It was Mike and Steve's turn to freeze then they shared a glance. Mike swallowed. "A gun going off in a rooming house?" he echoed.

Devereux was nodding, his gaze far away as if he was trying to remember details.

Mike glanced at his partner, both of them now on full alert. "Not a rooming house. This guy was beaten to death in a hotel room."

Devereux shrugged. "No, sorry, I'm pretty sure they were talking about a rooming house. Nobody mentioned a hotel as far as I can remember."

Mike looked down. Steve could feel the frustration emanating from the older man.

"Okay, Mr. Devereux, thanks a lot." Mike took a business card from his jacket pocket. "Here's my number. If you think of anything else, anything at all, please give me a call."

Devereux glanced at the card. "Thanks, I will. Sorry I couldn't be more help. Listen, ah, I gotta get back out there – it's a busy day for us. Anything else I can do you for guys?"

Steve smiled. "No, thanks, we're good. Thanks for your time."

They shook hands again before the foreman left the trailer. Steve turned to his partner. "Man, that was close," he said with an ironic smile.

Mike was staring into space, his arms crossed and his head down. "I don't know, buddy boy, I think we're onto something here." When he looked up, there was a renewed vigor in his body language. "I want to find out more about our electricians."

# # # # #

The phone to his ear, Steve looked up from his desk as Mike walked into the office. He put a hand over the mouthpiece and lowered the receiver. "Where have you been all morning? I've been trying to get a hold of you." On Mike's glance at the receiver, he hefted it slightly in his hand. "I'm on hold," he explained.

Mike crossed to his office, putting his hat and jacket on the rack and taking his notebook out of his jacket pocket. "I had a little hunch and thought I'd follow up on it. What've you got?"

"I'm on hold with the Night Watch Commander – I'm trying to find out if there've been any complaints, anytime or anywhere, made against either Halladay or Armitage since they've been here recently, or back when they were here working on 44 Montgomery. He's being a little stroppy with me – he doesn't want to divert manpower into digging through some old records, and I told him I was gonna sic you on him if he didn't."

"Oh, thanks," Mike replied dryly. "Stroppy?"

"Sorry," Steve chuckled, "I used to date a girl from England – she used that word a lot. Anyway, he's trying to find someone to do it and he wants me to wait on the line till he finds that someone so I can give them the information first hand. I think it's his way of punishing me for the 'request'. What did you get?"

"I," said Mike with self-satisfied smile, "got a third electrician." He turned from the door and crossed to his chair, grinning at his partner through the glass walls as he unsnapped the .38 from his belt and put it in the top desk drawer before he sat.

Steve's brow furrowed and he glanced at the receiver in his hand. With a quick headshake, he hung the phone up, got to his feet and entered the inner office, leaning over the desk to face his cat-that-ate-the-canary grinning partner. "A third electrician?" he asked softly.

Staring at the younger man with upraised brows, Mike nodded, tossing his notebook on the desk and flipping it open. "There was a third electrician in their room on Monday night."

Smiling with barely contained curiosity, Steve held his tie in place as he sat slowly. "How the hell did you find that out?"

Mike had taken his glasses out and put them on, rifling through his notebook to find his latest entry. "I had a hunch."

"That must have been some hunch."

Mike chuckled and looked up. "After we finished up with Devereux yesterday, I just couldn't get what he told us out of my mind. You know, the bit about the 'gun going off in a rooming house'? And I kept thinking, well, what if Devereux didn't get the story quite right. Maybe it wasn't a rooming house; maybe it was a hotel? Nobody's gonna admit to that, right? But something similar might make for a good tale when you're sitting around with a bunch of guys sharing 'war stories'. And a lot of these 'war stories' have a little grain of truth in them, don't they?"

Steve nodded.

"Well, I was also thinking about what you said, about how the electrician you interviewed seemed to be a stand-up guy, and Devereux backed that up. But Scott said he heard yelling and laughing in that room and I thought, hunh, maybe there was more than just two guys in there that night. You still with me?" he asked with a chuckle.

Steve leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms. "I'm listening."

Pulling out the bottom drawer of his desk and putting his right foot on it, Mike tilted his chair back, his notebook in one hand. "So this morning, I gave Mr. Kennedy a call – you remember that bellhop we interviewed a couple of days ago? And I asked him if he remembered if Halladay and Armitage had any visitors that night. And he said he remembered someone going up to their room with them when they got back from work that day.

"Of course nobody thought anything about it at the time or afterwards, and why would they? The murder didn't happen in their room. Anyway, I got a pretty good description of the guy from Kennedy; seems he's been a bit of a regular."

Mike glanced up from his notebook and grinned, and Steve smiled back, shaking his head with a quiet laugh. "You did all that this morning?"

"Oh, I did more than that," Mike chuckled. "I dropped by the construction site on the way here and talked to Devereux again. I gave him the description and he gave me a name." He glanced down at his notebook. "Robert Linden. Been working on the same Powell building since they started. And there's a couple of other things Devereux told me about him – he has a temper, and he just loves his guns."

Mike finished with a flourish then just sat there, grinning and staring across the desk at his quiet partner. Steve tilted the chair forward, looked down, laughed, then looked back up. "What can I say? That's, ah… You did all that this morning?" he repeated.

Mike's head bobbed up and down furiously. "Yep. I haven't even had breakfast yet. But I am functioning on about eight cups of coffee right now." He held his right hand level in front of his face and stared at it. "Not bad," he chuckled, "the shaking's gone away."

"Adrenaline or caffeine?" Steve asked with a laugh.

"I'm not sure." He dropped his hand, shaking his head and grinning. "Oh, ah," he said suddenly, taking his foot off the drawer and leaning forward, "I almost forgot. Did our Mr. Scott come in for his polygraph this morning?"

Still smiling, Steve nodded. "Oh yeah. I was here when he arrived. And he was on time, too."

"And?"

"And… he passed, so I let him leave."

"I kinda thought he would," Mike said, shrugging. "I did tell him I believed him. Just had to make sure."

Steve gestured at his partner's notebook. "So, what do you want to do with all this…new information?"

Mike looked down at the notebook and snorted a quick laugh. "Yeah. Ah, well, I gave that some thought on the way here."

"Of course you did," Steve said under his breath, still stunned at the swift turn of events.

"What was that?"

"Nothing, nothing," Steve answered quickly, shaking his head, trying to suppress a grin. "So what's your plan?"

"Well, the first thing I want to do is eat before I pass out," he chuckled, "and then I want to find out all we can about this Robert Linden before we even begin to think about bringing him in to talk to him and the other two."

Getting to his feet, Steve leaned across the desk slightly. "Breakfast is on me. I've gotta have you at a hundred percent if I'm gonna sic you on that Watch Commander, now that I gotta add a third name to that list. Come on, let's go."

# # # # #

"It's amazing what a little flattery and the promise of a bottle of scotch'll do," Mike said quietly to his seated partner as he passed by the inspector's desk on the way to his office. Steve looked up from the stack of photos he was poring over as the older man stopped at his office door to hang up his jacket and hat. "Jack'll be calling you shortly to get the names of the three electricians we want checked out."

Nodding, Steve got up from his desk with the photos and followed his partner into his office. As Mike stored his revolver in his top drawer, he said warmly, "Hey ah, thanks again for breakfast, that really hit the spot."

"You're welcome," the younger man replied almost absent-mindedly as he turned the photos in his hand around and dropped them on the desk facing Mike. "I've been going over these again and there's something that's bugging me. I want to run it past you."

Mike glanced up from the photos to his partner, who was looking at the desk with a frown. "Okay, shoot. What have you got?" he said, rubbing his hands together as he sat.

Remaining standing, Steve moved the top 8x10 off of the one below and set them side-by-side. The first one was a longshot of Bennett's body, lying facedown on the carpet with his hands up by his shoulders. The second was a close-up of his left hand, the burned-out half-cigarette between his middle fingers. Mike looked up questioningly.

"You've never been a smoker, right?" Steve asked, and Mike shook his head. "Well, smokers tend to keep their cigarettes in the hand they favor, unless they're doing something like writing and even then, they usually stop writing to take a drag. In other words, a right-hander seldom holds their smoke with their opposite hand, at least not for very long."

Mike glanced down at the photos. "And you're thinking that Bennett was right-handed?"

Steve pointed at Bennett's right hand visible in the first photo. "Now, I can't be a hundred percent sure, but those look like nicotine stains on his right fingers, don't you think?"

Mike had slipped his glasses on and picked up the photo to take a closer look. "You may be right about that, buddy boy. We can check with Bernie. And I'm pretty sure I asked his wife about which hand he favored – I'll check my notes." He put the photo down, took off his glasses and looked up at his partner. "So what's going through your mind?"

With a smile, Steve sat down and leaned across the desk. "I've been doing a little thinking myself. What if, say, the electricians were getting a little loud in their room, so much so that Bennett was having trouble hearing his movie, and he maybe, I don't know, pounded on the wall to shut them up. And maybe one of the electricians, the one we don't know much about, Linden, the one with the temper, he takes exception to this and goes next door to confront Bennett."

Mike had leaned back with a small smile. "Keep going, I'm listening."

"Bennett's sitting on the bed, having a smoke. He hears the pounding on his door and he gets up to open it, and as he walks to the door he transfers the cigarette from his right hand to his left so he can open the door – the knob's on the right side, right? So now he's face to face with Linden at the doorway."

Steve looked at Mike in anticipation but after a few seconds of silence, the senior partner ventured, "So then what? I mean, you got Linden at the door but… Bennett wasn't shot to death, he was beaten."

"Yeah, I know," Steve agreed reluctantly, "that's where my theory kinda falls apart."

"No, no," Mike said encouragingly, leaning over the desk, "I like where this is going, we just have to explore it some more. So what do you think? They're face to face in the doorway and Linden hauls off and kicks Bennett in the crotch, and he goes down. I mean, I know what Bernie said; that it had to have been one hell of a kick to lacerate his scrotum and reverberate all the way up to his heart and kill him."

"Linden was wearing steel-toed boots if he went there right from work," Steve offered, "and maybe he's as big as Scott."

Mike nodded with a facial shrug. "Yeah, that's possible." He paused. "But I still can't figure out how Bennett ended up face down, and how the cigarette was still in his hand."

"Yeah, I know, I can't get past that too." Steve hesitated then met his partner's eyes again. "And then there's what Devereux said about Linden liking his guns. I think we have to take that into consideration."

"Sure, but why? I mean, there's no evidence that a gun was ever fired in Bennett's room, right?" Mike leaned back and growled. "God damn it, when are we gonna catch a break in this case?!" He rubbed his hands over his face, laughing slightly, then slapped his hands on the desk. "I tell you what we're gonna do. We're gonna go back over to that hotel. I want to go over every inch of that room and see if we've missed anything."

"But Mike, they've probably cleaned that room a couple of times since we released it. What's there to find?"

"I don't know, but I'm not just gonna sit around here all day waiting for Jack to get back to us with those background checks." Mike stood up and took the .38 out of the drawer, snapping it onto his belt then crossed around the desk to the coat rack. "Come on, let's go. Leave that list of the names of the electricians with Norm; he can deal with Jack. And bring all those photos with you."