To make room for her, Ethan slid over, and she sat beside him.
“Tell us about what happened,” Gene said.
Because they were a family here, and she was devastated about Megan, Molly shared.
“It was a slow night. Like I said, by ten, we’re at our worst, normally, but it was pretty dead in here. My dad needed to cut some staff, so he asked who wanted to go home. Megan volunteered.”
Gene was curious.
“Was that normal?” he asked.
She shook her head.
“No. HeNEVERlets us leave unless we areLITERALLYdying. Only, we had too many servers on duty, and not enough customers. So, he let Megan leave, and I was going to cover for her if it got busy. I can multitask.”
Ethan was making notes.
Molly was worrying a ring on her pointer finger as she shared what she recalled that night.
“Megan grabbed her things out of the locker room and walked out the back door. No one thought anything about it untilwe were leaving around three after closing. We all walked out together, and there was her car.”
Gene was curious.
“Who is‘we’?” he asked.
She rattled the names off of the people who had been working that night.
“There was myself, my dad, Mitch, Kiki, the other server, Jimmy, the backup bartender, and the two cooks, Maddy and Kelvin.”
Ethan stopped her.
“I need all their last names.”
She rattled them off for him. When she was done, she kept talking.
“My dad was caught off guard because her car shouldn’t be there. It was weird she drove to work in the first place, but then, he let it go because Megan lives around the corner, not far from here. So, he wasn’t sure if she walked, but it was too late to call her and ask.”
Ethan made notes as Gene kept asking questions—or tried to.
Yeah, he didn’t get to finish.
“HEY!”a big, gruff-looking man said, as he headed toward them. “What’s with this?” he asked, pointing at his daughter sitting in a booth with the two men.
She rolled her eyes.
“Calm down, Mitch. They are here about Megan,” she said, and that worked. “This is my Dad.”
The big man softened at the mention of her name.
“Cops?” he asked.
Now, they could bang out another interview at the same time, so Gene showed him his badge.
“Feds, and we were trying to do this on the DL, so your business didn’t get tagged by the media nuts,” he said, pointingto the news that was on with the story being run about the memorial for the first victim.
Hearing that, Mitch grabbed a chair from a table, spun it, and straddled it.
“My bad. I’m protective about my baby girl.”
