information. She typed that in, and a welcome screen appeared. She used the mouse to click on the button marked “Menu.”
“You’ve seen the cameras inside the store. There are six total: the four inside, and one each at the front and back doors.”
“You mean there’s, like, one in the courtyard?”
“It’s pointed at the door,” she explained, pulling up a screen that showed all six views at once. “You don’t need to be paranoid; no one is spying on you if you sit out there to eat your lunch. Though pretty soon, it’s going to be too cold to be out there without a parka.”
“Yeah, I heard there might even be snow for Halloween. I think about how that would suck, you know, being homeless in the snow.”
“Don’t worry, there are plenty of shelters and volunteers to help folks in need when the weather gets bad,” she absently assured him, concentrating on the screen. “Here, the program’s set to run automatically. This is how you can tell it’s in real time, and here’s how to play back what you’ve previously recorded.”
She spent the next twenty minutes going over the features and letting Robert try it himself, until she was sure he had it down pat. “You can go through the review first thing tomorrow when you get here. You won’t have to watch every minute, just fast-forward through until you make it back to real time. Or you can stop it sooner if you see something that needs a closer look . . . like Hamlet sneaking out of the building. We’ve got to put a stop to that before he gets hurt.”
Or before he stumbles over another dead body.
“Don’t worry, boss, I’ll keep a sharp eye out,” the teen said with another of his snappy salutes. “And I’ll try to, you know, think like a cat so I can figure out where he’s getting out.”
“I’d appreciate that.” She glanced at her watch and added, “You can sign out now, but why don’t you plan on getting here about thirty minutes early tomorrow morning so you can look at the video.”
“Got it.” He initialed the printed schedule on the clipboard she kept beneath the register, and then reached for the backpack he kept stashed beneath the counter. As he did so, a couple of candy bars tumbled out of the unzipped side. While he stuffed the snacks back in and zipped up the pack again, Darla noticed that today he had a thin sleeping bag cinched to the bottom.
“Going camping tonight?” she asked with a smile.
He shrugged and then pulled the straps over his narrow shoulders. “Sometimes some of us go to the park at night to hang out. The girls, they always complain that it’s, like, too cold. But if I bring along a sleeping bag, we can crawl inside, and they don’t have an excuse to, you know, leave early.”
“Got the picture,” Darla said, hurriedly cutting him short. She didn’t want to think about what else might go on in that sleeping bag. “See you tomorrow, then.”
Robert headed for the door, sending a long-distance fist bump in the direction of Hamlet, who had taken over his spot on the beanbag chair. Darla frowned a little as she watched him leave. She’d hung out in parks at night as a teen a time or two herself. Still, that had been close to twenty years ago and in Dallas, which—contrary to its natives’ protests—had still clung to a small-town mentality despite its sprawling geographic bounds. But what was it like in Brooklyn, in this day and age? Besides, there could be a killer on the loose!
“You’re acting like someone’s mom,” she told herself with a wry smile. Robert was over eighteen and presumably had a mother of his own. If he wanted to go out at night, that was his call. But as for another of her employees—
She glanced again at Hamlet, who was busy kneading the beanbag chair into a more comfortable shape to accommodate his furry self. He’d been darned lucky so far to have returned home unscathed from his unauthorized forays outside the building. With luck, Robert would eventually discover the crafty feline’s escape route, but until then, she intended to keep a keen eye on Hamlet, as well as on her shop’s exterior fixtures . . . at least, until the roaming scrap thieves were caught and jailed.
Though heaven help any scrap thief—or murderer—unfortunate enough to cross paths with the official mascot of Pettistone’s Fine Books.