“This looks like a command center,” Nahla said, looking slightly bewildered.
Capri laughed. “It kind of is.”
“Aight,” Cannon said, ignoring them both. “There’s a lot to go through, so I divided the files between us. Pull up those chairs and choose a laptop.”
As they did that, Cannon pulled out a few notebooks and pens.
“With each of us working on different sets of files, we’ll cover more ground, quicker. As you go through each file, write the filename and a summary of what’s in the folder. By the time we’re done, we’ll have a catalog of everything in these files and know what we need to examine more closely.”
“You know what would help us ‘cover ground’? A fourth set of hands,” Capri said sarcastically.
Cannon ignored her.
She huffed and dramatically leaned toward her computer screen.
The room settled into a comfortable silence—all that could be heard was the sound of pens moving across paper and the clicking of computer keys.
Occasionally, Nahla would notice something that was familiar or that raised flags.
“If you see anything with the initials A-H or T-H, could you flag it?”
She had found two files already with those initials, and she had a feeling they stood for Anita and Theodore Howard, two of her strongest sources.
As they worked, there was no tension or arguing, just an efficient rhythm. She knew this wasn’t the first work session like this that Cannon and Capri had together, but their fast-paced, quiet urgency was something she was used to in her line of work, and the three of them gelled well together. She felt like part of the team.
About thirty minutes in, something on Nahla’s screen made her pause.
A ledger.
There were rows and rows of numbers. On the document was a name that she’d seen before . . . in a document she received months ago. It was before Cannon came into her life, and because it didn’t connect to anything else she had uncovered at the time, she disregarded it.
“Cannon,” she said, still staring at her screen.
“Wassup?”
“A few weeks after I started digging into this story, I received a weird email that I wrote off as unimportant. It was about the arrest of Darius Laston. He had been arrested for breaking and entering but had gotten off shortly after, due to faulty evidence.
“He was a Caucasian man who worked at theLyle Public Library, and I assumed that someone close to him sent the information to me so that I could shed light on his wrongful arrest.
“I dismissed it because I was so caught up with my current research, and he had beaten his charges, but it looks like whoever sent me that might have been trying to tell me something else. Look.”
Both Cannon and Capri huddled around Nahla as she pointed at her screen.
“Darius Laston is who prepared this ledger, and according to the letterhead, this is aBlue Stone Holdingsdocument. His name and this company being on the same document can’t be a coincidence. This is the name of the LLC that Deputy Allen’s wife owns.
“Every property that’s been seized traces back to that LLC.”
“Wait,” Capri said suddenly. She rushed back to her own workspace and picked up her notebook. After scanning the page for a few seconds, she retrieved her laptop and opened up a specific file before turning the screen so that they could see.
“The name Darius Laston is on this document, also. It’s another ledger, but it has some weird codes I don’t understand.Either way, though, Laston seems to be a large piece in this puzzle.”
“Hold on,” Cannon said, moving to Capri’s laptop.
The information on the ledger was very similar to Nahla’s, but there was an additional column on it with strange abbreviations. As Cannon continued to study it, understanding washed over him.
“These aren’t codes. They’re signatures.”
“How do you know that?” Capri asked.
