"They don't?"
"Oddly, no. I can't understand it myself."
Bryant chuckled. "Okay, so hit me with today's hypothetical tech question, unrelated to any cases you're working."
Gabriel explained the situation.
"Nah," Bryant said. "It doesn't work like that. Spoofing numbers is easy enough, but it doesn't take much to prove they're spoofed. I know you don't like the technical details, so here's an example. If I used your phone number to send nude pics to my girlfriend, those pics would never appear on your phone. And if I started texting your girlfriend while spoofing your phone number, my texts would certainly never appear midstream in your conversation thread with her."
"Nor in her thread with me. Is that correct?"
"Right. She'd get an entirely new conversation thread, seemingly from your number. Now, having said all that, I'll add the usual caveat--there's a chance I'm full of shit. Tech is always advancing, especially black-market tech. Right now, though, I don't know of any way someone could do what you've described. If anyone can, then they have serious skills. Or the cash to rent them."
Gabriel signed off with the usual "I'll wire a donation to your college fund," along with the usual promise to pass on Bryant's hello to his grandmother. Then he hung up, thought a bit, and pulled out his laptop to begin searching.
There were many reasons for one spouse to want the other dead. In fact, no other relationship seemed to end in murder quite so often. Putting aside domestic violence, the top reasons to kill one's spouse were sex and money. More accurately, infidelity and inheritance.
He had Heather Nansen's phone records, along with a program designed by Bryant to analyze those--cross-referencing calls received and made, noting length and attempting to match the numbers to ones found online. Once analyzed, he had to dissect that data, looking for outliers and patterns.
Here he found both: outliers and patterns. Namely, multiple instances of ten-to fifteen-minute calls to numbers Heather only ever dialed once, all within a brief period, all the numbers tracing to the same type of business. Private investigators.
Six months ago, she'd been trying to hire an investigator. That was what the pattern suggested. Contact one, explain the situation, and ultimately, decide against hiring. She had something in mind, something she wanted investigated. All those calls came before the break-ins, suggesting no link there.
In the end, his digging circled back to the restaurant. Eclipse. To its financial health. It didn't take long for Gabriel to form his own diagnosis: the patient was on life support, and really, the smart thing to do would be to pull the plug. No incentive would have convinced him to invest in the restaurant. Despite its popularity, it leaked money like a sieve, which suggested someone was siphoning off profits.
He continued digging, through both public records and not-so-public ones. He was playing a hunch, and it didn't take long to confirm it.
When opening a business like a restaurant, one needs investment capital. Those initial investors are the ones with the most to lose, arguably even more than Alan Nansen, who could ride his reputation to a new venture. The investors were also the ones directly affected by any misappropriation of funds.
There were a minor and a major investor in Eclipse. The minor one? Heather's parents. And the major? Heather herself, who had funded the venture almost singlehandedly.
Heather Nansen's degree was in business, which she used working for both Eclipse and her mother's firm. That led to a second call, to Ricky, with questions about his own MBA, and the role he
played in his father's business. The legal role, that is.
"Sure, I do handle the money," Ricky said when Gabriel asked about finances. "Dad began shifting that over to me when I started my degree. Now it's all mine. I control the piggy bank. Dad just signs your checks."
"Are you trained to find evidence of mismanagement? Questionable accounting?"
"An MBA is like a law degree. You can't be an expert in all law, and I'm not one in all aspects of running a business. But I happen to like number crunching--and Dad needs that more than he needs marketing and advertising--so I learned more about the financial side than other MBAs might. I don't do our accounting, but I oversee it. In a business like this, there's always someone looking to skim."
"If I send you some financial records for Nansen's business, can you tell me if anything looks suspicious?"
"Sure."
Twenty minutes later, Ricky called back with a yes. Or "Hell, yeah."
"Someone's raiding this piggy bank. Ricky said there's no way a restaurant that busy should see profit this low."
That suggested the person siphoning out money was Alan Nansen. Heather likely had the skills to spot discrepancies, and if she'd suspected someone other than her husband, she'd have been quick to inform on the culprit.
Gabriel could understand Nansen wanting a bigger share of the profit--he was the talent, the vision, and the one putting in the hours. But skimming would be more understandable if the investors were faceless corporate sponsors. When it was his wife's money? That was unacceptable.
Given the amount of the investment, Gabriel presumed that, like Olivia, Heather had received a trust fund. Wealthy parents wanting to make their only child's life easier at the time she needed it most--when she was young and establishing her own life, rather than waiting on an inheritance.
He suspected the lion's share of that trust had gone into Eclipse. What if Heather then discovered her husband was stealing from their nest egg, her birthright? And where was the money going? A mistress? Drugs? Gambling? Not back into their own bank accounts, that was sure.
Had she sought a private investigator to answer her questions...and then decided on another solution? One that would mean she didn't need to turn over half her remaining assets to Alan in a divorce court?