“Okay, thank you. Now you said that you need to talk to Troy again but it would have to wait. What’s that about?”
“Well... I’m not sure I should say. I should give Troy a chance to explain.”
“I respect that but it’s hard to know if it will help us in any way unless we know what it is.”
“I don’t think it will but since you’re the police, I guess it’s okay. After I left Garage on Division, I ran to get a cup of coffee. Unfortunately, the lid came off while I was driving and I ended up spilling most of it. The receipt I’d gotten was ruined. My car is a company car. Without a receipt, I wasn’t going to get reimbursed for the expense. I was going to go back right away but needed to get to work. I stopped in Thursday morning and asked Davy if he could help me. It took him a little while because for some odd reason, it wasn’t with the other receipts. Anyway, he finally found the right file in the drawer and made me a copy. It was only after I got back out to my car that I realized that something was very wrong. My bill was for $89. But the receipt I was looking at was for $389.”
“Davy gave you the wrong receipt?”
“Oh no. Same exact receipt as I’d gotten the day before except somebody had added a three to the total. I don’t know what the heck is going on but I sure can’t turn in a receipt for $389 for an oil change and a transmission flush.”
“Do you have that receipt?” A.L. asked.
“Of course,” she said.
“I’m going to need to see it,” he said.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, he and Rena pulled up to Peitra Jonet’s house. She met them at the door with receipt in hand. Both he and Rena glanced at it. “We’re going to need to take this with us,” he said.
She shrugged. “I guess that’s okay. It’s not like I can turn it in anyway.”
They walked back to their vehicle and backed down her driveway. However, two blocks away, A.L. pulled off. He studied the receipt. “This is the opposite of skimming.”
“Skimming?” Rena asked.
“Yeah. Restaurants, dry cleaners, dog walkers, hair stylists. Hell, I don’t know, probably just about any small business and probably some large ones, too, underreport sales. Then they don’t have to claim income or subsequently pay taxes on their real revenue, but rather on some reduced amount. But it looks like Troy is overstating his revenue. Why do that?”
“To make his financials look better. So he could qualify for more financing,” Rena said. “From his friend Steven Hanzel.”
“I’m a simple guy but overstating your revenue doesn’t do anything to improve your actual financial position. You don’t end up with more cash on hand. In fact, wouldn’t it make you look worse? Like you’re making all these sales but where’s the money?”
“We need a better look at his financial records. Or should we say, his cooked books?” Rena said. “It’s already pretty late on a Sunday night. We’re going to need a warrant and some resources to help us if we’re going to do this right. Maybe we wait until morning.”
“Absolutely not,” A.L. said. “I want those records and I want them now.”
* * *
At 1:13 on Monday morning, they knocked on Troy and Leah Whitman’s door. It was opened promptly since they’d called ahead. The young FBI agent motioned them in. They found both Leah and Troy in the living room. She was standing by the bay window that looked out into the dark backyard. He was sitting in the chair. They didn’t appear to have been talking.
A.L. handed him the signed warrant. “You can ride with us down to the garage. A technician will be meeting us there. We will take custody of your computer and any other electronic or paper records that are deemed financial in nature.”
“This makes no sense,” Leah said.
“Are you ready?” A.L. asked, looking at Troy.
“Yeah,” the man said. He looked at his wife but didn’t say anything to her. Didn’t say anything to anybody for the next hour as a force of seven, three from the FBI and four from the Baywood Police Department, descended upon his business. Simply stood to the side and unlocked things that were locked and pointed to other things when asked a direct question.
* * *
“Did you think that was odd?” Rena asked later, when they were back at their desks. It was 3:30 in the morning.
“I don’t know. If he’s innocent of wrongdoing, then he was in shock. You know, how had it come to this when he and his family were the wronged party? If he’s not innocent, then he might have assumed that anything he said now would come back to haunt him later.”
“Leah seemed pretty confused,” Rena said.
“Yeah.” He was staring at the screen.
“How can you still see?” she asked. “We’ve been awake for almost twenty-four hours.”
He didn’t answer.
Seeing no choice, Rena pushed back her chair and walked around the desk to stand behind him. She looked at his screen. It was some kind of spreadsheet with multiple columns and rows. She looked at the column headings. Date. Work Order Number. Last Name. First Name. Phone Number. Quote Amount. Sale Amount.
July 1 through July 31. Bunch of different work order numbers. Bunch of names and phone numbers. The columns for the quote amount and sale amount were sometimes the same, sometimes different. She understood that. The quote was given before the mechanic really got into the guts of the problem. He found something else wrong and the price went up.
“I need to find the spreadsheet where these numbers tie into the money he’s taking in,” A.L. said. “Damn. I should have studied harder in accounting class.”
“You took an accounting class?”
“Yeah. I was going to get a business degree before I switched over to criminal justice.”
“You’d have hated being a businessman.”
“Yeah, probably.” He was opening new tabs on the worksheet. “Bingo,” he said after a minute. “Here it is.”
“What?” she demanded. She was tired and hungry and not in the mood to be kept in the dark.
“Do you remember when I told you that I met Troy’s neighbor, who delights in his dog shitting in Troy’s yard?”
“Yes.”
“He told me that the catalyst to that was an outrageous quote for $1,000 in July that he’d given to his wife. Her name was Lois Martin.” He flipped back to the original tab he’d been on. “Here it is. Lois Martin. Quote was $1,080. Final sale was $1,080. And here,” he said, flipping back to the second tab, “is where he shows it in his daily deposit as a collected payment.”