She winced. “I know. I know,” she said. “We’ve still got one drive-by from a few years ago that we never closed, don’t we?”
“Exactly,” he said. “You never know. This could be the same players though.”
She looked at him in surprise. “Why is that?”
“Both… involved old Chevy trucks,” he said.
She stared at him. “Well, in that case, they could easily be connected.”
“Not necessarily,” Rodney said. “I’m mean, sure it’s a similarity, but it’s not enough. The trucks were different colors. I don’t have any confirmation of what years they were, and we don’t have any ID on the driver from the first one—or for this one, for that matter. If I understand it right, the victim was standing outside, smoking a cigarette.”
“Where was he?”
“He was on the same block as a popular nightclub. So it could have been random, I suppose.”
“Or it could have been targeted.”
“Both possibilities are still on the table right now.”
“But the shots were also well-placed, correct?”
He nodded. “Yes, the victim died at the scene.”
She nodded. “And what about the one before,… the older open case?”
“Same thing,” he said, looking at her in surprise.
She shrugged. “It’s just one more consistency between the two cases, that’s all.”
He frowned. “That’s pretty thin as far as consistency goes, even more than the Chevy.”
“Hey,thinis my middle name,” she said, with a laugh. “Let me go through these statements. I’ll see if anything’s there.”
“Yeah, thin ice maybe. Good luck with that. Most of the statements came from the partiers who were going in or out of the nightclub.”
She nodded. “The thing is, somebody saw something. It’s just a matter of finding out who saw what, and, if they saw what they said they saw.” He blinked at her several times, frowning, but she just waved a hand. “Don’t worry about me,” she said, with a chuckle. “You carry on, and so will I.”
*
After the earlymorning start, Simon carried on through the downtown area. He had several addresses he needed to look at, to consider for purchase. One was for rehabbing; another was a potential rehab or drop. He wasn’t sure which it would be. The Realtor had tried to tell him that she already had offers coming in, and, if he was interested, he needed to make an offer soon. If that were the case, she shouldn’t have called then because he didn’t do anything under pressure and never just because somebody else told him to.
Breathing deeply of the fresh morning air, he stopped at the first place on Hastings and looked at the surroundings. This area was really up for a lot of renewal, and it was happening, just very slowly. A lot of these buildings needed complete remodels or rebuilds, but the businesses were either older, gone, or at the lower end of what he wanted to be associated with. A sex shop was in the middle of the block and what looked like a pawn shop right beside it, with multiple For Lease signs on other windows.
He frowned at that and studied the huge building that reminded him of the brownstones in England, where they were pinched between two other stone buildings. This one looked to have been built around 1960, and he checked his paperwork to see it was 1965. He nodded to himself. “Everything will have to be redone, from plumbing to electrical and probably even structural.”
He let himself into the building, as the Realtor had told him it was empty. As soon as he saw just how decrepit the structure actually was, he moved swiftly through the place. It was probably 50-50 on costs as to whether this one needed to be dropped or rebuilt as it was. With the property prices in Vancouver skyrocketing in the last five years, the price they were asking for this piece of crap was unbelievable.
He put a question mark beside the listing, but he sure as heck wasn’t in love with it, and he knew, if he decided to take it on, it would strictly be a financial decision and none other. He felt no joy in this building, and trying to restore her would be very expensive. She’d been unloved for a long time, and, although it was unfair to her, he wasn’t sure he needed to take on every building crying out for attention. He would have spent a lot more time and way more money if that had been his agenda.
As he headed toward the next address on his list, he noted it was now midmorning. He’d spent longer at the last building for sale than he’d intended, so something there must have drawn his attention. As he passed a coffee vendor, he stopped, snagged a coffee, and carried on. A bench was just up ahead. As he got closer, he almost stumbled, making him stop and collapse onto the bench with more force than intended, as a number slammed into his brain. The number thirteen.
“What the hell does that mean?” he asked out loud. He set his coffee beside him on the bench and rubbed his face.
The coffee vendor raced toward him. “Are you okay, sir?”
He looked over at the young girl with a smile, then nodded and said, “Sorry, I’m fine. I just tripped.”
She looked like she didn’t believe him. “Are you sure you didn’t have a heart attack?”