"No bet." Wu turned him down flat. "I've finished with the phone found at the scene, but there's nothing useful on it. There's only one number in the call log, and every call was incoming. None outgoing."
With that, he dusted off his backside and left, leaving the other two staring at each other in silence.
"He seems to have a lot of pent-up resentment, doesn't he?" Hancock asked, though he knew the answer.
"With his experience and ability, he could've joined the detective unit ages ago. What do you think?" Nick rolled his eyes at him and picked up the lightest of the evidence bags on the desk. It held the SIM card Wu had removed from the phone.
"An unregistered SIM?" One glance told him what he needed to know. "I'll apply for a search warrant for the carrier, have them provide historical location data for this phone and the other number."
Seeing his partner get up to leave, Hancock quickly stopped him. "Hang on. The fingerprint results are back. Don't you want to hear them?"
Nick thought there had been some special discovery, but when he leaned over to look at the computer screen, he was left speechless.
The driver's fingerprints matched a phantom identity linked to six cases in Oregon alone, nearly all of them petty thefts of various kinds.
But the fellow was slippery. He had left behind no eyewitness or surveillance evidence, and with the amounts involved neither particularly large nor small, the local police departments clearly hadn't investigated very seriously.
"Let me know as soon as there are any new leads. I'm going to the courthouse to hurry the warrant along. I'll be back later." Nick patted his partner's shoulder and headed out.
"Where else are you planning to go?" Hancock called after