“I need you to come to the office with me,” said Ramsey. She saw her coworker in the Loss Prevention Unit approaching from the left. Mel Summers was in his early fifties, and when he wasn’t watching the cameras in the monitoring room because he didn’t feel like walking, he typically patrolled hardware, camping, and automotive. He looked like he belonged there.
He came to a halt a little to the left and behind the woman’s shoulder and grinned at Ramsey. “Caught it on the camera. If you hadn’t blocked that swing I guess we’d be calling you Mrs. Potato Head.”
“Ms. Potato Head,” she said. “And you’d call me that once.”
“Uh-huh. Right.” Mel Summers had a toothy smile set off parenthetically by cheek pouches. It would not be long before they could properly be referred to as jowls, but for the time being he looked as if he were storing M&Ms or honey roasted nuts. He passed a hand over his balding head and squinted as he observed the scene. “Police been called?”
“Heather did it, but you should have.”
“Yeah, well, I thought I should get here as fast as I could.”
Ramsey had always thought walking and talking was a challenge for Mel, but she’d have another opportunity to share that opinion with him. God knew, he gave her plenty of chances.
Ramsey addressed the customer again. “Mel and I would like you to accompany us to the office. This doesn’t have to be difficult. We can hear you out. Make sense of what happened. I’m thinking you have a story. Something along the lines of you left the bum but not soon enough. He took your stuff, cleaned out your bank account, and disappeared. What does that sound like?”
The woman stared at Ramsey. She folded her hands, wrung them together. “It sounds like you know me.”
“I knowhim. C’mon.” She absently rubbed her forearm. It was still throbbing but there was no acute pain. “Let’s go. That’s Mel behind you. He’ll bring up the rear. It suits him.”
The woman’s faint smile showed a bit of sympathy. “Horse’s ass?”
“You know it.”
“I heard that,” Mel said.
“You were meant to,” Ramsey told him. “This way.” She waved the woman forward and stepped slightly to the side so they could walk together. As she passed the cart, she pushed it backward in Mel’s direction and told him to bring it along.
Once the police arrived, nothing about the woman’s story held together. Ramsey had not been hopeful that it would. She had offered up the explanation to invite the woman’s cooperation, not because she believed it was true. It was a strategy, nothing more. It no longer surprised her that it worked as often as it did. People did not necessarily believe she had personal experience with the story they told, but they almost unanimously believed she was a sucker for it.
The woman’s debit card did not match the name on her driver’s license, not first, not last, not middle initial. The Virginia license had expired almost a year ago, and when it was through the system it tagged to a couple of misdemeanors, driving under the influence, and three unpaid speeding tickets. There was a bench warrant for failure to appear in court while on probation.
Ramsey’s take on Cindy Ann McKeever was that she was a cool one. On a hunch, supported by the expired license, she left the interview room to walk out to the parking lot. She found Ms. McKeever’s partner behind the wheel of a rusting Camaro listening to Wiz Kahlifa with the volume pumped. The car vibrated. He was a skinny Caucasian sporting a two day stubble as dark as coffee grounds. She collected buggies from a nearby stall to get a closer look. He had a shaggy head of hair that hadn’t been introduced to a comb in days. He wore a black T-shirt with the Steelers logo on the front. The short sleeves were rolled up to his armpits like a greaser from the fifties. She sighed. Couldn’t he have been a Cowboys fan or maybe worn a wife-beater tee?
She memorized the license plate, make, model, and color of the car and pushed half a dozen buggies into the store. She told the officer what she found, and Cindy Ann was not so cool that she didn’t give her boyfriend away.
After the police officer left, Ramsey shooed Mel out of the office so she could write her report. She was three-quarters of the way through when Paul walked in.
“Someone’s here to see you.”
“See me?” She looked past his shoulder but couldn’t see anyone. She jerked her chin at him. “Where were you when I got clobbered?”
“Doing my job. Loading bay. We had a shipment snafu. Twenty pallets of paint. Bisque. I had to make a decision to either send them back or see if I can sell them.”
Ramsey didn’t ask what he decided. She knew he would sell them. It would be to his benefit to do so. “Did you see the recording?”
He nodded. “Mel found me. I watched what happened. Are you all right? Do you need to file for comp?”
“No.”
“Write it up anyway. Separate incident report. I don’t want it coming back to haunt me. If you’d missed that swing, you’d be—”
“Yeah,” she said, interrupting. “I know. Ms. Potato Head.”
He wiggled one bushy black eyebrow as he shrugged. “I was going to say Tater Top, but Ms. Potato Head works too.”
She waved him away and tried to see past him again. “Is it Officer Longabach? Is he back with questions?”
“No.” He stepped aside and opened the door wider to admit the person still out of Ramsey’s view. When Sullivan Day walked in, Paul winked at Ramsey and walked out. He closed the door behind him.
