“The police called me. They said they found my home number listed first on Denny’s cell phone. It was in the glove compartment and survived the fire.”
“Do you know why?”
“He might have been planning to call me for some reason. I don’t know. It’s weird. He never called when he wanted to talk to someone. E-mail was his only form of communication. At least with me. How long he’d had my number, who knows?”
“Okay, okay,” Mark said calming the man down. He didn’t want him on the defensive. Defensive people rarely gave detailed answers.
“Anyway they called me, told me what happened. They told me that the crime scene was suspicious. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? I called Dominic at home and Caroline answered. She said he’d gone into the office.”
“What time was that, when you called her?”
“Early. I think the police called me just after four in the morning. This would have been about four-thirty.”
“And is that normal? For Santos to be at the office at four-thirty in the morning?”
Steven sighed. “He’s a workaholic so it’s not totally out of the question but something she said led me to believe that he’d been at the office all night. Again, not completely off the wall. It wouldn’t have been the first all- nighter he pulled.”
“Then you called here,” Mark prodded gently.
“Yes. I called his direct extension and he answered. He started to say something, but I told him about Denny and he stopped.”
“What was he trying to say?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t really listening. I was about to tell him that Denny was dead. It was hard enough to process that information let alone share it.”
“How did he respond?”
“He hung up the phone. I tried to call him back but he wouldn’t pick up. I figured he was in shock. I know I was. Hell, I still am. Why would anyone kill Denny?”
Mark assumed the question was rhetorical, but he asked him anyway. “Why do you think?”
“I have no idea. He was a misfit. A computer geek. He spent the largest portion his life staring into a monitor. His interactions with people were few and far between. I can’t imagine he ever got close enough to anyone to make an enemy.”
“Do you know what he was working on?”
“I told you, I didn’t follow his work. Although he was busy with a project, something he said was huge, but then he told us he was dropping it. Nobody knew what it was. Dominic was going to talk to him about it.”
“Two days ago, you said.” Mark remembered what he’d told him previously. Mark remembered everything, it’s what made him a good detective. “Two days ago, Dominic talked to Denny about the project he was working on. That night Denny is murdered. You tell your partner the next morning and he vanishes. You didn’t wonder where he was yesterday?”
Steven paused. “I guess I figured he went home. To be with his wife. I didn’t come into the office until later.”
“I have what you’re looking for,” the agent announced.
Both Mark and Steven looked over her shoulder to the monitor.
“That last thing he did was open this.” She clicked on an icon and a picture of a woman Mark knew to be Santos’s wife filled the screen.
“Ahhh, isn’t that sweet,” Mark cooed sarcastically. In truth it revealed a lot. The man was obviously smitten with her. A smitten man might not want to run too far. “Please tell me you can find the second-to-last thing he did.”
She clicked on another icon and opened the last file that had been worked on.
“That’s the company’s financial statements,” Steven said recognizing the figures on the screen instantly. “We needed them for our presentation before the subcommittee. Something is wrong. Those numbers aren’t right.”
He pushed closer to the screen and took control of the mouse moving the page down. “What the hell…”
“What is it?” Mark squinted, but didn’t see anything but a bunch of numbers. Big numbers.
“I need to sit there,” Steven said to the agent.
She vacated the seat and Steven took her place. He clicked open a few more tabs and studied them.
“What is it?” Mark wanted to know.
Steven opened his mouth, then closed it.
“Too late,” Mark said instantly recognizing that whatever Steven had found wasn’t good news for his partner. “Don’t make me haul you down to police headquarters for questioning.”
“These numbers aren’t correct. They’re not what I gave him,” Steven said, the shock evident in his voice. “There’s two million dollars unaccounted for.”
“You’re telling me he stole two million dollars from his own company.”
“I’m telling you two million dollars is unaccounted for. There’s a listing on these financials for a consulting firm whose services we never used. And the cash total is off that amount from when I finished the statements. I would have to check our accounts at the bank to be sure, but I know these numbers like the back of my hand. And that total is wrong.”
“Who else would have had access to the statements?” Agent Rodgers asked. Mark shot her a look. So much for not interfering. She pretended she didn’t see him.
“No one. Me and him. This is insane,” Steven insisted. “Dominic wouldn’t do this.”
“Which?” Mark wanted to know. “Steal or kill.”
“Either.”
For a moment there was silence. Then the officer who had brought Mark the warrant stepped back into the office. “Sir, a word?”
Mark left the two behind the desk. “We got some hits on the fingerprints we ran. Take a look at this.” The younger man passed him a fax.
Mark let out a low whistle. “Get out. The geek was a con?”
“So was the partner.”
“Santos?”
The officer shook his head. “Not his real name. The prints we lifted from this office match Dominic Butler, onetime resident of the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi, the same pen Haskell called home.”
“What was he in for?”
“Assault.”
“How long ago?”
“Seventeen years.”
“Shit, he was just a kid.”
“Pretty much. He went in at twenty, came out eighteen months later. Kept every appointment with his parole officer the year following, then disappeared. Not a trace of him in the system after that. He must have gotten somebody to forge him a new birth certificate. Because not long after, Mr. Dominic Santos, without a criminal record, arrived on the scene. He got a social security card, a license, opened up a checking account and got a credit card. Anybody looking might have found it strange that his life seemed to begin the year he turned twenty- three.”
“Yeah, but if he never screwed up…”
“Then nobody would have bothered to go looking,” the officer finished.
“Dominic Butler. Con and corporate genius. Okay, thanks.”
Mark turned back to the office to find Agent Rodgers standing by the door. Steven was still behind the desk looking at the numbers, apparently trying to find two million dollars.
“You hear all that?” asked Mark.
“I did.”
“I’m kind of surprised the government wouldn’t have done a background check on the guy they were about to give all my tax dollars to.” He studied her face then, but she gave nothing away. A cool customer, this pixie was.
