Chat - Archer Mayor [51]
“Yeah, you bastard. I meant to mail you a grenade for that. You want some coffee, by the way?”
Joe shook his head. “Not after that, I don’t.”
“What can I do for you, then?” Tim asked, getting down to business.
Joe pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket and handed it over. Tim recognized its contents immediately.
“I take it there’s a punchline?”
“Stamped on a Taser tag. It—and only it—was under the motel room bed of a guy we found dead elsewhere, stripped of all identification.”
Tim looked up at him. “The floater on that BOL you sent out a while back? No shit. I circulated his picture at every one of our shift briefings. Got nothing, of course. And you only found the one tag? You know there are supposed to be up to forty of these things in each cartridge.”
“Meaning, whoever used it tried their best to clean up,” Joe agreed. “It got one of my guys wondering if maybe a cop was involved.”
Frowning, Tim considered the scrap of paper a moment longer before placing it on his knee and stating, “I bet you’re going to say you traced this serial number to us, right?”
“You have a cartridge go missing?” Joe asked.
But Giordi shook his head. “Not that I heard. Of course, I might not’ve been told, either.” He got up, reached for the phone on his desk, pushed the intercom button, and asked the voice on the other end to join them. His demeanor had lost its earlier joviality.
An older woman appeared at the door thirty seconds later. “Chief?”
“Kathy, did we have a Taser cartridge disappear anytime recently?”
The woman glanced quickly at Joe, whom she didn’t know, and immediately fell into professional mode. “I don’t know, Chief. I’ll get hold of Matt and have him report to you directly.”
Giordi nodded. “Thanks. Right away.”
She disappeared as Tim turned to Joe. “The shit just hit the fan there. We run pretty close herd on that kind of equipment, for obvious reasons, and Matt Aho, being the supply officer, is the go-to guy. If I were Kathy, I’d be telling him to put on a flak jacket right now.”
But he was smiling as he said it, lessening Joe’s apprehension about what might happen next.
A minute later, a concerned-looking young man showed up, a three-ring binder in hand.
“Something missing, Chief?” he asked.
Joe and Giordi got up as the latter made the introductions. “Matt Aho, this is Special Agent Joe Gunther of the VBI.” Tim handed over Joe’s note before continuing, “This belongs to a Taser tag. His people found it at a crime scene down south—a homicide. Apparently, it belongs to us.”
Aho crossed over to a side table and laid his binder open. He began flipping through pages of equipment log entries. Finally, he stopped and ran his finger down the length of one particular sheet.
“Got it,” he announced at last, his voice tense.
Both men leaned forward to see the line just above his index.
Aho explained. “Last month, three cartridges were issued to Brian Palmiter. He was on airport security then.” Aho glanced at Joe. “Yours was one of them.”
“Did he ever report it missing?” Tim asked.
“Not that I heard,” Aho answered cautiously. “He sure hasn’t asked for any more, which implies he didn’t use them up.”
“You said he was on airport detail then,” said Joe. “Is he still?”
“I think he rotated off,” Aho answered.
Tim crossed back to his phone and dialed a number. “Locate Brian Palmiter and have him report to my office right away.”
He listened for a moment before responding, “Great. That’s perfect.”
He hung up and looked over at Joe. “Got lucky. He’s in the building.”
Giordi walked back to Aho. “That’s it for the moment, Matt. Leave the log behind. I’ll make sure it gets back to you ASAP.”
Aho nodded to Joe and took his leave without further comment. In the next few minutes, Joe could imagine the air thickening with the murmurings spreading from just outside Tim Giordi’s office door. He was all too familiar with how police departments were hotbeds of gossip, rumor, and randomly circulating tidbits. Long after this little mystery was resolved, people