Chat - Archer Mayor [97]
Giordi, knowing his subordinate’s meticulous style—one of the reasons he’d been given this job—nodded patiently.
Aho continued. “So I went over the outgoing transfer manifests and the airport receiving logs, totaled everything that I’d signed out against everything that everyone I interviewed claimed to have received, and I found that the missing cartridge never made it out of my office—at least not officially.”
“Meaning somebody walked in, when you weren’t there, and swiped it?” Giordi asked, thinking privately that was what he’d assumed from the beginning, even though he was sympathetic to Aho’s resistance to the idea.
As if reading his mind, Aho flushed slightly. “It seems that way, yes.”
“Yeah,” Giordi mused. “That’s not too surprising. Your office is off of a high-traffic corridor. What’s your suggestion for a more secure setup?”
Aho brightened considerably at that. “I’ve already put in a requisition for a security Dutch door kind of arrangement, with a grilled upper half. It shouldn’t be much more inconvenient than the present system, and it’ll make things much tighter. But that’s not actually where I was headed.”
“I see.” Giordi smiled. “And where was that, exactly?”
Aho didn’t react to the question’s wry tone. “Well, having narrowed down the where part of the puzzle, I now had to find out the when.”
“Right,” his boss coaxed.
Aho pointed to an entry on one of his logs. “As you know . . . Actually, maybe you don’t . . . but I try to do things like receiving, unpacking, and cataloging at regular times, so that I have a routine I can follow. It helps keep me on track. As a result, I have a pretty good idea at what time of the day I probably set the cartridges out to be shipped to the airport division, putting them on the corner of my desk, as usual . . . well, as usual in the old days.”
“Right,” Giordi repeated.
“Not to make a big deal out of it,” Aho continued without irony, “I pretty much identified a half-hour time slot when somebody could have taken that cartridge—right here, between eleven thirty and noon.”
“Okay.”
Aho straightened triumphantly. “Well, the rest was easy. We know what shifts were in the building then, and we have the visitors’ log for people from the outside.” He laid a final sheet before his chief. “So, there you have it—a complete listing, as best I can figure it, of everyone who had access.”
Giordi glanced at the list—a significant number of people—and sat back in his chair. “Nice job, Matt. Above and beyond the call. I’ll make sure to check this out and share it with Agent Gunther and his people, and I’ll also make sure that your new door gets priority treatment.”
Aho smiled nervously, gathered up his exhibits, and headed out the door. Giordi waited until he’d left before getting out his bottle of aspirin.
An hour later, Lester Spinney crossed the VBI office in Brattleboro and retrieved the fax that had just arrived.
“Who from?” Sam asked from her desk.
“Burlington PD,” he answered vaguely, reading its cover sheet and contents. “It’s a list of all the people who were in their building when that Taser cartridge went missing.”
“Huh,” she reacted. “I thought that was a lost cause.”
Lester stopped in the middle of the floor, bringing the sheet closer to his eyes. “I’ll be damned.”
“What?”
“One of the visitors was John Leppman. Small