“We will ask anyway,” I said. “Jot down what kind of wine it was,” I said, reaching for the small notepad with its attached pen in my pocket, and passing it to her. “And this is the same Chinese food place you ordered from that night?” I asked, waving at the food.
“Yes. Always. They know my number when I call,” she admitted with a guilty little smile.
“That’s good, though, for the case. They’ll remember if they sent someone out last week. Who found you?” I asked.
Her lips parted at that. “I… I have no idea. And my doorman didn’t have any idea that anything had happened. I just spoke to him.”
“Does he ever leave his station?”
“No… yes. To run errands for us sometimes. Pick up tickets. Grab something from the corner market. Not often, but he will do it because we all give him a handsome bonus.”
“That could explain why he didn’t know. But someone would have seen the ambulances and cops.”
“You’re going to talk to my neighbors?” she asked, looking horrified.
“I might have to,” I told her honestly. “If they saw anything, we need to know about that.”
To that, she let out a deep sigh.
“Okay.”
“I am going to do everything I can to keep this quiet, Miranda,” I promised her, understanding how it could impact her reputation and her status in her industry.
“I really can’t afford any negative publicity right now.”
“Why? Is something important happening?”
“My company is doing a takeover of another company,” she explained, making a chuckle escape me. “What?”
“And you don’t think you have any enemies, sweetheart? When you’re doing a takeover.”
“It’s not a hostile takeover. We all agreed to this.”
“No, correction. You and the other shareholders agreed to this. The workers didn’t. And when workers hear ‘takeover’ or ‘merger,’ they hear ‘layoffs’ at the same time. And people in tight spots, worried about their income, they do desperate-ass shit.”
“I can see that. But this level of desperate?” she asked, waving at her arm.
“Honey, some people are cracked,” I said, shrugging.
As much as I hated to think about those times anymore, I damn sure came across a lot of cracked people in my time. Some people did the most fucked up shit you can imagine. And some things that you couldn’t even imagine.
Most of those people walked around the world like your average, everyday people. Ones you brushed shoulders with on the street, you engaged in silly small talk with at the water cooler, ones you invited into your house to fix your hot water heater.
“Yeah,” she agreed, exhaling hard, her mind far away.
I guess maybe she was back at the psych facility, thinking about some of the people that she’d seen there.
The difference was, of course, that the people she was with at that facility were not criminally insane. They were a whole different thing entirely.
“Okay. Security,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you have any here? Cameras? Motion sensors?”
“I’m just a businesswoman, not a celebrity,” she said, shaking her head. “I have good locks. I have a code. But no cameras.”
“Okay. Well, you need to have cameras,” I insisted.