Chapter 42

FORTY-TWO

Garcia licked his lips. Josie could tell by the way his breathing picked up, the slight increase in speed in the way his chest expanded and contracted, that her shot had hit true. She let the moment stretch on until, finally, he said, “I don’t want to get fired. This is a good job. A good gig.”

“But you still needed more,” Gretchen pointed out.

Now the spark in his eye was from anger. “Hell yes. I always need more. Kids are expensive as fuck. Even sending my baby to public school, I still got a shit-ton of expenses. Food, doctor’s visits, fucking playdates and little kid birthday parties. Clothes and shoes. She outgrows them as soon as I buy them. I bought two new pairs of shoes in the last three months, and I got a girl, so it’s not just some pair of sneakers. She wants pretty shoes and boots, too.”

Josie said, “Edgar, we’re not trying to get you fired. We just need to know who pays you to leave the lot open so they can ‘borrow’ the cars.”

He shook his head, twisting the rag in his hands. “You think I don’t know how this works? If I tell you, my boss will find out. Don’t even try to tell me he won’t. Cops don’t keep shit a secret.”

“The person ‘borrowing’ these cars?” said Gretchen. “They’re an accessory to murder—if not an actual murderer—so regardless of whether your boss finds out or not, getting fired is going to be the least of your worries.”

He turned away, pacing a short path before them, pressing the rag against his forehead. “Holy shit. I didn’t know that. I never would have agreed to it if I knew that. Oh, man. I’m so fucked.”

Josie said, “Edgar, cooperate with us, fully, and we’ll do what we can to work with the DA to make sure you don’t face charges.”

“My job!” he said. “What about my job?”

“We can’t help you with that,” Gretchen said honestly. “But it seems to me that whether you try keeping this one or try getting a new one, it will look better if you cooperated with police.”

“Regardless,” Josie said, “we already know about your arrangement, about the cars. Whether you cooperate or not, we’re going to have every older-model car without GPS impounded and processed for evidence in three homicides. You can take control of who finds out what and when as well as your role going forward, or you can get out of our way and let things play out however they’re going to.”

He paced for another few minutes, fisting the rag and hitting himself lightly in the head with it. Muttered curses spilled from his lips.

Josie let him go as long as possible, but the clock was ticking. Another victim waited and with her, another polaroid.

“Edgar,” Josie said. “I know this is hard. We really didn’t come here with the intention of blowing up your life, but more people will be murdered if we don’t get on with things. Just this morning we found a victim. A mother. Her son is in the hospital getting surgery right now. He’ll never see his mother again. On Monday, a baby girl, not even five months old, lost her mother. Help us stop this killer.”

He stopped pacing and nodded, almost to himself. Taking a steadying breath, he looked back and forth between them. “I don’t know about no killer. All I know is some lady approached me.”

“A woman?” Josie said.

“Yeah. I don’t know her. I don’t know her name.”

“She’s not a customer here?” asked Gretchen.

He shrugged. “Who knows? She could be. Probably, she is. How else would she know what we got on our lot? But I don’t meet the customers. They got front desk guys for that.”

And they were all charm, too. “You don’t see any of the customers?” Josie asked.

“I mean, sometimes, yeah, if I’m in and out, but ninety-nine percent of the time, I’m back here. It’s an endless line of cars and there’s only three of us during the day. We barely even get a break for lunch. I stay back here. The boss and front desk jockeys handle the customers.”

“Then where did this woman approach you?” asked Gretchen.

He looked at the floor and nudged the creeper with the toe of his boot. “At the playground. I was there with my daughter. She was running around the big jungle gym thing. This lady comes up to me, starts talking about how pretty my kid is—and she really is—and I don’t give it too much thought ’cause women talk to me all the time at the playground. All of us parents and grandparents do, you know? Hell, that’s how I found out about blue light and shit, and that I was giving my daughter screen time too close to bed. Really helped with her sleep cycle, you know?”

Josie kind of hated that Garcia’s life was about to get blown up. She liked him, in spite of his underhanded dealings with the older cars. He probably knew more about parenting than she and Noah combined, and they were on the precipice of asking someone to give them their child to raise. “When was this?”

“About three weeks ago.”

Gretchen said, “So, what? She just said hey, I know you work at this auto repair shop. I need access to some cars without GPS. Can you help me?”

He laughed mirthlessly. “Basically, yeah. I told her she was nuts and to get the fuck away from me and my daughter. Then she told me how much she was willing to pay.”

“Which was?” Josie asked.

He told them.

Gretchen met Josie’s eyes briefly. The unspoken agreement between them was that it was hard to blame Edgar for taking her up on her offer.

He continued, “But I told her I didn’t want to know why. I didn’t want to know her name or anything about her. I didn’t want to know anything at all. Cash only. I’d leave her the padlock key in a hidden spot. The keys for the older cars would be in the consoles. All she had to do was not get caught and make sure the cars were always returned and the gate was always locked afterward. I can show you the key in case you want to try to get prints. Seems like something you would want to do.”

Josie wasn’t sure Hummel could pull a clear print from a key that had been handled by Edgar and this woman, but it was worth a shot. “Great. How did she pay you?”

“Cash in the glove compartments. I checked every morning ’cause I never knew when she was coming.”

Gretchen arched a brow. “She wasn’t caught on camera taking the cars and returning them?”

Edgar chuckled. “My boss got a padlock on the gate out there. You think he’s springing for cameras? Please. One of the guys out front talked him into Ring cameras but the batteries ran out a month after he put them up and he didn’t bother to recharge them. He said no one would know they were dead and just having them was a deterrent.”

That happened more than people thought. Josie said, “What did this woman look like?”

Edgar sighed. “I don’t know. Like someone’s grandmother.”