Johan's Joy (Heroes for Hire #22) - Dale Mayer Page 0,38
morning.”
“Where are they now?”
“One is Barlow. He’s up in his office. He’s supposedly still there, but I don’t know that for certain. I don’t have an ID on the other one. It just says, visitor pass.”
“Did he come in with Barlow?”
“Within a few minutes.”
“So that person could be with him, or it could be someone who followed behind him.”
“I know,” he said. “First things first, let’s go find Barlow and see if he’s even here.”
“And the reason?” Galen asked. They took their laptops with them and headed toward the elevator.
“We’re here to investigate crimes,” he said. “Do we need another excuse?”
Galen shrugged. “Not really,” he said, “but it would be nice if we had something that we could pinpoint. Pretty quickly they will all look at us as wasting everybody’s time.”
“I know,” he said. “We could say the same thing about them too.”
They rode up the elevator and finally stopped on the top floor. When they stepped out, once again that empty hollow sound permeated the area. They walked down to Barlow’s office and rapped on the door. When there was no answer, Johan turned the handle, but it was locked. Johan frowned, asking Galen, “Did he come out of his office?”
“No,” Galen said, frowning as he checked. “It says he’s still in here.”
Johan pulled out his card and used it to unlock the door, only it wouldn’t unlock. “Once again we don’t have security override to enter everywhere,” he said. Pulling out his lockpick set, he had the door opened in a few seconds.
“Now that set off an alarm,” Galen said. He worked on his laptop, holding it with one hand, shutting down the alarm with the other.
“Good enough.” Johan pushed open the door and called out, “Barlow, are you here?”
There was no answer.
They were in what appeared to be a large reception area with a couple private offices farther inside. “So this is like a private suite,” Johan muttered.
Galen sat in the front room, still working on his laptop.
Johan walked through the reception area, headed toward what was the biggest office in the corner. He didn’t need to look far because Barlow was right here on the floor. “Damn.” Barlow stared at Johan, but no life was left in his eyes. A bullet hole decorated his forehead. Looks like a .22 made entry. A woman’s gun usually, Johan thought. But don’t get trapped into that thinking.
“Damn,” Johan whispered. “This case just got much uglier.”
Chapter 8
When the phone call came to her cell an hour later, the two other phones in her apartment went off as well. Joy looked at Kai and Tyson as they all reached for their phones.
“Johan, what’s up?” Joy asked.
“The CEO of the company—Barlow—he’s dead,” he said. “Two security cards accessed the building this morning. His was one of them.”
“What?” she cried out. “That’s terrible. How did you find him?” she asked, her hand over her chest as she thought about the ramifications. “Was it a heart attack?”
“Possibly, but it went hand in hand with a bullet then too,” he snapped.
“He was murdered?” She bounced up to her feet.
She and Kai had been sitting here, nursing the second pot of coffee, talking about everything—from Kai’s relationship with Tyson, Joy’s relationship with Johan, which she’d called a nonrelationship—all as Tyson worked in the living room. They’d shared a wonderful brunch of pancakes, and, when that was over, things had fallen to the side of girl talk. But now all three of them were on their phones.
“This is just too unbelievable,” Joy said. “I wonder why?”
“We did a quick search of his office,” Johan said, “but we didn’t find anything else.”
“Who was the other security card?” she asked.
“It was a visitor’s pass,” Johan replied.
“You should be able to check the log to see who it was signed out to.”
“Okay, hold on a sec.” When he came back on the line, he said, “Galen’s checking.”
After a few seconds, she heard Galen say something in the background to Johan.
“Jesus,” said Johan. “It literally says Donald Duck.”
She stopped pacing and froze. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah. Quack-quack,” he said in disgust.
“So Barlow likely came in with his killer.”
“That would make sense, yes,” he said. “We’re thinking that, chances are, he was followed to work, and this person came in right behind him.”
“That makes sense,” she said, “unless it was somebody he knew.”
“We’re also looking at the security cameras, but guess what?”
“What?” she asked, her heart sinking.
“All the cameras were offline this morning.”
“Oh, good Lord,” she said. “So, it was a setup, and