Ashes to Dust (Las Vegas Mystery)

p.m. on the fourteenth. They’ve got clear video of her picking the boots out, and again at the checkout counter. The manager said he’ll print out a dozen photos of her. We can pick them up in fifteen minutes at the entrance. I’ll meet you there in front of the shopping carts.”

Alice James sat erect at her desk, her forearms resting on the arm supports of her swivel chair, her fingers interlaced.
    Jim Snow escorted their guests into her office and seated them in the client chairs across from Alice. He then seated himself in his swivel chair at the end of Alice’s desk and crossed his arms.
    Alice’s voice was calm, the words flowing evenly. “Thank you for coming by so late in the evening on such short notice,” she said. “We appreciate that. But this is very important. We have something urgent we need to discuss with Crystal.”
    Crystal Olson sat with her hands in her lap, her shoulders limp. She watched Alice’s face with glassy eyes, her eyebrows drawn together and her mouth hanging open. Her mother, Kathy, sat next to her with an identical expression. Neither of them spoke.
    “Crystal,” Alice said, “you told us that after you got off work on the fourteenth, you went shopping.”
    “That’s right,” Crystal said.
    “Do you mind telling us where you went shopping?”
    She shrugged. “Meadows Mall.”
    “Did you buy anything there?” Alice said.
    Crystal shook her head. “I tried on a few things at Macy’s. Decided I didn’t like them.”
    “Did you buy any shoes?” Alice said.
    Crystal’s eyes widened, along with her mouth. “No. Why?”
    Alice opened her bottom desk drawer, lifted the work boots out, and set them on the desk. They landed with a solid thud.
    “Did you buy any boots like these, Crystal?” Alice asked.
    Crystal and her mother stared at the boots as if they were a basket full of squirming snakes.
    “No,” she said, her voice a dry rasp.
    “How about at Walmart—on Eastern Avenue?”
    Crystal said nothing. She continued to stare at the boots, her face losing color.
    Alice opened the drawer in front of her. She reached inside for the stack of photos and pulled them out. She set them on the desk. “You might want to look through these,” Alice said. “In case you forgot where you went shopping and what you bought.”
    Alice picked them up and moved them to the far side of the desk in front of Crystal.
    Crystal and her mother stared at the top photo. It was a clear printout of Crystal standing in front of the size twelve men’s shoe rack, examining a pair of the brown work boots.
    Finally Crystal spoke. “Okay. So I bought a pair of men’s boots. They were a gift for my fiancé.”
    “Where are they?” Alice asked. “Can you show them to us?”
    “Huh?”
    “Where are the boots you bought from this store?”
    She stared at Alice as though in shock. She said nothing.
    Kathy Olson finally spoke, her words rushed. “Alright. How much do you want for these pictures—this information?” Her eyes shifted from the pictures to Alice, then Jim, and back to Alice.
    Alice leaned forward slightly. “This isn’t for sale, Kathy.”
    “The reason we asked Crystal to stop by,” Snow piped up, “is to show her what we now know. These pictures were taken at four thirty-five p.m. on the fourteenth of September, not long before Laura Roberts’s corpse was discovered burning near Stober Road. The tread on the boots you bought, Crystal, which are identical to these on the desk, match perfectly the tracks in the dirt near the burn site.”
    “There must be a reasonable price we can pay for this information,” Kathy tried again.
    “There isn’t,” Snow said. “We’ve concluded our investigation, and as a favor to Crystal, we decided to show her what we know before we turn it over to Metro Homicide. Now, we can wait a reasonable amount of time before we do that. This will allow Crystal, if she wishes, to go to the police with an attorney and tell them everything that happened.”
    Kathy thrust her hand up, covering her mouth as though she were about to vomit. Crystal’s gaze wandered back to the boots. Color began to return to her cheeks, her mouth open as though emitting a silent scream. She stared at them as though they were the remains of her dead roommate.
    Kathy covered her face completely with both hands, her eyes squeezed shut.
    A few moments passed with everyone frozen in place, no one speaking.
    Eventually Kathy Olson removed her hands from her face