“You’re the one with real experience in this sort of thing,” Joey said a few minutes later as he and Glenn crossed the street from where they’d parked in the lot beside Harv’s garage.
Glenn cocked an eyebrow. “What makes me the expert? You’re the one with the police training.”
Joey smiled slightly. “And you’re the one who can look at things from the viewpoint of the perp.”
“Yeah, yeah, rub my past history in.” Glenn chuckled so Joey would know he was kidding.
“Past? You still do it, more or less, unless the trips you say are for your job are just excuses to step out on me.”
“I would never step out on you.” Glenn swatted Joey’s ass. “And you know it.”
“I do.” Joey glanced around, figured it was dark enough, and gave him a swift kiss.
“Keep your mind on business,” Glenn growled.
Joey sobered. “So what are we looking for?”
“Signs of a struggle for one thing, if the searchers haven’t messed things up. As you said to Chief Leades, unlocked door, though it’s doubtful it would be now even if it was when Nate came down here, if he did.”
“He has to have, and there has to be a reason he did. He’s totally into Rory, he wouldn’t have missed meeting him at the coffeehouse come hell or high water, and for sure he wouldn’t have gone off with someone, even someone he knew, without letting Rory know.”
“So if we’re right, and it is only a supposition, someone lured him in here.”
Joey nodded, scanning the pavement ahead of him. As far as he could tell there was nothing indicating Nate had been there, to say the least having been taken or something worse. Cramming his hands in the back pockets of his jeans he started to move deeper into the cut-through before realizing the only illumination came from the lights over two doors on the wall to his left. He muttered he’d been stupid not to bring a flashlight when one appeared in front of him. “At least one of us was thinking.”
Glenn chuckled softly. “That’s why you keep me around.” He aimed the penlight he was carrying at the base of the door nearest to them then brought it up slowly along the handle side. “It’s clear,” he said.
“How do you know for sure?”
“The stuff in the corners there.” He pointed his light to the small drifts of dust and debris where the door met the wall at the bottom. “If someone had gone in or out in the last few hours it would have been disturbed. If I don’t miss my guess it piled up there this afternoon when it was so windy.”
“Duh. Okay.”
“You’d have figured it out eventually.”
“I hope.” Moving forward, Joey looked at the next doorway, trying to see it the way Glenn would. “Same thing here,” he commented. Walking on a few feet he stopped at the bottom of a rickety set of wooden stairs set into the wall. They led up to the roof of a shop which faced the street behind the bookshop. “Okay, someone was on these since the windstorm.”
Glenn came up behind him, training his light on the stairs. “Why do you think so?”
“Umm, maybe because I can see footprints in the dust, smartass?”
Glenn chuckled. “Good call. They go up and down. Which came last?”
“Coming down, because they overlay the others, and whoever made them was moving cautiously. There’s just toe-prints, not the full shoe.”
“Very good. Still we don’t know who made them. It could have been Nate.”
Joey nodded. “If he saw something up there, or more like he heard something because he couldn’t have seen anything from where he was standing.” Stepping back he looked up at the buildings. “It’s straight across from the top of the stairs to the roof of the bookshop.”
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