I was almost all the way back to the food court for my appointment at Healthy Wraps, when I heard the crash of shattering glass.
I looked down the promenade and saw that a huge rectangular piece of glass had fallen from the roof!
People were screaming, running away from the spot where the glass had fallen. I fought the tide, running toward the scene of the accident, to see if anybody needed help. (Both Frank and I have CPR training.)
The glass had fallen right in front of In the Groove, this really cool, funky store. At first the whole area looked clear of people—which was a good thing, believe me. But then I saw that someone was lying on his stomach in the doorway. He was covered in little pieces of glass. Lucky for him it was safety glass, the kind they use in car windshields. When it breaks, it shatters into little round pieces instead of deadly, jagged-edged shards.
As I got closer, I realized, first, that the guy was lying on someone else, and second, that I knew this guy.
“Frank!”
He looked up at me. “Hi, Joe. Am I dead?”
“No, dude—you’re still here. Let’s just make sure you’re okay.”
He got up slowly, checking himself for blood, and I saw that the person underneath him was a really cute girl with huge dark eyes. She was clinging to Frank like a barnacle.
Frank helped the girl up, and between sobs, she hugged him, saying, “Thank you!” over and over again, and “You saved my life!”—all of which Frank accepted without an argument.
“You okay, dude?” I asked him.
“I th-think so,” he said, still checking himself over.
“You sure seem like you’re doing fine,” I commented, glancing at the girl.
“Oh. Yeah—Joe, this is Adriana. Adriana, my brother Joe.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said, nodding at me.
“Likewise.”
“I’m, uh, going to be working with her, Joe—here in the store,” he explained.
“Ah. Well, good for you.”
“What about you—did you get a job?”
“Yeah, but I think you’re gonna like yours better,” I said, with an eye on Adriana.
Frank was already at work, though—and not the retail kind. He was crouching down at the edge of the pile of glass, looking for clues.
Meanwhile, mall security had arrived, along with the janitor—a weird-looking old guy with OSKAR stitched on his uniform. He was wheeling a large garbage can and carried a big broom over his shoulder.
I looked up at the roof where the huge pane had come loose. The ceiling was high, and the lighting wasn’t that good at this hour—but I thought I saw a neat edge of glass around the metal frame of the missing pane. Which made me think that maybe—just maybe—someone had cut through it on purpose.
Of course, I couldn’t be certain—not from this far away. I needed to get up there on the roof and check it out.
“Everybody back!” shouted the mall security officer in charge. There weren’t very many of us around—mostly store employees, since closing time had come and gone, and the customers with it. In the distance I heard police sirens.
And then I saw Mr. Applegate, running down the promenade toward us from the direction of his office. I could tell right away that he was the most upset person there—even more than Frank and Adriana, who had every right to be scared out of their wits.
Just then, a police whistle blew. “Stand back, everyone!” yelled a voice I recognized instantly as belonging to Chief Ezra Collig—our dad’s old friend, and the top man in the Bayport Police Department. The East Side Mall was on the outskirts of town—in his jurisdiction, but just barely.
“Somebody want to tell me what happened?” he asked, looking around at the crowd, most of whom were wearing ID cards identifying them as store employees.
Everyone started answering the chief at once, and he had to blow his whistle again to silence them. “One at a time!” he shouted.
Then he saw me and Frank, and he frowned. “Aw, now, why is it that every time there’s trouble, you two are always nearby? No, don’t answer that!” he quickly added.
“That skylight came down right on top of us,” Frank told the chief, his arm still around the shivering Adriana. “It nearly killed us.”
“Hmm,” the chief said, scowling. Turning to Officer Con Reilly, another of our pals on the force, he said, “Haven’t I been telling you about this place? I get more complaints about conditions here—”
“This was no accident!” Mr. Applegate piped up. “I’m always very careful about safety conditions here—those code violations were all fixed months ago! You can check your records and see.”
The chief looked up at the hole in the glass ceiling, then down at the shattered fragments of the skylight, and said, “Looks pretty hazardous to me. But we’ll have a look—don’t you worry.” Turning to Reilly, he added, “Get a detail up on that roof, Con.”
“Right, Chief,” said Reilly, who took off at a trot, motioning for two other officers to join him.
“If this was an accident,” the chief said to Applegate, “I’m gonna have to cite you for unsafe conditions. Again.”
“I’m telling you, sir—this was a message meant for me.” Then suddenly Applegate looked up and over my shoulder.
I turned around to see what he was staring at, and saw a blond-haired woman, soaking wet and about thirty years old. She looked straight out of a sixties movie, with her headband, her vest full of patches and buttons, and her hair in braids. She stared right back at Applegate, with a look on her face somewhere between anger and pleading.
I noticed that one of the buttons on her vest said STEMM. I remembered what Applegate had just said: This was a message meant for me.
Then I looked beyond the retro-hippie lady—and there, lurking in the shadows of one of the potted palm trees that lined the promenade, I saw the lawyer for Shangri-La, Bob Meister. He was staring at Applegate too—with a look on his face that said, I told you so.
Chief Collig had already started interviewing the witnesses, beginning with Frank and his new “instant girlfriend.”
I decided my time would be better spent getting to the roof and seeing what Con Reilly was up to. So I headed for the emergency stairs, which were just to the right of the escalators.
Two flights up, I found the door to the roof. It had been propped open with a cinder block. Its alarm system must have been turned off too, because it hadn’t sounded—at least I hadn’t heard it, and I have pretty good ears.
Reilly’s two men were trying to make their way across the metal frame of the glass roof, keeping their weight off the remaining sheets of glass as they inched their way toward the missing pane.
“Hey, Joe,” Reilly greeted me. “Did Chief say it was okay you being up here?”
I had to laugh. “Sure, Con. You know how he loves me poking around his business.”
“Ah, that’s okay,” he said, “seeing as it almost hit Frank, I guess you take a personal interest. Besides, you’ve saved our bacon more than once. Hey, maybe you’ll spot something we don’t.”
“I doubt that,” I said modestly—but it was true. Frank and I have solved more than a few cases for the Bayport Police Department. Chief Collig might not like it, but at least we don’t try to take any credit. (ATAC wouldn’t let us do that, even if we wanted to. That’s how a secret agency stays secret.)
Con’s two officers had made it over to the missing panel. “Looks like it was cut through on purpose,” one of them called back to us. “Nice clean job—still an edge of glass firmly in place all the way around.”
“Geez,” Reilly muttered. “If that isn’t creepy …”
“Hey,” I called, moving farther along the framework to a vertical brick wall that had been tarred black. “Check this out, Con.”
He came over and stared at it. Then he let out a low whistle. “If that don’t beat all,” he said.
On the black wall, someone had spray-painted a message, graffiti-style: NEXT TIME DURING BUSINESS HOURS.
It was signed STEMM.