The Yoga Store Murder by Dan Morse Read Free Book Online Page A

dog at 11:15 the night before and heard a woman shouting. She’d thought the sounds were coming from the street, though, not the store. The woman went on to say that at the end of the block, outside the Barnes & Noble, she saw a parked 1965 Dodge convertible with windows down and keys in the ignition. Near the car was a dark-skinned black man in a gray jacket. Anything remarkable about him? Ruvin asked. No, she said. The young detective went back into the store, shaking his head—as he knew, the police description of the suspects released to the public hours earlier had said nothing about race, because Brittany said she wasn’t sure herself. What stood out to Ruvin about the woman’s story was how it apparently exemplified her own fears.
    At 8:00 P.M. Drewry and others were still in the store looking for clues, as they would for the next several weeks. Lululemon had given them “control” over the place, along with a set of keys, and not too surprisingly didn’t seem to be in a hurry to try to reopen for business. But Ruvin was anxious to do one more thing before he went home for the night: study surveillance video given to him earlier in the day by an Apple manager. It captured images from the night before in the parking lot behind their store, and with any luck, it also captured something behind the yoga shop.
    Ruvin grabbed the taped-up, brown-paper evidence bag that held the bloody rope, walked to his car, and drove ten miles north to Montgomery’s police headquarters, a glass and brick structure nestled among a series of gleaming office parks along Research Boulevard, a name befitting all the biotech firms stationed there. Inside headquarters, though, the place was dingy and dated, the result of the department having moved in thirty-three years earlier in what was supposed to be a temporary stay. As the department grew, the building’s layout became ever more dysfunctional—carved up, partitioned off, overcrowded. Ruvin went in through a side door, wound around a kitchenette, and took a left down a hallway toward his cubicle with its four-foot high walls. He sat at a desk adorned with photos of his wife, Yasra, a native of Morocco, and their six-month-old son—and one of his favorite dumb criminals, a teenager who’d snapped his own picture in front of a bathroom mirror, which Ruvin had captioned: “Mohawk Haircut: $10. Shower Curtain with Sea Creatures: $40. Taking a photo of yourself with the victim’s stolen phone: $$$ Priceless $$$.”
    For the most part, the young detective enjoyed his work. But it involved a staggering amount of “death calls”—not necessarily murders, but any passings that had to be checked out for signs of foul play: drug overdoses, suicides, drownings, healthy people not waking up in the morning. Talking about all the gloom with his wife the previous year, Ruvin had come up with an idea to create some balance in his life by starting a side business as a wedding videographer. He’d discovered a talent for the work when editing the lousy footage from their own wedding a friend had taken, which Ruvin had been able to salvage by editing with a program that allowed for cuts, fade-ins, background music, and other effects. It had been relatively easy for him to do, and all their friends thought the video had been done professionally. The side business shooting and editing wedding videos might not make him rich, but being around the happy gatherings—with their dancing, drinking, and laughing—seemed about as far from death as you could get. So the couple bought two cameras, placed an advertisement on Craigslist, spread the word, and launched their business, doing a handful of weddings a year.
    Ruvin popped the surveillance DVD into his computer and scrolled to shortly before 10:00 P.M. For more than an hour he saw nothing helpful, just cars, couples, individuals in light-colored clothing. Just after 11 P.M., two men suddenly appeared from the left, walking right. One looked to be