Page 40 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Thrown for a Loss

“Yes. By the way, Lieutenant, my name is Louella, Louella Weller.
I’ve been working here for five years. Anything else you want to
know, just ask.”
“A woman is dead down there, one Bertha Marks. Her ID lists her
as a resident of this city, age eighty-nine. Do you know her?”
“Not by name. Maybe I’d recognize the face. What about next of
kin?”
“Down there. A grand-daughter, Autumn Pratt, age seventeen.
She was behind her grandmother when the escalator jerked to a stop.
She became a projectile slamming Ms. Marks into the side and treads
of the escalator. The girl’s injuries are minor. Possibly her
grandmother broke her fall. Definitely she broke her grandmother’s
neck. I need to examine that button. Please keep an eye on the
witnesses while I do so. The old couple can be sent home after you
get their names and telephone numbers. They may be of use
corroborating someone else’s account, but the others are likely to
have observed things more closely. They should not leave the
vicinity.”
I had to agree with that, too. Privately it was my opinion that the
button was pushed by some child much younger than the mall rats,
and that he immediately ran away. Malicious? Maybe. A kid ten years
old could do terrible things just to see what would happen. Arson.
Gunplay. Household chemicals. Emergency buttons. If I see an
unsupervised kid that young in here I treat him—or her—like a lost
child if a responsible adult is not nearby. So I dismissed the elderly
gent and (as it turned out) his elderly girlfriend, then walked toward
the teenagers, who were huddled in a knot in front of Intimate Oils
and Aromatherapy. Looking over my shoulder I saw Labelle kneeling
in front of the red stop button. It had a clear plastic cover you had to
reach under to get at the actual button, to prevent accidental
activation. My eyes are just as good as my ears, and I could see what
she was studying so closely. Some kind of pale substance was stuck to
the bottom edge of the plastic cover. Maybe it had come off the hand
or sleeve of the perpetrator. Maybe it had been there for weeks. I
would have been looking for fingerprints, something a little less
anonymous. Of course, she would have to wait for a police
technician to apply an official dusting and lift the prints, unless she
carried a whole crime lab in her fanny pack.

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