Threads of Suspicion(70)
“A good point.” Evie returned the folder to its box and went on to the next one. Sorting through all that was here was going to take hours. She glanced at the conference room, aware they had shifted attention away from the other case while David helped her solve this one.
“Your PI, David. You were going to check out crimes that happened around the Englewood area, where Saul may have disappeared that Saturday night. Later today I’ll spend an hour looking at that for you. I don’t want to leave his case entirely cold while we pursue this one.”
“I’m sure Saul would understand,” David replied, “but thanks, Evie. We’ll get both cases resolved if they can be. It just makes sense to push first where there’s movement, and Jenna’s case feels that way, and may still be flowing into current crimes. Saul’s looks to be ended.”
Fourteen
Evie studied the latest database matches. Ticket purchases made at the Triple M website yielded sixty-two names in common with at least three of the five concert locations and dates. There were twelve matches for all five concerts. A strikingly high number of matches, she thought, given the dates went back nine years, with locations crossing four states.
She started at the top of the list and went hunting for what she could learn. Kyle Kendrick, 18 Hillcrest Road, Pawnee, IL. That put him south, in the middle of the state. He’d bought tickets to all five concerts of interest. Was he still living there? She pulled up the DMV database and found that he still lived at the same address. He was forty-three now, placing him at the high end of the likely age range. She searched the marriage and divorce records but came across nothing under his name. She moved to business records and found his name and address under business ownership. She tracked the business number in the Doing Business As database and came up with Shirts for You. She found a matching website with a shop address in Pawnee, IL. Kyle was a T-shirt vender who, going by the website content, followed a lot of popular bands.
Probably not Kyle, she concluded, but she doubted he was the one going out to the concerts and actually selling the shirts now that the business looked to have prospered. He’d hire a college kid, provide a ticket to the concert as part of the deal. She’d probably find Kendrick or his shop name in the vender list at the various concert venues. She could ask who he had paid to work the five concerts; maybe she’d get the same name for all five. She picked up the phone and made the call, found Kyle a rather puzzled but cooperative man willing to dig out that answer for her. She thanked him for his help and moved on to the second name.
Lucille Johnson, 79 Marigold Lane, Evanston, IL. DMV showed her to be sixty-nine. A bit more digging came up with the surprising bit of info—she was a music-magazine staffer. Evie made another call and this time got a recording, left a message that she would be interested in talking with Lucille about concert venues in the Midwest.
She was going to have to wade through a cottage industry that had latched on to the Triple M band as a lucrative group for business reasons to get to the fans buying tickets because they loved the music. But the only way to separate the groups was to identify each individual. Evie could feel the clock running as she followed names and generated information. Some she found in the business-license database, sometimes there was an arrest on file, while for others there was a permit issued—T-shirt vender, ticket broker, food vender. They all were efficiently buying tickets to every one of the concerts, taking the discount by ordering directly from the website. But these kinds of leads would be buying tickets for a lot of bands, and for now she wanted only Triple M fans.
She found her first probable fan—Garry, with two r’s, Nichols, 552 Rowlings Road, Gurnee, IL. That put him close to the Illinois-Wisconsin border. DMV showed a Garry Nichols now resided in Chicago. He would be the right age, thirty-one now. She searched for a criminal record, found a long one. Multiple drunk-and-disorderly arrests, short jail times, a B&E—that caught her attention—two restraining orders issued four and five years ago, cited as at fault in a traffic accident causing injuries two years ago. “Garry, you and I need to get better acquainted.” Evie sent the information to the printer.
She heard the door open, glanced around to see David. She looked at the time, realized it was later than she had thought. “How were the interviews?”
“Productive, but negative. I can eliminate both union guys.”
“Well, I’ve got more names—those who bought multiple tickets through the band’s website.”
David smiled. “More names is always a good thing.” He pulled free a yellow sheet of paper taped to the conference room glass door. “You’ve found there was trouble in Englewood around the time of Saul’s disappearance.”