Menquez remained bent forward.
“Have you lost your job?” Walt asked rhetorically. “I suspect you have. Are you in jail? Not yet. Cut your losses, Gilly. Play it smart.”
“I didn’t do nothing.”
“Gilly…”
He leaned into Walt and whispered harshly. “You got nothing.”
Walt dropped his fingers onto the space bar. The black and white video ran on the overhead screen, winning Gilly’s attention. But it played too quickly for him to see it for exactly what it was.
Walt hit the rewind button and played the clip again.
The screen showed an elevated view of a quiet street with the signs of Ketchum establishments lining either side. There was an Inter-Mountain Bank sign a block in the distance. The short clip played out as a series of stills-like from a bank’s security cameras. A Forest Service pickup truck entered the frame, moved down the street, and pulled into a parking space in front of the bank.
“Recognize that truck? Traffic cams, Gilly. Did you know Ketchum has traffic cams now?”
Menquez’s face went a pasty gray. He looked at Walt and back to the overhead screen as Walt played the clip again.
“You see the time stamp?” Walt asked. “Days before you claimed to have found the SUV. There’s a time stamp on the withdrawal as well.”
Menquez licked his dry lips. He looked like a beached fish.
“We can get you into treatment, Gilly. We can do that before all this comes out, so the Service will foot the bill for it. You’ll come out clean and sober and on your feet, and maybe you even keep your job.”
“I got kids. A family. I needed that money. I wouldn’t have taken it.”
“You’ve been drinking up your paycheck, Gilly. I see this all the time. This is nothing new to me. Let me help you.”
“I didn’t mean to screw things up for you. I found the truck. I swear I was going to tell you. But there was the wallet on the floor. The guy had written his PIN number on a piece of paper tucked into his wallet. I mean, how stupid is that? It’s like he was asking me to do it.”
“I need you to run it down for me. I need every detail exactly as it happened.”
“Including the bat?” Gilly said.
Walt felt a bubble in his chest and did his best to suppress his surprise.
“How come no one found that bat?” Gilly asked. “That wouldn’t have nothing to do with you, would it, Sheriff?”
Walt wasn’t going to answer that. “Every detail,” he said.
“Including the bat? Or am I supposed to leave out the bat? Then again, maybe this is up for negotiation. Maybe both of us have something the other guy wants. Maybe we both got something to hide. Maybe this works out for the both of us.”
“I need to know exactly what you did,” Walt said. “The chain of evidence is corrupted. It’s not going to hold up in court, but I need this evidence. Do not play with me, Gilly.”
“But then that bat’s going to need explaining. That’s evidence too, right?”
“You let me worry about that.”
“I imagine you are worried about that.”
“You don’t want to go there.”
“We’re already there-you and me. I’m not going anywhere but to treatment and jail, isn’t that right, Sheriff? Or maybe you’re buying me my next drink and we get all chummy-like.”
“I wouldn’t count on that.”
“I saw you go to the back of the Jeep just when everyone showed up. I didn’t see you take nothing out of the Jeep, so maybe you put something in. You want to talk about evidence, Sheriff?”
Walt pushed the legal pad toward Gilly. “I’ll give you thirty minutes. Every detail exactly as it happened. What you found, when you found it, what you did.”
“I’m going to include tossing that bat into the woods,” Menquez said, taking a deep breath. “That’s right: it was lying there on top of the wallet. Didn’t see the blood on it until I moved it. But when I did, I chucked it out of there. That goes down here,” he said, tapping the pad, “unless you tell me otherwise.”
“Did you see who drove the SUV?”
“No. Engine was cold when I found it.”
“You said there was blood.”
“A stain on the bat. I know dried blood when I see it, Sheriff. You track poachers for thirteen years, there’s not much you haven’t seen.”
“The bat and wallet were on the floor. Anything else? Was there anything else of value in there?”
“Maybe there was, maybe there wasn’t.”
Walt sensed there wasn’t. He pushed the pad even closer to Menquez. He needed a few minutes to get in front of the baseball bat as evidence. He hoped Boldt would answer the phone. “Exactly as it happened,” he said. He stood and headed to the door.
“Whatever you say, Sheriff.” Gilly Menquez gurgled up a laugh.
“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Walt said. He’d placed the call from his office phone where there would be a record of it. He felt like a juggler who kept adding balls to the circle he kept alive in the air. There was a limit to it all and he was quickly approaching it.
“They developed prints,” Boldt said, half apologizing. “Three different sets. Last I was told, those prints were being run through ALPS. Not sure of the hang-up. Let me put you on hold.”
The phone line went dead in Walt’s ear. Thirty seconds gave way to a minute. Closer to two minutes before the line popped and Boldt returned. “The delay was with ALPS. Their e-mail went down. They’ve had the results, we just never got them. My guy made a call just now. No hits, I’m afraid. The guy said he can and will e-mail them some other way. I’ll send them along when I get them.”
Walt thanked him, and asked for the bat to be returned by overnight courier. “And all the paperwork, please.”
“Chain of evidence.” Boldt didn’t miss much.
“I’d appreciate it.”
“You spoke with Matthews.”
“Smart lady.”
“Hang on,” Boldt said. “I just got them.” Walt heard a keyboard tapping, and a moment later an e-mail notice popped up in the lower corner of his screen.
“That was fast,” Walt said.
“She shared your conversation with me. I hope that’s all right?”
“We’re in this together,” Walt said.
“You get anything back on the blood evidence?”
“Never went to the lab. Wynn’s lawyer, Evers, put a noose around it. The shoes are still in limbo. We’ll be lucky if we get them before the next millennium.”
“It’s got to be either your case or mine,” Boldt said. “He didn’t cut himself shaving.”
“My deputy got a little overzealous. If they take a deposition, we’re going to lose the evidence.”
“Blood shadow,” Boldt said.
“I didn’t catch that.”
“You’re going to lose the blood evidence on the shoes,” Boldt explained. “But then there’s the matter of the shoes themselves.”
“I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”
“That’s ironic,” Boldt said, “because I think you may have just saved me. Do me a favor and send across the manufacturer and shoe size, will you please?”
“Happy to do it.”
“And if nothing else, convince the judge that it’s worth holding Wynn in town until the evidence is sorted out. I may need him to claim those shoes and I don’t want him going anywhere. I don’t want someone doing it for him.”
“I’ll make a couple calls. You going to let me in on this?” Walt asked.
“You’ll be the first to know,” Boldt said.
They ended the call and Walt opened the e-mail that included nine attachments, all high-resolution scans of latent fingerprints. The Automated Latent Print System was a national fingerprint database for felons in all fifty states. The fact that these prints had not kicked out identities didn’t tell the whole story. Most states, including Idaho, also maintained databases of fingerprints of state health workers, teachers, law enforcement officers, politicians, judges, attorneys, and even some ministers and priests. There were national databases for federal employees as well. With the push of a button, Walt could initiate additional database searches. The searches would then generate candidate lists and the results would be scrutinized by hand by latent print experts. The results could take anywhere from hours to days, sometimes weeks, depending how Walt labeled the request, and the workload at the facility. Potential homicides moved to the top of the list. Aggravated assault would move a request down the list.