"What handle do you use when you're chasing little girls online, Les?" he asked his colleague.
"Willy," was Lester's immediate response, to Sammie's appreciative laughter.
"Anything yet?" Joe asked Lester, who was in fact checking the BOLs they'd issued on both unidentified bodies.
Spinney sat back in his chair and shook his head. "Nothing. Guess we still get to call 'em Bald Rocky and Hairy Fred."
"It'll take all the fun out of it when we can't," Willy agreed.
"All right," Joe said, getting them back on track. "You all read my notes?"
There were a couple of nods and a muttered assent, none of them from Willy, of course.
"Well, in addition, I got a call this morning from Rob Barrows," Joe continued. "No big surprise; his boss is as excited about the possible drug dealing by Dan Griffis as he is totally uninterested about the possibility that Les's Bald Rocky is a sexual predator."
"Typical," Willy growled.
"I probably would've done the same," Joe conceded. "Predator cases are a bitch to sell, and this one's not even in his county. The drug case is a gimme. To be honest, I'm just as happy, given my personal connections to the Griffis family."
"That mean you're handing everything over to the sheriff?" Willy challenged him incredulously.
Joe tilted his head to one side noncommittally. "On the record? Sure. Off the record? I have Rob Barrows on speed dial. By the way, since we're talking about it, there's been no evidence yet connecting Steve's Garage to my family's accident. Regular service records only, and nothing about tie rods. Looks like they had several layers of books, though, so it's still early."
He looked at Sam. "In the interests of full disclosure, I should also mention that I asked Sam to look a little beyond that interview the two of you did with Dave Snyder at P and P."
Willy let out a small bark of surprise as he stared at his girlfriend. "No shit? You didn't tell me that."
"Add it to the list," she tossed back at him.
"Now that a part of what happened to my family has become a formal case," Joe said, cutting off Willy's response, "I'd just as soon have everything out in the open. So, Sam, why don't you tell us what you found out."
"Not too complicated," she reported. "I chased down Beth Ann Agostini-we learned about her through Snyder-and she told me that Andy Griffis hanged himself because he'd been raped in prison. At least that's what it boiled down to. Pretty good reason for his family to be pissed at you," she added.
Joe considered that, not for the first time, and suggested, "If he told any of them."
Sam had no comeback, not having considered the possibility.
"I'm guessing nobody in law enforcement knew about the rape at the time, much less who did it?" he asked.
She shook her head. "I checked six ways toward the middle on that. Nobody knows who should know, and nobody's talking who might."
Joe squared his shoulders abruptly, as if shaking off a weight. "Okay. Let's put all that on the shelf for the time being. The other thing Rob Barrows gave me this morning was the name of a guy I'd like you, Lester, to contact directly." He quickly consulted a note lying on his desk. "John Leppman. A psychologist and computer geek out of Burlington-been working with the PD there and the state police, profiling Internet predators and making it easier to flush them out. Burlington's chief said Leppman was their go-to guy on this topic. I have his contact info here. Since it looks like we've stumbled into the middle of something having to do with the subject-at least for the time being-we'll be needing all the help we can get."
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 checked with the parking division downstairs. No abandoned cars in the last week."
"That still leaves a possible short bus trip," Sam countered.
Willy shrugged, but Joe followed up. "Issue a BOL to all municipalities within fifty miles. What we're after is an abandoned car in a lot or parking space near a bus depot or train station, maybe with out-of-state plates."
Sam began writing herself a note as Joe pointed at Lester. "I'm having Rob Barrows send you a copy of the hard drive we collected from Steve's Garage. Like I said, they'll be concentrating on the drug deal between CarGuy and SmokinJoe, but I'd like you to find out what you can about Rocky from that-retrieve what he said and who he said it to, or at least do the best you can."