Chat - Archer Mayor [59]
He glanced at the notes he’d scribbled down to help keep him on track. “Speaking of just that, let’s look at what we’ve got so far. Two men without identity or background”—he eyed Lester and added—“Bald Rocky and Hairy Fred—both appear in town, both rent motel rooms, apparently to meet up with someone else, and both end up dead. We’re pretty confident that one, at least, was immobilized with a Taser before being dumped into the water. The other, we don’t know.” He looked up at them to explain further. “After we found a small Taser dart hole in Bald Rocky’s back, Hillstrom went over Fred, inch by inch. She found nothing similar. She now knows that Tasers don’t necessarily need to pierce the skin in order to work, but they usually do, and it’s pretty unlikely that you’d get two people in a row with minimal to no markings. My gut tells me that the Taser was used only once.”
“He probably only had the one cartridge,” Lester suggested, “since it looks like it was stolen.”
“I got a question,” Willy stated. “You still need a gun to shoot the cartridge. You can get both online. Why buy one and not the other?”
“Too early to know,” Joe answered, “but it seems like we’re dealing with a very careful guy. We’ve got to assume that both Fred and Rocky were acting on instructions when they checked into their motels. Too big a coincidence otherwise. And, you’ve got to admit, every detail was thought out, right down to the extra key being attached outside the room door.”
“Plus, the fact that they both came on foot,” Sammie commented.
Everyone in the room looked at her, drawn less by her words and more by the leading tone of her voice.
“What’re you thinking?” Lester asked first.
“I’m not sure, but when you’re talking about coincidence, that seems pretty big to me. Everybody drives around here.”
“Bald Rocky’s room looked like it might belong to a guy who rode a bus,” Willy mused.
“Right,” Joe agreed. “If maybe just recently. From his clothes and appearance, he seemed like a man heading down the social ladder, but not like he’d been that way for long.” He recalled Hillstrom’s appraisal of the man’s toenails, but kept it to himself. “Hairy Fred’s room was middle-class fare. Did you circulate both head shot pictures to the bus people?”
Sam nodded, adding, “Not to all the drivers, though. That’ll take longer.” As she spoke, she was pawing through the photographs they’d printed of both crime scenes. She held up a picture of the man who had identified himself as R. Frederick—the body found in the more upscale motel. “Look at the back of his right shoe,” she suggested, displaying it for all to see. “Just above the heel, on the leather.”
Like trained pets, they all leaned forward in their chairs, including Willy. Lester was the first to notice what she was talking about. “It’s worn from where he rests his heel on the floor of a car when he’s pushing the accelerator. He drove a lot.”
“Nice,” Joe said. “Okay. Let’s back up a bit. What you just said, Sam, about both of them arriving on foot. Why have them leave their cars behind?”
They knew what he was after—he’d been using this Socratic method for years.
“Identity,” Lester chimed in first, just as Willy muttered, “Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
Lester forged on: “Our cars have everything about us—papers, fingerprints, DNA samples, you name it.”
“You’re saying Fred pulled a fast one,” Sam said, her excitement building. “Disobeyed orders. Either stashed his car and walked, or just took the bus for the last leg of the trip.”
“I’m saying,” Joe expanded, “that we love our cars and we tend to bend the rules out of habit, especially if we’re already breaking the law.”
Willy said in a bored voice, “I already