That’s when he noticed something out of place. When he and Izzie had set up shop in the community room earlier that week, the first thing that they had done after bringing in all of the boxes of evidence had been to move almost all of the upholstered chairs that were normally positioned around the table over to the far side of the room, leaving just two in place at the table for them to use. And when he and Izzie had left the day before, that was still the case. But now there was a third chair that was parked right in front of the dry erase board, facing it, like someone had sat down and studied what was written on it for a while.
Patrick looked around the room, slowly chewing a mouthful of grilled steak. Was anything else out of place? Who had been in there since they were last here? There was only one key to the community room available to check out, and Patrick had it with him the whole night. The only other people in the building with access in the meantime were the cleaning staff and the captain. But the cleaning staff had been instructed not to enter the room while it was being used to store evidence, and the captain always avoided the room like the plague because he said it reminded him of too many unpleasant memories of interminable meetings with disgruntled community members. Which was not to say that a member of the cleaning staff couldn’t have entered the room, or the captain too, for that matter, but that neither of them would have had a reason to. And if someone had been in here, which seemed to be the case, what had they made of the things that Patrick and Izzie had written on the dry erase board?
Looking around the room, it didn’t appear that anything had been taken away, though he couldn’t be sure whether anything had been moved. The mountains of books on history, the occult, science, and mythology appeared no smaller than they had when he and Izzie had unpacked all of them three days before. And the boxes containing the rest of the material evidence they’d requested from storage, including the murder weapon and silver-skull mask that Fuller had used in the killings, were still sitting where they’d left them at the far end of the table.
Patrick got up and closed the door to the hallway outside before sitting back down and pulling the second taco out of the bag. He savored a bite of al pastor and tried not to worry about the chair. The worst-case scenario was that the captain had come in to check on their work, and had spent some time looking over what they’d written, in which case he had probably walked away mystified. But the fact that Patrick hadn’t been ordered to the Medical Unit to see one of the departmental psychologists suggested that he didn’t have much cause for concern.
The one thing missing from the web of associations written on the dry erase board was the spider at the middle: Martin Zotovic. His software company, Parasol, was prominently represented, as was the Pinnacle Tower building where it was headquartered, and any number of its current and former employees who had been identified as being involved in the manufacture, distribution, or sale of Ink. But not Zotovic himself. Up until the night before, it had been impossible to imagine that such a high-profile figure could be involved in anything as sordid as trafficking in street drugs, and they hadn’t known that he had any connection to the Fuller murders. But his name belonged on the side of the board that listed all of the members of the Undersight team that had been the victims in the Reaper killings, even if the Reaper hadn’t lived long enough to get to him. And they now knew that the Ink trade was being directed by the highest levels of Zotovic’s company.
But what did they know about Zotovic himself, beyond what appeared in the newspaper headlines?
Tucking the last of his taco al pastor into his mouth and wiping his fingers on a paper napkin, Patrick brought up a browser window on the laptop and did an online search for “Martin Zotovic.” Then he pulled the third and final taco from the bag while the search results loaded.
The top results were mostly links to news pieces about Zotovic’s various business dealings, or announcements about product launches from his company, Parasol. As he savored his grilled chicken taco, Patrick worked his way through the links, building a larger picture of the self-made millionaire’s business dealings.
Zotovic had first started making headlines a few years before when he launched a photo-sharing app for smart phones that quickly became one of the most popular software applications of its kind. Free to download and driven by sponsored ads, it was also one of the most profitable. Flush with capital from the success of that first launch, Zotovic founded Parasol, which originally operated out of a small office block in a converted warehouse in the South Bay. But within a year Parasol had outgrown that space, with a steadily increasing workforce and an ever-widening catalog of new apps on offer, and the company continued to move to increasingly larger spaces over the course of the next two years. Zotovic founded a second company, a private equity firm called Znth, to handle the increasingly complex real estate dealings that those subsequent moves involved. And finally, the year before, Znth had closed a somewhat controversial deal to purchase the landmark Pinnacle Tower outright from the holding company that had owned the
