Page 184 - Labelle Gramercy, On the Case

Jury-rigged

“Then Alexander could have buttoned up his outer clothing,
concealing his distinctive shirt and tie, put down his candle and
disappeared from the church or the vigil without being noticed.”
“Possibly,” I conceded. “We interviewed the parking lot attendant,
showing him a photograph of Alexander, but he didn’t recall his face.
And that’s all you see of a person sitting in an automobile. Everyone
driving out had to pay a dollar. The church doesn’t provide free on-
site parking on Easter.”
“Did the plainclothesman lose him in the crowd?”
“Several times, I’m afraid. Possibly more often and for longer
periods than he admitted.”
Labelle frowned at her screen. This was yet another messy
sequence of events she would be itching to clean up. Fine. Let her
take on the whole congregation—it was irrelevant as far as I was
concerned.
“Now we come to Hannibal. You indicate he has no good alibi at
all: slept through the night like a baby, according to him.”
“Yes. ‘The slumber of a clear conscience,’ I believe, was his
phrase.”
“No one else around?”
“Not a soul.”
“So, what is wrong with his account? And wipe that silly grin off
your face, Duncan.”
“After our previous problem tracking him, I decided to furnish our
surveillance team a little technical assistance. We set up an infrared
scanner in a panel truck parked in the alley behind his place, and
patched it into a digital recorder just in case our team nodded off. I
instituted that procedure three days before the Bowan murder. On
each of the prior nights we had no visual or infrared evidence of
Hannibal sneaking out the back way after dark. But on that Saturday
night it was different. Sure enough, our guys swore they watched his
back door the whole night while another unit kept tabs on the front
entrance, and nobody saw anything suspicious. The infrared data told
a different story. Just after one a.m. a warm blob suddenly appeared
on the side of his house and moved slowly off into the neighbor’s
bushes. About three forty-five it reappeared and slipped back into the
exterior wall.”
“Very good, Sergeant Donat. What did you do then?”

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