by John McMahon
“How many guests have stayed in that room since my colleagues left, Miss . . . ?”
“Lady,” she said. “Just Lady. And the answer is one.”
She walked toward the room then. Or maybe “strutted” is a better word. Her clothes fit tighter than a pregnant bride’s.
The numbers on the doors we passed were all odd: 3, 5, 7.
At number 9, I saw a dent in the shape of a foot in the lower half of the door. Someone had drawn a rectangular shape around the hole in Sharpie, and I guessed that a kick-plate was being installed. Hide the hole, rather than replace the door.
We got to Room 11, and Lady used her plastic master key to unlock the door.
I stood on the concrete strip outside the room for a moment. Examining the place for the first time.
“The room ain’t gonna search itself, handsome,” Lady said.
I smiled at her and moved inside. The room was simple. A queen bed, covered in a white quilted comforter with a gold throw blanket draped long-ways across the base of the bed. It matched a single gold pillow that was placed in between two bulging white pillows at the head of the bed.
“You looking for something in particular?” the manager asked.
“I am,” I said.
Beyond the mattress stood two dressers, both made of a fake wood laminate, done in a red oak. Atop one of them was a black Mr. Coffee machine. Single cup hotel style. It was set on a plastic tray that contained a paper cup with a stirrer, a packet of sugar, and a single plastic container of creamer.
I walked over and lifted the machine up, examining it. The air in the room smelled stale, and I was guessing that the window-unit AC had mold in the water circulating inside it.
“This work okay?” I asked about the coffee machine.
“Damn well better,” Lady said. “It’s brand-new.”
“What do you mean, ‘brand-new’?” Remy asked.
I don’t think my partner appreciated Lady’s comment about the fire department, because these were the first words that Remy had uttered since we arrived.
“The one guy who stayed here complained that nothing was working. So that’s a new one. Grabbed it from our stockroom this morning.”
“Café,” I said, and Remy made a noise with her nose.
“Shit,” Remy said. “Carilla was saying ‘coffee’ in Spanish.”
“Where’s the old unit?” Remy asked.
“Dumpster.” Lady pointed to the parking lot.
Remy turned and headed out the door.
My partner’s hand whipped to the back pocket of her slacks, where she always carried at least two pairs of gloves. The second set was usually for me.
A black dumpster stood in the parking lot. It had a gray, hard plastic top that flipped on a swivel. My partner grabbed the top and pushed it up, spinning it on its hinge. As she did, Lady and I caught up with her.
The thing was about half full. About a hundred small clear bags full of crap that people toss in hotel trash cans.
I was pretty sure chain of custody had blown the need for gloves, but I put them on when Remy handed them to me. On the far right, I could see a black Mr. Coffee machine.
“Right there.” I pointed.
Remy wedged her shoe into a slot on the side of the dumpster and took a step up, grabbing the machine.
She handed it over, and I walked a few spaces down from the dumpster to my Silverado. I opened the back door and grabbed a shop towel from my truck.
I placed the coffee maker on the hood of my truck with the towel under it.
Flipping the machine over, I stared at the screws that held it together. All four were nearly stripped.
“You got a screwdriver in that office?” I asked Lady.
She glanced at me, perhaps considering a smartass comment. Turned to the office instead. “Coming right up.”
While we waited for her, I turned to Remy.
“You know what I can’t understand?” I said to my partner. “Why the hell was Carilla still hanging in this area?”
“After his two friends are shot, you mean?” Remy asked.
I nodded. “His boys get killed Thursday. He got shot in the hand. Yet he circles back to the bar. Shows up at Tandy’s Thursday night. Friday too, when we see him. Why?”
“Abe asked me the same thing. The only idea we had is that he’s waiting.”
“Waiting for what?”
“I dunno,” she said. “He sent another text to that same throwaway cell.”
I blinked. “What?”
I was still playing catch-up from being gone three days.
Remy checked her tablet and pointed to something in her notes.
Thursday morning’s gonna come fast, and you’re still gonna need what I got. Let’s talk.
“Jesus, what the hell?” I said to Remy, my eyes narrowing. “You never told me that.”
“Sorry.”
“And that was sent when?” I asked.
“Five p.m. Friday,” she said. “Same day we saw him at Tandy’s. Presumably he was referring to the following Thursday.”
I was frustrated that I was getting this piecemeal, and I needed an hour free to go through all of Remy’s notes from the three days I took off.
Lady came back with the screwdriver then, and I thanked her.
After she left, I pressed the Phillips-head hard into the screws, knowing they were stripped, and I might only get one shot at removing them. Slowly, each turned and fell, popping with a metal clink onto the shop towel sitting on my truck hood.
I removed the bottom panel of the coffee maker then, and Remy and I glanced inside.
Carilla had removed the entire motor, leaving an open shell inside for hiding items.
And something was hidden there. Taped inside.
29
I carefully peeled back a strip of silver duct tape. A piece of what looked like metal was inside. But it was an odd shape.
I handed the item to Remy, pointing at a second piece, also taped inside. This was a square metal box, the size of my palm, and I gingerly pulled it away from the tape that held it in place.
I put the housing of the coffee machine down on the ground beside the truck and stared at our two findings, laid atop the shop towel.
The first piece I removed was about six inches long, with a squared-off flange down one end and a circular ring down the other.
“The hell is it?” Remy asked.
She laid the object across her palm, easily lifting her hand up and down, in a demonstration of its weight. Because although the piece looked like metal, it was light, like balsa wood.
“It looks like one half of the front of a set of eyeglasses,” I said. I ran my finger around the circular shape. But down where it would become the bridge, if it were a set of glasses, the metal-looking material terminated in a squared off blunt shape.
“It’s painted,” Remy said. “To look like metal.”
I turned to the second piece then, which was a small box, also plastic, about four inches by two inches by one inch. It had a curving piece of what looked like metal coming out the bottom of the box, and another one from the top.
It was hard to be certain what the hell we were looking at, but I had a thought.
“Do they fit together?” I asked.
Remy messed around with the two parts, trying to fit one to the other.
“Nope,” she said.
I pointed at the curved metal piece that protruded from the bottom of the box. “I think this might be a trigger.”
“To a gun?”
“A plastic model of one,” I said.
Remy took the box from me and pushed the metal flange that protruded from the top back and forth. “If that’s a trigger”—she pointed at the bottom—“then this thing might be the safety. And not a good one,” she added, pu
shing the flange back and forth. It didn’t lock well into place.
I took the box back, noting again how light it was.
“So it’s a toy?” she asked.
“Seems so,” I said. “Except for one thing.”
“The trail of dead bodies?”
“Make that two things,” I said. “The trail of bodies. And the fact that Carilla hid these two things inside a coffee machine and told a couple cops about it with his dying breath.”
I thought about the hotel room. Not this one, but the old guy’s. The Homewood Suites.
“The old guy could’ve shaved a piece like this down,” I said, turning over the box in my hand. “Could’ve created that pile that looks like metal filaments we found in his kitchen at the Homewood Suites.”
“Maybe,” she said. “But neither of these two pieces have any paint missing or rubbed off.”
This was a good point, and I turned it over in my head. We had two pieces of some puzzle, but we were missing the other parts. And a lot of context.
“So going back to the roadside,” Remy said, trying to put the story together.
“The old guy shoots the two guys in the front seat.”
“Vinorama and Dilmendes,” Remy said.
“Then he turns to shoot Carilla, but only hits him in the hand.”
“Carilla takes off,” Remy said.
“Let’s say whatever’s in the case between them,” I continued, “not all of it is in the case.”
“What do you mean?”
“Carilla didn’t trust the old guy,” I said, holding up the pieces we’d taken from inside the Mr. Coffee. “Maybe he didn’t trust the meet itself. So he held back these two pieces in case things went south at the roadside. Now the old man needs these two, whatever they are, and the short guy’s got leverage.”
My partner nodded, but it was just theory until we knew what the hell the two pieces were.
Lady let us go back through the room then, and we searched through other areas where Carilla might’ve hidden additional pieces. We looked for a set of screws on the back of the TV, but found none. Shone our flashlight inside accessible AC vents and checked up under the sink and inside the commode tank. Nothing anywhere.
Back in my Silverado, we knew that cross-traffic would be busier at this hour and took a different way back to the Homewood Suites.
Moving across a local road that housed a marble refinery, we tracked white chalk dust down the highway. “8 Hour Drive” by Lynn Miles played on the radio, and I told Remy about a friend named Chester Gardner who owned a gun shop.
“Yeah, you’ve talked about him before,” she said.
“What do you say we send these two pieces his way?” I asked. “Give him a few hours with ’em.”
“It’s too light to be a gun,” she said.
“But if it’s a trigger to something,” I said, “Chester’ll know.”
Remy agreed, and we hustled back to the Homewood Suites.
As we arrived, we saw Alvin Gerbin from our crime unit, who’d come by while Remy and I were gone and was printing the inside of the room. We were still trying to get an I.D. on our old guy.
“Anything so far?” I asked, knowing a print would go far in terms of identifying the man who had killed four innocents, including a cop’s son.
“Not yet,” he said.
Alvin’s normally pink cheeks were flushed, and his face was a little pastier than usual.
“You all right?” I asked.
“I had some bad Indian for lunch.”
“I need you to dust these,” I said, producing the two pieces found inside the coffee maker.
Alvin placed them on the counter and photographed them first. Then dusted them.
“No prints,” he said when he finished the work.
“Shit.”
I handed the two pieces to Patrolman Yantsy to rush over to Stock and Barrel, the gun shop that Chester Gardner owned east of town, between Falls West and Burna.
Remy and I headed back inside the hotel room then, wanting to go through the place one more time.
We reversed roles, with me taking the bathroom and bedroom this time, and Remy the common areas. After an hour of finding nothing new, we left Alvin there, and headed out to the gun shop ourselves.
30
By the middle of the afternoon, Remy and I had taken SR-906 east and gotten off at the exit for Ferris.
In the corners of the afternoon sky, a pinkish-red color was dancing. In the distance beyond it, thunderheads were rising, the second day in a row with wind and the threat of rain but no payoff.
We parked in a gravel lot that served a plumbing supply store and housed a line of orange-and-blue trucks. Pickups mostly, F250s and Tundras with camper shells covered in vinyl wraps advertising parts from Moen or Delta. To the left of the storefront that read L&M Plumbing was a western-themed sign that read Stock and Barrel: The Finest in Weapons and Ammunition.
We crossed the lot, with dust and gravel trailing behind us. As we entered the gun store, a small bell hooked to the door dinged. Bing bong.
Inside were three waist-high glass display cases that ran the length of each of the walls. The first contained Glocks and Berettas, since Stock and Barrel was a dealer for those manufacturers. The second held ammo, shotguns, and AKs, while the third was a clearance and surplus section, with everything from knives and scopes to cleaning kits and Mace. The far back wall bore an American flag with the words “In God we trust. All others pay cash.”
I spotted Chester Gardner from the door and headed over.
Chester is a big man—white, six-four, and two hundred eighty pounds—with an unkempt brown beard and a wide chest. He wore a pea-green army jacket over a Black Flag T-shirt.
“There’s my dog,” he said, pulling me into a bear hug that I couldn’t prevent if I wanted to. We’d grown up together and had gotten into trouble since we were kids.
“Chess,” I said. “This is my partner, Remy Morgan.”
“The one with the good shot,” Chester said. “Appreciate you keeping this guy around.”
Remy nodded. She had saved my life by putting a bullet in someone’s forehead earlier this year, and I had told that story to friends a half-dozen times.
“You get my package?” I asked.
He nodded. “I keep thinking you’re gonna send me something I can keep. You know—five-finger discount from the evidence room, like on TV.”
“You think the evidence guys trust him?” Remy asked.
Chester grinned. “I like her,” he said to me. He surveyed his store, which had one customer talking to a clerk in the handgun section.
“Tommy, you’re it,” Chester said, and turned to face us. “Let’s talk in back.”
We followed him over to a door that looked like a storage closet, which he unlocked with a key from around his neck, but didn’t open yet.
“She knows we met in third grade, right?” Chester said, his eyes moving from Remy to me.
“No one’s here to go through your secret stash, buddy,” I said.
He pushed the door open then, and we stepped into a room that was about fifteen by ten. A work space, with shallow tables around the perimeter and stools pulled up here and there. Each area of table was marked with a white towel, covered in gun parts, as if four simultaneous projects were under way.
All along the walls were pegboard, strung with a mix of two types of weapons: old or valuable—and most of them were both. An eighty-year-old Parker shotgun was hung on the far wall. Beside it was a Winchester 1873 and a Colt 1911 that had been used in Vietnam. The place smelled like Hoppe’s No. 9 bore cleaner.
Chester locked the door behind us. He set an alarm, and flicked on a series of screens so he could monitor the store. A half-dozen grenades hung on loops near the TVs.
He moved over to one o
f the tables then, and we followed him.
There, laid out on a towel, was the first part we’d found inside the black Mr. Coffee machine at the Garden Palms. The piece that I thought looked like part of a pair of eyeglasses.
“Okay,” Chester said. “Let’s start with the simple stuff. This part here is a trigger guard, like you figured.”
“All right,” I said. “Except it’s not part of a handgun, and it’s light, man. We couldn’t tell—”
“Just bear with me,” he said.
Chester crossed the room and came back carrying a massive gun. An M24 sniper rifle. Because of his chest and girth, it almost looked small in his hands.
He proceeded to take it apart, piece by piece, while we waited.
The M24 is a bolt-action rifle preferred by many of the world’s best snipers. I’d shot one last year, at a gun exhibition that Chester had dragged me to. In an expert’s hands, an M24 had a range of twenty-five hundred feet. In mine, a pretty decent shot, maybe eight hundred.
“The trigger guard,” Chester said, removing it from the massive weapon he’d brought over, “is the bottom-most part of a gun like this. The hole in your piece is where you thread your finger through in order to shoot.”
“So that attaches up under the body?” Remy confirmed.
Chester nodded, and I pointed at the two small holes on the underside of the piece we had found. “Except the holes in our piece aren’t even threaded,” I said.
“Yeah,” Chester said, holding out the two matching pieces: the one that we’d found and the heavier piece that he had just removed from the giant rifle.
“When I first saw what you sent, I assumed that’s ’cause it was a toy. Or a 3D-printed model that guys paint and put on their wall. You don’t need a screw if it’s a model, you know? You can just put a dab of glue there.”
“So it’s a toy?” Remy confirmed.
“Well, you may know this already. There ain’t no 3D-printed assault weapons that work more than two or three minutes before falling apart. That’s the edge of 3D technology right now. AKs that fall apart. That’s what these 3D printers are all trying to make.”
