“Nope,” she said after swallowing.

Joe made a mental note to ask Willy or Ron if Cheri had a garage or to see if she visited some nearby hiding place in the next couple of days. He was convinced by now that Cheri’s involvement with her son’s activities went beyond simple advice. If so, this conversation might stimulate another habitual nervous twitch, which was for a thief under pressure to head for his or her cache to check its security.

Colored conical hats had been passed out across the room to the birthday crowd, and a trolley appeared bearing a few gifts and more cupcakes.

Joe rose and leaned forward to speak. “Thank you, Cheri. You’ve been a big help. No guarantees. You know that already. But we’ll do our best to find out who did this.”

“Sure,” she said, not looking up at him.

Back in Seabrook, Sam and Lester were discovering how well Don Kalfus had heeded his mother’s guidance. They had chosen a systematic approach to analyzing and tracing the contents of the storage unit, succeeding more or less in the first and essentially failing at the second. It was easy to deal with the trove physically—large items went in one corner, electronics in another, guns and tools in a third, and boxes of miscellaneous items, from trophies to knickknacks to watches and jewelry, completed the divisions. But while many of these had serial numbers or other identifiers, it turned out that much of it was of little use.

Investigators are no less prone to happy fantasy than wishful civilians. In this instance, Sam and Les had hoped to tumble upon the one obvious icon of revenge by one person against another. An example for Lester would have been a weapon connecting its owner to a major unsolved crime—thereby making of Kalfus a marked man for stealing it.

But no such reward appeared. As he and Sam spent hours comparing discoveries to laptop-mounted lists of recently stolen items, the hits were here and there, but nothing above the mundane. The guns were either too old to be registered or simply belonged to law-abiding victims of burglary. The jewelry and watches were bland to the point of anonymity. Computers, tablets, and phones were promising, but slated to be delivered to Fred Houston for more protracted examination.

Nowhere could they find the “aha” item that spoke of something deserving of a homicide.

By the end of it all, discussing this very point—now tired, hungry, and covered in dust—Sammie sat on a box, closed her laptop, and glanced at her colleague.

“Why does somebody kill somebody else?” she asked rhetorically.

“Could be anything,” he allowed. “One guy shot another over a parking spot.”

Sam indicated the pored-over piles surrounding them. “Meaning all this was for nothing. Our smoking gun could’ve been that off-the-shelf bowling trophy we found in the first five minutes. What’s that leave us with?”

Lester stood up. Smiling down at her, he suggested, “Scooter’s old cell phone? I do know one thing,” he added.