Chapter 31
I walked into Alton’s Furniture and snapped my head right and left, looking for the store manager. Not seeing him anywhere, I grabbed the first employee I saw—the Amy girl.
“Back so soon?”
“Yeah. I actually need the manager again.”
“Conner,” she said. “I’ll go grab him for you. I think I saw him walking to his office. You could just follow me if you want.”
“That’ll work,” I said.
She led me through the store, into a back hall, then through another door into a warehouse similar in setup to the one across the street.
Amy walked me to an office, and through the big glass windows, I could see the manager inside sitting at his desk.
He’d caught sight of us walking up, stood, and waved us in.
“There you go,” she said.
I walked into the office as she headed back the way we’d come.
“Something else?” the manager asked.
“Yeah,” I said as I stepped into the office. “That employee training manual that you gave me was exactly what I was looking for. I’m going to need some employee information from you. Do you have the authority to give me that?”
He stood in silence for a second.
“I mean, I can get a subpoena for it if that’s what’s needed,” I added.
“I’m not sure that we have to do all that,” he said. “Um, come in and grab a chair. If you tell me what you’re looking for, I can probably make a quick call and get a yea or nay on whether I can give it to you.”
I took a seat, as did Conner.
“I need to know the names of who had access to this book. Who would have a copy. Who could get a copy. And with that, I kind of need to know if the training manuals from the years leading up to last year were the same as this book or not.”
He just sat there looking confused.
I broke it down for him again, and after some back and forth, I was pretty sure he understood.
It helped that he had a couple of employee binders from 2023 and 2024.
I checked the “living room” books and found the Connerton set in both.
But each book had a different layout, meaning that the letters clipped to craft the killer’s letter undoubtedly came from the 2025 training guide.
Having that part clear, I told him that I needed a list of employees who would have received the 2025 training guides as new hires, plus a list of current and past employees for the previous year.
The manager nodded. “Got it. I can make the call, but there’s still a problem if you’re looking for an employee that specifically had access to those training materials.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Like I said before, we are nationwide. We have six hundred and some stores. I think we have something like twenty-some-thousand employees.”
The thought had already crossed my mind, but I would worry about the nationwide aspect of things if and when I needed to.
Everything about the case seemed to be contained in a small local radius.
And I was betting that our suspect lived or worked in the same area.
If I was proved wrong, we could always expand our search.
“We’ll start with this store and go from there,” I said.
“Sure. Let me make a call,” Conner said. “If you want to grab a coffee or soda, the lunchroom is right around the corner. There’s actually some pretty good coffee in there.”
I figured that was a hint that he wanted to make his call minus my presence, and a coffee didn’t sound like the worst idea.
I left the manager to make his call and went to grab a cup of caffeine.
As I waited for my coffee to brew in the big fancy touchscreen machine, I messaged Halloway, letting him know that we might have to get a subpoena for employee information from the furniture store and that I’d let him know if it was needed within a couple of minutes.
The machine beeped that my coffee was done.
I snatched it up, had a sip of my way-too-hot-to-drink beverage, and looked at the television mounted on the wall in the corner.
The local news was playing a segment from the neighboring furniture store.
In the top corner of the news coverage, the screen read “Recorded earlier.” I watched and listened to the reporter for a minute before I saw myself on the screen, walking to my car.
As the reporter shouted questions at me on the screen, I walked from the lunchroom with my coffee in hand.
I gave the manager’s office door a knock, seeing that he wasn’t on the phone and was tapping away at his computer. He waved me in.
“Do we have a verdict?” I asked.
“I’m getting the employee information for you now. This is just going to be from our store here. If for some reason you need a full company-wide list, you’ll have to go through corporate, and yeah, they’ll want some paperwork for that. Seems in this instance, though, we have the green light.”
“That’s all fine. And I appreciate you helping me out,” I said.
He gave me a nod. “Not a problem at all.”
I retook the chair that I’d sat in a few minutes before and waited as the printer in his office prepared to print whatever it was going to spit out.
“These printouts are just going to be names, positions, and phone numbers,” the manager said. “I figured it would be the easiest thing to give you. If you need further details on anyone in particular, I can pull up their actual employee paperwork to get their address and all of that.”
“All right. So these are going to be anyone who was working here last year, then?”
“Exactly that,” he said.
The printer came to life then stopped after kicking out a single sheet of paper.
“That was quick,” I said.
“Yeah, it’s just forty-four names and numbers.” He spun on his chair, snatched the piece of paper from the printer’s tray, then slid it across his desk to me.
I grabbed the list and went down the names as if one of them was going to jump out at me or something. I wasn’t really expecting any of them to stand out, but one did—like a sore thumb.
I held up the sheet of paper. “This should be all I need. If we need to follow up with anything, I’ll be in touch.”
“All right. I hope it helps in some way,” he said.
“That makes two of us.”
I thanked the manager for his time and walked out with my coffee and a list of names—one of which I had a heck of a lot more interest in than the others.
I grabbed a seat in the cruiser, fired it up, and pulled away from the front of the furniture store. I dialed Halloway the second I did.
“Hey. What’s up?” Halloway asked. “You need that subpoena?”
“No. I got the names. And I also have a person of interest.”
“Who and how?” the captain asked.
I ran through it for him, how we’d matched up the letters used in the killer’s message to some employee training materials from last year. And then we’d learned that Evan Coker, a former employee, had happened to find the body.
“Hmm,” Halloway said. “That’s definitely something. But I have to think these places swap employees pretty often.”
“Probably,” I said. “But the guy struck me as off. He struck Officer Kincaid from Midwest as off too. He had access to the training materials used to craft the letter. And he was the guy who found the body and called it in.”
“Bring him in,” the captain said. “Let’s shake his tree. See what falls out.”
“Is Steve there? Or Garcia or Ryan?” I asked. “If I’m going to this guy’s house, I want someone else with me. And also probably a car from Midwest close by.”
“I don’t see any of them,” Halloway said. “I think they’re all still out. Remember, they were going to canvass the neighborhoods again and reinterview people for the Sloan and Mehen cases.”
“Yeah. Damn. You know what, I’m just a few minutes from the office. I’ll pop back in quick. I want to look at something, and then I’ll worry about rounding a few people up. Get a plan together.”
“Okay. See you in a few,” Halloway said.