The Bag with Too Many Colors
Keisha’s handbag looked too cheerful for a crime scene.
Red cloth beside yellow. Green triangles. Blue squares. A strip of purple velvet from one of her mother’s church dresses. It was the kind of bag people complimented because it seemed bright, handmade, harmless.
That was why she had chosen it.
No one searched softness first.
At the police station, she sat in an interview room with a towel around her shoulders and the bag on the table between her and Inspector Holt. Marcus stood by the door until Graham nodded him out to check on Keisha’s daughter.
“Her name is Amara,” Keisha said quickly.
“I’ll make sure Officer Bell uses it.”
That mattered more than it should have.
Keisha opened the bag and pulled out ordinary things first: keys, lip balm, a bus pass, a folded scarf, a packet of tissues softened by rain. Then she reached into the lining at the bottom and found the slit her sister had sewn for her two weeks earlier.
Out came a sealed envelope.
Graham did not touch it until she pushed it toward him.
“I work temporary admin for the housing recovery office,” she said. “Three days a week. Filing, calls, transport logs. People think temps don’t read what passes through their hands.”
“Do you?”
“I read patterns.”
She told him about the missing emergency grants intended for tenants displaced after the winter floods. Small transfers at first. Then larger ones. Contractor payments to companies that seemed to exist only on paper. Families waiting in damp flats while money vanished into polite accounts.
One tenant, Mrs. Althea Brown, had been old enough to stop fearing officials. She asked questions at the public desk every Thursday until the morning she was found dead in her flat after what the report called a fall.
Keisha’s voice changed when she said that.
“Mrs. Brown was not clumsy.”
Graham leaned forward.
“You reported this?”
“To my supervisor. He told me grief makes patterns where there aren’t any.” She laughed without humor. “Then my shifts got cut.”
The envelope held copies of transfer logs, calendar fragments, and the name of a private security consultant who had visited the office the same week Mrs. Brown died.
Graham’s face gave almost nothing away.
Almost.
Keisha saw the small tightening around his eyes.
“You know the name,” she said.
“I know enough to say you were right to hide this.”
“And enough to know why someone wanted me off that bus?”
May you like
He looked through the rain-streaked station window before answering.
“Yes,” he said. “Enough to know the attacker at the curb was not where this started.”
