before she left Samoa?” Renie shrugged. “Russell collects
dead bugs. Big deal. Margo supposedly slept with everybody.
Naturally, Andrea would want to believe that. Ward’s wife
was an albatross. Andrea had fingered Max for running the
hooker ring. No surprise there, either. I’m getting bored.”
“Leon was devoted to his mother,” Judith said, flipping
through the chief financial officer’s file. “He was very secretive
about his personal and his professional life. Obviously, the
latter was a sore point with Andrea. She’s written a note on
this one page that says, ‘Why can’t he tell me?’ ‘Me’ is underlined three times.”
“They were sleeping together,” Renie said. “Like most
women, she probably felt they shouldn’t have secrets from
each other. Like most men, Leon may not have agreed.”
Judith looked up from the file. “There’s a page missing.”
“How can you tell?” Renie inquired. “Most of the entries
are fragmentary.”
“Not all of them.” Judith tapped what appeared to be the
last page in the folder. “Andrea has written what must have
been the equivalent of a teenaged girl’s diary. She goes on
at length about some staff meeting and an independent audit
and how Leon stood up to Frank and refused to be badgered
and acted like—I quote—‘
Frank brought up the audit later…and that’s it. The sentence
stops, and the last page starts in mid-sentence about how
much Leon liked the annual report cover with the photo of
the sun setting behind the microwave tower.”
“It was a cliche shot, though,” Renie said. “I did some of
the interior graphics for that report and…Whoa! That’s the
end of Leon’s file?”
Judith nodded. “That’s it. Why?”
“Because that was last year’s annual report.” Renie
frowned, then started looking through some of the other
files. “Coz, this is weird. Check the last pages of the other
folders. See if you can tell when the final entries were made.”
Surprisingly, Andrea had been haphazard about dating
her material. Still, Judith could find nothing more recent than
the previous January.
“That’s very strange,” Judith remarked. “Why would she
stop keeping her personal files a year ago?”
Renie had no explanation. “We haven’t gone through
Frank’s,” she pointed out. “Let’s see if his file ends abruptly,
too.”
Frank Killegrew’s file was thicker than the others. He’d
been born in Molt, Montana, served as a U.S. Army Ranger
in Korea, attended Montana School of Mines in Butte, and
gone to work for Mountain States Telephone Company in
Helena. His mother’s name was given as Kate Killegrew; no
