3 Malled to Death by Laura Disilverio Read Free Book Online Page B

drill.”
    “With mustard.”
    “In your dreams.”
    He gave me the lifted brow and I thought I caught the tiniest hint of a smile. Was he baiting me? I wasn’t sure the man had a sense of humor, but every now and then he surprised me with a look or comment that hinted that he wasn’t as humor-free as he appeared. Maybe he even laughed uncontrollably at Three Stooges movies, like most of the men I knew. I started to tell him once again about the man I’d seen leaving the bathroom, but he turned away as uniformed cops came forward and began taking people’s names and contact information. With the movie cops in dark navy uniforms, and the VPD officers in a slightly lighter blue uniform, it looked like a cop convention had landed at the mall. The Keystone Kops, I thought, hoping all the police, real and faux, kept their weapons holstered for the duration.
    • • • 
    “Tell me there hasn’t been another . . . incident, EJ,” Curtis Quigley pleaded minutes later when I dropped by his office to give him a report. His British accent, which rumor had it he’d adopted during a semester abroad in college, was more noticeable when he was nervous. His assistant Pooja hadn’t wanted to be the bearer of bad news, so Quigley was still in the dark when I arrived. He might not shoot messengers, but he whined at them a lot.
    Quigley had perfected the head-in-the-sand approach to life; I’d bet his mother had had to slip medications into his apple juice to get him to swallow them. The unpalatable things in life went down better smeared with peanut butter or drowned in juice. Nothing was going to make murder go down easier. Quigley twiddled his cuff link, which flashed a pale orange when it caught the light. “Nothing . . . major has happened, has it?” he repeated.
    “Um . . .”
    He winced. “An accident of some sort?” he asked hopefully.
    “Homicide.”
    Sinking into his chair, he heaved a put-upon sigh. “I don’t understand. None of the other FBI malls has murder-of-the-month issues. Sure, some of them have gang problems, and one in Texas got blown up when the gas line ruptured, but my mall is the only one with dead bodies littering the place.” He flapped his hands aimlessly, as if to show how widespread the bodies were. “Do you know how bad it looks at board meetings when I have a murder or two to report every quarter? ‘Profits were down three point one percent for the first quarter,’” he said as if making a presentation, “‘and bodies were up two hundred percent.’” He ended on a bitter note.
    “Only three of them were actually at the mall,” I offered helpfully. “Weasel and Captain Woskowicz were killed off the premises, so technically—”
    “You know I hate it when you get technical on me, EJ,” he said querulously. He craned his neck to peer around me. “Where’s Ms. MacMillan?”
    I was hoping he’d overlook Coco’s absence since I had no idea where she was. Certainly, as the director of security, she should have been updating Quigley. I was tempted to say, “Who knows?” but couldn’t make myself throw her under the bus. “Since I found the body,” I improvised, “she thought it was best that I fill you in.”
    “Hmph.” He listened as I told him about finding Zoë in the restroom, about the cops’ arrival, and about the kind of support we’d need to offer them.
    “But they’ll be out of here before we need to open, right?”
    “No.” I refused to sugarcoat the truth. “They may not even let us open.” Although it felt like two days had passed, it had only been an hour and a bit since I’d walked into the restroom and found Zoë. It was still an hour until mall opening time . . . if the mall was going to open today.
    Quigley made a strangled sound. “Not open! But it’s Tuesday. A weekday. Malls are always open on Tuesdays. What will shoppers think?”
    Quigley could have printed up one of those rubber bracelets with “WWST” on it, as that