“From nine o’clock on. Restaurants and bars saw no reason to reopen when they got the go-ahead sometime after midnight. They remained closed until Sunday morning.”
Steffi whispered, “She wasn’t there.”
“Had she been, she would have mentioned this.”
“Good work.” Steffi raised her glass to Smilow.
“I think raising toasts is a little premature,” Hammond said angrily. “Maybe she has a logical explanation.”
“And maybe the pope’s a Baptist.”
He ignored Steffi’s wisecrack. “Smilow, why didn’t you confront Dr. Ladd with this when you were interrogating her?”
“I wanted to see how far she would carry it.”
“You were giving her enough rope to hang herself.”
“My job is easier when a suspect does it for me.”
Hammond searched his mind for a fresh approach. “Okay, so she wasn’t in Harbour Town. What does that prove? Nothing, except that she wants to safeguard her privacy. She doesn’t want it known where she was.”
“Or with whom.”
He shot a cold look at Steffi, then continued speaking to Smilow. “You’ve still got nothing on her, nothing that places her inside Pettijohn’s suite, or even near it. When you asked if she owned a gun, she said no.”
“But of course she would,” Steffi argued. “And we’ve got Daniels’s testimony.”
Hammond wasn’t finished with his own arguments. “According to Madison’s report, the bullets removed from Pettijohn’s body were .38-caliber. Your garden-variety bullets from your garden-variety pistol. There are hundreds of .38s in this city alone. Even in your own evidence warehouse, Smilow.”
“Meaning what?” Steffi wanted to know.
“Meaning that unless we find the weapon in the murderer’s possession, it will be nigh unto impossible to trace,” Smilow said, following Hammond’s thought.
“As for Daniels,” Hammond co
ntinued while he was on a roll, “Frank Perkins would make hash of him on the witness stand.”
“You’re probably right about that, too,” Smilow said.
“So what does that leave you?” Hammond asked. “Nothing.”
“I’ve got SLED running some test on evidence collected from the scene.”
“Hand-carried to Columbia?”
“Absolutely.”
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division was located in the state capital. Evidence that was collected, bagged, and labeled by the CSU was usually hand-delivered to SLED by an officer to prevent chain of evidence discrepancies.
“Let’s see what turns up,” Smilow said in the unflappable manner that only emphasized to Hammond his own unraveling temperament. “We didn’t get much from that suite of rooms, but we picked up a few fibers, hairs, particles. Hopefully something—”
“Hopefully?” Hammond scoffed. “You’re relying on hope? You’ll have to do better than that to catch a killer, Smilow.”
“Don’t worry about me,” he said, his mood growing just as fractious as Hammond’s. “You tend to your job and I’ll tend to mine.”
“I just don’t want to face the grand jury with nothing but my dick in my hand.”
“I doubt you could find your dick with your hand. But I’ll find the link between Alex Ladd and Pettijohn.”