This one needs time to stew, and I don’t have time to wait her out.
And… right after declaring I didn’t have time for Muriel’s bullshit, I find myself with little else to do. Émilie has our information on the miner, but she needs to get her investigator involved. Finding a guy who matches the parameters I’ve provided isn’t something she can do with a simple internet search.
She also has the investigator looking for a connection between Blake and Mark, though that requires first identifying Mark.
When I realize I’ll just be spinning my wheels, my impulse is to go back to Muriel. Dalton stops me, rightly. I just told her she’s spending some time in solitary. If I break that thirty minutes later, she knows I’m not serious.
I do have things Icando, obviously. Shore up patrols, with Yolanda and Anders gone. Spend time with my baby. Or sleep. Sleep is always good, when I’ve had so little. As anyone who knows me might guess, I pick the first two instead. I patrol with Gunnar for an hour while Dalton is with Rory, and then we switch off. Once I’ve fed Rory, we have a “take your daughter to work day” outing.
I pop my head into the Roc. It’s quiet within. The café closed early, to allow a short opening of the pub part before curfew. There’s an hour between the two, and I’ve slid in during that. Devon and Brian have packed and left, and Isabel and Phil are setting up for cocktail hour.
“No one under nineteen allowed,” Isabel calls from the back room, on hearing Rory babbling.
I ignore her and take a seat at the bar. She comes out and steals my child, putting Rory on one hip as she arranges the bar.
“Everything okay?” she asks me.
I sigh. “A case that suddenly has too many clues and not enough connections. But I wanted to check in on another case—the one I abandoned. Your break-in.”
She snorts. “Bored, are you? Or, I should say, frustrated and stalled and making work for yourself.”
“Maybe. But I still should check in. Any clues? Anything turn up missing?”
“Not a damn thing. I’m sticking with my original theory. They broke in hoping to grab booze and left when they realized we keep it all in the locked stockroom. Now, Phil thinks they wanted something else.”
“What?”
She shrugs. “Pencils? Envelopes?” She looks back at the stockroom. “Phil?”
He comes out with a box of liquor and sets it on the back counter.
“Casey’s asking about the break-in,” she says. “Tell her your theory.”
He sighs. “It’s not a theory. Simply an observation.”
She makes a hurry-up gesture.
He starts unloading liquor bottles for the bar stock. “There were footprints leading to my desk at the back. I checked with Brian, and he said they’d definitely swept the shavings before they left, so the prints were new. They weren’t distinguishable. If they were, I would have called you. Simply marks showing that someone went over there.”
“To your desk?”
He nods.
I walk deeper into the bar. Phil’s “desk” is in the back corner, where he works at a table, sometimes when the coffee shop is open and sometimes when the bar is. What he calls his desk isn’t that table but the small dresser of supplies beside it. That explains Isabel’s quip about the thief looking for stationery.
“What’s in there?” I say.
Phil keeps unloading the box. “Nothing of value. A calculator. Steno pads. Pens.”
“Any files?”
He looks up, clearly affronted. “Certainly not.”
“I don’t mean anything confidential. Regular stuff, like inventory logs or supply lists.”
“None of that. I considereverythingto be confidential. The desk contains supplies I need to work. Any paper in there is blank. The files are kept locked in a secure location that only I have access to.”
“I don’t even know where it is,” Isabel says.
