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remained seated. “Yes?”
    “That idiot Woskowicz isn’t here, is he?” Helland said it like he didn’t give a damn if Woskowicz was listening from the next room.
    Against my will, my opinion of the detective went up a few notches; anyone who could zero in on Woskowicz’s idiocy within minutes of meeting him deserved some respect. Although, Woskowicz’s intellectual failings weren’t exactly hard to suss out. “No.”
    “The cretin actually walked right into my crime scene. No gloves, no booties, no common sense. God knows what evidence he destroyed or corrupted.” Ignoring Joel, Helland focused on me, his pale gray eyes assessing. “I need a liaison here at the mall. You’re it.”
    “I don’t wa—”
    “For starters, I’ll need blueprints of the mall, names of all employees with contact data, video from any cameras that would have line of sight on either the interior or exterior entrance to Diamanté, and a corned beef sandwich with extra mustard. Think you can handle that?”
    “Yes, sir!” Joel piped up before I could tell the man what to do with his corned beef sandwich. “EJ already got me started—”
    “I’ll have the documents and video to you within the hour,” I said, keeping my tone professional.
    But Helland was already out the door and I doubted if he heard me.
    A little browbeating got me the blueprints from the mall manager’s office in record time. But the personnel list was another matter. They didn’t have one. Each of the stores maintained their own list of employees; no central list existed. Quigley’s office maintained personnel records only on the mall’s direct hires: janitorial staff, security staff, and mall administration. I accepted the list of those employees, knowing it wouldn’t satisfy Helland, and crossed back to the security office where Joel had finished transferring the camera data to a CD. We sat side by side in front of his computer monitor, fast-forwarding through a whole lot of nothing, looking for a murderer hauling a body into Diamanté. Detective Helland was going to be disappointed by the video evidence, I suspected. Although the mall had approximately one hundred cameras, only about a third of them were actually hooked up. The rest were for show, to scare crooks away from shoplifting or vandalism, the video equivalent of “This house protected by So-and-So Security” stickers on the windows of a house with no alarm system. A flicker of movement on the screen caught my eye and I paused the CD.
    “Weasel,” Joel said.
    He was right; it was only Billy Wedzel, the midshift officer responsible for mall security from eleven at night to seven in the morning. The camera had caught activity near the movie theater until the last film let out at just past midnight, but nothing after that. A couple of fuzzy cars entered the north garage at just after two a.m., moving with the stuttering motion that not enough frames per second produced. I wished Helland and crew good luck in getting a license plate number. The cars were on the opposite side of the mall from Diamanté, anyway, and probably had no connection with the murder.
    “Well, that wasn’t worth wasting a CD on,” Joel observed, disappointed.
    I popped the CD out and slid it into a case. “Maybe the murder will get management to upgrade the camera system,” I said, not believing it. Cost cutting was the order of the day at Fernglen, and it would take a terrorist attack or an alien invasion, I figured, to get Quigley to allocate more money to security. Taking the blueprints, the abbreviated personnel list, and the CD, I glided back toward Diamanté.
    Crime scene tape still roped off the area, but the crowd had diminished. The body was gone from the display window, I noted with a glance, and Gina Kissell and her baby had left. The lone cop standing at the entrance to the wing looked over at Detective Blythe Livingston when I told him I had documents requested by Detective Helland. She stood talking to