Chapter 6: Customers

"I have a camera over the back door," I told the officers.

The taller one looked up from his notebook. "Does it record?"

"My father put it in the day I took the lease. He said a bakery with one lock is a bakery waiting to be robbed."

Emmett was standing beside me with glass in his hair.

He said nothing, and I was grateful.

I brought out the office laptop and opened the camera program with fingers that still weren't steady.

The two officers crowded behind me.

At 3:41 a.m. the back door opened.

Nobody had forced it. Someone had turned a key.

A figure in a gray hood stepped into the prep room, took the rolling pin off its hook and left again, closing the door softly.

The hood was down against the cold and I couldn't see a face.

But on the alley side, the second camera caught the figure crossing to a car parked under the streetlight.

The figure stopped beside the driver's door, pulled out a phone to check it and tipped her head back to read the screen.

The light fell full on her face.

Brown hair in a low bun, and the small gap between her front teeth.

"That's Odette Kern," I said.

The shorter officer glanced at me. "You know her?"

"She works for my husband."

"She has a key to your shop?"

"Not from me."

I thought of the spare key on Gavin's ring, hanging by our front door, the one I had given him the day I signed the lease.

The first customers had gathered on the sidewalk outside, drawn by the broken window and the police lights.

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