Page 26 of The Hard Way (The Kinky Bank Robbers #5)

Chapter Twenty

We reconvened at cupid central. Margie was out. I wanted to sit in the nice living room and talk over clues, but my guys couldn’t deal with the cupids and classical music-from-an-unseen-source combo.

Banks invest billions in security every year, but it turns out the combination of cupids and classical music is the ultimate bank robber repellent. Who knew!

The four of us trudged upstairs and squeezed onto my and Zeus’s bed. This bit about the cheese being perfectly fine had turned out to be a huge break.

Thor and Zeus had been in Hank’s place, in the process of downloading copies of his calendar, when my text had come through.

“We’d already looked at his deleted browser history,” Thor said.

“We’d found some good stuff—he’d definitely been researching foodborne pathogens, and he’d definitely visited websites of academic research labs, but we thought it was just to study up on salmonella.

We didn’t understand the significance of it until your text. ”

“Wait, you got into his deleted stuff on his computer?”

“Nothing’s ever deleted on a computer,” Odin said. “The only way you can really ever delete anything is with a sledgehammer.”

“Um…” I said. “Okay. So we have him researching foodborne illness before it happened.”

“Yet it’s still circumstantial.” Thor pulled up shots he’d taken of the screen with his iPhone.

“Check this shit out. These are research facilities across the region. But this one, Wilbur College of Medicine, was visited by Hank often and last. It seems like he was very interested in news of a break-in there—a break-in that happened a month before the cheese incident. Unsolved.”

Odin smiled. “Or as I prefer to put it, not yet fucking-g solved.”

“Whoa,” I said. “So we were right. That’s how he did the crime. He used stolen research strains of salmonella to infect the cheese.”

Thor pulled me onto his lap. “He got the strains and infected the cheese, and then he probably let it incubate—probably put it in the sun.”

“You think Hank did the break-in? Because I don’t see him breaking and entering. He’s a motherfucker, but to do an actual break-in…”

“He probably hired somebody. Climbing in the window at your sisters’ farm is one thing, but breaking into a lab, he needed a seasoned criminal for that, and he probably paid a lot of money to that person.

That’s who we need to find. We find him, and we turn him against Hank.

According to the articles, there were no suspects, but they did get prints.

Whoever pulled the job isn’t in the system.

We need to get the prints and find the guy. ”

“How do we steal fingerprints from the police lab? You aren’t thinking about a B&E on the police, I hope.”

“Nah,” Zeus said. “Our guys at Guvvey’s have a few dirty cops on the line.

For enough money, they can put a call into the investigating department and say they’re experiencing a string of similar crimes and want to cross-check with this one.

Cop shops share evidence all the time. No cop would pass up the chance to get a case cleared for free. ”

I nodded, feeling hopeful for the first time since reading that newsletter in that Roman hotel. We might just pull this off. “They can take away our detective agency, but they can’t keep us from being the most badass detectives ever.”

Zeus smiled. “That’s right, bitches.”

“But even if we get the prints,” I said, “how do we figure out who matches the prints? If the cops couldn’t find a match for the prints, how can we? God, this is a hard case.”

“Oh, it would be a hard case…” Thor crossed his legs, looking all suave, blue eyes sparkling, “if we weren’t the kind of detectives who are also criminals.”

Zeus grinned. “According to Hank’s online banking account, which autofilled —we didn’t even need a password for it—he took out fifteen grand in cash just before the break-in.

That’s about right for a B&E. His calendar had a lot of appointments in the days after that withdrawal.

Most of them were businesses. We took down the ones that had numbers and called, and they seemed legit.

But there were two really vague appointments.

One just said ‘Chas 2 p.m.’ It was the only Chas the whole year. ”

“Wait—Chas, Chas. I know him. Chas Landers. He’s a handyman. He did handyman work for the bank!”

“Could he do a B&E?”

“Hmm. He’s a little sketchy, but…I don’t know. He’s kind of a lush—he would sometimes show up smelling of alcohol.”

“Was he any good as a handyman?”

“Yeah.”

“He could do it,” Zeus said. “The other appointment just said Z . It said ‘ Z —noon.’”

“Could it be Nancy Zietlow?” I asked.

“We thought so, but there are only three Z s in the whole calendar—two before the B&E and one after, and then they stop. It doesn’t feel like Nancy. ”

Since I knew pretty much every family in town, and I was personally acquainted with most of the people who were under forty—at least the ones that had lived in the area two years back—we sat around running through Z first names of guys.

Zach, Zeb, Zander. Nothing stuck out or at least no Z guys who were the types to do crimes for Hank.

“If I had a few high school yearbooks…” I said.

“Wait! I know what’ll jog Ice’s memory.” Thor grabbed a bottle of scotch and four little styrofoam cups from the coffee maker area and led us down to the guest living room, setting the bottle and cups onto the table.

“During breakfast yesterday, I noticed these.” He went and crouched down at a far bookshelf. “Check this shit out.”

I went over and crouched next to him. It was a row of about twenty phone books—white pages and yellow pages from the five little towns in this area.

There were many sets of them stretching back a decade.

“I thought it was funny that towns around here still even make phone books. What the fuck is that?”

I pulled out the Baylortown ones. Hank lived in Baylortown, and people in Baylortown tended to know other people in Baylortown. I flopped them onto the coffee table.

“We go through the Z s.” Zeus poured the scotch into the cups.

Thor sat down on the couch with the phone book. “I’ll read the Z names aloud to you. I think it’s better if you hear them.”

“Okay.” I downed a cup and laid on the couch with my head in Odin’s lap and my shins in Thor’s lap. He propped the phone book on my calves and began to read the Z s of Baylortown.

Zeus sat on the floor in front of us with the laptop open.

I’d stop Thor now and then and ask for an address, because sometimes that helped me remember. There was a Ron Zimmerman who was a notorious bad kid, but then Zeus looked him up on Facebook and found out he was in the army.

“Knowing Ron, that’s probably for the best,” I said.

We Facebook-investigated a few more names, and the guys drank more scotch. Odin had his phone, and sometimes he’d get a Google satellite image of an address that sounded familiar so that I could see the house. Because sometimes you remember people from their houses. .

It was kind of fun being the one who knew things for once. Usually I was five steps behind my guys. I let myself have another shot of scotch and then lay back down, half on Thor and half on Odin. We weren’t turning up any more suspects, but I had a feeling we were on the right path.

I opened my mouth. “More scotch, please.”

Odin dribbled some scotch into my mouth so that I wouldn’t have to sit up. Things were almost feeling normal.

There was one guy, Mark Zebold, whose house had been a big party house in high school and who was a definite fuckup, but then Zeus looked him up on Facebook and discovered he was running a successful microbrewery in Green Bay.

“Zebold? Are you shitting me? Show me his picture,” I said.

Zeus turned to me and held the laptop up like an offering so that I could see Zebold’s face on the microbrewery about us page without lifting my head from Odin’s lap.

Because I was feeling lazy like that. And a bit tipsy.

“God, that is him! I can’t believe Mark Zebold pulled his shit together like that. Though I guess for our purposes it would be better if he was a loser.”

“Just as well we rule him out,” Odin said, stroking my hair.

I opened my mouth. “More, please.”

Odin dribbled in a tiny bit more scotch while I tried not to laugh.

It was right then that we heard it—the harrumph of a throat clearing. I nearly spit out the booze.

Margie stood at the door, staring, lips parted.

At first I thought it was the scotch-drinking the was the problem.

Was there a rule about alcohol in the living room?

Then, slowly, Odin removed his hand from my head, and I realized the insane picture we presented.

Me lying with my head in Odin’s lap and my feet on Thor’s lap.

Zeus kneeling in front of me showing me a computer.

Odin dribbling booze into my mouth. It was positively Hedonistic.

“Oh, hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said.

Thor shut the phone book, smiling breezily. “Just verifying a few names and addresses.”

“Yeah.” I sat up with some difficulty. “Verification. It can get a little tedious.”

She nodded, but I could tell she wasn’t buying it. Verification had gone a long way for us, but it looked like we’d just found its limit.

“Did you have a nice evening out?” Zeus broke in.

She plastered on a smile and nodded again. “Very nice.” She waved at the group of us. “Well, I’m glad one of those directories came in handy. I keep them around for my older guests, but…”

“It’s been very handy,” Thor said, face like a mask.

She smiled uncertainly and bid us goodnight.

Thor poked me in the thigh. “It can get a little tedious?”

“What? I was trying to…I don’t know. Show how hard we work. How diligent we are.”

“Dude, you made it sound like, ‘Our work as insurance adjustors is so boring we have to have group sex.’”

“You think that’s what she thinks?” I looked up at Odin, who just kind of sparkled down at me. “Oh my god. She must think I’m a total sex maniac with a harem of men!”

“She’d be right, goddess.”

I hit him, and he grabbed my hand and bent down to kiss me.

“Not here!”

“I think the jig is up,” Thor said. “Let’s go through the rest. There are only a few more.” He proceeded to read more names in a quiet voice. Nothing sparked anything for me.

“So we only have Chas. I don’t know…”

“What about your sister? ”

“What about her?”

“Would she know?” Zeus asked. “Your ear isn’t to the ground anymore, but hers is.”

I checked the time. Nine at night. I hated to involve her, but Thor was right. He always had sensible ideas like that. “I’ll call her.”

We put the phone books back in their place in the bookshelves and headed up to our room.

My guys gave me privacy while I called Vanessa.

I told her just that we had a lead that the nickname or initial of the person who’d helped Hank was Z .

“If our theory is right, he did criminal things to help Hank, like the harder criminal things, not the amateur-hour stuff. I’ve been trying to think of Z guys.

At first I thought about Mark Zebold, but I found out about his business. ”

“Can you believe it?” she said. “It’s amazing!”

I asked her about a few others. She didn’t think any of them were likely to be involved, and she couldn’t come up with any leads, either.

“Fuck,” I said. “Now what?” Somehow it was even more depressing to have had that burst of optimism earlier and then lose it than it had been to have no hope at all.

“Wait,” she said. “I don’t know guys like that, but I know who would—Lexy Coventry.

We used to work together at McDonald’s, and she’d tell me.

Her man is, like, the worst guy. He’s not a Z , but she’s constantly complaining about him and his friends.

And I see her all the time at the feed store. That’s where she works now.”

“Can you go there when it’s dead and talk to her?” I asked. “But without being obvious? See if she knows a criminal Z ?”

“No, I’ll do better than that. She hangs out at Meatn’ Place. She’s always wanting me to stop by.”

“I don’t want you out there investigating.”

“I was gonna go one of these days anyway. Come on, let me help. Candace is here with Kaitlin. ”

“You can’t tip Lexy off that you’re going specifically to get this.”

“Dude, trust me. I’ll make it into gossip or something.

Like a game. Wait—I’ll tell her I have a friend who is having an affair with a criminal type in the area who’s nicknamed Z .

I’ll say my friend won’t say who it is. She’ll enjoy the challenge of guessing it.

She’ll think it’s fun. She loves analyzing Malcolm’s friends. ”

“I don’t want you getting mixed up—”

“I’m more than mixed up in this. Let me help. I’m doing it anyway. You can’t stop me.”

I smiled. Vanessa was stubborn like that. “You’re awesome,” I said.

She lowered her voice. “Hank needs to go down. Everyone agrees, and I mean everyone, unless their last name is Vernon. Did you hear about Glenda?”

Vanessa went on to tell me how the beloved owner of Blue Deer Ice Cream—the place I was so sad to see closed—killed herself after Hank made her lose the ice cream shop that had been in her family for generations.

“Everybody’s scared of him. He has everybody’s mortgages, and it’s like this reign of terror.

Nobody was reading the small print until it was too late, or else the terms are really good, and they think, ‘Hank screwed this or that person but he won’t screw me.

’ And then he fucking screws them. And he sues them if they talk bad about him.

He’s a liar and a cheat, but people want to buddy up to him because he’s rich. He’s horrible.”

We can be more horrible, I thought, but I didn’t say that.