Paula pulled up another directory without being asked. Her expression suggested she was beyond caring about protecting Crawford's privacy now. Kate wondered just how long her distrust for her boss had been brewing. "You should see the contracts folder," she said.
Kate watched as Paula navigated to a directory labeled "Legal Documents" and opened several contract templates. They were standard mentorship agreements, but attached to each were supplementary documents labeled "Intellectual Property Sharing Agreements."
"What exactly are we looking at?" Kate asked.
Paula clicked on one of the attachments. "It's something he added about two years ago. Participants sign it as part of joining the program. It says that any business concepts developed during the mentorship period are subject to 'collaborative review and potential sharing with cohort members for educational purposes.' And honestly, some of the participants don’t even see this part. Of course, that’s sort of their mistake and not something Crawford could be charged for.”
"Still, that's buried legalese for 'I can give your ideas to other people,'" Sloane said.
"Pretty much," Paula confirmed. She looked at Crawford, and Kate saw genuine anger in her expression. "I told you this was going to cause problems. I said someone was going to figure it out and get angry."
Crawford slumped further in his chair, suddenly finding it hard to look at any of them. "It wasn't theft. Every participant benefited from the shared knowledge. That's what mentorship is about."
"No," Kate said firmly. "Mentorship is about guidance and support. This is you taking successful business plans and replicating them across multiple participants to inflate your own success rate."
Sloane continued digging through the files, pulling up financial records now. "His profit margins have tripled over the past three years. Because he's not actually developing new strategies for each participant. He's just recycling what'salready worked and hand-selecting which projects will be quote-unquote successful."
Kate stood up, looking down at Crawford. "Rachel Thornton, Patricia Holmes, and Susan Hayes. All three of them were featured prominently in your promotional videos. All three had businesses that succeeded after your program. Were their plans original, or did you give them ideas from previous participants?" She wanted the answers, but she also knew that this line of investigation was also leading slightly away from the main case.
Crawford was silent for a long moment. When he finally spoke, his voice had lost its earlier confidence. "Every business builds on what came before. There are no completely original ideas. What I did was facilitate the sharing of proven concepts. I created a knowledge base that everyone could benefit from."
"You mean you stole ideas from people who trusted you," Sloane said. "And then you used those stolen concepts to create new success stories you could market."
"It's not that simple," Crawford insisted. "The participants signed agreements. They understood that their work might be shared with others in the program. I was transparent about the collaborative nature of the mentorship."
"Buried in legal documents they probably didn't read carefully," Kate said. "That's not transparency. Some might see that as almost being exploitation."
Paula had moved away from the desk and was standing near the window, her arms crossed. "I always knew something was off about those sessions. The way you'd come back from them talking about how brilliant certain ideas were, and then two months later I'd see the same ideas in a different participant's business plan."
"It was… it was the facilitation cross-pollination of successful concepts," Crawford said, but even he seemed to hear how weakthe excuse sounded. "That's all it was. Helping everyone learn from the best practices."
"That's one way to describe it," Sloane said. "Another way is intellectual property theft dressed up as mentorship."
Kate walked over to stand directly in front of Crawford. "Here's what I think happened. You built a successful program by taking the best ideas from your early participants and recycling them. That created more success stories, which let you market the program more effectively. But somewhere along the way, someone figured out what you were doing. Someone realized their ideas had been stolen and given to someone else. And I’m really afraid that person started killing your most visible success stories."
Crawford's face had gone pale. "That's pure speculation."
"But is it, really?” Kate challenged.
"I want a lawyer," Crawford said quietly.
"You'll get one," Kate replied. "But first, we're going to finish going through these records. Because somewhere in here is the name of the person you stole from. The person who decided your success stories needed to pay for what was taken."
Sloane looked up from the laptop. "However you want to explain it, you're under arrest. Now shut up and let us work."
Crawford closed his mouth and slumped in the chair again, his brief flash of confidence completely gone. Kate returned to the desk, pulling her chair closer to Sloane. Paula remained by the window, her expression suggesting she was mentally reviewing every interaction she'd had with Crawford, every session she'd scheduled, every participant she'd watched come through the program.
The office was silent except for the quiet clicking of the laptop keyboard as Sloane continued navigating through Crawford's files with Jennifer’s guidance. Outside, the citycontinued its evening rhythm, unaware that inside this office, three women's murders were finally starting to make sense.
Kate glanced at the stack of folders still waiting to be reviewed, the emails that needed to be read, the participant records that might hold the name they were looking for… someone who felt they’d been wronged, who'd watched their ideas succeed in someone else's hands.
And hopefully, they’d find that name before the killer struck again.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Kate had been scrolling through participant records for nearly forty minutes when she found the name that didn't quite fit. She'd been working chronologically backward through Crawford's files, examining each cohort's submissions and tracking which business concepts appeared in multiple plans. The pattern was clear once you knew to look for it: successful strategies being recycled across different years, different businesses, different industries.
She paused, rubbing her eyes. The process reminded her of the memoir work she'd been doing during downtime. Organizing information chronologically, looking for patterns and connections across years of accumulated data. With the memoirs, she was sorting three decades of cases by theme and timeline, trying to find what connected them beyond just dates and locations. Here, she was doing essentially the same thing with Crawford's program participants—laying them out chronologically to see what repeated, what evolved, what didn't fit.
