Flame in the Dark (Soulwood #3)(15)
T. Laine said, “I hung around the feds as much as I could. There was no sign of magical use in the house or on the investigators. All human, all the way. The feds didn’t want to talk around me, so I put in earbuds and pretended to play with my phone. But in reality I was wearing the new MMs.”
Rick looked interested. MMs were micro mics, a device dreamed up by JoJo. They looked just like earbuds but amplified noise like mega hearing aids. When hooked to a cell with the proper app, the ambient noise could be filtered out, so that the wearer could hear and record any conversation the wearer wanted. Sometimes. Sometimes not. JoJo was still working out technical problems. MMs were likely illegal. They were certainly not something that could be used for evidence gathering, but they were handy when you wanted to be sneaky. JoJo had made two sets of the MMs, and T. Laine had one, Rick had the other, though he probably already had better than human hearing, being werecat. “And?” he asked.
“Nothing from the feds. There’s some kind of ambient hum at the Holloways’. Maybe part of the security system. But I did get something from the security team when I went by the master suite. The hum disappeared there, and the guy in charge of the team? He has a drug problem, a gambling problem, and two girlfriends. And a wife. I gave the info to JoJo.”
We all turned to Jo, who said, “Deep background in process. Peter Simon is a former Green Beret, injured in a nonmilitary exercise, I guess you’d call it, while on leave. He was jumping out of a plane and his parachute didn’t open correctly. He survived the landing and made it through rehab, but he was on Oxy for about six months and it looks like he never kicked the habit. The addiction is what drove him out of the service, put his marriage into trouble, and gave him two ladies on the side. One may be his dealer. The other is pregnant with his baby.”
“Making him a target for coercion or blackmail,” Rick said. “What about the gambling problem?”
“Occam has that one,” JoJo said.
“Tennessee’s gambling laws are some of the toughest in the country, and so Simon has no legal way to indulge. We got a warrant for his electronic history and he has a bookie named T.J., just the initials, and nothing in the system on that name or any correlating name with those initials. It’s gonna take time and more time to do an electronic probe and analysis on all the particulars. I’m willing, but the feds have the people and the system in place to do a full electronic forensics workup. And they don’t know about this angle yet.”
“He’s human. Giving this to the right federal agent, in the right way, could give us some negotiation room if we need it later,” Rick mused. “Clean up the file and send it to me. I’ll make a call.”
Occam nodded and started tapping on his tablet.
“Tandy?” Rick asked.
“Everyone has secrets,” Tandy said slowly. “It’s not hard to read past the natural protective emotional barriers of most humans and paranormals, but unless the interviewer asks the right questions”—he looked around the table—“the emotional reactions are not exactly easy to interpret. Everyone we interviewed at the party had secrets. That said, I didn’t pick up on guilt that might be related to the shooting.”
I had tuned in to Tandy’s report as he spoke. Only weeks past, the empath had been a bundle of nerves and emotional pain. The not-so-secret affair with JoJo was doing him a world of good.
“But you did pick up on other guilt?” Rick asked.
“Several who were currently having affairs, one who was feeling guilty about something at his job, maybe embezzling. Several with substance abuse problems. Three with anger issues. One couple with domestic abuse issues. I amended the reports on each of them and Jo is checking them out.”
“Jo, dig deeper into all the things Tandy picked up. If you can substantiate it, then make sure the domestic abuse is turned over to whatever agency can best address it,” Rick said. “If the embezzlement is likely, see it goes to the DA for consideration of further investigation. The affairs, substance abuse, and anger issues are out of our bailiwick unless they indicate a tie to the shooting. That all, people?” When no one spoke up Rick said, “You all know your assignments. Go. Stir the nests. Keep your eyes open.”
? ? ?
Once the meeting was over, the others took off into the field to continue follow-up interviews, visits to the city morgue, and higher-level meetings with the FBI and ATF and assorted law enforcement organizations. The probie had no such fun assignments, and JoJo was too important at IT operations to be wasted on basic field drudgery, so the two of us were relegated to the office.
I spent the late afternoon in my little cubicle reading over the speech-to-text interviews and correcting mistakes. JoJo continued digging through a surface background check of all the partygoers tapped by Tandy, to see if anything pointed to problems that might have resulted in a crime of passion or crime of profit. And once those exciting and dangerous (not at all) assignments were done, JoJo and I began to create a working, searchable bible of the crime, the people who had been injured, the party guests, the caterers, and the security personnel, with strong concentration on Peter Simon, the head security guy, the one with the substance abuse problems, woman problems, baby problems, and problem problems.
It was boring and tiresome, but listening on earbuds while reading the transcripts on an electronic reader did give me time to water all the plants I had started in the office and stick my fingers into their soil, giving them a little boost to make them thrive. In front of each window I had planted a mixed assortment of plants, and we now had access to spinach and three varieties of lettuce, a dozen varieties of basils, mints, chives, thymes, and other edible herbs. Rick had grumbled that I was using the office as a greenhouse, and since he was right, I hadn’t argued. But I needed the fresh greens to offset the impact of fast foods on my system, and the others had quickly learned how to augment their own meals with the fresh stuff, and asked for tomatoes, cukes, and squash. I wasn’t sure how I’d grow all that with the limited light in HQ, but the fresh food sounded wonderful.