by Matt Doyle
“So IP addresses, cheque numbers, phone numbers for telephone transfers, that type of thing?”
“That’s right. Please, Steve, I really don’t want to get in trouble again.”
Steve sighs heavily and gives in. “Okay, okay, I think that should be alright. Have you got your boss’ details there with you?”
“Thank you,” I reply, laying on the gratitude and relief in thick measures. “Thank you so much. Yes, I have them here.”
Twenty-Two
I RUN THROUGH Hollister’s details pretty quickly, and Steve runs a quick check of the e-fax number against the contact details held on the business end of the account. Once he’s confirmed that matches, he loads up the files and I make my way out of the washroom, phone now switched back to normal mode and held up to my ear on a low volume. I make it back to the e-fax machine just as he finishes his checks.
“So that’s all the details for the last two months, right?”
“Yes,” he says. “I’ll just hit send now…and done.”
“Thank you so much, Steve, you’re a lifesaver.”
The e-fax machine springs noisily into life, but Steve doesn’t seem to notice it. “You’re welcome, Miss Ghoul. Is there anything else I can help you with?”
“No, no, that was it. Thanks again.”
“You’re welcome. Have a good day.”
I hang up and grab the papers as they start to come through. A quick glance shows that they are indeed the details I requested. From the look of it, each month runs to about fifteen pages, which isn’t surprising if we’re assuming that all business and private expenditure goes through the one account.
“Sorry,” I say to Mr. Mackintosh, grabbing the final sheet. “I didn’t realise there’d be so much. Steve is pretty thorough, though.”
“Not a problem, Miss Tam. Now, if you’d like to come this way, I’ll get you back to the main desk.”
I smile politely and follow along like an obedient little guest. I could have pointed out that I could happily find my own way back, and there have been some days where I’d have said just that just to get a rise out of him, but today at least I’d rather avoid conflict. I soon find myself outside the building and getting back into Lori’s car. Lori looks about as happy as I’d expect after the talk with Hollister.
“So what did you do?” she asks.
“Got a copy of his bank statements for the last two months. If he paid Devin to murder Eddie, it’ll be in here.”
“Unless he used a different account.”
“Yeah. He looked like he at the very least puts on a front of being big on following the letter of the law, though, and he seems to value the input of others, so…” I wave the wad of papers and add, “From the amount of info they sent me, I reckon he’ll have taken the single account advice from the tax office as gospel.”
Lori starts the car up and we head out of the parking lot. “So, do you think that he did it?”
“Like I said before, he has the means. We can find out if Eddie really did write for the blog easily enough, and if that turns out to be true, then Hollister has a motive too. Whether that means he really is hiding something in one of the companies remains to be seen. The Roots of Eden are Rotten are hardly reputable for giving whole truths, so it could just be the betrayal or a fear that they’d make something up that hit a little too close to home.”
“It seems weird that he just gave us all that, though. He’s smart.”
“That’d be why he gave it to us. Guilty people are expected to hide what they did, but they don’t always do it how you’d think, if at all. He’d know that what he told us puts him in the picture as far as having a motive goes, so he could be banking on us thinking that his info dump was too obvious to pursue. What he told us could be untrue, or it could be littered with half-truths. Or, he may be entirely innocent and telling the complete truth. We won’t know for certain just yet.”
“So what happens now?”
“Now, you drop me back home so that I can go through these, and you head back to yours to get some rest.”
“But…” she begins, but I cut her off.
“No, Lori. This is going to take me a while, ’cause I’m gonna have to do it all manually. You’ve had a hard enough day as it is, and whatever answers this gives us are just going to make it harder. Rest now so that you can deal with whatever happens later.”
Lori sighs, and we spend the rest of the journey in silence.
Twenty-Three
I INTENDED TO recall Bert once I got home, but the more I thought about the amount of work that lay ahead, the easier it became to convince myself that a little more surveillance of Gary Locke might be useful. I love him to bits, but Bert has an awful habit of making a nuisance of himself when it comes to paperwork. That’ll be his tendency to get bored creeping in. There’s not much duller than watching someone else pore over masses of really boring data. No, he’ll enjoy the job more than being here—well, if enjoy’s the right word. Can Familiars really enjoy anything? Their responses are programmed and learned over time, but that’s not too far removed from a growing child learning the appropriate way to respond to…I shake my head. My subconscious is finding ways to distract me from the task at hand. Bad Cassandra, I admonish myself. Just get on with it.
If Dean Hollister was a normal person rather than one of the rich and powerful, finding a fee the size that Devin normally charges among his outgoings would be easy, but a lot of the business procurements that go through his account are pretty large. I scan down the numbers on my tablet screen, leaving my thumb pressed tightly under the account number that I’m checking. Devin has six accounts that I know of, two that I found myself during investigations and four that I’ve learned about through working with the PD. The problem is, with Hoover being forced to pull support on this one, I won’t be able to check if he has any new ones that they know about without getting one or more of the good guys in trouble. If I’d thought there was any chance that the case would blow up like it has, I’d have asked when I was applying for the warrants, just in case. Way to go, hindsight; never useful and always a pain.
No match, but that’s not a surprise. I’ve got to check all the payments, ’cause I don’t want to miss something stupid, but the likelihood of Devin charging something as specific as thirty-seven thousand, six hundred and ninety-three dollars and forty-three cents is remote at best. The next few entries are smaller, by which I mean they each about equal my monthly income on a good month, and judging by the recipient names probably fall under the “business premises maintenance expenditure” bracket. After that comes some genuinely small private expenditure for films, food, and clothing. I can probably skip the recipient names for anything on here below fifteen thousand dollars. After that, anything could be a Devin Carmichael account under some fake name.
I finish the first month and rub my eyes, painfully aware that the orange glow creeping in through the bedroom door means that the sun is setting. With a grunt, I push to my feet and slouch into the kitchen. The time on the tablet says 20:58, which means that it’s taken me an hour and a half to check through the first half of the paperwork. I fill the kettle and flick it on, then lean back against the counter and cross my arms. Let’s see…Unless Devin is using another account, this means that either Hollister didn’t have any long-term plan to kill Eddie Redwood, or he didn’t pay Devin at all. Or Hollister has another account. The second half of the paperwork covers the entire last month, so I can safely ignore everything after the day that Lori found Eddie’s body. With Devin, it’s pay first, kill second. Good. That means it should only take another forty-five minutes to get through the initial run-through. Then, if there’s still no sign of a payment to Devin in there, I can start a second run-through in case I missed something. If that comes up empty, then I can start working on just using the payment origins in case there’s something in there that looks out of place. People often say things had a tendency to be more efficient way back when we didn’t rely on tech so much.
I like to think of myself as a pretty intelligent person, and I defy anyone to find fault in my work ethic, but looking at how much of a struggle this is, I don’t have a clue how people got anything done in a decent amount of time when they had to do damn near everything manually. Here’s to you, office workers of the pre-twenty-first century. You have my pity.
The kettle clicks off, and I pour myself an uncharacteristically black coffee. At this point, I’m expecting a dead end with this first run of checks. If I’m right, sleep is not something I’ll be getting, so a good, hard caffeine kick now is a reasonable precautionary measure. If nothing turns up at all, then Lori and I are going to need to have a long chat about what to do next. With one warrant remaining, I could force Hollister to provide details of all bank accounts held in the last two months, including any that he closed. If that comes up blank too, then we’re out of fair means and down to foul in terms of gathering information. We’d also be left with Gary Locke as the only potential suspect or lead.
Right now, I could kill Inspector Bergesson for tightening the leash on Hoover like he did. Leash. I know that I joked about “walkies” with Lori, but I wonder if Plain Jane ever takes Murphy for…
“Ugh,” I groan. “I hate paperwork. Hate it.” I slap my cheeks in an effort to snap myself out of the tedium-induced attempt at sidetracking.
No more distractions, my inner voice says. Get on with it.
“Yes, ma’am,” I grumble in reply.
I sit back into the chair at the head of my work table and take a big grimace-inducing mouthful of sadly milk-free wake-up juice. I slide the last couple of sheets of paper off to the side, stopping on the sixth from the back. Right at the top, the last payment made on the day that Lori found her brother’s body. Twenty-three thousand dollars dead-on, just about in time to be viable, and not made payable to any well-known firm and company. Wouldn’t it be a lucky coincidence if that’s the payment to blow the case wide open? Let’s just check the account number against the list and…no match.
“Diu.” I sigh and flick back to the front page. First large entry, nineteen thousand dollars and eighteen cents. No match. Seventeen thousand dollars and fifty-three cents. No match. Thirty-seven thousand dollars, no match. Fifteen thousand and one dollars, no match. I tap my fingernails against the table and take another mouth of tar. What I need is a way to narrow these figures down. I could start with just the round numbers, but I’m more likely to miss something that way. Charlie only takes cash payments too, so it’s not like she could just tell me what account Devin was using. Hell, even if he had paid for the stimulants via a card transaction, he’d have probably moved the money from one account to another, several times over a prolonged period of time to lengthen the trail. He could even have transferred only small amounts and made separate withdrawals…
My eyes go wide, and realisation dawns on me. I let my face slump onto the pile of papers and groan. “I am such an idiot.”
Devin takes payment first and kills second. His bill would have included expenses, and his expenses would have included the cost of the Flash7. Which means that I already know the last day that he could have taken payment, and I know how much he would have been paid on top of the kill fee. I slide my chair out, the loud scraping adding to the already plentiful mass of white scratches on the hardwood floor. The marks around the table are mostly my doing, but Bert can take the blame for most of the ones everywhere else.
I make my way into the bedroom and slide open the top drawer of the filing cabinet closest to the window. The drawer is labelled as Currently Working, but with the amount of crap in there, a more accurate description would be Can’t Be Bothered To Tidy. Still, being the last thing that I dumped in there, Charlie’s list is at least at the top and easy to find.
I make my way back to the desk and turn the pages until I find the pink highlighted entry for Devin. The stimulants cost three thousand, two hundred dollars and sixty-seven cents. Unless prices have skyrocketed, Charlie charged him a good 50 percent more than she would most people. I guess she would have known that it was likely for a murder, so she was probably just trying to make as much money on it as possible. Assuming she did know roughly what it would be used for, I wonder if she felt any guilt. Regardless of which way her moral compass points these days, it’s the sixty-seven cents that makes me smile. VJ Dealers generally charge in round sums, but Charlie liked to add the odd couple of cents on every now and then if she was a little short for the milk or whatever. No one ever asked for it to be included in the general pot because it would be a pain to split it, and she’s always been one of their top sellers, so she just kinda got away with it. Once, she added two cents exactly ’cause she wanted to buy me a new tie, and she loved making the cashiers at the high-end clothing stores count out the small change.
Now, which tie was that?
I slap my cheeks again and force myself to take a swig of coffee. “Focus,” I groan to myself. I trace down the numbers with my finger and find a couple of payments ending in sixty-seven cents. The first is to settle a bill of fifty-one dollars and sixty-seven cents at a well-known supermarket. In other words, not Devin. The second one is for twenty-two thousand, two hundred dollars and sixty-seven cents. That would make the kill fee nineteen thousand. That sounds about right. The recipient name is Tad Haulage Limited, which just sounds fake to me. The account number…We have a match! I throw my fist in the air and pull it back in triumph, cracking my elbow against the table in spectacular fashion in the process. I let out an involuntary whimper and grip my arm in towards my chest.
You know what? I don’t care. I don’t care about the pain or that I could have found this much sooner and saved myself a lot of time and effort. I don’t care that I’ll still have to go through the old audio transcripts to flesh the case out, or that I can add the transcript of the meeting from earlier today to that pile ’cause Hollister got it through to me about an hour ago. I don’t care, ’cause the account number matches, and that means we’re a whole bunch of steps closer to proving that Dean Hollister hired Devin Carmichael to kill Eddie Redwood.
The bank statement has an IP address next to the figure, which means that it was a regular banking transfer made online, whether on a real-world connection or a virtual world session. It’s in the new style too, with a heavy mix of letters and numbers, which means that if it wasn’t a local location, it was in another of the new-build cities. That narrows it down a lot in terms of looking for links relating to the location and the suspect. I’m hoping it’ll be local, as my last warrant will still hold that way.
First things first, though. Let’s dig a little deeper. There’s something off about the IP address attached to the payment. The vast majority of the amounts going out seem to stem from a handful of locations, and it’s pretty easy to guess what each of them relates to. This one stands out because I can’t see any other incidences of it appearing during this, or the next and previous few pages. But it should still show up on the log-in reports that the Monitoring Office gave me. If I can get a match for Hollister around the time of the payment, then that would give me enough to at least tell Lori that we’re pretty certain it was him.
I swipe down the top bar on the tablet and tap the local system icon. A few seconds pass before the room speakers say, “Synch to local system complete. Please state your desired settings.”
“Single room audio. Tracking mode target, Cassandra Tam.”
Beep. “Settings active.”
“Document content search, server six, target primary folder, open case files. Subfolder, Redwood Lori. Search term, thirteen, a, dot, c, a, one hundred and seventy, dot, sixteen, dot, forty-nine, b, b, a. Full matches only, no partial matches.”
“Processing,” the speakers reply.
I could ask the system to search Dean Hollister’s log-on history too, but given how slow it’s running, that would probably just overload it. “This is gonna take a while.” I sigh and walk back to the kitchen. I pour another coffee and, this time, allow mys
elf the luxury of milk. Hey, this is as close to case-closed as I thought I was when I believed Eddie accidentally OD’d. My diligence has earned me a reward and a chance to relax a little.
Rather than sit on my hands while I wait for my system to finish its leisurely stroll through my files, I grab my tablet, load up the notepad, and slide the stylus out from the side of the machine. I’d use the audio dictation feature, but that would present two problems.
First, until I get around to getting this thing fixed, that would put just enough strain on the system to slow it down further. Worse yet, on the last occasion I tried running dictation at the same time as a document contents search, the search crashed and the system couldn’t tell me because it was having so much trouble trying to translate my ramblings into the written word. The voice recognition can understand me just fine as long as I make a point of speaking clearly, but once I get going, my accent becomes more prominent and it struggles.
Problem number two is that part of what I want to do is a five-bar gate. The audio dictation is perfectly capable of doing this, or so the instruction manual said. I, on the other hand, am not capable of remembering all the keywords and commands to make it work. Sure, I could look it up in the manual, but in this world of tech-focused advances, there is no hard copy, only a file stored on the tablet. Do I want to keep switching between the notepad and the manual every time I forget how to change where the marker goes? Do I want to risk the system deciding that having multiple files open at once, and frequently switching between the two, is the straw that broke the available-resource camel’s back? Do I want to forget where I’m up to in the hard copy printouts while I’m busy messing around and most likely swearing at a machine that can’t even come close to comprehending how angry I am with it?
No, no, and no. I’ll go old-school and use the stylus.
I flick back to the start of the papers and note down IP addresses as I come to them, then under that, I write the type of purchase the address has been used to make. Not needing too much detail for this, I keep the headings broad: groceries, industrial purchase, private expenditure, that sort of thing. As I come across each purchase, I put a mark next to the relevant heading. It’s a simple system, but it gives me a chance to see what patterns emerge.