It was definitely creepier here at night. Emerging into the warehouse proper, she saw the mannequins standing in their rows. They were back to neatness – at least, they were on this side of the warehouse. She couldn’t see all the way to the back past them, to see if there was any debris left from their chase towards the exit. She couldn’t imagine that one manager and perhaps the one janitor together had enough time to clear it all up, even in the time they’d spent interviewing Dan Martin. They’d made a lot of mess.
Laura stopped there in the near-darkness, holding her breath. Somehow, she’d though that being here would have been enough alone to trigger something and help her to figure out what was going on. Like the answer would have been beamed down to her from some higher power. But standing here, all she saw was a warehouse full of mannequins. Yes, the same as it had been in her vision. But as much as she strained her eyes and stared, she didn’t see a single flash of movement.
Being here was stupid. She wasn’t going to see anything new. All she’d discovered was a janitor and a security guard, and they would have been included in the employee checks Detective Thorson carried out. They didn’t add anything.
Laura was about to turn and leave when she froze, thinking.
They would have been checked, wouldn’t they?
The security guard, his uniform had the logo of the company. He was clearly an employee, and he would have been on the roster.
But the janitor… he was wearing a uniform, too, and there was a logo sewn on the breast pocket. She was sure she’d seen it. But it wasn’t the same logo as the one the security guard wore. It had been totally different – two interlocked initials, she thought, one in blue and one in red. MV, she thought, or something like that.
A contractor.
A contractor wouldn’t have been included in the employee checks.
Not that it mattered, did it? Because they had the killer behind bars in the precinct. He wasn’t going anywhere.
A killer that kept insisting he was innocent, and on whom they had so far not been able to collect any physical evidence.
No, that didn’t matter. She’d seen him in her vision. Here, in this room.
Only –
Only this room had been dark like it was now in her vision.
And her brain supplied one more thing to her, one last detail it had been holding onto: the fact that when the janitor passed her, he’d been holding the garbage bags in two hands. Both of them covered by latex gloves for hygiene.
The janitor hadn’t been checked to see if he had a criminal record. He had access to the mannequins at a time of night when no one else would have noticed him taking them. One security guard for this whole warehouse - there was no chance that he would have been able to cover the whole ground at once. Anyone could have taken whole crates of merchandise out of there without being spotted.
And he wore latex gloves, meaning he didn’t leave fingerprints behind.
Things were starting to click in Laura’s mind. The mannequins had been meticulously cleaned before they were placed, ensuring there wasn’t a shred of evidence left behind – the kind of professional job you might expect from someone who cleaned for a living. Even the evidence at the scenes had been tidied up. They never had worked out where the blood from the initial blow had gone, and maybe being a janitor had given him a unique perspective on how to resolve that issue.
And his job was lonely. Overlooked, ignored. Even Laura hadn’t bothered to speak with him, despite having a reasonably lengthy conversation with the security guard. A guard who had seem starved for attention. How much worse would that starvation have been if you were never even noticed, performing a thankless task every shift.
How you might start to imagine the mannequins were real people. Might start to imagine how your life could be.
And a contractor… they might also be contracted to clean the adjoining office building now that it had been converted, mightn’t they?
They might just have the chance to overhear snippets of therapy sessions while tidying the waiting room and emptying the garbage…
Laura had made a terrible mistake.
A strangled scream cut the air and she whirled around, looking back towards the reception area she had entered through on their first visit, the place where the sound was coming from.