Pender found Skip sitting on the edge of his hospital bed dressed in a paper-thin seersucker robe over an open-arsed hospital gown. “Hey there, Magnum, P.I.! How’s it going?”
“Not bad, G-man, not bad at all. I just talked the doctor into cutting me loose. The problem is, they seem to have burned everything but my wallet and my shoes.”
Pender winked. “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”
Twenty minutes later, Skip left the hospital wearing a pair of ludicrously oversize blue-and-green plaid golf pants, a loosely draped, periwinkle-colored polo shirt, and a pair of ankle-high pink socks. “I don’t want to seem ungrateful,” he told Pender as they drove away in Pender’s dusty rental car, “but would you mind stopping off at the first clothing store we come to?”
“Right after I get this to the sheriff’s station,” said Pender, waving the card with the dead man’s fingerprints. “Cal-ID’s promised to give it crash priority.” Cal-ID was the computer network that linked population centers all over the state with the main fingerprint database in Sacramento.
Skip told Pender he’d wait in the car while Pender dropped off the card and conferred briefly with Sheriff Lisle. But when they drove off again, instead of heading back into town to find a clothing or department store, Pender aimed the Toyota in the opposite direction. “They found something out at the site that the crime scene tech thinks might interest us.”
“No way,” Skip protested. “I’m not going anywhere dressed like this.”
“Are you kidding?” said Pender. “You look great in periwinkle. It brings out your eyes.”