“I took the afternoon off to do some apartment shopping, if you must know. Anyway, I have some information on this Clancy Conley person, and also on Laughton.”
Virgil put a legal pad on his knee, took out a pen, and said, “Give it to me.”
“Conley was a drug addict, has five arrests, all as a user, never as a seller, always for amphetamine. The arrests were in Missouri, Iowa, two in Nebraska, and one in Minnesota. I’ll put the details in an e-mail. As far as income goes, he shows a little over eighteen thousand last year, most of it from a newspaper called the Republican-River, and three thousand dollars from Minnia Marketing, which is an Internet phone-sales operation. He worked there for four months.”
“Selling what?”
“As far as I can tell, almost everything. It appears that Minnia Marketing—the name comes from ‘Minn,’ as in Minnesota, and ‘Ia,’ as in Iowa—basically owns nothing except some telephones. What it does is advertise on the Internet for all kinds of things, from manufacturers where they’ve qualified for wholesale prices, and then when somebody orders from them, they contact the manufacturer and have the product drop-shipped to the buyer.”
“They’re a boiler room.”
“Yup. Not a very good one,” Sandy said. “They reported earnings last year of twenty-six thousand and change, after expenses and taxes.”
“What else?”
“Okay, this is kind of interesting. I talked to the executive editor at the Omaha World-Herald, who said that when Conley wasn’t high, he was a terrific police reporter, and showed signs of becoming a good investigator. Had very good instincts and big balls. But he couldn’t stay away from the drugs, and finally they had to fire him. I found it interesting that he was supposedly really good . . . which could bear on your case.”
“Yes, it could,” Virgil said, thinking of the photos. Through the porch window, he could see Johnson bent over the spreadsheets. “Send everything you’ve got by e-mail. This is all good. Now, what about Laughton?”
“Another interesting case,” she said. “Last year he reported income of thirty-one thousand and change. So maybe he got a sweetheart deal on the truck? I wouldn’t know. I do know his income tax returns don’t show either gains or losses from investments, which should mean that he doesn’t have any. What’s more interesting is this guy, who doesn’t make any money, showed a real-estate tax deduction for four thousand dollars for a house in Tucson, Arizona. I checked on a real-estate site, and he apparently bought it two years ago, and probably for cash, for three hundred and ninety-eight thousand dollars—I can’t find a mortgage document anywhere.”
“Send me all that. And, Sandy—you’re a genius.”
“I know. Unfortunately, a low-ranking, outstate investigator whose most often used first name is Fuckin’ is the only one who recognizes that.”
—
THAT FUCKIN’ FLOWERS took his notes back inside, where Johnson looked up and said, “Well, this is boring. Lots of these whatchamacallits. Numbers.”
“You see anything?”
“A few things,” Johnson said. “It looks like a purchase list from some big nonprofit organization, though I can’t tell you which. County government, maybe, although it seems too big for that.”
“How do you get nonprofit?”
“Because there’s an entry column for taxes, but whoever it is doesn’t allot money for taxes, which means it’s either public or nonprofit.”
“Could be the schools—schools are big.”