They went back and clustered around Leo’s desk, telling him about their interview with Juan and what they’d learned about the wildcat auto-repair shop.
Leo couldn’t seem to stay focused on what they were saying. Presently Sarah realized he was just waiting for them to stop talking so he could tell them about his afternoon. The bank examiners had finally given him a full explanation of how they thought the theft was done. As he talked, Sarah realized it still wasn’t really settled.
‘The truth is there’s still some question about how much money is missing. Nobody’s ever been able to prove exactly how much he took because they’ve never been able to find out where he put any of it.’
‘Then how do they know he took any?’ Sarah said.
‘Well, because the three charities he was banking for all tell the same story: Frank always picked up the money after one of the events – the bake sales, the ball games, the Thursday night bingo games – and took it to the credit union and made the deposit. It was very casual, a system left over from years ago when Tucson was smaller and so were all these organizations. Not proper procedure but he’d been doing these crummy little jobs for so long, all the things nobody else wanted to do, and he did so many favors for so many people, they just took it for granted.
‘Then one day the new bank examiners for the whole state came in and looked over the accounts and said, “This isn’t right, you shouldn’t be handling these little two-bit accounts in the first place. And besides, there should be at least two people counting and signing off on everything.” So Frank got kicked upstairs, as it were, to work at being the comptroller his title had been saying he was all along. And two members each from the food bank, the Kiwanis, and the Royal Order of Elks had to take on the job of depositing the money from their special events.
‘They all complained bitterly about losing Frank’s helping hand, for a while. But then a funny thing happened – they noticed that their take went up and stayed up. After a while they compared notes. Then they started talking to some of the members who were accountants and lawyers, and pretty soon they went and talked to the president of the credit union , and we had that simmering scandal about missing money that went on for months.
‘They had no way of knowing how much was missing, but they got together and worked out an estimate of somewhere between seventy and eighty thousand dollars, depending on how long they thought he’d been skimming.’
‘While you and I and Will,’ Sarah said, ‘were busy chasing the Snakes and the Worms.’
‘Right. Ridding Tucson of the terrible plague of illegal drugs. Wasn’t that a whooping success?’
‘Well, it was what we were tasked with doing. Because, you said it yourself, the credit union scandal wasn’t our case until Frank Martin offed himself.’
‘With a stolen gun,’ Jason said. ‘That turns out to be part of a haul in a home invasion burglary almost certainly done by Joey García.’
‘Whose car was being maintained by his employer?’ Sarah looked at her teammates. ‘I’m sick of this circle. I’m going to go see how Tracy’s doing.’
THIRTEEN
‘Ah, here comes my favorite lady sleuth,’ Tracy crowed, snapping his braces. ‘I was just coming to fetch you, dear lady.’ He was back in first-rate fettle, bowing from the waist, beaming with all his zits aglow.
‘You look as if you … did you? Oh, fan-freaking-tastic – you found it, didn’t you?’
‘Of course I found it. I thought you said you were going to give me something interesting and fun to work on. This was just routine.’
‘Oh, stop. You found it in Angela’s email? I don’t understand that! Ollie said he searched through her inbox and trash, and—’
‘It wasn’t in Angela’s email – it was in Ed’s.’
‘What?’
‘Well, isn’t that where you wanted me to look? It was his message.’
‘But Ollie said Ed didn’t have an email account on this machine.’
‘Ollie just looked at the file system. He didn’t find a folder for Ed in Documents and Settings. He didn’t know to look at the user accounts. When I saw there was a user account for Ed but no files, I looked in the recycle bin. I found Ed’s user folder and restored it and after that it was child’s play. I just logged in as Ed – he had no password either. Sheesh, cavemen on computers!’
Sarah scratched her head. ‘Recycle bin?’
‘Yeah. Angela must have deleted the whole folder.’