“I’m attending an adult education water conservation workshop at seven, but I’ll stop by afterward.”
I headed for my front door. I glanced back, noting that Ed the cat had taken himself inside and now sat on Henry’s high bathroom windowsill, his mouth moving mutely in what I took to be a plaintive cry to be let out.
“You just stay where you are. I’m not letting you out,” Henry said.
7
I sat down at my desk and dragged the banker’s box out of the knee-hole space. The lid was askew because the files were jutting up above the rim. It looked like someone had jammed the lid into place, trying to force a fit. Half the file tabs were bent and mangled in consequence. I lifted the box, using the handhold on either end, and set it on my desk.
This was the same cardboard carton in which I’d found Pete’s tape deck wedged some months before. I’d since moved the recorder to my bottom drawer. The old Sony was oversize and had the look of an antique compared to those currently in use. On the cassette he’d left in the machine, I’d found the illegally recorded phone conversation he’d used in the blackmail scheme that eventually got him killed. It really was a wonder he’d lived as long as he did.
I emptied the box, hauling out file after file: bulging accordion-style folders, correspondence, case notes, and written reports. Byrd-Shine had a document-retention policy of five years, so most were long out of date. The major portion would be duplicates of reports sent to the various attorneys for whom Ben and Morley had worked. My plan was to assess the contents, set aside anything sensitive, and deliver the remainder to a shredding company. I wasn’t sure what would qualify as “sensitive,” but occasionally lawsuits drag on for years, and it was always possible a case might still be active, though no longer under the purview of the now-defunct agency.
Pete must have cherry-picked these client files, perhaps hoping to generate business after the agency was dissolved. Given his questionable code of conduct, he would have felt no compunction about reaping the benefits of Ben and Morley’s split. The fifteen files I counted seemed randomly assembled. Pete probably had a game plan, but so far I hadn’t discerned the underlying strategy.
Among the cases, the only one I remembered was a lawsuit in which an attorney named Arnold Ruffner had hired Byrd-Shine to do a background check on a woman named Taryn Sizemore, who was suing his client for intentional infliction of emotional distress. The defendant, Ned Lowe, was accused of stalking, harassment, and threats. His attorney paid Byrd-Shine a big whack of money to find evidence that would undermine the plaintiff’s credibility. Morley Shine had handled the matter.
At the time, I was still in training, so I wasn’t involved. Eventually, the suit was dropped, so Morley must have delivered the goods.
Remembering Ruthie’s caution about Pete’s penchant for hiding cash, I turned each file upside down and riffled the pages. I wasn’t even halfway through the process when a piece of folded graph paper fell out. I opened it and found myself looking at handwritten columns of numbers, eight across and twelve down, the numbers grouped in subsets of four.
I checked the other side of the paper, which was blank. There were no torn edges, so it didn’t appear the page had been removed from a financial ledger. No dollar signs, no commas, and no decimal points. Many numbers were repeated. Eight of the twelve lines ended in sets of zeroes, which might have been place holders used to round out the grid. I couldn’t imagine what it was, but I assumed the data was significant, or why would he have hidden it? Knowing how devious he was, I didn’t want to underestimate his thinking process—but I also didn’t want to overestimate his smarts. I put the paper in the outer compartment of my shoulder bag and went back to the job at hand.