Once the quality of the area dropped significantly and they were several miles away from downtown, Taylor found the most run-down motel he could imagine. It was the kind of place most people would drive past, no matter how tired they were. It exactly what Taylor was looking for. Instead of parking in the parking lot, he drove past it by several blocks, and stopped, pulling up to the side.
Putting the car in park, he got out, collected the backpack that Whitaker wasn’t holding, and started walking away from the car. After a second, Whitaker ran to catch up to him as they walked back to the motel.
“Leaving it running so someone steals it?”
“Yep. In this kind of area it will be gone in an hour. They’ll take it on a joy ride or keep it for a while. Either way, when the police do find it, and tie it back to a business near the campus, they won’t be able to use it to trace our movements.”
“We’re going to have to find a new ride, you realize that.”
“I do, but we can’t drive around in a car with a broken window. Any cop with half a brain will run the tags and see it is reported stolen. We’ll deal with that tomorrow. Tonight, we need to figure out what our next move is.”
Taylor went in to rent a room while Whitaker waited around the corner, deciding that the two of them together were more likely to make people remember seeing their pictures on TV, than just one of them. They could have probably not even bothered, considering how uninterested the clerk behind the desk was. He took Taylor’s money, not questioning one night being paid for in cash, and never even looked up from whatever magazine he was reading. The kind of place it was, though, that was probably a feature since most of the rooms would have been rented by the hour and not for a whole night.
Once inside, Whitaker pulled out the college students' laptop and continued rummaging through their bags while Taylor dropped the other one by the door. They’d have to toss these in a random dumpster, but he didn’t want to leave them out where someone might find them and give it to a cop who’d put two and two together.
Taylor sat on the bed and watched Whitaker as she seemed more interested in the kids' other possessions than the laptop. After half an hour she dropped the bag and powered up the computer. On the password screen, she typed something in. Taylor held his breath for the second it took to see if it worked, letting it out once the desktop appeared. Considering their faces would be even more all over the news now that they led police on a chase that ended in shots fired on a college campus, they needed to avoid extraneous trips out in public as much as possible.
“Impressive.”
“It was his girlfriend’s name,” Whitaker said. “She was all over his day planner.”
“So, let's see what we have.”
Whitaker inserted the flash drive and brought up the video of that night. It was a large file, covering a several hour period, forcing Whitaker to scrub through the video looking at the time stamp. The empty area in front of the apartment door flickering slightly, since other than the breeze, nothing moved or changed for almost an hour of video. They knew roughly when the murder happened, so they were watching the time stamp in the corner count up when Taylor reached out and squeezed Whitaker's shoulder.
“Stop. Back it up.”
“What?”
“I saw someone.”
Whitaker rewound the video, stopping when she reached the moment when a person finally entered into the shot, looking up at the camera as they opened up the front door. Looking up at them was Graf, cell phone at his ear. It was smack dab in the middle of the time of death and less than ten minutes before the video of Whitaker coming back to the apartment.
“Shit,” Taylor said.
“Yeah.”
“I’m not surprised, but it’s a kick in the nuts to think I was riding around with him for several days and never figured it out.”
“He’s fooled a lot of people. Hell, you said Joe was the one who introduced you. There’s no way you could have known.”
Taylor just gave her a look when she glanced up at him. She wasn’t wrong, but he’d been banking on his ability to read people and go by his gut. The fact that Graf had completely snowed him was going to bother Taylor for some time.
“So we have him. He was at the scene at the time of the murder, before I came back, and omitted it from the official record.”
“It won’t be enough.”
“Why?”
“Because it takes a really overwhelming amount of evidence to convince a department that one of their own is dirty. Like, admitting it on video, bloody knife in hand kind of evidence.”
When Whitaker gave him a look, and Taylor threw up his hands defensively as he said, “I know. It’s hard to see from your side. I know you guys see yourselves as always evidence-driven and fair; but that’s the way it is. It doesn’t mean you’re dirty or anything, just that it’s hard to accept that someone you know is dirty. It’s how Hanssen was able to run free for so many years.”
Bringing up the specter of the FBI’s biggest shame was enough to make Whitaker look away. Robert Hanssen had been an agent inside of the New York office's counterintelligence division. While not quite as big as Aldrich Amies, the CIA agent turned Russian informant, he was a giant black eye on the Bureau.
“It’s not enough.”
“No. We need more. This might get you cleared of killing your aunt at a trial, but the
