Identity Crisis (Sam McRae Mystery 1)

“I’ll pass on your first thought, go along with your second.”

“What’s wrong with the first?”

“No proof your client wasn’t involved.”

“I don’t have to prove Melanie wasn’t involved, you have to prove she was.”

He fixed a level gaze on me. “What makes you so sure she wasn’t?”

I filled Duvall in on what I knew. I told him about my trips to Melanie’s apartment, and how the box had mysteriously shown up the second time. I told him why she disappeared. And I told him what I’d seen earlier that night. Duvall mulled it over.

“That’s interesting,” he said. “I can see why you think she was set up. The bank statemen

ts don’t help though. She worked at the bank.”

“So did Garvey.”

“True.” His hand swept in an arc, toward the boxes. “Shall we take a look?”

“Let’s do it.”

We dug in. Box-by-box, we worked our way through. It went slowly at first, but the pace picked up as we became familiar with what was in them. Many of the boxes clearly hadn’t been touched in years. Opening them sent up a cloud of choking dust. A couple of them were new.

One box held nothing but tax records and a thick file of correspondence with the IRS. A quick glance through the letters showed Ash’s returns had been questioned on several occasions.

“Ash seems to have trouble finding good help to handle the books,” I told Duvall. I related Rhonda Jacobi’s comments about Schaeffer.

“Maybe he doesn’t care,” Duvall said. “These businesses could provide deductible losses.”

“It would explain his lack of involvement. As I understand it, he never comes here.”

He shrugged. “In his shoes, I wouldn’t either.”

We picked up the pace, but the process remained tedious, since we had to view everything together. What if I found something helpful to his case that hurt mine, or vice versa? We also tried to keep track of where the boxes were and put them back as we found them, which took extra time.

We didn’t talk much—just stuck to the work, determined to get through it. We had three boxes left when Duvall heaved a great sigh.

“Oh, man,” he said. “We’re so close, but I’ve got to stop—stretch my legs.” He got up and walked around.

“I know.” I stood up, too, and stretched my arms behind me, then overhead. “God, I’m stiff.”

From the corner of my eye, I thought I saw Duvall checking me out, but when I looked at him, he’d turned away. I shook my hands out.

“You know, people think investigative work is so glamorous,” Duvall said, standing on one foot doing quad stretches, his hand on the desk for balance. “They should see me now. I’ve spent the entire night in a dingy strip club looking through boxes and come up with nothing.”

“Very little, not nothing. We know Ash has tax problems.”

“For what that’s worth.” He switched legs. “Frankly, I’d like to find out more about this Tom Garvey fellow.”

“Join the club,” I said.

“What about your client?”

“She knows very little about him. He wasn’t the kind to talk about himself a lot.”

Melanie had said Tom would never talk about his childhood or where he came from. He hardly spoke of work and, when he did, it was always in generalities.

“What about the cops?” I said. “Don’t they have information on him?”