Free Sleight of Hand by Mark Henwick

and I was hoping you could help me some more. I’m so worried.”
    It was difficult not to laugh. I happened to know Captain Morales was happily married, but that wasn’t a defense against this kind of attack from Jennifer. And it showed good thinking on her part. If she could persuade Morales to send a squad car here, they would treat it more seriously than if the desk sergeant did.
    Another time, I would have to find out how she knew Morales. I waved and let myself out.
     

 
    Chapter 8
     
    Back at the parking garage, I approached my car cautiously, but there was no one waiting for me. I headed back home to Aurora through the late night traffic.
    Even cheap is expensive for me. Aurora is part of Denver and yet is its own whole city, with good parts and bad. I lived in a room on the side of a house in the cheaper part of Aurora. It suited me fine. There was a half kitchen, a tiny bathroom, a bed and a place to keep some of my stuff. The rest was in a storage unit.
    The only drawback was that the door to my room was off the porch, and Mrs. Desiarto was reliably found on it at night. She was an old-style Italian mamma transplanted into the suburbs of Denver. In an Italian village, she would have had many people to talk to. Now that her children had fled the nest, she had me. I suspected the rent reflected this and I did try to sit and talk some nights.
    However late I came home, she always seemed to be there, sitting in her cane rocking chair. She claimed she was unable to sleep due to the pain in her hips.
    As I stepped up, I gave thanks it was dark and she couldn’t see my face.
    “Amber, you been working late again.”
    “Maybe I’ve been out with a boyfriend, this time,” I replied, leaning against a post.
    She laughed, which was a bit unfair. It wasn’t that unlikely, surely. “You have no boyfriends, Amber. You scare them off. Look at you. I couldn’t pinch so much as a tweezer of skin from you. It’s not natural.”
    “It is for me, Mrs. Desiarto.” I sighed. “But you’re right, I’ve been working and I’ve still got to finish up.”
    “A man would think he was lying on a bed of stones with you. You need to eat decent food, take it easy. Find yourself a man. You need to think about starting a family, you know.”
    I made a move to my door. Once she was off on this, I would get her history of how she had met her husband and the clever way she had snared him. Unless I went now, I would be here a long time.
    “I’m sorry, Mrs. Desiarto, maybe another time. Good night.”
    I escaped and slipped into the dark warmth of my room. I stood in the darkness for a few moments before switching on the light, and only then did I take my hand out of the backpack where I had been holding the gun.
    I threw everything on the bed, sat down and wrote up the day’s report on the laptop. I emailed Jennifer a brief review about my visit to Troy’s apartment along with my suspicions and recommendations, even though we’d spoken.
    I glanced at the clock and winced—another late night. I didn’t care for the idea of looking at accounts at this hour, so instead I did a search through the USB drive for the security footage from Silver Hills.
    It was a black and white closed-circuit camera time-lapse movie. The camera and lights had probably been linked to a motion sensor and timer. It started with a couple of frames showing an area with bulldozers and storage containers, in natural light with long shadows. Nothing was happening. The clock timer at the bottom showed early evening. Then there were a couple of frames where the timer had triggered and the lights came on briefly to record that nothing was still happening. The timer showed 9:30.
    What showed next made me sit up in a hurry.
    Between the directional security lighting and the limitations of a black and white security camera, this wasn’t going to win awards for detail, but the motion sensor triggered and the camera went to full video, capturing what looked like