“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.