obligingly agreed and headed over to the children’s section, landing with an alarmingly loud plop in the beanbag chair. At another time, Darla would have lectured him on the proper care and handling of beanbags, but now her attention was on Jake and her test sticks.
“We have a winner,” the older woman said, holding up one strip that now sported a faint bit of green on the formerly white pad surface. “Definitely blood, but like I told you, there’s no way to tell if it’s human or not.”
Darla stared uncertainly at the strip. Finding the blood traces could mean that Hamlet had indeed been at the crime scene and been the one to leave the paw prints. On the other hand, the blood could be his own, or else have been the aftermath of Jake’s suggested nasty little mouse massacre. Bottom line, they still had no proof one way or the other that Hamlet had witnessed the crime.
Jake, meanwhile, had pulled out her phone. She snapped a quick picture of the strip next to the container’s color chart, then slipped the strip into a small paper bag and wrote Hamlet, left-rear paw and the date before initialing and sealing it. The remaining used strips she stuck into a mini biohaz bag.
“Normally, we’d need the original item as evidence,” she explained as she stowed everything back into her kit, “but I don’t think Hamlet will let me lop off his back paw.”
“And why would you want to perform an amputation on our store mascot’s extremity?” James asked—rhetorically, Darla assumed—as he slid past them to reach the register. With swift efficiency, he rang up his customers’ purchases (Latin grammar; Darla saw him nod in approval) while she and Jake prudently hung back and did their best to be invisible.
“Wonder what’s in those briefcases,” Jake whispered in her ear.
Darla gave the customers a professional smile as she murmured back, “Either dirty laundry or bomb-making materials.”
James finished the transaction but waited until the two young men had left the store before he coolly replied, “I believe it was the former, as I detected a distinct whiff of gym socks emanating from one of the gentlemen. And now, would you care to share what sort of experiments you were performing on Hamlet?”
“Just testing a theory of Darla’s,” Jake airily dismissed the question as she collected her kit. “Gotta go. I’ve got some reports to write up and a couple of errands to run.” To Darla, she added, “I keep forgetting, the man has bionic hearing. I swear he could hear a mouse farting in the next room.”
Not waiting for a reply, she headed for the door. James fixed Darla with a quizzical look, one gray brow quirked in question. Darla debated fobbing him off the same way that Jake had, but she couldn’t just leave, as the store didn’t close for a few more hours yet. Finally, she said softly, “I’ll tell you more, but wait until after our part-timer goes home for the day.”
“Yo, I can hear mice farting, too,” Robert called from the beanbag. “It’s not nice, keeping secrets from the hired help.”
“Actually, keeping employees in the dark is a time-honored tradition,” James countered before Darla could respond. “I presume you are familiar with the concept of information being dispersed on a need-to-know basis?” At Robert’s nod, he clarified, “Let us just say that you do not need to know.”
Darla heard a bit of grumbling from the beanbag, but Robert obediently subsided back into his study of the manual. Hamlet, meanwhile, had slipped out from behind the main shelf in the kids’ section. He planted himself beside the beanbag in what appeared to be a gesture of solidarity with the teen, despite Robert’s earlier bit of betrayal.
Shaking her head, Darla said, “Robert, let’s do this training now, so I can throw you out of here before James dies of curiosity.”
“Believe me, there is no danger of that,” James countered with a hint of a smile. Tugging his vest into place, he headed toward the stairs leading up to the storeroom.
Robert slapped shut the manual and flung himself out of the beanbag with much the same gusto as he’d dropped into it. Darla waited until he’d joined her at the counter and then opened the security program on the computer.
“That’s the icon,” she said, pointing at the screen, “and here’s how you get in.”
Taking the manual back from him, she flipped it open to page 99 and showed him where she’d written the password