Chapter 7 #2
“Tiana knows more than she’s saying,” I said.
“She’s young and in love. Dre could do no wrong in her eyes, so she didn’t ask questions. Questions lead to answers you don’t always want to hear.” Jack glanced at me. “Women have been pretending they don’t know what their men are up to since the beginning of time.”
Jack called Cole on the drive over and asked him to get a digital warrant for Dre’s gym locker at Fit24, and also for his phone records and financials so he could irritate the judge all at once.
By the time we pulled into the shopping center, the warrant was sitting in Jack’s email. What used to take hours of tracking down a judge and hand-delivering paperwork now took a phone call and a few keystrokes. I loved technology. Even if the robots were eventually going to kill us all.
Fit24 sat at the far end of the shopping center, sandwiched between a nail salon and a sandwich shop.
The sign out front promised 24-HOUR ACCESS and NO COMMITMENT, which pretty much summed up what you got for twenty bucks a month.
Through the plate-glass windows I could see rows of treadmills facing a wall of televisions, and a handful of people going through the motions of their afternoon workout.
This was a gym where people went to feel good about themselves for showing up, not the kind where anyone was getting punched in the face.
Which was exactly the point.
Jack grabbed the bolt cutters from his kit in the back of the Tahoe, and we headed inside.
The girl working the front desk couldn’t have been more than nineteen—high ponytail, Fit24 polo, phone in hand like it was a permanent extension of her arm. She looked up when the door chimed and her eyes went straight to Jack’s badge.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Is this about that guy?”
“What guy?” Jack asked.
“The one who got killed? Andre something?” She set her phone down and leaned forward across the counter. “One of our members was talking about it this morning. Said he used to come here all the time, really early, like before five.”
“Did you know him?”
“Not really. I mostly work afternoons. But I saw him a few times when I covered for Jared.” She bit her lip. “He was nice. Always wiped down the equipment. You’d be surprised how many people don’t.”
I grimaced. Knowing people the way I do, I would not, in fact, be surprised.
“We need to see his locker,” Jack said. “Is your manager around?”
She disappeared into the back and returned with a thick-necked guy in his early thirties. His name tag said Derek and his expression said he already knew this wasn’t going to be the highlight of his day.
“What can I do for you?”
“Homicide investigation. We’ve got a warrant for one of your members’ lockers.” Jack pulled up the warrant on his phone and showed it to Derek. “Andre Washington. I can forward this to whatever email you need for your records.”
Derek read through it, nodded slowly, and rattled off his email address. Jack sent the copy while Derek led us back to the locker room.
The room was empty and smelled like industrial cleaner and body spray—the cologne of budget gyms everywhere. Derek pointed us to the full-sized lockers along the back wall, the premium ones that cost a few extra dollars a month.
“Forty-seven,” he said. “That’s his.”
“Appreciate it,” Jack said. “We’ll take it from here.”
Derek took the hint and left us to it. The combination lock on number forty-seven was nothing fancy—the kind you’d buy at a hardware store for ten dollars. Jack positioned the bolt cutters and squeezed. The lock gave way with a sharp snap, and he pulled the door open.
At first glance, it was exactly what you’d expect from a man who used the gym for cardio between real training sessions. A gym bag with a change of clothes. Running shoes, well worn. A stick of deodorant and a small toiletry kit zipped into a side pocket.
Jack pulled on gloves and started going through the bag with that methodical patience that made him good at this job.
He lifted each item out carefully, checked pockets, felt along seams and linings.
Most people hid things in obvious places—taped to the backs of drawers, tucked under mattresses.
But Dre had been smarter than most people.
Jack unzipped the interior pocket of the gym bag and went still.
“What?” I asked.
He pulled out a small spiral-bound notebook with a black cover—the kind you’d grab off a rack at the dollar store without thinking twice. Taped inside the front cover was a small brass key.
Jack flipped the notebook open, and I leaned in to look.
Names—or initials, more accurately. Dates.
Dollar amounts. Page after page of them in neat, careful handwriting.
Some entries had a W or L beside them. Other notations I couldn’t make sense of—abbreviations and codes that clearly meant something to Dre but would need deciphering.
Numbers were scrawled on the inside back cover, but whether they were phone numbers, account numbers, or something else entirely, I couldn’t tell.
“He was keeping records,” I said quietly.
Jack kept flipping pages, his expression getting harder with each one. “Of something he thought was worth documenting,” he said. “And worth hiding.”
I looked at the brass key resting in Jack’s gloved palm. It was small and flat.
“We need to get all of this to Daniels,” Jack said. He slid the notebook and key into an evidence bag, then sealed and labeled it. “Every page photographed, the key cataloged. And we need to start digging into Dre’s finances. Every account, every transaction.”
“Once the phone records come in, we’ll have a clearer picture of who he was talking to.”
“And that notebook might fill in the rest.” Jack closed the locker door. “Whatever Dre was into, he was smart enough to keep the proof somewhere nobody would think to look.”
Smart kid. Careful kid. The kind who planned ahead, kept records, and spread his secrets across multiple locations so no single person could find everything at once.
Not smart enough, in the end. But smart.