He nodded. “I have an AM radio. It’ll work as long as the device isn’t too fancy.”
I tried to keep the skepticism out of my voice. I was expecting something higher-tech than an AM radio. I pointed at the box. “All right. Check this out for prints first and guard it like Fort Knox. We’ll do the sweep after hours. And keep this to yourself, okay?”
“You got it.”
I slid off the hospital bed and shuffled painfully down the hall to the nurse’s station.
A young woman in white with a small pink teddy bear pinned to her collar looked up at me and smiled. “All set?”
“Yes. Could you tell me what room John Woll’s in? I just want to poke my head in to see how he’s doing.”
She gave me a pleasant shrug. “Better than you, I guess. He checked out.”
“Already? I thought they’d hold him for a while.”
She shook her head. “He just looked bad. Once the alcohol wore off, he was fine. Facial cuts do that sometimes-they look much worse than they are. Lucky guy.”
I thanked her and left, the irony of her last words like a bitter taste in my mouth. Tomorrow, I thought, Dunn or no Dunn, I’d go by John’s place to check up on him.
Tyler was unpacking what indeed looked like a large transistor radio from a briefcase when I limped into the squad room at nine, after dining on a steaming, limp, microwaved ham-and-cheese grinder at the convenience store across from the courthouse. He turned to greet me, but I silenced him by putting my finger to my lips and motioning to him to follow me outside.
“What’d you find?” I asked him in the parking lot.
He wobbled his right hand from side to side. “Good news, bad news. The bottles had prints, enough good ones to make a match but not from my files. If the guy has a record, it’s not with us. I FedExed what I got to both Waterbury and the FBI with a red flag on both. So we’re going to have to wait and pray.”
“How about ruling anyone out?”
“I’m working on that. The easy exclusions are Charlie Jardine and Milly Crawford, and the entire staff at the vet clinic. All their prints were either on file or easily accessible. I don’t know how you’re going to get any from the Wentworths or Arthur Clyde or even Fred McDermott without a legal fight. The biggies, of course, are John and Rose Woll. I called the state’s attorney’s office to see about getting sample prints from them. They said they’d call me back.” His expression told me how much credibility he pinned on that happening any time soon.
“By the way,” he added. “I took a little time to check on Fred McDermott’s whereabouts at the time you and Ron were being run over. He was out of his office all afternoon. They found the van, too, in Dummerston, clean as a whistle. It’d been stolen.”
I was disappointed about the prints, but I thanked him for his speed, complimented him on taking the proper initiative, and led the way back inside. Outside the veterinarian’s, with the squeal of the killer’s tires still in my ears, I was convinced I had my hand on the prize. Now I had to face the possibility that the killer’s prints were not on file at all-leaving us with something, but not the jackpot. Still, I thought as we re-entered the squad room, at least we could eliminate some of the suspects, even the dead ones, and narrow the field a bit.
McDermott, of course, seemed the obvious number-one choice, but what stuck in my craw there was that, if he had been clever enough to present such a sterling facade all these years, why had he been dumb enough to set up an illicit checking account under his own middle name and address? It was an inconsistency that had been tugging at me for most of the day.
Also, that afternoon, Sammie had reported on her search through McDermott’s past. Hours of digging through files at the town clerk’s and the tax assessor’s offices had revealed the man’s life to be as bland as his appearance.
I pointed at the radio on Tyler’s desk and raised my eyebrows. He nodded and switched it on. Tinny music filled the room before he tuned it to soft static between two stations. Shaking my head in doubt, I followed him into my office.
For about three-quarters of an hour, I sat on the edge of my desk and watched him pace slowly back and forth, the extended antenna on his radio hovering like a nervous hummingbird over the phone, the desk, the fan, the carpeting, the walls, the radiator, the wall switch, the filing cabinet, even my office chair. Throughout the entire process, the slight hum emanating from his speaker never altered. Until he reached the false-ceiling panels.
He was standing on a chair by then, working in a three-foot square grid near two intersecting walls, when the static gave out an ever-increasing howl of protest, affronted by what it had found.
He quickly killed the power switch and looked down at me in the now-accusing silence, his face questioning. I motioned him down and took his place on the chair.
Gently, the fingers of both my hands splayed, I carefully exerted pressure on the white-foam panel directly overhead. It resisted at first, but then, with an almost imperceptible pop, it freed itself from the surrounding metal framing. I slowly moved it to one side and peered into the semidarkness captured between the real and false ceilings. There, two feet away, dangling from a wire above and twinkling in the half-light, was a small microphone.
I replaced the panel, descended from my perch, and pulled a sheet of paper from my desk. On it I wrote, “One bug, coming from above. Let’s try to trace it without being seen.”
He nodded, reached into his pocket, pulled out a key, and mouthed, “master key.”
I chuckled softly and gave him a thumbs-up. Leaving his detector behind, we headed out the door and one flight up.
Avoiding detection was no great feat. Only the police department was manned at this time of night, so the janitor remained our sole other concern.
Nevertheless, we proceeded like cat burglars, walking on the balls of our feet, keeping to the walls, furtively looking about. Had we run into Buddy, he would have thought we’d lost our minds.
We didn’t meet anyone, however, and arrived on the floor over our squad room half embarrassed and half triumphant. We were standing amid a cluster of town offices which clung like satellites to a central reception area. In the corner, directly over my own office, was an approximate clone with a locked door. At eye level was the labeclass="underline" Building Inspections-F. McDermott.
“I’ll be damned,” Tyler whispered.
I resisted telling him of Sammie’s discovery that McDermott, on top of all the other suspicions gathering around him, was rumored to be holding an anonymous fifty-thousand-dollar bank account.
Tyler used his key to get us into McDermott’s office. It was dark, of course, and the remaining coolness of a day’s worth of air-conditioning still lingered. I shook my head at Tyler’s gesture toward the light switch, and instead made my way across the room by the reflected glow from the parking-lot lights filtering through the windows.
Directly over where I’d seen the microphone dangling, near where the two walls met, was a low-profile filing cabinet covered with a neat row of housing-regulation reference books. I shifted the books to the floor, lifted one end of the cabinet, and held it as Tyler slid several of the books underneath to keep it elevated. Then we both got on our hands and knees and followed the beam from my pocket flashlight.
What we saw, nestled in the cavity of the cabinet’s three-inch base, was a small black box with two wires coming from it, both of which vanished through the wall-to-wall carpeting into the floor. Tyler slipped a cotton glove on and gingerly reached in and manipulated the box slightly, studying it in the flashlight’s harsh but narrow glare.