Secure Location - By Beverly Long Page 0,22

in early yesterday, about six. Oscar came in at his regular time.”

Cruz glanced at the sheet and saw that Oscar started work shortly after eight. Cruz would have much preferred that the time records were from a time clock with an automatic time stamp, rather than handwritten. He could have trusted them more. Still, it was a small place. Tracy probably had a handle on when her employees arrived.

Meg had said that she’d left her condo around seven. That wouldn’t have given him much time to trash the place. Plus somehow between her arrival at work and noon, he’d have had to get over to the hotel, bang up her car and plant the bad fish.

“He was here the whole day?” Cruz asked.

Tracy nodded. “All day. He did have to run out midmorning. We got an unexpected contribution from one of the big grocery stores in town. They had a bunch of canned goods that were coming up on their expiration date. The need in this community is pretty great so we wanted to get it picked up and sorted, then distributed as quickly as possible.”

“Where is the grocery store?”

The woman walked over to a large map that was tacked to a cork bulletin board. “Here,” she said.

Cruz looked at the map, figured out where the hotel was in relation to the grocery store and realized that the two were less than fifteen blocks apart. “How long was he gone?”

Now Tracy was looking at him oddly. “Less than an hour. Is something wrong, Detective?” she asked. “This is a small place, with very few employees. We don’t want any trouble.”

If the guy was telling the truth, Cruz was close to screwing up any hopes of him keeping this particular job. “No. Nothing’s wrong,” he said. “Thank you for your help.”

Cruz nodded at Oscar as he left the building. The man didn’t respond.

Cruz got in his car and started driving toward the grocery store. Once inside, Cruz gave a woman at the service counter his business card and she went off to look for the manager. Cruz waited impatiently.

The manager was a young black man dressed in a white shirt, dark pants and a tie. His head was totally shaved and it reminded Cruz that he should get a haircut. The man shook Cruz’s hand. “Detective Montoya,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“I’m attempting to verify the time that a pickup was made at your store yesterday. A man came from the food pantry and got some canned goods.”

“We can check. We log that kind of activity.” The young man led him through the store, back to the dock area. There were big trucks and it smelled like diesel fuel. It was hot in comparison to the air-conditioned store.

The manager pulled a clipboard off a hook and ran his finger across a line. “He arrived at nine-thirty and left here at ten-ten.”

With travel time, that would have given him very little time to get to Meg’s car. Impossible? No. But not likely if Tracy’s memory was correct.

“Thank you,” he said. He returned to his car and immediately opened the file for the employees who had been terminated by the hotel within the past year. He plugged the first address into his GPS.

He found Mason Hawkins at home. The neighborhood was middle-class, with small ranch-style homes. None of them had garages and most had cars parked in the driveway or in front, along the street.

There were no vehicles in Hawkins’s driveway. An old white van, with its front tires beached on the curb, sat in front, halfway between Hawkins’s house and the neighbor’s.

Cruz knocked on the wooden door and waited a full minute before it slowly swung open. Hawkins wore boxer shorts, black socks and a cardigan sweater that zipped up the front. His hair was dirty and he was holding an open bag of potato chips.

Cruz noted it all but he wasn’t overly interested in the trappings. A man could change his wardrobe, alter his appearance and even take on a different persona. He couldn’t change his physical size as easily. And Hawkins was close enough to five-ten, one-sixty, that Cruz stayed interested. He took stock of Hawkins’s thigh muscles and saw that they didn’t scream slacker in the same way his outfit did.

“Yes?” Hawkins said.

“I’m Cruz Montoya.” The man showed no reaction to Cruz’s name. That didn’t sway Cruz one way or the other. If Hawkins was behind last night’s push, he probably knew that Meg’s ex-husband was