Page 54 of The Hard Way

“Why would she tell? There’s no way she doesn’t do time if she’s the one who fed him the cheese. Without a lot of pressure, anyway. And Hank won’t confess. He’s a stupid, sneaky asshole, and that’s the hardest kind of guy to get a confession out of. These are things Odin knows.”

I wrapped my arms around myself, thinking about my beautiful sisters—especially Vanessa. Even a day in prison would be unimaginable…but twenty-eight years? “It isn’t fair. They did nothing wrong. Vanessa can’t go away—she couldn’t handle prison.”

“We won’t let her go away,” Zeus said.

“Over my dead body does she go away,” Odin growled, strolling out of the shadows.

“But we’re going to exhaust our death-free options first,” Zeus said. “Because if we start doing professional fucking hits and extreme interrogation, that shows Denko we’re involved.”

Odin didn’t address this last bit. “Door open, alarm off. Come on.”

We headed into the dark store. It was weird. I’d never been in there all alone.

“Here we are inside the Pig,” Odin said.

“Atthe Pig,” I said.

They both snickered.

“Hungry?” Zeus asked.

I groaned. I was still stuffed from dinner. “We have to stop eating those steaks!”

We headed over to the cheese area.

“Fuck,” Zeus sighed.

“What?”

“No cameras.”

“Crap,” I said.

“But they have them up front. I saw them when we talked to Warren. Let’s at least see who came in when. We know somebody walked the cheese in. Somebody walked in with a bagful of cheese and walked out with no cheese. Let’s see if that somebody was Hank.”

We headed back through the silver door and up a small staircase to the offices and computer area. It was quiet, computer screens glowing softly, one with a bouncing Mickey Mouse screensaver.

Odin got down to business to see how to access the video files. Zeus and I worked out a time frame. We decided Hank or whoever did it would have had to sneak in the cheese during a twenty-four-hour period between Wednesday morning, when the cheese was tossed, and Thursday morning, when the first purchase of tainted cheese was made, according to the FDA report. That first purchase was made by Gwen Schuster, who worked at the movie theater up in Dieter’s Corners. I kind of knew her—she had a daughter Candace’s age.

“Bingo,” Odin said. He hit a few buttons, and the screen split into four squares. The top two squares showed views of checkout lanes, and the bottom two squares showed the entrances—one on the west side, one on the east.

“Let’s focus on the entrances and look for just Nancy,” Zeus said. “Then we look at who came in the half hour before Nancy. If our theory is right, that somebody took them out of the garbage and heated them up or whatever and brought them to the store, then there were only a few toxic cheeses in that case, right? They had to make sure Nancy could find the right one. Either they marked them or set them somewhere.”

“Right, Nancy would need to not buy the wrong cheese,” I said, impressed by all this strategic thinking. It was like a chess game in reverse.

Odin hit the buttons. We watched people going in and out of the store three times as fast as they do in normal life.

“We should take turns,” Odin said after a while. “This’ll take a few hours.” He turned to Zeus. “I could use more dessert. Did I see some chocolate sauce down there?”

Zeus rose. “Don’t mind if I do.”

He left, and Odin and I zoned out in front of the most boring TV show ever.

“You’re sure you don’t want anything?”

“You guys are seriously going to make me fat.”

He came around behind me and rubbed my shoulders. “I could make him confess,” Odin said.

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