“Could be, although they’d probably put the distinguished visitors in the main office, not here at the secretary’s desk.” I sat down, pulled on my gloves, and touched the space bar. The screen sprang into life. “You check the trash can. I’ll poke around in the computer.”
“You’re not afraid you’ll mess up any evidence it contains?”
“I won’t save or delete or close anything,” I replied. “Considering it’s been running here unguarded for who knows how long, I don’t think my doing a little careful snooping is going to compromise anything that hasn’t already been compromised.”
“Snoop away, then, and on your head be it.” He walked over and began peering into the trash can while pulling his gloves from his pocket.
I started by looking to see what programs were open. Firefox, Microsoft Word, and Adobe Photoshop.
Firefox was showing the Caerphilly County Web site’s page about the week’s activities in the town square.
Interesting, but I had no idea what it meant. Except that it was more evidence that the computer had been used recently. The page it was showing hadn’t existed a few weeks ago.
“Now this is interesting,” Denton said.
I glanced over and saw that he had a handful of what looked like standard sheets of eight-and-a-half-by-eleven-inch paper that had been torn in half. He moved over to a clear space on the office floor and began arranging them.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Matching the tops to the bottoms,” he said. “Although I’m starting to think that’s not so useful. They’re all copies of the same document.”
“What document?” I asked.
“Looks like the signature page of a contract.”
I knocked over a chair in my haste to take a look at his find.
“Appears to be a copy of the loan document between Caerphilly and First Progressive Financial,” he said.
“Yes, but why haven’t all the county board members signed it?” I pointed out.
We put aside the identical top halves for the moment and compared the bottom halves. All of them had been signed by Mason Shiffley, Randall’s uncle, who had been and still was county board chairman. And all of them had been signed by Quintus Washington, the vice chair. But while Mason’s signature was unchanged from document to document, Quintus’s signature varied wildly. On one copy it was way too large. On another, too small. On several it slanted left or right, or fell a little below or above the signing line. But even in all these tries, it was the placement of the signature that varied. The loops and lines themselves remained curiously static. They all even had the same little broken bit on the capital W where the ink flow had stuttered slightly.
“Someone’s working on forging these signatures,” I said. “Or is it counterfeiting?”
“No idea,” Denton said. “But yeah, he’s digitized their signatures, and he’s working on adding them to a copy of the contract.”
“He’s got Mason’s signature the way he wants it,” I said. “And he was interrupted while working on Quintus’s.”
Denton nodded.
I raced back to the computer and began doing one of the few computer tasks in which I was expert.
“What are you doing?” Denton asked.
“Running a search,” I said. “If you forget where you filed a document, but can remember something about it, you can find it again. The mayor was supposed to have vacated his office about a week after the recall election. I’m searching for any documents created since then. And look—I’m finding some.”
The search screen was gradually filling up with the names of documents. Most of them were either Microsoft Word files or graphic files. When the search feature finished, I arranged its findings in date order.
“So this computer has been used on—call it six occasions in the last year,” Denton said. “Two of them were single day uses, and the others stretched from two to four days. The most recent being a three-day session that started on June thirtieth and ended on July second, the day of the murder.” He had pulled out a notebook and was scribbling. I pulled out my trusty notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe and followed his example.
“And look what he was doing on July second,” I said, pointing to a group of files with that date. “He or she; I’m sure forgery is an equal-opportunity crime.”
Denton studied the file names I was pointing to for a few moments, then shook his head.
“Apart from the fact that they’re all graphics files, I’m not sure I get it.”
“Look at the file names. Atkinson.jpg. Hallett.jpg. MShiffley.jpg. Vshiffley.jpg. Washington.jpg. It’s the members of the county board.”