Kim smiled a warm, happy smile—as if the thought gave her genuine pleasure. “Yup, for another year or two. Now they’re both defunct, and honestly, the world is probably a better place. The services those companies provided were taken over by bigger consulting firms, and the world kept on turning, didn’t it?”
“Not for Christopher or Kevin,” Grady said carefully, watching her face as he spoke.
“Well, no. Not for them.”
He fidgeted with his notebook. “Do you remember, off the top of your head, any employees from Probable Outcomes who came on board at Digital Scaffolding?”
“There were three or four, I think. I’m sorry. I don’t remember the particulars, it’s been so long, and I went out of my way to forget everything that had anything to do with that place. God, it’s like I had PTSD coming out of there.”
“Was there anyone named Scott?” Leda asked fast, while Grady was still scribbling.
Both Kim and Grady looked at her like they weren’t sure where she was going with this. That was okay. Leda wasn’t sure, either.
“Nobody springs to mind, but like I said, it’s been a minute,” Kim said. “The old records might tell you, but I don’t know what became of them. So much of that stuff was shredded or otherwise disposed of. If anything’s in storage anywhere, you’d have to ask Janette, I guess. She’s the one who closed the company. She’d have to keep something around for the sake of the IRS; they make you keep records going back seven years, I think. Maybe I’m wrong.”
“You’ve seen those records, right?” Leda asked.
“Some of them, but not all of them. Like I said, you need either Janette or… or one of the accounting people, maybe? Richard or his wife? I honestly don’t know where you’d go, or who you’d talk to, if you wanted to know more about the personnel makeup of a company that’s been out of business for almost a year.”
“That’s fair,” Grady told her. “We can do some digging around elsewhere.”
“Hey, thanks for staying on the case. I’d still like to know what happened to those two. At least, I’d like to know what happened to Kevin. I don’t honestly care what happened to Chris.”
Leda said, “Ouch. Tough, but fair.”
“I liked Kevin. He was so kind and thoughtful. I was working my way up to asking him out. He was only a couple of years older than me.” She sighed, and it was a sigh that said she had already mourned the lost opportunity but still considered the possibilities quite fondly. “And to think, I’m the one who sent him to that hotel that day. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know he’d never come back.”
Grady leaned forward. “You did?”
“Yeah.” She nodded. “He was looking for his dad. It was on Chris’s calendar. I didn’t know it was a secret. Plus, I would’ve told Kevin my social security number if he’d asked me for it.”
Leda’s face scrunched up in confusion. “Wait, he put a secret meeting on a calendar?”
Kim nodded more enthusiastically than the question seemed to warrant. “Oh yeah. He couldn’t remember anything, unless it was written down somewhere, on something. The really shady stuff went onto his Google calendar.”
“But you had access to it?” Grady asked.
“Right. The man was not a genius.” She shrugged and shook her head. “I’m just sorry that he wasn’t smart enough, or kind enough, or… or… aware enough to keep his own son out of it. That’s the thing that sticks with me more than anything. I wish Kevin hadn’t gotten caught up in it.”
20.
“She didn’t do it.” Leda told Grady excitedly on the way back to the car.
“Why do you think she’s innocent? And what was with your little moment back there, with the questions about those other companies? Did you flash on something?”
Leda grinned widely and leaned back to steady herself against the incline, as they staggered together down the hill. “Not a flash exactly—more like a hunch. But now we know what the connection is between Tod’s murder and the Gilman murders!”
“Wait, we do?”
Smugly, she declared, “Probable Outcomes.”
He snapped his fingers. “Yes! That’s why the company name sounded familiar. You had it somewhere on your murder board.” He was getting excited now, too. “I feel stupid for forgetting it.”
“It’s okay! It’s a crowded murder board, and there’s no way you could remember everything on there. And I know that Kim Cowen didn’t do it because she was head-over-heels in love with Kevin Gilman. Did you see the look in her eyes every time she said his name?”
“I did notice that, yes. But true love isn’t much cover for a murder motive. Claiming to have been in love with a victim is kind of a classic excuse.”
“Is it?” Leda asked.
“Yes.” He stopped to wait for a light to let him cross. Leda stopped beside him. “Just because she had the hots for one of the victims, that doesn’t mean she didn’t kill them. If we’re operating from the theory that Kevin was merely caught up in the violence, then it could’ve been anyone—even someone who was not-so-quietly in love with him. She could’ve killed Christopher and then panicked when Kevin caught her in the act.”
The crosswalk light gave the all clear. Leda stepped onto the street first, letting Grady trail along behind her for once. “That’s true, but that’s not what happened. My psychic senses are tingling.” She glanced back at him, making sure he was keeping up.
“Are they tingling about somebody named Scott? And if not, what was that about?”
“Yes. There’s definitely a Scott involved.”
When they got to the car, Grady unlocked it from the driver’s side and Leda let herself into the passenger seat. “You think Scott’s our killer?” he asked.
“No clue. Or rather, it’s not a very good clue, but it’s the one I’ve got. Now what happens next? Who do we talk to now? Did any random Scotts turn up in your investigation?”
He was quiet until they’d pulled into traffic. They’d almost made it to the interstate on-ramp when he said, “None spring readily to mind. I can get into the corporate records in storage at the precinct; some of that stuff was seized as evidence at the time, and our mystery Scott might turn up there.”
“What about the IRS?”
“That was just a guess. The IRS won’t give us the paperwork without a lot of hoop-jumping. No, Janette is more likely to have that stuff… and she probably doesn’t. The odds are better than zero that it’s all been shredded except for the tax-related financials and whatever we have downtown, and I don’t know if that’ll be enough to tell us anything. We’ve already gone over all of it with a fine-tooth comb—and at one point we used a real forensic accountant,” he added. “We already knew about the accounts in the Cayman Islands, and we already knew that someone was helping themselves to the corporate coffers. It might be new information to you, but we knew most of this already. I mean, we-the-police. Not we-you-and-me. I hate to say it, but this was not the world’s most productive interview.”