“He got murdered this morning. At the driving range. Shot once in the head.”
Gage’s whole body tensed. The linchpin that held together his strategy to rotate the case away from Burch had broken off.
“Damn.” Gage said the word more to himself than to Peterson.
“Why damn?” Peterson asked. “He was about to finger Burch.”
“No he wasn’t.” Gage sat forward in his chair. His voice intensified. “You wanted him to finger Burch. That was the one thing he told me he wouldn’t do. And he had something on Matson. Something big.”
“So you say.” Peterson’s snide tone made him sound like a schoolgirl gossiping at the lunch table.
Gage blew past it. “Look, I needed him more than you did.”
“Being needed by you is a very dangerous occupation. First Burch, then Fitzhugh, and now Granger. My indictment is getting shorter every day. It looks like we’ll need to cast the net a little bit wider.”
“Is that a threat?”
“Against you? No. Unless you know something I don’t. But we’ll be looking real hard at anything that connects to Burch.”
Gage hung up, then rose from his desk and stepped to a window. He watched a tugboat, its nose to the bow of a container ship, nudging it toward the Oakland Port. He realized that this was what he’d been trying to do with Peterson’s indictment, steer it from the outside. But it wasn’t going to work. Peterson had too much momentum, and with Granger dead, Gage had nothing left to push with.
Gage called Courtney, trying to sound upbeat, wanting to protect her and Burch from the world closing in around his ICU room.
“How’s he doing?” Gage asked.
“Not good.” Her tone was weary. “He’s got an infection, maybe pneumonia. They’re working on him now.”
Gage heard conversation in the background.
“What’s that?”
She didn’t answer immediately. “The doctor is talking to one of the nurses…Oh, dear. They’re going to put the breathing tube back in.”
“I’ll call back.”
“Wait. They want me to step outside.”
Gage heard her footsteps on the linoleum floor, then the room sounds faded.
“I hear something in your voice,” Courtney said. “Is something wrong?”
“No. Other people are trying to blame Jack for things they did. But it’s nothing to worry about. I’ll take care of it.”
Gage hung up, then examined the flowcharts covering the walls of his office. Too many arrows pointed at Burch and the companies he’d set up for Matson.
He wished he’d hung up two sentences sooner.
CHAPTER 38
Y ou’re right,” Gage said, “the beef chow fun isn’t bad.”
Gage and Milsberg were sitting on a wooden bench near the Japanese Friendship Garden, eating out of Styrofoam containers. A group of schoolchildren bunched up along the shore a few yards away were staring down at orange and yellow and blue koi looking up, waiting to be fed.
Milsberg laughed. “You didn’t believe me. I really am a man of taste and culture. In fact, I composed a new haiku: chow fun, mu shu pork, heartburn at midnight. ” He raised his eyebrows. “Am I ready for prime time?”
“Not quite,” Gage said.
“Yeah. There aren’t enough syllables. It’s supposed to be five, seven, five. A shame, I used to be good with numbers.”
“But accounting wasn’t your first choice.”
“Maybe that’s been the problem all along.” Milsberg set down his chopsticks. “I read about Granger in the paper.” He held his hands out toward Gage. “No need to check for gunshot residue. I didn’t do that one, either.”
“It didn’t cross my mind.”
While Milsberg took a sip of Coke, Gage took out a notepad from his jacket pocket.
“Did you bring everything?” Gage asked.
“Just about. I have a dozen boxes of old financial files for you, but the really important things are these backup tapes.” Milsberg removed three cassettes from a paper bag and laid them on the bench. “Tape one holds all of the accounting records and everything on the workstations. Two is a backup of the intellectual property division. It’s got device drawings, specs, anything related to hardware design and software development. The third one covers the production line. It has the metrology database and the manufacturing execution system. You’ll find the specs and history of every product that’s ever been sent out of SatTek.”
“How did you get them?” Gage smiled. “Maybe you should’ve been a private eye after all.”
Milsberg shook his head. “Dumb luck. The IT guy resigned yesterday and I was the only one around he could surrender his keys to.”
“What about phone records?”
“Tape one. I’ll give you the numbers that Matson calls out on. I’ve got a file of his cell records. I think he has another cell phone in London but I don’t have any of those records.”
“E-mails?”
“Tape one.”
“Shipping and receiving?”
“Tape two.”
“Stock sales?”
“Ditto.”
“Almost perfect,” Gage said. “Now for the home run. What about enterprise resource planning software?”
“Sure.” Milsberg grinned. “ERP on tape three.”
“Very poetic.”
Milsberg looked skyward. “Finally.”
Alex Z’s eyes lit up like stage lights when Gage set the SatTek backup tapes on the conference room table, but went dark after he picked up one and read the label.
“Jeez, boss, even if these are only half full, there’s got to be at least ten terabytes of data here.”
“How long do you think it’ll take to make them searchable?”
Alex Z’s head rocked back and forth as he thought. “Eight or ten hours, but I won’t know for sure until I see how much is really there.”
“Get to work. We need to figure out what Granger was planning to trade. While you work on the tapes, I’ll be down in the storeroom going through a bunch of boxes of financial documents Milsberg gave me.”
Gage’s cell phone rang two hours after Alex Z left.
“It’s going to take longer than I thought,” Alex Z said. “Even if I can get them copied by midnight, it’ll probably take until morning for our computers to index the data.”
“My end isn’t going any better. The hard copy records I’ve found so far are too old to be useful, but I’ll keep pushing through them. Let’s meet in my office for breakfast. See if you can be ready to abstract some information from their accounting system.”
Gage thought for a moment.
“For guys like Matson, greed can be both their strength and their weakness. We just need to find a way to turn it from one to the other.”
