“And now that we know they are buried close to home, you think they never left at all.” Like Nate, Lucy thought.
“It makes no sense that they’d leave and return a week or two later.”
“Unless they left, felt guilty, and returned so Denise could turn herself in. But someone stopped her. A partner, maybe.”
“Yeah, that’s definitely possible, you’re a good cop, you’ll find the truth,” Ash said. “Anyway, the detective here told me he would call the parents, and he didn’t, and I’m frickin’ mad about it. These folks are incompetent. They saw only what they were supposed to see and nothing more. They were manipulated by the killer, and finding justice for this family is going to be an uphill battle three years later. I gotta go, unless you need something?”
“No. Call if you find anything.”
She ended the call.
“He’s heated,” Nate said.
“He’s taking it personally.” She’d reach out to him after work, listen to his frustrations. She understood how he felt—she often took cases personally. Sometimes, she couldn’t avoid it. But she recognized that the more personal, the more likely one could make mistakes—that tunnel vision could cloud judgment or how one viewed evidence.
Nate continued, “While you were talking to Ash, I tracked down Henry Kiefer. He’s now the general manager for a quarry in Bandera. Used to run a multi-million-dollar construction company, now makes mid–five figures working for someone else.”
“Because of the embezzlement?”
“I skimmed a couple news articles, but I don’t think they explain the whole picture. In essence, he took a contract from the federal government for a major public works project. He’d already ordered supplies and paid for permits and fees and a bunch of stuff, hired additional staff, and started work. When the bills came due, there was no money to pay for them—I don’t know if that was why he hired the auditor, or if that was just standard practice and it spooked Albright.”
“And he kills her whole family?”
“Don’t know, but we’ve both seen worse.”
Nate was right about that.
They decided not to call ahead. While on the surface it didn’t seem plausible that Kiefer would kill an entire family out of rage over stolen money—and not get the money back—they couldn’t discount that he might be violent. It was sometimes better to get a first reaction.
It was less than thirty minutes to Henry Kiefer’s workplace. They arrived just after eleven that morning and showed their badges. Kiefer was out in the quarry, and it took a good ten minutes before he arrived in the crowded, but functional, office.
“FBI?” he said, and shook their hands. “Henry Kiefer. What can I do for you?”
“Is there a place we can sit and talk?” Lucy asked.
He glanced around. “I have a desk in that room, but it’s tight. This would be better.” He leaned against a table piled high with papers, then he suddenly stood straight, his face ashen. “Did something happen to my girl?”
“No, sir,” Nate said. He nodded toward a family photo on the wall with Kiefer and a young woman in a Marine uniform. “Your daughter is a Marine?”
“Yes, twelve years now, went through ROTC at Texas Tech with a double major in computer science and mathematics. She’s a smart girl, now a major. Major Paulina Kiefer. I didn’t think when they said FBI—”
“We’re not here about your daughter, I’m sure she’s fine,” Nate said. “Is she deployed?”
“She’s not in the country, that’s all I know. She doesn’t tell me where she goes. She tells me she can’t, so sometimes I worry. She sends emails every week, but doesn’t talk about her job. All I know is that she uses her degree, so I figure something like computer maintenance or maybe coding, something along those lines. At least, thinking that way makes me more comfortable.” He smiled nervously.
“We’re here about Denise Albright,” Lucy said.
He blinked, then frowned. “You found her. It’s about time.”
“We found her remains. She and her family were killed three years ago—at about the same time that she was suspected of leaving the country.”
He stared at her as if he didn’t believe her.
“She’s dead? Glen? Her kids?”
“You may have heard about the bones uncovered after the flood. Yesterday we learned that they belong to the Albright family. They were murdered and buried in a remote area of Kerr County, near the Kendall County line. They may have been there since the day they disappeared.”
Lucy was watching Kiefer closely—she didn’t know what to expect from his reaction, but he seemed mostly confused.
“You’re telling me that Denise has been dead for three years.”
“Yes.”
“And her family.”
Lucy nodded. She kept the information about Ricky Albright to herself, mostly to see how he would react.
“But how?”
“They were killed late September three years ago. We’re scrambling now that we have the bodies identified, and unfortunately, we don’t know much about the missing money or how you came to accuse Albright of embezzling funds.”
Kiefer took a moment to regroup. “I—well, I went over this with the DA here in Kerr County, and again with the FBI a month or two later. I never imagined that Denise would have stolen from me. That week, I told her that I was bringing in an outside auditor. It’s not unheard of, and I do it every couple of years. With all the tax regulations changing constantly, I wanted to make sure everything was accounted for, especially since this was such a big federal project. Well, big for me. The new contract we’d received—it was one of the largest we’d had, and it would have brought hundreds of jobs to the area. Not just my company, but supporting companies, small businesses in the area. The three million she stole was only the initial funding—it would have been a thirty-five-million-dollar project for us.”
“So her work had been audited before.”
“Yes—at least twice since she’s been working for me. So when she didn’t show up to the meeting with the auditor on Monday, I thought she’d forgotten. He went to her office and grabbed the files—they were right where they were supposed to be.”
“When did she leave Friday?”
“She didn’t work in my office full-time, and I don’t think she was in at all on Friday. She was a CPA, had several clients. She worked out of her house to keep expenses down, though she had a small office with me because she spent so much time on my books and it was convenient for both of us. She was there at least one day a week, but because of this project she’d been spending more time in the office.”
News to Lucy. Why hadn’t Chavez given them that information? Why wasn’t it in the files she had?
“I tried calling her that morning, she didn’t answer, didn’t return my calls. I didn’t really think much about it until Wednesday morning—I think it was Wednesday—when the independent auditor said that the trust account was empty.”
“How did you come to suspect that Denise took the funds?”
“I—well, she was the only one with access to the trust account other than me. It was wired to another account in her name, and then wired to another account in a business name, and then wired to another account and closed. The FBI said they haven’t been able to trace it since. But it was her log-in and password. And she changed the protocols with the bank so there didn’t need to be a dual signature—the bank said that I signed off on it, but I didn’t. Either she tricked me and said I was signing something different than I was, or she forged my signature. I don’t see how else she could have done it.”