Chat - Archer Mayor [46]
Angela Lundy, the maid, told Lester that when she’d entered the room the following morning to clean it, she barely found anything to do. The bed was still made and the trash empty. The toilet and shower stall hadn’t been touched. She conceded that, in general, she only cleaned or straightened what most obviously needed attention, and she stared at him blankly when he asked whether she ever went into the desk drawer to check on the stationery supplies. She did say that she found only one of the two issued key cards.
Les didn’t bother asking about her technique for cleaning under the bed.
But, despite the time the two men spent in Rockwell’s former quarters, neither of them had a single eureka moment. In fact, the more they collected, the less they thought they had anything of worth.
Until Willy, with his magnifying glass, suddenly hunched over, his nose two inches off the carpeting.
“What’ve you got?” Spinney asked.
“Hand me the tweezers,” Willy answered him.
Les watched as his partner painstakingly extracted something minute and dropped it carefully into a small glassine envelope, which he then handed over for scrutiny.
“Can you figure it out?” he asked with a knowing smile.
Lester held it under the glare of his flashlight. Inside the envelope was a single brightly colored dot, much like a piece of confetti, looking as if it were made of plastic. Remarkably, however, it had numerals stamped across its miniature surface.
Lester straightened as if pricked by a pin. He knew he was looking at a serial number, and he remembered seeing this kind of tiny item before.
“Holy cow.”
Willy’s smile broadened. “A Taser tag, right?”
Tasers, the well-known electrifying alternative to a baton or a shot of pepper spray, had a feature few people knew about. Along with the twin wire-trailing barbs that flew from the device upon being fired, each Taser cartridge contained a cluster of about forty tiny confettilike plastic flakes, or “tags,” that were stamped with the cartridge’s unique serial number. The logic was that every Taser could thus be traced to the person using it—a handy detail when and if it came to conducting a postshoot analysis.
The fact that every police officer knew that his or her Taser shot, like the bullets from a gun, could be traced back to the shooter was supposed to be a deterrent to reckless acts of abandon.
Or, as just possibly in this case, any acts of criminal mischief.
Lester stared at Willy in astonishment. “Damn. Here’s hoping that where there’s a number, there’s a name.” He waved the small envelope between his fingers. “This should be interesting.”
Willy, however, in keeping with his darker outlook, had already gone beyond such a prize. He frowned and nodded slightly, before suggesting, “Yeah, and where there’s a name, there might be a cop. ’Cause whoever shot it knew enough to pick up all but this one tag—and why.”
Sammie Martens watched from her car as the teenage woman she was waiting for left the restaurant after closing, waving to her fellow employees and adjusting her coat against the cold winter breeze. It was almost midnight.
Beth Ann Agostini—Andy Griffis’s former girlfriend—was on foot, despite the weather and the lack of sidewalks on Route 9 beyond West Brattleboro. She didn’t live far away, true—in an affordable-housing complex only a mile down the road—but any pedestrian travel was quasi-suicidal, given the speed and accuracy of some of the late-night motorists out here. Still, Sam knew that Agostini took this route every night and was probably an expert at keeping an eye peeled for traffic.
Either way, it wasn’t a relaxing walk, especially after a long day. Which was exactly what Sam hoped to have working to her advantage. She’d done her homework, as usual. Beth Ann didn’t like the police much, had had her run-ins with them over the years, but, according to Sam’s informant, had yet to become too hard-bitten.
If approached correctly.
As Beth Ann reached the halfway point across the restaurant’s broad parking lot, Sam put her car into gear,