CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Kowalski came in at a few minutes past two, carrying a coffee and a slightly satisfied expression.
Miles had quickly come to find that Kowalski was a quiet man unless he was asked a direct question, so to see him with a bit of excitement on his face made Miles dare to think he may be bringing some good news.
"I've got three officers pulling additional records," he said.
"Business licensing, city permit databases, and one of them has a contact at the Better Business Bureau. They’ll be able to pull complaints filed against wellness businesses going back five years.
Anything that might help us sort the list faster. "
Miles sat back and pressed his palms flat against his lower back, arching against the pressure that had been building there for the last two hours.
The chair was not a good chair. None of the chairs in the borrowed workspace were good chairs, and he had been in this one since before noon.
He stood and stretched properly, walking a slow circle around the table while his back resettled.
"That's a huge help," he said. "Particularly the complaints piece. If any of these businesses have a history of clients who felt defrauded or misled, that's potentially a connection to why the killer is selecting within this category."
Kowalski nodded. "My thought exactly. Not that a complaint proves anything, but it might narrow the pool further if we're looking for businesses with a pattern of that kind of customer experience."
"We may not be able to narrow it much more," Miles said. He was still standing, one hand on the back of the chair. "At some point we’ll have to just bite the bullet and call the ones that are left—and I’d prefer to get started on that today.
But if your people can get anything in the next hour, it's worth the delay. "
"They'll be fast," Kowalski said. He picked up his coffee and looked at the whiteboard, where the working list was reproduced in Miles's handwriting. He studied it for a moment without commenting, then looked at Vic. "You find anything interesting?"
"Maybe," Vic said without looking up from her laptop.
She had been on the same entry for the last several minutes, opening tabs and cross-referencing.
She turned the screen slightly so both men could see it.
"This one, in particular. I just came across it about five minutes ago.
Catherine Valdez, Luminary Wellness Studio on East Cesar Chavez.
She offers aura cleansing and chakra alignment.
The site describes her work as providing both enlightenment and guidance to clients seeking deeper awareness. "
Miles stopped pacing. "Both of those words."
"Both of them, yes. Guidance and enlightenment…that’s verbatim, in her services description." Vic clicked on the studio's main page, and the thumbnail that loaded showed the front window of the studio. "And look at the signage."
The photograph showed a storefront window that was almost entirely occupied by neon.
There were at least six separate pieces visible from the exterior alone, in overlapping colors, the signs stacked and arranged in the window so that there was almost no clear glass visible behind them.
The overall effect was not elegant, and Miles wasn’t sure it was meant to be.
It was dense and vivid and slightly overwhelming, a wall of colored light that declared itself from the sidewalk with considerably more force than most of the other businesses on the list.
"That's a lot of neon," Kowalski said.
"It's almost aggressive," Vic said. "I counted six signs from the exterior photo alone.
There is more inside, according to the gallery on her website.
" She pulled up the gallery tab, and the interior images confirmed it.
A neon mandala on the east wall was the centerpiece, but there were smaller pieces throughout the treatment room and along the hallway leading to it.
It appeared that the studio had been decorated around the light rather than the other way around.
Miles stood over her shoulder and looked at the screen. The word enlightenment was in the second sentence of Valdez's services description. The word guidance appeared twice more, further down the page.
"She's on the list because of the neon," Vic said, "but I’d say the language is what puts her at the top of it."
"Have you called her?" Kowalski asked.
"Just tried." Vic held up her phone, shaking her head, and said, "Voicemail. The recording says she's with a client and to leave a message or call back during business hours." She set the phone down. "Business hours, according to the site, run until seven today."
Miles looked at the window photograph again—the density of the neon, the specific language on the website, the unanswered phone on a day she was listed as open and available. None of those things individually constituted urgency. But together, they were more than enough.
"What's the drive from here?" he said.
Kowalski had already pulled it up on his phone. "Twelve minutes in current traffic."
Miles looked at Vic, who was already closing her laptop.
"Kowalski," Miles said, "can you keep working the list with your people? If anything on it looks comparable to Valdez in terms of the neon density or the language, flag it and call us." He picked up his jacket from the back of the chair. "We'll go check Valdez out."
"You want a unit?" Kowalski asked.
"Not yet. We don't know that there's anything to respond to.
It could just be a massive waste of time.
We're just going to talk to her." He said it straightforwardly, because it was true.
The visit was precautionary…but the alternative was to call again and leave another voicemail and wait, and that didn't seem like the right call when the drive was twelve minutes, and the match was this clean.
Miles and Vic went out through the bullpen and down to the parking structure.
The afternoon was warm and the air outside the building carried the particular dry heat of a Texas afternoon in full sun.
Miles pulled his jacket on as they reached the car, which was counterintuitive in the heat, but it had quickly become a habit after he’d officially stepped into the role of field agent at the start of this Kane nightmare.
Vic pulled up the address on her phone and set it in the cupholder between them, the navigation screen visible from the driver's seat.
"The fact that she didn't answer doesn't mean anything," Vic said. Her tone was not quite reassurance, but more out of a habit of staying level, and not reading ahead into worst-case scenarios when the actual facts were still limited.
"I know," Miles said. He pulled out of the structure and turned onto Eighth Street, heading south. "But the language on that site was specific enough that it bothered me."
"Me, too," Vic said. "That's why I flagged it. And good God, the amount of neon…”
The route took them south and then east, moving through blocks that shifted from the downtown core into quieter residential stretches before picking up commercial density again closer to East Cesar Chavez.
Miles drove at a pace that was brisk without being aggressive, making the lights where he could and not pushing when he couldn't.
Eight minutes later, the navigation announced a right turn, and he took it, and half a block down, the Luminary Wellness Studio came into view on the left side of the street.
Even from a distance and in afternoon daylight, the front window stood out…
which Miles assumed was the point of such a tactic.
The neon was still running, all of it, the signs casting their colors against the interior glass in overlapping bands.
From the sidewalk, even in full sun, the effect was considerable.
At night it would be visible from the end of the block.
Miles pulled to the curb across the street, and they sat for a moment, looking at it. “Well, if she truly is with a client, she’s just going to have to be pissed at us,” he said.
“I’m good with that,” Vic said.
With that, they stepped out of the car and, much like two buzzing insects, hurried toward the glaring lights in the window.