The Social Security number he had given on his employment application
was real enough, only it belonged to a female State Department employee
who had been assigned to Thailand for the last two years. He must have
known the carpet cleaning company wouldn’t have checked. What did they
care? The address on the application was a motel in Beltsville,
Maryland. No one by that name had registered at the motel in the last
year and no one fitting Rogers’s description had been seen there. The
state of Kansas had no record of him. On top of that he had never cashed
any of the payroll checks given to him by Metro. That in itself spoke
volumes.
An artist’s sketch based on Pettis’s recollection was being made up down
the hallway and would be distributed throughout the area.
Rogers was the guy, Prank could feel it. He had been in the house, and
he had disappeared leaving behind a trail of false information. Simon
was right this minute painstakingly examining Pettis’s van in the hopes
that Rogers’s prints were still lurking somewhere within. They had no
prints to match at the crime scene, but if they could ident Rogers ‘
then dollars to donuts he had priors, and Frank’s case would finally be
forming. It would take a great leap forward if the person he was waiting
for would decide to cooperate.
And Walter Sullivan had confirmed that an antique letter opener from his
bedroom was indeed missing. Frank feverishly hoped to be able to lay his
hands on that potential evidentiary gold mine. Frank had imparted his
theory to Sullivan about his wife stabbing her attacker with that
instrument. The old man hadn’t seemed to register the information.
Frank had briefly wondered if Sullivan was losing it.
The detective checked his list of employees at Sullivan’s residence once
more, although by now he knew them all by heart. There was only one he
was really interested in.
The security company rep’s statement kept coming back to him. The
variations generated by fifteen digits to get a five-digit code in the
correct sequence was impossible for a portable computer to crunch in the
very brief time allowed, particularly if you factored in a less than
blazing fast response from the security system’s computer. In order to
do it, you had to eliminate some of the possibles. How did you do that?
An examination of the keypad showed that a chernicalFrank couldn’t
remember the exact name although Simon had recognized it-which was
revealed only under fluorescent light, had been applied to each of the
number keys.
Frank leaned back and envisioned Walter Sullivan–or the butler, or
whoever’s job it was to set the alarm-going down and entering the code.
The finger would hit the proper keyb, five of them, and the alarm would
be set. The person would walk away, completely unaware that he or she
now had a small tracing of chemical invisible to the naked eye, and
odorless, on their finger, And, more important, they would be totally
ignorant of the fact that they had just revealed the numbers comprising
the security code. Under fluorescent light, the perps; would be able to
tell which numbers had been entered because the chemical would be
smeared on those keys. With that information, it was up to the computer
to deliver the correct sequence, which the security rep was certain it
could do in the allotted time, once given the elimination of 99.9
percent of the possible combos.
Now the question remained: who had applied the chemical? Frank at first
had considered that Rogers, or whatever his real name was, might have
done it while at the house, but the facts against that conclusion were
overwhelming. First, the house was always filled with people and to even
the most unobservant a stranger lurking around an alarm panel would
arouse suspicion. Second, the entry foyer was large and open and the
most unsecluded spot in the house. Lastly, the application would take
some time and care. And Rogers didn’t have that luxury. Eventhe
slightest suspicion, the most fleeting glance and his whole plan could
be ruined. The person who had thought this one up was not the type to