Marcia Clark - Trouble in Paradise

Erica had entered behind us, and now I felt her tugging on my sleeve. I turned. “What?”

“She’s the one who helped us. Don’t let her see me, okay?”

It didn’t seem worth arguing that this girl’s identification of Erica was the least of her problems. “Send Tammy Susie’s photo to my phone. Right now.”

Erica backed out of the store, and I approached the salesgirl. “We’re looking for a girl, about so tall.” I gestured four feet in height. “She was wearing a red-and-pink scarf on her head and she tried on some clothes here a couple of hours ago?”

The salesgirl’s brow wrinkled, and she stared off for a moment. “You mean Tammy Susie?”

I didn’t need her blabbing that the little celeb had dropped off the radar, so I tossed out the first lie that came to mind. “Yes. We’re working on the show, and Tammy Susie lost her uh… scarf. We need it for the episode we’re taping now. Can we check out your dressing rooms?”

“Sure, no problem.” She led us to the back of the store, where drapes closed off the fitting area. She pulled them back and gestured to the dressing rooms. We checked every room, looked behind mirrors and under chairs… no Tammy Susie. Bailey moved back toward the draped archway and pointed to a door that was next to the first dressing room on the left. “Where does that lead?”

“Just to the office.” The girl opened the door and showed us a small room that held a chair, a sofa, and a dusty computer sitting on a wooden table.

I walked around behind the table and scanned the room. A full-length mirror on the wall to my right looked a little askew. Crooked hanging things always make me nuts, so I went over and straightened it. And that’s when I noticed the mirror was actually hanging on a door. The mirror was large enough to hide the knob and obscure the seam where the door fitted into the wall. “What about this?” I asked.

“I never saw that before,” the girl said. “The owner’s the only one who uses this office, so I hardly ever come in here.”

I turned the knob and pulled, taking care not to knock the mirror down. It led out of the store and into another side of the mall. I stepped through and studied the knob from the outside, searching for pry marks or some evidence of forced entry. It looked pristine to me. I waved Bailey and Toni out to give me their opinions.

“Looks clean,” Bailey said.

“Yeah,” Toni said. “But what’s that?” She bent down and picked up a little red beaded bracelet with a silver smiley face in the center.

We all exchanged looks. It appeared to be a kid’s bracelet. If it was Tammy Susie’s, the theory that she’d just wandered off on her own or even sneaked away on purpose could pretty much be ruled out. No way would a nine-year-old have discovered that office door, let alone the door behind the mirror. The possibility that we were dealing with a kidnapping had just been upgraded into a likelihood. I leaned down to examine the area for blood, hair, or some other signs of a struggle. “What’s that?” I pointed to a smudge on the door frame.

Bailey peered at it. “Hard to tell just by looking. Might be blood, but it could be dirt.”

Toni called out to the salesgirl through the doorway. “Where’s the store owner?”

As the person most likely to know the layout of the mall and where all the doors were in this store, the owner made for an attractive suspect.

“At home, probably. She doesn’t come in much.”

She. A woman was less likely to be a kidnapper, but then again Tammy Susie was a pretty small target, even if she was, as Erica intimated, a tad chunky. “Why not?” I asked.

The girl shrugged. “It’s hard for her to get around. Grieta’s pretty old.”

Old. But to this girl that might mean thirty-nine. “How old?”

“We just threw her a party for her eighty-first birthday.”

Eighty-one was a little too old to handle the kidnapping. At least, without help.

“Does anyone work here besides you?” I asked.

“No. Not anymore. Renzo, that’s Grieta’s nephew, used to work on the weekends, but he just left for school up in Amherst.”

“How’s the store doing? Sales good?” Bailey asked.

I knew she was fishing around for motive. If the store was going under, an owner might get desperate enough to collaborate in a kidnapping scheme for some quick cash.

“Sales are okay…”

The way she trailed off told me sales were nothing to write home about. Maybe we were onto something.

“Okay… but not good,” I said. “Is Grieta maybe a little strapped for money?”

“Grieta? Strapped for money?” The girl laughed. “Her husband left her a fortune. This store’s just a hobby.”

I won’t lie. The owner wasn’t looking like our best suspect.

“Do you remember seeing anyone else in the store at the time the little girl was here?” Toni asked.

“I think the lady who works for Tammy Susie was here. I’m pretty sure I showed her a pair of Tahitian pearl earrings.”

Tahitian pearls are not cheap. That Erica has nice taste. And I bet she’d love to hear that she works “for” Tammy Susie. Not to mention the fact that the salesgirl had called her a “lady”-teenage shorthand for “old.” It was probably best that Erica had stayed outside. “Did anyone else come into the store?” I asked.

The girl frowned, then looked up at the ceiling. I watched her eyes move back and forth for a few seconds, as she played back her mental video. “It’s possible someone walked in and then walked out without my seeing them. But if you mean someone who could’ve gotten past me and into the dressing room area without my noticing, no way.”

We’d reached the bottom of this well, and it was bone-dry. I asked Bailey to collect Erica and meet Toni and me outside the newly discovered back door.

After a few minutes, Erica and Bailey came into view. Even if I hadn’t been looking for them, I’d have noticed Erica. She held her head down and shot furtive sidelong glances at the crowd around her as she walked. She may as well have been wearing a sign around her neck saying, I JUST DID SOMETHING HORRIBLY WRONG. I told her as much and warned her to chill out. Then I showed her the bracelet and told her where we’d found it.

Erica paled. “That’s Tammy Susie’s. But I don’t understand. If even the salesgirl didn’t know about that back door, then how could some stranger figure it out? You said it was hidden by a mirror.”

Apparently Harvard hadn’t been a complete waste. “Obviously, whoever took Tammy Susie out of there knew the lay of the land. Maybe the owner’s nephew told someone about it.” It was just a guess but, all things considered, not a bad one if I did say so myself. “But the salesgirl didn’t see anyone else in the store. So whoever took Tammy Susie came in through that secret door and left with her the same way.”

“I didn’t notice any security cameras in the store, did you?” Toni asked.

“No,” I said. “You see any cameras that might’ve picked up activity outside the shops on your way here?” I asked Bailey.

She shook her head. “Nada. We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way: canvass the area and ask whether anyone’s seen her.”

Toni added, “And hope to get very, very lucky.”

Finding the hidden door and the bracelet had a sobering effect on all of us. With the last vestiges of hope that Tammy Susie had skipped out on her own now pretty much obliterated, we moved with greater urgency, working the shops most likely to be on the kidnapper’s escape route, showing Tammy Susie’s photo and asking if anyone had seen her.

But we kept getting the same response: “No, sorry,” or just a shake of the head.