Panic Button (8 page)

I’d been waiting for the opening. Yeah, it was kind of shallow of me, showing off
like this, but let’s face it, I wasn’t about to miss the opportunity to impress Nev.
Besides, I had a very real skill I could offer at this point in the investigation
and I could guarantee that neither Nev nor Jason could hold a candle to it. It would
have been careless of me not to step forward and use my expertise.

I ducked into the back room, got a special keychain from the drawer in the worktable,
and breezed back into the shop. “Come with me,” I said, including both Nev and Jason
in the invitation, and together, the three of us stepped outside.

There’s always something happening on Thursday night in Old Town, and that night was
no exception. The music was cranked at the bar down the street, its deep bass line
punctuating our steps and vibrating my bones. Lights
sparkled from the display window of the interior design studio that had opened almost
directly across from the Button Box only a couple weeks earlier, and tourists scrambled
all around us, heading for nearby clubs and restaurants. The scene was just as lively
and interesting as our merchants and residents association promised tourists it would
be on our website and in our e-mail newsletter.

When we stepped under the yellow crime-scene tape that was draped across the entrance
to the alleyway and on to the brick walkway that led back to the courtyard, though,
it was as if we were entering another world.

There, the music was muted and it was nearly pitch dark. Still, when we stepped from
between my brownstone and the one next door and into the courtyard, and Nev felt along
the back wall of my brownstone for the switch that would turn on the faux gaslight
near the park bench, I stopped him.

“We’ll have to look for the enamel button and the metal button once it’s light,” I
told him. “But if we’re going to find that uranium glass button, this is the ideal
time to do it. We need to do it in the dark.”

I pulled out my keychain and switched on the light at the end of it.

“Hey, it’s a black light.” Jason was young, but perceptive enough.

He couldn’t see me nod, so I explained. “Uranium glass really does have uranium in
it. It was added to the glass prior to melting, before the melted glass was pressed
into the button molds. And when a UV light is shined on an object with uranium in
it—”

“Cool!” Jason was obviously a science nerd. “It glows.
Hey,” he added for Nev’s benefit, “when it comes to buttons, she really knows her
stuff.”

Jason was right.

But only if I found the uranium glass button.

Keeping the thought in mind, I swept the light over the ground near our feet, and
when I didn’t see a thing, I moved a couple steps and began the sweep all over again.
As I mentioned before, the courtyard wasn’t big, but looking through it inch by careful
inch still took time. The minutes ticked by with me, Nev, and Jason walking side by
side, scanning the ground, and after a while, we were nearly to the center of the
courtyard.

Nearly at the spot where I’d found Angela’s body.

Darn it, I tried my best to act like it was no big deal, but before I could control
the reaction, my spine stiffened and my breath caught.

He didn’t say a word, Nev just slipped his arm through mine.

I didn’t thank him. For one thing, Jason was standing on Nev’s left, and for all I
knew, he hadn’t noticed Nev’s gallant gesture. For another…well, I was afraid if I
tried to speak, my voice would crack and the raw emotions I was hiding would come
tumbling out.

This wasn’t the time for that.

Though it was most definitely the place.

I skimmed the black light over the pavement where, hours before, Angela had been sprawled
on her back, her eyes staring up into a clear morning sky she couldn’t see, her mouth
gaping in an expression that was at once a sign that she’d been gasping for air and
an indication of how surprised she’d been by the attack.

Now, of course, the body had been removed, and nothing remained to show the horror
that had happened at the spot the night before, nothing more than the chalk outline
of Angela’s body.

“No…” My words were tight in my throat, and I coughed. “No sign of the button here,”
I said, and I kept on looking.

Jason wasn’t convinced. Not that I could say for certain, of course, since it was
nearly impossible to see his face in the dark, but I heard the little click of his
tongue that told me that while he might be impressed by the mumbo-jumbo of the black
light as a way to locate the uranium button, he wasn’t one hundred percent certain
it was going to work.

“If there were still buttons here, we would have found them,” he said. Jason might
be enthusiastic when it came to the theories of science, but obviously he wasn’t all
that thrilled about the grunt work. He was bored, and when Nev and I stepped forward,
beyond the park bench and into the back part of the courtyard, he hung back. “A glass
button. Isn’t that what you said it was?” Jason asked. “It was sunny this afternoon,
remember. If there was a glass button out here, we would have seen it shining in the
light.”

“Not if there wasn’t much of it left to shine.” I guess Jason heard the very real
relief that washed through my voice because he hurried over to stand at my side and
sucked in a breath of wonder when he looked at the ground where the light was trained.

The brick there was coated with what looked to be a dusting of particles that glowed
an eerie green in the black light.

“It got stepped on and broken!” Jason almost made this sound like a good thing, as
if the fact that the button wasn’t whole—and whole buttons were what his team was
looking for—actually made a difference.

“It’s still evidence,” Nev reminded him, and though it took a couple seconds for the
fact to register, the kid finally got the message. He dashed inside for another evidence
bag, and the brushes and such he would need to make sure he picked up all the specks
of the smashed button.

“That…” Nev waited until Jason was gone before he put his hands on my shoulders and
turned me to face him. “That was amazing.”

I didn’t try to hide my smile. “It was pretty cool, wasn’t it?”

“Nobody else would have known about the button glowing in the black light. Nobody!”
Even through the gloom, I saw the wink of Nev’s smile. “You’re—”

“The world’s greatest button expert?” I hitched my hands around his waist.

“I was going to say…well, you know. But if you’d rather be known as the world’s greatest
button expert…”

“How about the world’s greatest fabulous button expert?”

“Done.” He leaned a hairsbreadth nearer and I thought he might kiss me, but the sounds
of Jason scrambling his way back down the alleyway put an end to that. I dropped my
hands, and Nev backed away.

“Can I use the black light?” Jason asked, his voice high with excitement. He swallowed
down what apparently sounded even to him like too much of an unprofessional
reaction. Jason cleared his throat and forced his voice down an octave. “I mean, of
course, it will be easier for me to retrieve the shards of glass if I can use the
UV light to find them.”

“Of course.” I handed him the keychain and we left him to his work.

Back inside, Nev walked right over to the desk, retrieved the photo of the uranium
glass button, and plunked it down in an empty spot on the nearest table. “When Jason
brings what’s left of that button in, we’re ready for it,” he said.

He was right. “I only wish…” I strolled over to the nearest table, automatically letting
my gaze roam over bag after bag after bag of buttons. “I wish we could figure out
if it means anything.”

“You mean the buttons that are missing?”

“I mean the charm string being used as a weapon in the first place.” The thought creeped
me out, and I shivered. “Who would do such a thing?”

“Professional opinion?” Nev almost perched himself on the edge of my rosewood desk,
but he stopped and reconsidered. It was a delicate antique, and he knew better than
to press his luck. “My guess is the murderer didn’t come here to kill Angela. If he
had—and I’m only saying
he
in a general sort of way, not because we know anything about the killer—if he had,
he would have brought a weapon with him.”

“So it could have been random.”

Thinking, Nev scrunched up his nose. “Weird random. He obviously lured her into the
alleyway, and what woman in her right mind would allow something like that to happen?”

“Except Angela wasn’t in her right mind. Not last night. I told you, she was really
upset.”

“Nobody’s so upset they completely forget about safety.”

“So what you’re saying is that you think she knew her killer.”

“I think…” Nev pressed a hand to his stomach. “I think I didn’t have time to eat lunch
today and I’m starving. After Jason gets these buttons packed and out of here, let’s
get a burger.”

I wasn’t about to argue. Now that I thought about it, I hadn’t eaten lunch, either.
At first, I was too upset. Then, I was just plain too busy printing out all those
photos and helping the techs match them to the proper buttons. Hungry or not, though,
I wasn’t done wondering. “Could it have been robbery?”

Nev shrugged and I knew how much he hated to do that in answer to a question about
a case. “There was no purse found with the body.”

I closed my eyes, thinking back to the night before. “I don’t think she had one with
her.”

“And that seems odd, doesn’t it?”

It did, and I tried again to picture everything that had happened when Angela came
for the charm string. “She had her car keys in her hand,” I said.

Nev nodded. “We found those under the body.”

“And when I handed her the hatbox that she’d brought the charm string to me in…” I
walked through the motions of all I remembered, stepping back toward the workroom,
then out again into the shop, my hands out as if I were carrying the box. “I handed
her the hatbox,
and it wasn’t like she had to hoist her purse up on her shoulder to take it from me.
Or move it from one hand to the other. She just grabbed the hatbox and got out of
here. I’m pretty sure I’m right. She wasn’t carrying a purse.”

“Which, unfortunately, doesn’t prove much of anything. Maybe Angela’s money is what
our killer was after, and when he realized she didn’t have any, he got angry. Or maybe
he thought there was something of some real value…OK, I’m sorry!” He rolled his eyes
and groaned. “I know you think the buttons are valuable, but a street thug sure wouldn’t
think that. He might have seen Angela carrying the hatbox, figured there must have
been something worth stealing in it, and gotten mad when he realized there was nothing
inside but buttons.”

I shivered. “That takes a special sort of cold person, doesn’t it?”

“Unfortunately, there are plenty of them out in the world.”

That uncomfortable thought was interrupted by Jason arriving with the newest evidence
bag. “I’ve got them all cataloged,” he said, reaching for the clipboard and the list
numbered from one to nine hundred ninety-seven that he’d worked on as I matched buttons
with photos. He added the uranium button to the list. “Now all I have to do is put
these boxes in my truck and get them downtown.” He looked from me to Nev. “I don’t
suppose you two—”

“We’d love to help.” I was smiling when I sidled past Nev and got to work. Helping
Jason with the buttons gave me one last chance to look at them, and besides, there
was a burger in my future. The sooner we finished, the sooner we could eat.

We helped Jason pack the boxes and load them into his truck, and once we were done,
Nev and I returned to the Button Box to turn out the lights and lock up.

I grabbed my purse out of the back room. “It’s been a really long day.”

“You got that right. And if I don’t come up with some answers about this case soon,
it’s only going to be the first of many. What do you think, Josie?” We already had
most of the lights in the shop off, but when he stopped at my desk and picked up the
two remaining photos, I looked at them, too. “If we don’t find these two buttons,
does that mean someone took them?”

I wished I had the answer to that one, and I told him that right before I added, “The
metal button, no. There’s no reason anyone would want it. You saw the charm string
buttons laid out on the tables. There must have been at least two hundred metal buttons.
Buttons with eagles on them. Buttons with animals on them. All of them—including this
one that’s missing—are pretty common late-nineteenth-century buttons. There’s nothing
special about them. In fact, the artwork on the one that’s missing isn’t even particularly
good. See…” Yeah, the light was bad, but I leaned over and pointed at the details
on the picture as best as I was able. “It’s a town of some sort, and a building of
some sort. Very uninspired, and not something a collector would find especially appealing.”

“But the other one…”

“Ah, the other one.” I looked at that photo, too, and I
swear, even in the dim light, that enameled button just about jumped off the page
and shouted its beauty to all the world. “If someone brought that button in here,
I’d pay plenty for it, and I’d be glad to do it.”

“But not everyone would know that.”

It seemed a no-brainer. At least to me. “Anyone who saw it would know it’s beautiful.”

Was that a pointed look I got from Nev? I used the dark as an excuse to pretend I
didn’t notice. “Come on, admit it, Josie. Pretty or not pretty, ninety-nine out of
a hundred people would walk by that button and not give it a second look. It’s just
a button. And that’s just what they’d think. It’s just a button.”

“So what you’re saying is that a common thief—”

“Wouldn’t bother with the button, no matter how pretty it was. I mean, OK, even if
our killer knew that buttons could be sold to collectors, wouldn’t he have grabbed
more of them? Why would just these two be missing? And here’s my prediction, we’ll
find that metal one tomorrow. It probably just rolled under something and the techs
missed it the first time through. They were pretty overwhelmed by all those buttons.”