“Give or take,” she repeated, and then the look in her eyes became slightly guarded. “Why don’t you two tell me what you want with sweet Willy boy before I answer any more of your questions?”
“We’re looking into a possible connection between him and a couple of bank robberies,” Candice told her.
Flower’s brow furrowed. “A couple of what?” she said. “Bank robberies? Girl, are you for real?”
“We are,” she said.
Flower shook her head and started laughing. I didn’t like it, and, by her expression, neither did Candice. “Well, now I know you two are crazy,” she giggled. “Will Edwards ain’t no bank robber!”
“We know he didn’t do the actual robbery,” I said, “but we still think there’s a connection.”
She rolled her eyes. “Honey, if that man had any hand in robbing anything bigger than a vending machine, he’d tell me. Hell, he’d even tell me about the vending machine.”
“How can you be so sure?” I said.
“Because Willy likes to talk through the whole thing, if you get what I’m sayin’. He’s a gabby one.”
“What does he talk about?” Candice asked.
“Shit,” Flower said. “What doesn’t he talk about? His kids, the wife, the house, the neighbor’s dog, the job, the boss, the diet, the doctor, his prostate . . . Nothing is off-limits with that man. He got his oil changed last week and he gabbed about it nonstop to me today.”
“Really?” I asked. “An oil change?”
Flower shook her head and sighed. “He’s a boring one—I’ll give you that. But I’m the only one that listens to him, makes him feel like a man.”
“You sure he’s not just a gabby guy?” I asked.
“Positive. The first three times he called on me, he didn’t say a single word. He was so nervous he got his business done before we could even put the condom on.”
I made an involuntary eww face and tried to think of something other than what images that statement conjured up.
“Anyway,” Flower continued, “to help him calm down, I started asking him about himself and he answered me with one or two words for about the next month or so, but slowly he started coming out of his shell, and now I can’t get that man to shut his piehole.”
Candice looked at me as if to ask if I had an angle to get some relevant info out of Flower. “What do you know about his job?” I asked, using my radar to pinpoint the direction I wanted to steer the conversation.
Flower shrugged. “I don’t pay that much attention when he talks about his work, but I do know that he works with cameras.”
“I thought he worked with drones,” I said.
“Yeah, he does. The cameras go on the drones.”
I nodded. “Ah, okay. So, does he ever talk about using one of his own camera drones to spy on someone or something else? Like a business?”
Flower shook her head and gazed at me with an amused smile. “Listen,” she said. “I know you’re looking to make Will out to be a bad guy, but I’m telling you, he doesn’t have a bad bone in his beautiful body—”
Candice choked on the sip of her tea she’d just taken, interrupting Flower. “Sorry,” she said, red-faced and coughing. “Went down the wrong pipe.”
At the mention of Will’s “beautiful” body, I’m pretty sure Candice’s reaction was more gag reflex then improper inhalation.
“Anyway,” Flower went on, “he ain’t spying on nobody and he ain’t no bank robber.”
“Maybe you don’t know Will as well as you think you do,” Candice said, clearing her throat to get the words out. “Maybe he’s hiding the bad side of himself from you.”
Flower actually laughed. “Honey, nobody hides the bad parts of themselves to a girl like me.”
I had to admit, she probably had a point there. If Will was keeping part of his personality or his life hidden, he was much more likely to hide it from his wife, kids, boss, et cetera. In fact, revealing himself was exactly what he was doing when he went to see Flower.
“And don’t think I don’t know a bad egg when I see one,” Flower continued. “Most of my clients, they’re not like Will. They’re dealers, dopers, and thugs. And most of them is dumb. Will’s not dumb. He’s really smart. Hell, later on today I got a date with a man who’s been asking me for two weeks if I know anybody who can help him unload a kilo of white china that the dumb fool spilled gas all over.”
“What’s white china?” I asked.
“Heroin,” Candice said.
Flower nodded. “Ain’t nobody wants to buy shit that smells like a gas tank,” she said. “Not even a junkie. But he keeps asking like I might know somebody who knows somebody dumb enough to take it off his hands. Fool. All my dates are fools. Except Will. He’s smart. And he’s . . .”
“What?” Candice prodded when Flower didn’t continue.
“He’s kind,” she said with a sad smile. “You don’t get that a lot in my profession.”
I looked around the table, which was still littered with bits of crab shell and cocktail sauce stains, and felt bad for not having been a little kinder to Flower during the meal. “Sorry,” I said, both for her situation and for my attitude.
She shrugged, like she was used to it and it didn’t matter, except that I thought it maybe did. “Comes with the territory,” she said. “But the point I’m trying to make here is that Will is a good man deep down. Whatever you suspect him of, I doubt he had anything to do with it.”
Candice and I traded “What do you think?” looks and I shook my head and so did she. There was nothing more that Flower could tell us. But then I had one last thought.
“Flower,” I said, “maybe Will is involved without knowing he’s involved. Maybe he’s seen something or knows someone who’s involved with these robberies.”
“Like who would he know?” she asked.
I thought about the ninjas at the bank, how in sync they’d been, and how they’d operated with such precision under the watchful eye of the leader who’d stood by the door. It was almost like a military special ops team, but the four robbers had been slight in both height and frame. No way were they U.S. military, but maybe they were something else, like part of a gang. But what felt off about that was the way they’d each individually moved. There was something so fluid and light in their movements. They’d each been light on their toes like acrobats from the circus. “Maybe he knows someone with a connection to a gang of acrobatic thieves,” I said, rattling the thought off before I’d had a chance to really think about it.
“Gang of acro who?” she replied, with a hearty laugh. “Seriously, are you for real?”
“We’re for real,” Candice said, backing me up, which I thought was pretty nice.
Flower rolled her eyes, and I said, “I know it sounds crazy, Flower, but think—has Will ever mentioned knowing anybody connected to a troupe of acrobats or someone in the circus?”
“Not to me,” she said. “He’s not the type to be hanging out with a bunch of circus people.” Flower’s eyes suddenly sparked with recognition. “Wait a second,” she said, snapping her fingers. “You ain’t talkin’ about those little ninja turtles pulling that heist out in La Cañada, are you?”
“How’d you know about that?’ I asked.
“I saw it on the news,” she said with a scowl, as if I’d judged her, which I hadn’t meant to do.
“Okay, do you know of anybody who could be connected to that robbery?” I asked next. “I mean, you said the rest of your clients are dopers, drug dealers, and whatnot. Maybe you heard one of them bragging about being involved.”
“No,” she said. “No one’s been bragging about that job. Least not to me.” She then yawned and stretched in her seat. “Whoo! That meal made me tired, y’all. Do you two have any more questions, or can you drive me back to my spot so I can get a lil’ nap before my next client
?”
“We’ll take you back,” Candice said, gathering up her purse and her keys. Before we departed the booth, however, Candice took out a hundred-dollar bill and handed it to Flower. “Do us a favor and don’t mention this little chat to Will, okay?”
Flower took the money and placed a finger to her lips to indicate they’d be sealed.
Once we dropped our guest off at a corner about three blocks from the hotel, which she said was her spot, I turned to Candice and plucked out a small piece of shell from her hair. “Man, she had that mallet flying all over those crab legs, didn’t she?”
Candice laughed, and mimicked Flower wildly pounding on a steaming crustacean. “Wham! Wham! Wham!” she said.
We both laughed and then sobered. “It was entertaining, at least. And she got a nice meal out of it.”
“I doubt any of her clients take her out to dinner,” Candice said. “Glad we could.”
“Still, I wish we could’ve gotten more info about Will out of her.”
“We got plenty of info,” Candice said, “just none of it very useful.”
“Not to mention costly,” I said.
“What was the tab?”
“A little over two.”
Candice took a deep breath and said, “This trip is starting to add up for us, right?”
“It is, and right now I’m working off the books. I’ll get paid for the two days I spent with the bureau, but that’ll probably only cover the rest of our stay at the hotel.”
“And if you throw in the cost of our daily expenses for fuel and meals, Abs, this is going to get pretty expensive. So, I have to ask you, Sundance, how bad do you want to stick with this case? I mean, we’ve got no leads other than some sort of a connection between Will Edwards and the robberies, but we don’t know what that connection is, or even how to find it. This could get super costly really quick and it might not lead to anything useful or to any arrests.”
I leaned back against the seat, feeling discouraged. I missed my husband, my dogs, my house, and even the guys at the Austin bureau. I wanted to go home in the worst way, and opened my mouth to tell Candice that we should pack it in and head back to Austin when, instead, what came out of my mouth was, “We’re sticking with it.”
Candice cocked her head slightly. “You sure?”
“No. Not at all sure. But those three or . . . possibly four girls need me, Candice. The only lead I’ve got is that the bank robberies are in some way connected to their impending murders. How that all factors in, I don’t know, but in order to prevent their deaths, I’m positive we have to solve this bank robbery case.”
Candice sighed. “Okay, then,” she said, making a right to head toward the highway again. “Then we go with plan B.”
“Plan B?” I asked.
“Yep.”
“What’s plan B?”
“Don’t know yet,” she confessed. “But I’m sure I’ll think of something.”
Chapter Ten
• • •
Plan B turned out to be pretty simple. We ended up just tailing Will Edwards for the next couple of days, waiting for him to do something suspicious. Or interesting. Of course, it was hard to top the seedy motel and the meet-up with Flower, but Edwards had surprised us once, so we were hopeful.
We followed him from home, to work, to lunch, to another hookup with Flower, and then back to the office and then home again. None of that led to anything useful. Or newly interesting.
By the third day of sitting in the car staring at the taillights of his silver sedan, the both of us were pretty cranky. “Christ!” I snapped. “I cannot watch this guy lumber into his office one more time.”
“Well, Sundance,” Candice said, “this is what surveillance work is. It’s dull, and repetitive, and boring, but short of breaking into his office at night and hacking into his computer to look for evidence, I’m not sure what else we can do to try to find his connection to the thieves.”
“What if we talked to him?” I asked. It was a desperate proposition, I knew, but my gut said that simply watching Edwards from afar wasn’t gonna lead us anywhere.
Candice stared skeptically at me. “You want to just talk to him,” she repeated.
“Yes.”
“And say what?”
I shrugged. “I dunno, how about, ‘Hi, we’re investigating a series of crimes and we think that you might have some information for us,’ or something to that effect?”
Candice’s left brow arched. “And you think he’s just gonna say, what? ‘Cuff me, ladies who have no authority in the state of California. I confess’?”
I sighed heavily. “Candice, I don’t know what he’ll say, but if he says anything at all, then my radar can ping against it and check for lies. He might slip and tell us something relevant that we can follow up on.”
“What makes you think he’ll talk to us at all?” she said next. “The second we tell him we’re investigating a crime, if he has any hand in the bank robberies, he’ll know that we’re fishing around about them, and since we’re not the Feds, or cops, or even licensed PIs in this state, he can tell us to go pound sand.”
I smiled wide. “And that’s when we ask him if he’d like for us to bring his wife a bouquet of flowers.”
Candice’s other brow joined its arched twin. “Ahh, blackmail. Why didn’t I think of that?”
“You would’ve,” I assured her. “Eventually.”
“I would’ve,” she agreed. “Still, that’s good leverage. Okay, Sundance, when he comes out for lunch, we’ll corner him and see what we see.”
A few hours later Candice eased the nose of our car directly in front of Edwards’s vehicle, blocking him in. He honked politely and we simply sat there, waiting.
He honked louder and we did nothing. He laid on his horn for a good ten seconds, drawing the attention of another man walking to his car, but still we sat there with patient smiles on our faces.
Finally he opened his door and leaned out a little. The move was awkward given his large belly, but he managed it okay. He gave us that palms-up “What gives?” gesture, and we continued to sit and stare at him.
Getting out of his car, he approached us with balled fists, but I wasn’t sensing anger so much as fear wafting off him, which was interesting. He knocked three times on Candice’s window and she waited a beat before pressing the button to let the window down. “You guys want something?” he asked us.
“Yes, Mr. Edwards,” Candice said. “We’d like to chat with you over lunch, if you’re free?”
Edwards blinked in reaction to the fact that Candice had addressed him personally, and then he sort of looked back and forth between us for several seconds without speaking. Finally, he found his voice and said, “Why?”
“It’s a personal matter,” I said. “Please, Mr. Edwards? We mean you no harm and only want a few minutes of your time.”
Edwards leaned down a little as I spoke so that he could see me and when I was finished speaking, he picked his head up and looked around the garage, unsure, I suspected, what to do. We waited patiently for him to decide we weren’t a threat and then he said, “I usually go to In-N-Out Burger for lunch.”
“Perfect,” said Candice, easing her car away from his very slowly. “We’ll follow you.”
Edwards got into his car and pulled out of the slot and Candice kept on his tail but not too close to cause him to get spooked.
We made it to In-N-Out Burger and parked right next to Edwards, then moved as a group inside. We let him go first to order, and I stood near him while he waited for his food. Candice got us two tap waters, because there was absolutely nothing on the menu she’d let me eat. My stomach grumbled in protest.
We sat down with Edwards and he saw that we weren’t eating and I think that made him even more nervous. “You guys on a diet?”
Candice smiled easily. “We are.?
??
“Okay,” he replied, opening the cardboard box his burger had come in. “So, who are you and what do you want?”
Candice tapped my leg and I said, “My name is Abby and this is Candice. We’re investigators—”
“Cops?” he said, taking his eyes off the burger long enough to stare at us with some trepidation.
“No,” I said. “Private investigators who often consult for various law enforcement communities.”
He pursed his lips. “Law enforcement communities? Like who?”
“Like the FBI,” I said.
That got his attention. “What’re you investigating?” he asked, and I saw that his forehead was suddenly coated with a bright sheen.
Candice took a small pull from her straw. “A series of bank robberies.”
His burger paused halfway to his mouth and he cocked his head at us. “Bank robberies?” The coat of sheen on his forehead glistened and began to show beads. “Why would a couple of PIs be investigating bank robberies? Isn’t that up to the police?”
“It’s actually the jurisdiction of the FBI,” I told him. “And we were hired to bring a new approach to the investigation.”
Edwards chewed thoughtfully, then wiped his mouth with his napkin before subtly reaching up to mop his brow. “I never heard of the FBI bringing in consultants.”
“We like to keep a low profile,” Candice said, leaning in to rest her elbows on the table.
Her proximity—the equivalent of getting into Edwards’s face—made him sit back against the booth and the sweat on his brow broke out again. “So why’re you guys interested in talking to me?”
“Because we think there’s a connection between you and the robberies,” I said bluntly.
Edwards set his half-eaten burger down and shook his head. “You two have the wrong guy. I never stole anything a day in my life.”
My radar pinged loudly in my mind. “Liar, liar, pants on fire,” I said.
His face registered confusion. “I’m not lying,” he insisted. “I had nothing to do with any bank getting robbed.”