“Don’t I wish! I kept an eye out for a computer in the storage unit. If I’d found one, I would have given it to Carter, who has limited access to a computer at the moment. I thought my uncle could do something good for me, even beyond the grave.”
I hadn’t realized that Carter’s situation was quite so difficult. Though I used my phone ten times more than a desktop, I did my accounting for the business and all the spreadsheets on an older HP machine. I figured I’d use that computer until it died before replacing it.
“So is this a clue?” Aaron asked, sounding way more excited than he should in the circumstances. “Who would take a computer?”
“It’s possible. I don’t know yet, but if he spent as much time on the computer as your former aunt said, then it’s likely to have some connection to the case. Either to point to the fact that he took it with him or that someone else took it.” My mind was already racing with possibilities. The police had checked the banks to see if Longhill had been on any his accounts – but they hadn’t been checking his emails. If he was that digitally connected, it could be hard to go cold turkey. That would fit with the description that Mrs. Avery had given of her former husband. Plus I was still concerned about that portfolio. I wondered if it had been accessed in the past few weeks as well.
“How is she? What did she tell you?”
I recounted the conversation as best as I could. I finished up by telling him that Carter had been the answer to her quiz to see if I really knew Aaron.
He laughed. “That’s just like her. I’m glad she’s doing well. I honestly would have preferred to keep her and get rid of Murray in the divorce.”
“She gave me some names at his work to contact too. Maybe the work computer will have something that I can look at as well.” I counted off the things that I had to do with this case. I was going to have to start another spreadsheet just to keep track of the clues that were being thrown at me.
“I have to say that I was dubious when Carter told me what you’d said about dead bodies and murders, but this is rather interesting. Way more intriguing than what goes on at my work!” His voice sounded enthused. I was glad that Carter liked the job and the unintended perks. I had been afraid that it would be off-putting to most applicants. I wondered what type of work Aaron did for a living, but now was not the time for a lengthy chat about his work.
After I got off the phone with Aaron, I called Danvers back. His lucky day, I thought.
“What again?” he answered. At least he’s consistent in his rudeness.
I recounted what I’d learned from Mrs. Avery and the rest. “According to the ex-wife and nephew, Longhill was obsessive about being on the computer. Did you check his emails after he went missing?”
Danvers didn’t even have to put down the phone this time. “It’s standard procedure these days. Longhill hadn’t sent any emails since his disappearance, and none of the items in the days before that seemed to indicate any desire for him to disappear or any reason related to a possible disappearance.”
“What about since then? Like last week or this week?”
“Sure, Maeve. We have a guy who just sits here and monitors other people’s email usage. Of course not. Once the investigation hit a wall, we moved on to other cases. I doubt that anyone’s looked at those records since the original file dump.”
This was where I had reservations. I wasn’t sure what Danvers would do for me in a technically open investigation. He’d suggested that I look into it, but how much actual help would he provide to me during my own investigation. “Could you dump his email logs and phone records as of this week? I think you’d be surprised at what you find.”
He laughed. “You sure don’t ask much. Would you like me to bring them over with a pizza tonight?”
Two can play that, I thought. “That would be great, but I thought you said we shouldn’t date – and here you are inviting yourself over.”
There was a noise that sounded almost like a growl. “Very funny. I’ll see what I can get, and then you can come get them sometime.” He hung up before I could even thank him for the help. I had a feeling that it would be longer than that before I saw the records, because I was fairly certain that he was going to find a very active email account. He’d hung up before I could tell him about Mrs. Avery not knowing about the portfolio, which meant it was fairly hidden, suggesting something nefarious, or he’d pulled together $50,000 in the short time since the divorce. The former seemed more likely.
Feeling more confident than before, I decided to call it a night. I made a light pasta dish and ate it while watching some TV. I wondered if this apartment just had this effect on people, or if I just needed some downtime.
*
I was right that it would be longer than Danvers had promised for the emails. He stopped by the next day at his usual time. “You were right,” he said almost between gritted teeth. I knew it wasn’t easy for him to admit that an amateur had bested him, but he made it look painful. I enjoyed the sight, since he was always taking the credit for the solutions.
“So tell me more,” I said, pausing from my afternoon routine to listen.
“There were no hits on the phone. We dumped that again and nothing. However, we checked his email accounts and found loads of activity. He reactivated the account about three months ago, after the investigation was about wrapped up.”
“Do you think that was a coincidence?” I asked. If he’d only started emailing again after the police had thrown up their hands, it was possible that he knew someone from the department who could share that type of information.
“That’s a question I was asking myself all evening,” he said. “The problem is that most of the correspondence is simple stuff. He signed up for a financial newsletter or three. He reactivated an account at a message board. He cleaned out his spam folder. No emails to anyone in his family and nothing about work. It’s like someone is just tidying up after him.” The grimace on his face eased as he spoke. I wondered if that was where all the hostility was really coming from – the idea of a bad cop. Danvers took his job seriously – and expected others to as well.
“So what’s next?” I asked, thinking that my bright idea had not netted me anything else to do on this disappearance. I’d just given more work to the police department.
“We’re having a forensic team go through them, look for locations based on IP addresses and internal information. We’ll look for any references to his disappearance and where he might be now.”
I nodded. I still didn’t see that I had anything to do now. This lead had given the police more work to do, but I was still stuck in the same place – with nothing more to go on. I might be looking for a man who just didn’t want to be found. That wasn’t a crime in Capital City – or anywhere else in the nation.
Danvers headed over to see Land at Basque in the Sun. I took a deep breath and went back to my work.
“Tough break, huh?” Carter said. “I heard him say that about Aaron’s uncle. That would be good news if the police found him.”
“I’m curious to see some of those emails,” I replied. It’s odd that he has done nothing financial until this week, but he’s been using the same email address for months. I also wondered if whoever was using the email account knew that using someone else’s name for financial transactions or setting up a cell phone account might be illegal. Yet the Internet is full of stories of people who faked an email account. Catfishing is so popular that it has its own show. If the account had been idle and then used again, all it might mean was that someone had figured out his password and started using the account.
Despite the apparent reappearance of Murray Longhill, his footprint was entirely electronic. I wasn’t so sure that he was really still around. I wasn’t sure how this was related to the man in the freezer, or if his disappearance was related to it at all. Danvers had said next to nothing about the homicide since they’d carted the freezer off for examination. Either they didn’t have any solid leads, or he was more t
han a little concerned that the two crimes were related.
The day finished up, and I decided to stop by Longhill’s former employer. RGF Industries was located in one of those corporate office parks that look like someone threw up a series of squatty office buildings in a random pattern. RGF was located in the back of the complex, and I got lost a few times looking for it.
I decided not to attempt to get by security. Instead, I waited outside for someone to leave the building. A man, who looked to be middle-aged with dark hair and a white shirt and gray tie, came out of the building. I stopped him a few feet away from the door.
“Excuse me, sir. I wanted to ask you a question.”
The man drew a deep sigh. “I’ve heard every racket in the book, and I don’t want anything from you. Just leave me alone.”
I checked out my outfit to see if I looked homeless, but I’d actually dressed up for this event. “No, it’s not like that at all. I was wondering if this was the company where Murray Longhill worked.”
The weariness left the man’s face, and he craned his neck to look at me. “Why? Who wants to know?”
“I’m a friend of the family,” I said truthfully. “They’ve been so upset about his disappearance. They keep feeling that this matter had to be foul play, but they have no proof. They wanted to know if there was any evidence – perhaps on his work computer – that might indicate something bad was going to happen to him.”
The man snorted. “Sister, you have no idea. That man was destined to get into something bad.”
My mouth must have dropped open, because he continued. “Look, it’s not that I’m trying to be mean here, but he just always seemed to get into trouble. It followed him like a lapdog.”
“How so? I asked. I’d heard nothing but good things about Longhill from his family, mundane things from his ex-wife, and rather apathetic views from the neighbors, now here was someone saying that he was destined to get involved in crime. I wondered if Murray would have still been married if Mrs. Avery would have known about these situations at work. He certainly sounded like anything but boring.
“Well, for instance, there was this one time that we had a person embezzling funds from the company. Murray figured out who it was, and that’s a good thing. However, he decided that it would be best to reveal the thief in front of the entire staff, kind of like one of those old-fashioned murder mysteries, except in this case, the guy hauled off and slugged him one. Broke Murray’s nose. He was in the hospital two nights. What a mess. He should have just reported it to a manager and been done with it, but then he couldn’t have shown how smart he was.”
I nodded. So Murray had an enlarged sense of himself that he could be the center of attention to correct a business problem.
“I’m guessing there were other stories too?” I asked, hoping to get more of a non-family opinion of the man.
“Yeah, he ran across a discrepancy in some accounts. He traced the money back to some pretty shady people. He worked with the FBI for a while. The Feds kept a low profile on it, but he told everyone around here about the matter. I always wondered if those guys found out and made him disappear ala Jimmy Hoffa. Murray always seemed to trip over crimes and criminals.”
I thought about what he said. I too was running across crimes around the food truck or in my home. I knew I would have to give real thought to this man’s words. Would I end up missing? Would some stranger be the one to look into my disappearance? It seemed rather depressing that his work had moved on so quickly. I would at least hope that Land and Carter would mourn a little before they got back to work.
“So is there any way that I could see his computer?”
The man bit his lip and then nodded. “Maybe – a big maybe. Come on back inside with me. The company is in a cost-cutting mode, and they recently surplused all the computers that weren’t in use. Murray’s desktop machine was just sitting there. No one sat at his desk after he left. Of course that would mean that they actually hired someone here.” He swiped a card on the front door and held it open for me. I went in and then waited to follow him to the elevators. “They’ve sent out a list of the equipment that’s being removed. They’re in the midst of trying to sell it off cheap. They’re not bad machines, nothing special, but like I said, they don’t want the computers just sitting around costing the company tax dollars.”
I followed him to a desk that said “Norman Unrau.” He sat down, powered on his computer, and smiled at me. “At least my computer is here, so I must still work here…for now.”
He pulled up an email in about a minute. He scanned through it. “You’re going to want to look for 4321. That’s the last four of the barcode, so you should have it easy. I always get some set of numbers that aren’t even remotely easy to remember.”
He led the way out of the cubicle and down the hall. A large conference room had a secretary, sitting like a sentry outside the door. Unrau nodded to her and said, “Good afternoon, Celia. We’re just looking for a particular computer.”
She didn’t speak, nor did she look at us. She just continued to face forward like the Queens’s guards in London.
We entered the room and Unrau said, “Looking for the computer ending with the serial number of 4321.”
The task sounded reasonable, but there were hundreds of computer units sitting around the room. Not all had the serial number tags on them, and I could see that this was going to be a long, dusty job. I started at one end of the room, and he started at the other. I appreciated his help. Otherwise it would have taken even longer.
We didn’t speak at all. There was no reason to. I doubted that he’d known Murray Longhill very well, and so he wouldn’t be able to provide me with any information on him. The computer, however…
I made it through three rather tall stacks of computers when Unrau made a noise. I turned around, and he was looking at one of the bottom units in a tall stack of computers. I joined him, and he pointed to the second unit from the bottom. “That’s the one.” I double-checked the tag number, since I had no desire to move that many computers without a good reason. It matched. We began the slow process of moving ten other CPU towers from the unit we wanted. Unrau checked it again against the paper too, but the number still matched.
“This is the one you want,” he said, proffering it to me.
I took it. The tower was one of the older models, probably made when I was still in middle school. It weighed a ton, and he motioned to me to carry it to the door. “Celia, this young lady would like to buy this unit. Are they still $40 a piece?”
Celia finally turned to look at us. “Cash or credit card?” she said simply.
“Credit card,” I replied, knowing that I never carried that much cash on me. I offered the card, and Celia pulled out one of those devices that can read a credit card from your phone. I’d thought about adding that to the business, allowing customers to charge their lunches, but the fees and charges had been so high that, in the end, I wouldn’t have made any money on the sale. Some owners preferred the method, since it meant less cash on hand and less chance of robbery. I’d never been robbed at the food truck – investigated murders, yes, but never a robbery.
We completed the transaction, and Mr. Unrau walked me to the elevator. “Good luck with that thing. If Longhill was doing anything, it would be on his computer. The man was on that all day long. He even played on it at lunch.”
I knew that I was guilty of playing with my phone from time to time, but I was nowhere as obsessive as some of my classmates had been, checking for emails or texts every few seconds. I wondered what made Longhill tick that he’d preferred the computer to face-to-face interactions.
I pondered this all the way to Carter’s house. I’d already come up with a plan about the computer. First, apparently Carter needed better computer access according to Aaron. So this would take care of that issue.
Secondly, I’d already had a man in my freezer. I didn’t want to be the one who found something else horrible on an appliance. I needed som
e space from such things. I figured that I could outsource the investigation of the computer to them. If it turned out to be personal, then Aaron would be on the scene to deal with the matter.
However, for all my leaps forward in dealing with Carter, I didn’t know that I would trust someone else with a potential clue like this. If Murray had actually put something on that computer, then it could answer the questions to solve this case. For as much as I trusted him, Carter would be the one reporting back to me. I couldn’t honestly answer what he would do if the news of what Murray did would embarrass or harm Aaron in any way.
So, in the end, I opted to take the thing home. For the sake of irony, I stored the CPU in the spare room where the freezer had been. Perhaps I could redecorate the room as some sort of CSI facility. I could hire my own staff and then just ignore Detective Danvers entirely.
I managed to eat dinner before my curiosity overwhelmed me. I unhooked my own devices and attached it to the CPU I’d purchased today. The startup took longer than I imagined, which probably spoke more to my impatience and the age of the machine than to any real issue with the CPU.
Fortunately for me, whoever had cleaned the machine had only done a partial job. Unless you actually go through several steps with a different software program or totally reformat the hard drive, most of your data can be retrieved. I quickly downloaded some software to undelete the files, and within 20 minutes, I had recreated a number of files from the computer.
I started with the email archives. While I vowed not to do more than glance at anything proprietary to RGF Industries, I knew that Longhill had to have written some personal emails during the time he worked there. Everyone does it to some extent, and I doubted that he was any different.
I started at six months before Longhill’s disappearance to keep a timeline going and to make a decent chronology if I located anything. The first set of archives did nothing to help the case along. They were all about some accounting practices that I couldn’t quite understand. I had a better than average understanding of how business accounting worked though, of course, each company used its own set of acronyms. I couldn’t determine what the actual practice might be from the RGF acronym. I printed this off to show my father. While I was above average, he was an accounting wizard. I was sure that he could help me learn what the company was doing and if it related to the case.
Dead Giveaway Page 7
