By the time Bass found his suit coat and turned off all the lights except for the ones in the living room, the twenty minutes he had planned on became forty minutes, and then fifty minutes.
When he arrived at the restaurant, there were more customers inside than what he was expecting. He wondered if it was close to bar closing time.
Gale Halferson, the morning waitress, poured him a cup of coffee, which he asked to have “to go.”
Bass noted that Blakely was in the kitchen. He saw his hands set a plate loaded with burger and fries on the ledge of the pass-through window.
“Working kind of late, aren’t you?” Bass asked Gale, making conversation as she snapped the plastic lid onto his coffee order.
“Yeah, with Edie gone, it sort of screws up our schedules.”
“No Margaret?”
“She called in
