"Then why the two cards?" Joe asked again. "Wouldn't you just tell your date what room you were in and open the door when he or she knocked? Or maybe leave the second key at the desk? Why ask for two and then take them both into the room?"
There was no answer from any of his colleagues. Joe tapped the wall beside him. "Any neighbors?"
"One," Ron answered. "The other room's empty. And that neighbor didn't hear a thing."
"How did he get here?"
"That's another thing," Lester said. "We don't know. Every car in the lot's accounted for. He didn't list one on his registration card."
Joe made another survey of the room, standing still and scanning slowly in a circle. At the end, he said, "One of you is meeting someone in a motel. You want it nice and anonymous-no real names, no credit cards, an out-of-the-way place. How do you set it up?"
As usual, Sam spoke first, after only a momentary hesitation. "I either call the other party with my room number after I check in, or I tell them to ask at the desk."
"Right," agreed Lester, catching the spirit of Joe's question. "But we already ruled out that he used the phone, and if you're trying to be secretive, you don't then tell that other party to ask at the desk. You tell him to come straight to the door. Plus, this guy took two key cards. He could've just left the second one at the desk, if that was the plan."
"How does the visitor know what door to go to?" Sam challenged.
"A signal out the window?" Ron mused. He stepped around his subordinate, still working on the rug, and opened the curtains. The room had a full view of the parking lot.
"Or a sign outside the door," Sam suggested. "Even a large piece of blank paper would do, Scotch-taped in place."
"Maybe the second key card itself," Lester added, "stuck in an envelope."
He walked to the door, opened it, and scrutinized its exterior surface, aided by a penlight. The others watched him, his nose almost touching the door, until he finally paused, brushed the area before him gently with his latex-gloved fingertip, and announced, "There was some tape here, recently enough that the residue's still tacky."
Joe was nodding all the while. "So our person of interest gets here, opens the door himself to avoid the noise of a knock or the risk of nonadmittance, then what?"
"Kills our guy," Lester said immediately, adding just as quickly, "but how?"
In the meantime, he left the door, crossed to the desk, opened the drawer, removed the cardboard folder he found there containing writing paper, a cheap pen, some postcards, and a single envelope. Holding up the latter, he said, "Two postcards, two sheets of paper, one envelope."
"But no Scotch tape," Sam said. "He either brought it with him or just used the glue on the envelope flap to hang it on the door."
"Suggesting some DNA transfer from tongue to envelope to door," Joe mused.
"Yeah," Lester agreed. "But from the victim, so who cares?"
"Right," Joe conceded before waving his hand in a semi-circle. "So, possibly apart from the envelope, nothing's disturbed, the dead man's clothes were neatly tucked into place, and there wasn't a mark on him." He paused to address Ron's detective. "You find anything yet?"
"No, sir," he answered.
"And," Joe concluded, "we found him lying across the bottom of the bed, facedown."
"As if stretched out for a nap," Lester said.
"Or passed out," Sam proposed. "You take a nap, you position yourself properly; you use a pillow, take off your shoes. Plus, you don't even go there if you're waiting for someone. The adrenaline's pumping. Naps don't come into it."
The four of them contemplated what all that might mean.
"Be a bummer if the ME said it was a heart attack," Lester said.
Joe smiled, knowing the unlikeliness of that. His response went to the crucial point none of them had yet addressed. "The real bummer would be if both our dry-cleaned John Does turned out to be naturals. This is number two, after all."
Sam grunted softly. "Christ. I hope they end up with something more in common than this."
"Like the same poison?" Lester asked.
"I don't know. Anything."
"No local connections to the first one yet?"
"No," she said gloomily. "We're still asking around."
"We might have to ask for some help there," Gunther suggested. "Get the newspaper involved, especially if this fellow turns out not to be from around here, either. You know: 'Have You Seen This Man?' Run them both. And if that fails, go wider, reach across New England. There's got to be somebody who'll recognize at least one of them. What was the name this one used at the desk?"
"R. Frederick."
Gunther laughed.
"What?" Ron asked.
He held his hand up. "I don't know. It just flashed through my mind-R. Frederick, Ready Freddy. Wonder what the 'R' stood for."
"You serious?"
Joe shrugged. "I don't know. I guess not. It's possible, though. You check into a motel for illicit purposes, maybe you're feeling playful. Anyhow, doesn't matter. We have to do this by the numbers, even if it turns out he used his real name. BOL, canvass, AFIS for the fingerprints, the whole smorgasbord. And we need to figure out how he got here-train, bus, cab, hitchhiking."
He paused to address Ron. "Anything you need from us?"
Klesczewski shook his head. "No. We're okay. We'll do a forensic vacuuming later, maybe use the luminol. Since the Bureau's paying, the sky's the limit, right, even though it's a motel room and guaranteed to give us too much and therefore nothing at all?"
Joe raised his eyebrows. "That mean you're giving us the case?"
Ron bowed slightly. "With our compliments. We're drowning in work right now, the budget's hemorrhaging, the chief's on the warpath, and Sam and Ron were telling me you might be working a related case anyhow. It makes sense."
"Then our wallet's your wallet," Joe told him. "And thank you. You going to want the crime lab at all?"
The state forensic lab usually did such work, traveling to assist almost every department in Vermont. But not all of them. The bigger PDs liked to lay claim to being just as good on their own. Brattleboro had been known to go either way.
"I think we got it," Ron said. "We'll keep you posted."
Joe headed toward the door. "Okay, then, I'll leave you all to it."
In the hallway outside, he began climbing out of his Tyvek suit, leaning against the wall for support. Sam had followed him outside.
"Thanks for coming down. I hated bothering you. How're things up north?"
He hesitated, one foot in the air, and pursed his lips, trying to pay the question its due. "Complicated," he finally said.
She tried reading between the lines. "Medically?"
"Not really, although Leo's not out of the woods." He resumed removing the overalls, continuing, "I'm helping the sheriff's office look into the car crash."
"You're kidding me," she exclaimed.
He shook his head. "I'm not saying there's anything to it-not necessarily. But I have some questions."
He held his hand up as she opened her mouth, her eyes wide. "Sam, that's all I've got right now. If I hit on anything, you'll be the first to know. In fact, you'll probably have to take the case over 'cause of my personal involvement. Right now I'm just sniffing around."
He bundled up the white suit and shoved it into a transparent bag for disposal. "You could do something, though, come to think of it," he admitted.
"Shoot," she answered.
"Run down what you can about Andy Griffis. I don't remember his birth date, but he was from Thetford originally. I busted him in Bratt a few years ago, and he committed suicide late this summer, so he shouldn't be hard to locate. Everything you can find."
She was already scribbling a few notes in her pad. "Got it. Reach you at your mom's?"