Chapter 6 Friday, May 6

Susan Paxton was finishing her work day when her husband called for the third time, "The kids want KFC, not hot dogs. Can you get home from get off work earlier?" How long will we live together?" She pretended to complain to her husband. "Hey, it was your idea to let them live with us. Didn't you still say last year that you should have another child? This is troublesome." "I'm in menopause, okay?" She was a little unhappy. "Women talk about everything when they're in menopause. Well, I'll buy them when I get home. No snacks though. They ate so many snacks last night." Cookies, ended up skipping dinner. I don’t want Lindsay to feel like we’re feeding the kids junk food all week.”

"When are they coming back?" "Two days, William," she said impatiently, "it's two days. You can't remember anything, keep asking. Call Greg and ask him to save us some steak .” "Okay. I guess it will rain for a week." "Then you can wear a hat every day." She felt better. "I want to eat steak, and I want to eat your grilled steak." "Oh, no problem, I'll do it. Thanks for the compliment." "Also, don't let them eat the cookies. I'll be right back. See you soon, dear." "See you later, baby." The other end of the phone hung up, and William smiled and put down the receiver.

Susan looked over to the sales shelf, at the new employee.This little girl's name is Sheckler, her name looks like an African surname, why did her parents give her such a bad name.He's only seventeen years old, but he behaves like he's fifty years old, very sophisticated.She was also stylishly dressed, with five earrings in each ear, piercings on the brow bone and tongue, and metal hoops. When Susan interviewed Sheckler, the first question Sheckler asked made Susan's impression of this new employee greatly reduced.According to Susan's idea, she wanted to let her get up and leave immediately, but Sheckler was the daughter of the judge who was dating the shopkeeper, so the interview was just a formality.

"I guess she's stealing from the store," Susan said to her good friend Ailish. "How could she steal something?" Ailish asked curiously, "There is a registration list for everything, and there are cameras at the registration office. She doesn't dare to leave or take anything without permission. However, I don't like it." Her kind. If Carmela is willing to keep her, no one else is to blame for what goes wrong." Susan shook her head and said, "I'm sure she's stealing. I bet." "But how did you steal it?" Airish asked, taking a handkerchief from his coat pocket and carefully tying up her silver-gray hair.

"I don't know how she stole it, it just feels that way," Susan said. "I can tell what kind of person she is." She squinted her eyes and made a gesture. Irish laughed, "Haha, you can see it, then look at it now. How did you see it?" "Because I was like her back then." She put her finger on her lips. "Actually, I was worse than her. Here's what I'm saying, Elish, she's a thief." "You said you were worse than this little Sheckler?" "Yes, I even had an alias in the Tao in the past, but don't ask. It's not something to brag about."

"Okay. Caught her while she was stealing, but we'll talk about it tomorrow. Let's get home from get off work now, it's freezing in here. It's going to rain for another day, and it's said that the sun won't come until the weekend. Then the weather will be real It looks like May." She said happily, grabbing her raincoat, "See you tomorrow." Except for Melissa, the rest of the staff got off work by five o'clock.Susan locked the door and hung the key on the door.She drew back a curtain and looked out.It was still raining so hard that the street could hardly be seen from the window.Passers-by on the street held their umbrellas, lowered their hat brims, and ran hurriedly through the cars and muddy water.Melissa can also come home from get off work with other colleagues, but she likes to stay until the end.She was one of those shy young girls who lived with her grandma near a market in Washington.She is always forgetful when doing things, but when it comes to money, she is never ambiguous.She stayed around every night to fold clothes neatly and check misplaced items, a job other girls didn't like to do.

"Clean up, go back early today." Susan said to Melissa, "I'm going to sort out the goods that will be put on the shelves tomorrow." "It's okay, you messed with you." Melissa said sincerely.But Susan shook her head firmly, "Let's go!" Melissa started packing her things, got her raincoat from the employee lounge, waved to Susan, and left. The surveillance video shows that everything is normal today.Next month, they will start to wholesale new autumn clothes, which means that they will have to take stock of all the stocks.Another summer is coming to an end, but it doesn't feel like it started off right.Time waits for no one.

Susan checked the videotapes, labeled them individually, and put them in a large envelope along with cash and checks.She put the envelope in the upright safe.Then, she went to the sales shelf, tidied up some scattered clothes, and put them on the shelves.She was checking sweatshirts on a revolving shelf when the outside door swung open.She heard the rain splashing in puddles outside.The cold dampness hit her back. She continued to squat in the middle of the sweatshirt, looking at the size of the clothes, and asked, "Did you forget to take something again? Why are you so forgetful every day, Melissa. Maybe you should try some ginkgo It fills the brain."

No one answered. She stood up and turned around, feeling something was wrong. Standing in front of her was a strange middle-aged man who had also been there during lunch.He was wearing a raincoat and a floppy hat pulled down over his forehead.He didn't look like the kind of customer who would come to spend money on buying expensive clothes like "Carmela" for his wife as a gift.Susan, who had disliked him at noon, was growing bored with him now. "Sorry, our store is closed now." She said firmly to the visitor, and at the same time looked up at the surveillance camera placed above her head to warn him.At this moment, she wished that the door had been locked when Melissa left.

She recalled the afternoon when the man seemed interested in the cameras installed in the store and observed where they were placed.He wandered around the store for a long time, picked up some clothes absent-mindedly, but didn't look at them seriously.Susan stayed by his side until he finally realized he was annoying and left. "We close at five o'clock." She pushed the strange man with her hand and said, "You can only come back tomorrow." The strange man laughed, showing his bad teeth.A horrific scar lay reclining on his neck.There is also a brown, disgusting bump behind one ear.She obviously didn't know him.With such a scarred face, there are still some things growing on it. Once you have seen it, you will never forget it.

She suddenly felt an ominous feeling, and a familiar shadow flashed in front of her eyes.At this time, two flashes of fire flashed, and with the sound of the gun, she felt that she had been shot.One bullet hit her in the back, another pierced through her tulle tunic and into her shoulder.She staggered and fell to her knees, holding a few sweatshirts in her hands.She raised her face and looked at the strange man in front of her in surprise. Sykes?The name flashed quickly in her mind.Earl Sykes?It can't be him. Sikes put the gun to her forehead and fired again, watching her body jerk back and forth as she sank face-to-face on the carpet.The bullet mushroomed through her skull. He pulled the brim of his hat down, then turned around and lowered his head to avoid the surveillance cameras, and walked out.Then he locked the door from the outside and joined the flow of others on their way home. Susan's husband was looking for her all night and early morning.He called the Pennsylvania and New Jersey police departments to see if she had been in a car accident.The Gloucester Heights Local Police Department went to check the clothing store where Susan worked. The store was dark and everything looked normal. At three o'clock in the morning, a New Jersey police officer found Susan's car on the side of the road near the Walt Whitman Bridge in a suburb.Nearly broken, William Paxton called Carmela, the owner of the clothing store, and told her to open the door so the police could go in and check. When the police arrived at the clothing store, Carmela's BMW had already parked in front of the store.It's not yet dawn, but street cleaners and garbage trucks are at work.Carmela opened the store door and pressed the power switch behind the display window.One police officer followed her into the office to check, while the other two hung around the door.The store was quiet, and everything seemed to be in order.The cash register is also normally closed. Finally, one of the two officers pointed to the back of the room and said to the other, "Frisco, you go over there and look at the shelves." "Okay." The Frisco policeman, who looked like dough, walked over to the sales area. He put his handcuffs on his arms, and walked with a dangling clang. "Everything seemed to be there," Carmela told police.She was also anxious about what had happened to Susan, but whatever had happened to her, it obviously didn't seem like it happened here.She closed the ledger, put it in a drawer, and asked, "Do you need to open the safe to check?" The officer who sent Frisco over to check shook his head and said, "No, ma'am. I think we're done." Suddenly, Frisco yelled and fell to the side of the shelf, dropping the handcuffs to the floor.Then, there was another scream from his blood-curdling body. Frisco tripped over the body on the ground, and his head just hit the bullet hole in Susan's head.This incident was circulated inside and outside the police station for a long time, and the more it spread, the more evil it became, and the more it spread, the more terrifying it became.Frisco's spirit was greatly stimulated, so he was unwilling to mention this matter again. Detective Payne arrived at 5.30am and took over the scene.His hair and face were still covered with raindrops, and he was holding a cup of coffee.He already knew about Frisco falling over the corpse, although it wasn't a good thing for a novice career to have that happen, with dead man's brains smeared on his face.But Frisco was a very brave young man, and he insisted on staying at the scene after washing the dirt off his face.So Payne patted him on the shoulder as he passed by.He knew that most of the other novices would apply for therapy if something like this happened to them, and then they could have an easy job in an office for the rest of their lives. Payne listened to the police officer's brief report on the scene, while Frisco recorded the scene at each entrance and exit. At dawn, criminal investigation technicians arrived and began to collect fingerprints left at the scene. "Collect the fingerprints on the safe carefully first. I will ask the shopkeeper to open the safe later." Payne ordered. The investigators nodded and started working. Payne walked to the side of the corpse and observed the fallen corpse from various angles.He knelt down, picked her hand away with the tip of a pen, brushed her hair away from her face, and observed the expression on her face before she died.He felt a pain in his heart, such a beautiful woman died like this.The bullet hole in the head went through the forehead and the back of the head, but no bullet was found on the wall or on the ground.He turned on a penlight, looked up and down the carpet, then crawled under the hangers, but found nothing. The bullet may have been severely deformed as it passed through the skull.Not enough impact to penetrate hardwood shelves or concrete walls.He focused on the hanger behind her. On a white blouse he found a halo of blood, extending in a cone over the body.He looked for the blood and found several oatmeal-pink turtleneck sweaters.Holding the flashlight, he looked through the sweaters one by one, and finally found a faint bullet mark on the hem of a sweater.He took a closer look, then bent down to look up.In the end, he half-kneeled down and picked up the sweater with the tip of the pen, and the bullet was properly stuck between the two sweaters.However, it was not the bullet that hit the head, it should be one of the two bullets that hit the body, and it did not touch the bone or tendon and penetrated the body. "I found a bullet." He pointed to the location of the sweater and shouted.A technician who was collecting evidence on the ground nodded to him and walked over.Payne stood up and walked over to Carmela to talk to her. The safe was opened, and Carmela found that the cash receipts, credit cards, and Susan's handwritten accounting statements were all intact.Even the cash box and check folder containing $300 were left untouched.In fact, the only thing that might be missing is a live surveillance videotape.However, the videotape was later found in the pocket of a new employee, identified as Sheckler. Payne can now be sure of two things.One is that the motive in this case was not robbery.Another point is that Susan Paxton didn't want to avoid going to work today, which means she didn't have a premonition that something would happen.Then this case must be related to personal grievances.He decided to talk to Susan's husband. The phone rang, and Carmela grabbed the receiver without thinking. She's a very charming woman, Payne thought, and a very successful woman at the same time.Payne learned in an article that she has clothing stores in cities including Boston and Washington, and is moving into menswear.Even when she was called out in the middle of the night, Carmela's hair and makeup were meticulously done to perfection.She has an aura about her that easily reminds people that she is an elite woman.But when she heard the voice from the microphone, she had a look of bewilderment on her face, and she didn't speak to the microphone.Payne heard a man's voice from the microphone: "Hello... are you listening..." Payne took the microphone from her and found William Paxton on the other end of the phone. Payne spoke softly to William, telling him to pass the microphone to the police officer who was staying with him at his home.Penn knew today was going to be a long, difficult day for William.When the truth is in front of him, it will be even more difficult for him to accept.Payne made arrangements with the police officer on the phone and gave some instructions.Payne hung up the phone, picked up the receiver and dialed 911 to call an ambulance.Carmela may be a calm, strong woman in business, but at the moment she looks vulnerable.Payne gave her his overcoat and draped it over her shoulders, seeing her lips turn purple.Susan's death must have been a great shock to her. There are pictures pinned to the wall with thumbtacks.One picture shows a group of people sitting around a birthday cake.Another is of a group of people having a picnic in shorts and shirts.In another, three women, Carmela and Susan, drink champagne in a boat.It was easy to spot Susan in the photo.She has bronze skin and big eyes, no make-up, and her hair falls straight to her shoulders.Although in his forties, he looks happy and healthy. Happiness, however, is only relative.Husbands or wives occasionally make mistakes.No matter how perfect the appearance of a person, they may also hide their unknown secrets. This is true for everyone.