Nick glanced over his shoulder through the door, to the man on the hospital bed. “No ID, no memory, shot in the head in the middle of a gunfight outside a robbery of a used bookstore. What. The. Fuck.”
“This ain’t a robbery,” Hagan said with a grunt. “You don’t shoot three people for an old book, I don’t care if it’s the Gutenberg Bible.”
Nick nodded. “You realize this guy could be the doer.”
“You think he’s faking?”
“He’s either a very lucky witness who lived through this, a perp who legit can’t remember, or he’s faking.” Nick shrugged.
“You were spec ops. You were trained to lie and shit. Can you tell if he’s lying?”
“Yeah, but if he’s faking, he’s damn good at it, ’cause I’m leaning toward believing him.”
They both turned to the witness again. He was once again sitting in bed with his head hanging and his eyes closed. His hands were trembling as they clenched at the blanket in his lap. The nurse had left him.
“What do we do?” Hagan asked.
Nick was at a loss. Did they treat the man as a witness or a suspect? “Either way, if he’s a perp or he’s a witness, he’ll need someone on him,” he finally said.
Hagan patted Nick’s shoulder. “Great. You go break the news to him, I’m going to get some coffee.”
Nick glared after his partner as the man lumbered off toward the nurses’ station. He took a deep breath to steady himself. It wasn’t his first case back since his surgery, but it was his first case back from behind a desk. He hadn’t been dealing with people lately so much as paperwork.
The witness looked up when Nick approached, and tried to straighten his shoulders, but they slumped again, probably under the weight of his injury and exhaustion.
Nick’s heart went out to him, and he had to fight to keep his attitude professional. “I’m going to have this officer stay with you in the hospital until they release you. Keep an eye on you. Then he’s going to bring you the station to talk with us a little more. That sound okay?”
The man nodded, then winced and brought his hand up to his bandage. “You think I’m in danger?”
Nick chewed on his lip for a second. “It’s a real possibility, I won’t lie.”
“It’s also a possibility I shot those people, isn’t it?”
Nick stared at him, shocked again by the man’s strange mix of perception and vulnerability. “That is also a possibility, yes.”The witness rubbed a trembling hand over his face. Nick placed a hand on his shoulder in an attempt to offer comfort.
The man reached up and gripped his fingers hard. He didn’t raise his head or say anything. He just seemed to need the contact.
“It’ll be okay,” Nick whispered. “We’ll figure this out.”
“So, we got the shopkeeper’s daughter coming in to try to ID the body,” Hagan told Nick, returning from the station break room with two cups of coffee. They’d been partners for almost three years and Hagan still couldn’t remember that Nick didn’t drink coffee.
Hagan set the cup down in front of him, steaming and giving off a sickeningly strong smell.
“Throw that away,” Nick ordered.
“Whatever. You’re welcome.” Hagan sat and chucked his feet up on the desk opposite Nick’s. They were set up facing each other. Nick glared at the coffee cup, then his partner.
Hagan gave him a toothy smile. “What else we got working?”
“Prints are going through the system for the other victim, and the amnesiac witness.” Nick held up a photograph from the crime scene. “Aside from the fact that the perps apparently riffled the bookshelves and made a damn mess of everything, the only things that seem to be missing were in this display cabinet.” He set it down and slid it across to Hagan. “Don’t get your coffee near that.”
“Yes, Mother.” Hagan picked it up, sipping his coffee as he studied the photo of the display case. The glass doors were intact, the wood unscathed. Whatever had been inside hadn’t been under lock and key. “I mean, what else does a bookstore display besides books?”
Nick shrugged. “I’ve seen some where they have antiques on show. They’re usually just for atmosphere, though, nothing worth a motherfucking heist.”
Hagan raised an eyebrow from behind the rim of his coffee cup.
“Yeah. Heist. Everything we have here is looking like a pro job. The security was disabled, there’s no sign of forced entry, and since the shopkeeper bled out where he fell on the sidewalk, it’s probable he wasn’t supposed to be there and the robbers literally ran into him on their way out and panicked.”
“That’s a lot to infer from what little we have.”
Nick shrugged. He’d always had a knack for seeing crime scenes lay out. He never denied that he could be wrong, but he usually wasn’t.
“One more odd job for this one, one of the dead guys had a bag under him. They found it when they moved the body. It had four books in it.”
“From the shop?” Hagan asked.
“We can only assume until the daughter gets here to ID them. They’re all old, too.”
“Just old? Or old as balls?”
Nick barked a laugh before he could stop himself. “The latter, I assume. Three early nineteenth century, one dating to the Revolutionary War. We can probably assume they were in that display case along with whatever objects were taken because everything else was just trashed, not stolen.”
“So, you’re a bookshop owner and you have this display case set up with rare books,” Hagan mused.
“Uh huh?”
“The objects you’d put in there for atmosphere would be related to the books, right? Somehow?”
“In my world they would be,” Nick agreed. He pondered it briefly, then nodded and called over one of the uniformed officers working nearby. “Do me a favor, bud, put out some feelers to city pawnshops and dealers, stay on the lookout for artifacts dating from 1750 to 1820. They might be stolen.”
The officer nodded and headed off.
Hagan scowled at the photo again. “Was the case wiped clean? Why would they wipe it down if they were wearing gloves?”
“They didn’t. Get this. Best the Crime Lab can tell, they wiped the motherfucking dust off the case to ruin the outline of whatever objects were there.”
“Covering their tracks, or . . .?”