke, his voice was emotionless and steady. “When I went to Hernando’s yesterday, it was to find out who rented the storage unit. It wasn’t your friend Alice. It was John Sweet.”

“But John is dead. If he’s behind all this, who killed him? And why? He couldn’t have been working alone. He was in the factory and the front doors were locked. The key was buried. You can try to get prints off it, right? I’ll bring it to you after I get the pajamas.”

Tex was quiet for a moment, and this time when he spoke, his voice sounded direct. “Listen to me very carefully. We found evidence in the upper floors of the factory that someone has been living in that building. There’s a very good chance the key you found buried out front is how the killer got in.”

“But if the key was buried, then whoever did this had to have left.”

“And when they come back, they’ll know you found them out.”

I looked behind me at the door to the pajama factory. I hadn’t locked it when I came inside because I hadn’t expected to be here for more than a minute. “Rocky’s in the inventory cage. I’ll be on my way in thirty seconds.” I hung up and put the phone in the opposite pocket as my keys. The two weighted items bounced against my hip bones as I walked. I reached the cage and went inside. Rocky’s head was buried in the bottom cubby that held men’s XL pajamas in the conversation heart print.

I didn’t know when this inquisitive side of Rocky had emerged or how long it was going to last, but it seemed as though all I’d been doing lately was holding him back from nosing around in things that weren’t his business. The irony of that wasn’t lost on me.

I tapped Rocky on his haunches. “Come on, little man, let’s go home.”

Rocky backed himself out of the cubicle. In doing so, the plastic bags that held the conversation heart pajamas shifted against each other and fell onto the floor with a clunk.

That was odd. Pajamas don’t clunk.

I squatted on the floor and shifted the fallen bag. It wasn’t filled with new old stock pajamas like the other cubicles.

Underneath the inventory were guns. Lots and lots of guns. Just like the one I’d been left in the unit at the storage facility and the one I’d seen John Sweet holding when Tex and I had found his body. And while my brain processed what it could possibly mean, I became aware of a second, more frightening sound.

Footsteps crossing the floor directly over my head.