While waiting for the chief, I’d laid the placards out neatly on the kitchen floor. The ones on slats were in two rows where our kitchen table would have been if we hadn’t taken it to the barn to serve as a prop table, while the placards on holly sticks were lined up on the other side, in front of the sink and refrigerator. The stickless placard lay in the center of the room in lonely splendor.
The chief pulled out his cell phone and punched a couple of buttons.
“Horace?” he said. “I’m in Meg’s kitchen. Can you come over here? Bring your kit.”
He flipped his phone closed and continued to stare at the orphaned cardboard.
“We’ll need your prints and Rob’s for elimination purposes,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “And Jorge Soto was helping Rob. And Horace might have touched them when he took them into the safe room. And—”
“We’ll follow their history, thank you,” he said. “It didn’t occur to you to wonder why one of the signs was missing a stick?”
“I didn’t notice the missing stick till just now,” I said. “I didn’t take them away one by one. I picked up the whole pile and carried them off.”
“And you put them in here?”
“I gave them to Rob to put in here. Which, wonder of wonders, he actually did. He and Jorge. But you’ll have to ask them whether they did it immediately or whether they left them lying around somewhere in plain sight for a while. You know Rob.”
The chief nodded.
Horace came in with a blast of frigid air, shook himself like a dog to get rid of the snow, and looked questioningly from me to the chief. Then he took a look at the placards and went pale.
“Oh, my God,” he said. “Those look just like—”
“Check that one,” the chief said, pointing to the stickless placard.
Horace pulled on a pair of gloves and examined the cardboard.
“You think that thing used to be attached to our murder weapon?” the chief asked.
“I can’t tell for sure till I measure these staples against the holes in the stake,” Horace said.
“I know that,” the chief said. “But if you had to guess?”
“Yeah,” Horace said. “The sticks are exactly the same, and these staples should match the tiny holes on the murder weapon.”
The chief took out his notebook and began scribbling in it.
“And look!” Horace said, pointing to something on the cardboard. “A couple of these staples have bits broken off. It’s possible that the broken off bits are still in the stake—which means I might be able to prove that the two were once part of the same staple.”
He looked so triumphant and excited that I didn’t have the heart to ask what good that would do. Even if he could authoritatively match the two sundered bits of staple, and even if that led us to figure out who had stapled the cardboard on the stake, I didn’t see that his forensic staple analysis would get us one inch closer to figuring out who had used the stake to kill Ralph Doleson.
“That’s nice,” the chief said, in a rather mechanical tone. Clearly he shared my skepticism.
“I know it’s a small bit of evidence, and there’s no guarantee it will be useful, but you never know,” Horace said. “Don’t you remember that case in Canada where a few cat hairs proved to be the critical piece of evidence?”
“I do,” the chief said, forcing a more cheerful demeanor. “And I completely agree. For all we know, the staple could be the key to the case, and I’m extraordinarily grateful that you’re available to analyze it. I’m sorry if I seem a little distracted. It’s been a long, hard day.”
Horace seemed mollified.
“I should take all of these signs in for possible comparison analysis,” Horace said. “Meg, can I borrow some more big trash bags?”
I saw the chief open his mouth to veto the mass sign confiscation—the police station didn’t have a very large evidence room, and the overflow usually ended up in the chief’s office. Then he closed his mouth again, nodded, and looked back at his notebook. I handed Horace our box of trash bags.
“If you don’t need me for anything, I’m going to catch up with the parade and see a little of the festival in town,” I said.
“Good idea,” the chief said.
Just then the power went out, as it nearly always did when we had heavy rain, high wind, or even a moderate amount of snow. Horace groaned. The chief made an impatient noise.
“We’ve got flashlights in the pantry,” I said. I heard shuffling noises as Horace headed that way. “And there’s a spare house key on the key rack. Horace, could you lock up when you leave?”