No offense, p.16
No Offense, page 16
“Elijah, who is that man?” she asked, showing him the photo.
Elijah squinted at the screen. “What man?”
“The man standing outside in the yard, looking in from behind the sliding glass doors.”
Elijah squinted some more. “Oh, wow. I never noticed that before. You’re right, there is a man out there.” He scrolled through a couple more photos as Molly looked on. “He’s in a few of them. Ugh, what a creeper. He’s just standing out there looking at us.”
“So you don’t know that man?” Molly asked carefully. “He wasn’t a guest last night?”
“What?” Elijah’s eyes were still glued to the camera’s display screen. “No! It was just me and the girls. Sharmaine’s parents weren’t even home. They were at some party, or something. Ew, look at him here. He must have known we couldn’t see him because of how dark it was outside and how bright it was inside. But he’s giving us the peace sign anyway!”
Elijah showed her the photo. It was true. The man—a white man about Elijah’s same size, but ten or so years older, and with a well-groomed goatee—stood in the darkened glass behind the three Snappettes mugging for the camera, two fingers of one hand raised to give the peace sign, a smirk on his face.
He was dressed in dark jeans and a black sweatshirt—a black hooded sweatshirt, the hoodie pulled up just enough to cover his hair but not his large ear gauges or vine neck tattoos.
And certainly not enough to keep Molly’s chills from increasing tenfold. She knew they were looking at a photo of the High School Thief . . . and also that the High School Thief was Dylan Dakota. There’d been a picture of him in one of the articles Meschelle Davies had shown her.
“Elijah,” she said, hoping he wouldn’t notice her wildly beating heart. “Where does Sharmaine live?”
Elijah told her an address she knew well. It was only a block or two from Mrs. Tifton’s house. While she and John had been kissing on Jasmine Key, Dylan Dakota—aka the High School Thief—had been creeping through the backyard of the house in which sweet, cheerful Katie had been having a sleepover, spying on her as she playfully posed for photos with her friends.
“Could you text me copies of these photos?” Molly asked, trying to keep calm. If she felt this freaked out, she could only imagine how John was going to feel when he saw how close his daughter had come to the most wanted man in Little Bridge without even being aware of it. “I need to send them to someone.”
Elijah shook his head. “No, I can’t. This is a camera, not a phone. I can’t send photos from it.”
“Oh, right.” How could she have forgotten? “Well, how could you get copies of these photos to me to show someone?”
“Well, I’d have to go home and download them onto my mom’s laptop—it’s a special memory card, see, that only fits into really old computers. There used to be a cable, but it got lost. Then I guess I could either email them to you, and then you could email them to the person, or I could print them out and bring copies over to you. I invested in some really nice—”
Molly thought her brain was going to melt. “Listen, Elijah,” she said, her fingers curling around the camera. “Why don’t you just give it to me, and I’ll—”
“Excuse me.”
Molly looked up to see the father who’d previously brought the bourbon and coffee into the library looming over her desk. She gave him a tight smile. Of course. Of course someone was interrupting her right now during this crucial conversation. She worked at a service desk. She was there to help people with their book-related problems, not solve crimes. “Yes, may I help you?”
“I just wanted to say sorry again about the book.” The dad looked shamefaced over what had happened. “If you want me to pay for the damage, I’d be happy to.”
Molly glanced at Six-Dinner Sid, which was sitting, sodden and sticky, on her desk. “Okay,” she said. “Great! That will be twenty-five dollars.”
The man looked shocked. “Twenty-five dollars! For a kid’s book? You have to be kidding me.”
“Well, it’s a hardcover picture book.” Molly was impatient to be rid of him so she could get back to her conversation with Elijah. “In full color, and also a library edition with special binding. So actually, twenty-five dollars is a bargain. They’re really—”
“Used!” The father stooped to scoop up his child, who was standing with one finger up her nose and another in her mouth. “I’m not paying twenty-five dollars to replace a used book! That should come out of all the money we taxpayers shell out for this place. Come on, Juniper. We’re never coming back here again!”
Then he stormed off, not seeming to care that everyone could see the pint bottle of bourbon he had tucked into his back pocket.
Molly sighed and turned back to Elijah.
“I need to borrow this,” she said, taking the camera from him. “I have to show these photos to someone right away, and I don’t have time to wait for you to go home and print them out or email them. I’ll give it back just as soon as I can.”
“Sure, no problem.” Elijah didn’t seem to be paying attention. “Wow, Miss Molly, does that kind of thing happen to you a lot?”
“What kind of thing?” Molly was busy scrolling through her phone for John’s number, which she’d thankfully added to her contacts list the first day she’d met him and he’d given her his card.
“People like that guy,” Elijah said, “being so rude.”
“All the time.” Molly found John’s number and began writing him a text.
Elijah shook his head in disgust. “Why do you put up with it?”
She glanced at him in surprise. “Because, Elijah, this is my dream job. I love it. I’m a librarian.”
Chapter Eighteen
John
“Well, that was terrible,” John said, as he and Marguerite exited Tabitha Brighton’s hospital room.
Marguerite smiled. “What’s the matter, Chief? You don’t like picking on defenseless young girls?”
“I wouldn’t call her defenseless.” He thought of the way Tabitha had spewed Larry Beckwith’s counterculture BS. “But I didn’t like doing it, anyway.”
“You knew the job was dangerous when you took it. Come on.” Marguerite elbowed him chummily. “Let’s go look at the baby. That might cheer you up. Seeing a happy, healthy newborn that we had a part in saving always cheers me up.”
Visiting Baby Aphrodite did cheer him up, a little. Especially since the baby was swaddled in a blanket with bright yellow ducks on it—one of the many donated by the public, the nurse explained. The baby’s mother—Tabitha—had directed that most of the rest of the donations be given to the island’s shelter for battered women and children.
This cheered John even more. It meant that though Tabitha hadn’t yet realized how thoroughly she’d been brainwashed by Dakota, she was at least somewhat civic-minded. This was a sign that she could still be saved.
It was later in the day when he received another piece of good news—at least good to him—though it came from a surprising source. Murray—who generally refused to work on Sundays, as that was when Sheriff Wagner had always allowed him the day off to visit his in-laws in Key West—shuffled into his office and said, “Chief.”
John looked up from his deputies’ reports that no sign of Dylan Dakota or his followers had been found anywhere in all of Little Bridge and gaped at the head of his tech department. “Murray. What are you doing here?”
“I’ve been here since Friday.” Murray looked like it, too. His uniform was rumpled, his face unshaven, and his glasses in need of cleaning. “I hope you’re going to approve the overtime.”
John frowned. “Of course, especially if you’ve got anything good.”
“Oh, I got something good, Chief. At least, I think you’re gonna think it’s good: Dakota’s hair is all over that sweatshirt they found at the widow’s house last night.”
John raised an eyebrow. He’d been expecting this, but it was still good to hear. “Hair as in more than one?”
“Either the guy is going bald or someone gave him a haircut while wearing it. I’d go for the former. Of course, I’m talking a microscopic match only. We won’t have DNA for a while. I’m guessing it will be the same, though. But that’s not all.”
“It isn’t?”
“Nope. The primary prints on the box the librarian found the baby in? They’re his.”
John nearly dropped the cup of coffee he’d been holding. “What?”
“That’s right.” The deep lines on Murray’s face crinkled into a smile. “It was a bitch because there were so many prints on it, but I managed to isolate a couple of Dakota’s right where someone would be holding a box like that if, say, they were carrying a baby in it from the new library to the old one.”
In a million years, John never thought he’d want to hug his chief crime scene tech, but he had to hold back an urge to do so now.
“Murray. That is great. Just great. Overtime approved.”
Murray was still grinning. “Thanks, Chief. Anything to nail this guy. Can you imagine, abandoning a little baby like she was trash?”
“No,” John said, going from smiling to frowning in a split second. He was actually feeling a little choked up, and not only over the prints. Murray was finally coming around to his side from Sheriff Wagner’s. “No, I cannot. Thanks for this, Murray. Thanks for skipping your in-laws this weekend to help with this. We might actually nail Beckwith this time—if we ever catch him, that is.”
Murray nodded and turned to go. “I hope so. And to be honest, skipping my in-laws is not exactly the biggest sacrifice.”
John laughed just as his phone chimed that he had a text. He checked it, expecting to hear from Katie. She had dance practice all day, but they were supposed to catch up that night over dinner together.
It wasn’t Katie, however.
Hi, John, it’s Molly. I found something I need to show you. Can you stop by sometime today?
His heart rate sped up. Pete had told him to cool it and not blow things by seeming overeager.
But she was texting him. Not even twenty-four hours since they’d last seen each other, she was texting him, and asking him to stop by. It was okay for him to do so, wasn’t it?
Of course it was. Pete was wrong. They were adults. There were no rules. Were there rules?
He knew there were laws, of course, and what to do about people who broke them. But this was different. Certainly there weren’t really rules like Pete was saying, about texting back too quickly, and the jumping of bones (Lord, how he hated that expression) by certain dates, and all of that. That was simply unbelievable.
Although, to be honest, Katie had shared a few things about dating in high school, and all of them had sounded just as unbelievable as the things Pete had shared. They had sounded so awful, in fact, that John had instituted a rule of his own, and that was that Katie wasn’t to date anyone until college.
But she had only laughed at him and said, “Oh, Daddy,” and done precisely as she liked. So that had been a failure, much as his own dating life had been until now, so clearly he knew nothing.
But that was high school. This was the adult world.
Quickly, he texted Molly back that he had to finish up some things (Pete would approve of this) but could meet her in a few hours.
A text bubble appeared. She was texting back!
Great. I’ll be helping out at the inn. Can you meet me there?
Of course he could. The inn was on his way home. And the good thing about the inn was that it had a bar. They could have a drink (surely she was allowed to drink while on check-in duty), and that would almost be like a date. A quick date, but it might count as their second.
And then when they finally managed to meet for the steak dinner, that would be their third—
No. No, he was not playing Pete’s game.
See you there, John texted back.
Of course, for it to count as a date, he had to pick up flowers on his way over, even though Pete had warned him against doing this.
But Pete didn’t know everything. Pete was John’s age, yet had never been in a relationship lasting longer than four months, so how were his rules working out for him? John knew from experience that women liked flowers, and also felt that Molly deserved flowers after everything she’d been through, finding an abandoned baby and its mother near death.
The only problem was that it was Sunday, so the island’s only flower shop was closed.
But that wasn’t a problem, because John knew from having dealt with a credit-card fraud case at Island Blooms that the Morettis, the flower shop’s owners, lived in a sweet little cottage behind the store, while also owning several apartments above it.
So he banged on their door until they answered it and bemusedly agreed to open the shop and allow him to buy a nice bouquet of daisies. Not roses, because that would be overkill, and Molly seemed like the type who would like daisies.
While there, he also queried the Morettis about the availability of an apartment for the new children’s librarian. It was ridiculous for Molly to have to work two jobs just to afford to live in Little Bridge, and the Morettis were known as being conscientious landlords, who kept reasonably priced, if fairly small, apartments.
“Molly’s very quiet,” he assured them, though in actual fact he’d found Molly to be quite loud when expressing her opinions, which she did quite often. “And she works for the city, so her income is steady.”
This piqued Mrs. Moretti’s interest. She said they happened to have a tenant they were kicking out of one of their one-bedroom apartments at the end of the month. “Rent never on time, and the parties!” She shook her head in disgust.
“Why didn’t you call me?” John asked. Excessive noise without a permit was considered a breach of the peace in Little Bridge.
Mrs. Moretti shrugged. “Call you every night? What would be the point? Anyway, he’s leaving now. We can take your girlfriend.”
John felt himself blushing. “She’s not my girlfriend. Like I said, she’s the new children’s librarian, and since the hurricane, as you know, affordable housing has been very—”
“Yes, yes.” Mr. Moretti laughed and slapped him on the shoulder. “We know. She’s not your girlfriend, but you’re bringing her flowers. We understand very much.”
John, still blushing, had them wrap the daisies in plain brown paper—he didn’t want the bouquet to look too over the top—and left after thanking the Morettis profusely. By the time he arrived at the Lazy Parrot it was happy hour, and the guests who’d already checked in were lounging around the pool with margaritas and cocktail plates.
“Hey, sexy policeman,” one of the lady guests said to him as he walked by, looking for Molly, who hadn’t been at the front desk. “Are those flowers for me?”
“No,” John said flatly. “And I’m with the sheriff’s department, not the police. These flowers are for Molly Montgomery. Have you seen her?”
“Oh, John!”
He saw a woman wearing a florescent-green beach cover-up with matching flip-flops waving to him from across the pool and realized it was Joanne Larson, one of the Lazy Parrot’s owners. He approached her, grateful to be getting away from the woman who’d called him a sexy policeman.
“Hello, Joanne,” he said, when he reached her. “Molly texted for me to meet her.”
“Yes, I know.” Joanne was holding a tray of something beige smeared on cucumber rounds. “She told me. She’ll be right back. She’s helping a new guest with their luggage. Fish dip?”
John shook his head. He felt another spurt of irritation at the unfairness of the situation. A librarian shouldn’t need a side hustle just to afford her rent.
Of course, if he convinced Molly to leave her live-in job at the hotel and move in to the Morettis’ apartment, that would leave Joanne and Carl Larson shorthanded. The only solution he could see was to find them a new night manager. He wondered if Deputy Swanson, the officer who’d been so blithe about his tardiness in responding to the alarm at Mrs. Tifton’s house, would care for the position. He certainly wasn’t cutting it in law enforcement. Maybe his true calling was in hospitality.
“So Molly tells me you’re going to be dancing in the mother-daughter Snappettes performance,” Joanne said, helping herself to one of her own hors d’oeuvres.
John attempted to smile.
“Yes. Yes, I am. I’m really looking forward to it,” he lied.
“So am I,” Joanne said. “I’ve already bought tickets for Carl and myself, and all of our friends, too. We can’t wait to see it. It’s going to be a hoot and a half! Are you going to wear an actual Snappette uniform?”
“The, er, costume decisions aren’t up to me, so I’m not sure. I’m certain whatever it is will be very tasteful.”
“Oh, I hope not,” Joanne said. “We all want to see you in a Snappette uniform. That’s what we’re paying for, really.”
“Wait, what are we talking about?” one of the nearby guests wanted to know.
“He’s going to be dancing for charity with the high school cheerleading squad,” Joanne said, pointing at John.
“It’s a dance team,” John corrected her.
But no one cared. Everyone on the poolside deck was staring at him appraisingly, all of the ladies smiling, the men confused.
“In a dress?” one of the men asked, looking appalled, though he himself was holding a drink that contained a pink paper umbrella.
“Shirtless, I hope,” one of the ladies said, winking at John suggestively.
“Where can I get tickets?” one of the other ladies asked from the hot tub, nudging her friend.
“It’s not till next month,” Joanne said.
“I don’t care,” the guest responded with a cackle. “I’ll extend my stay, especially if there’s a chance he’ll be doing it shirtless.”
John was beginning to feel uncomfortable. “Now hold on,” he began, because he’d learned at his four-hour sexual harassment workshop that the objectification of women could also happen to men—even law enforcement officers. It was also no less harmful, even though it was occasionally reinforced by first responders themselves, like those hose draggers over at the fire station and their ridiculous yearly calendar. “Let’s—”
