“Thank you.” Amanda plucked a card, and she and Trent returned to the hall. She forwarded the list to Molly’s email and passed her card on to Trent. “For when you get the warrant.”
“Yep. And while we wait?”
“We talk things out.”
They settled back in the conference room where they had been with Finch.
Trent started the conversation moving. “I’d like to know why Howard Gabay would sell his firm to Sharp if she gave him a lowball offer.”
“That’s assuming Finch is telling us the truthabout that. But let’s focus on the facts. The money started going back in six months ago. At the same time Dominique Sharp became interested in acquiring Gabay’s firm.”
“This could be about more than trying to cover the embezzlement. Whoever is behind this may have wanted the firm to look good on paper.”
“Which would track for Howard Gabay if not for accepting a lowball offer. Supposedly,” she added.
“Going back to covering up the embezzlement. If Finch was being framed, why would the real culprit care about feeding money back in? Finch would be the one to pay for the crime.”
“Except for one thing. This person could have lost their nerve and panicked, thinking this would lead back to them. After all, the sale would have put more eyes on the books. We can’t see those forms soon enough.”
“I just hope they still exist.” Trent checked his phone, and a moment later was pecking Molly’s email in from her card. “The warrant’s been forwarded.”
“Good, that’s one thing off the list. And while we wait on accounting to get everything together, we should consider another aspect to all of this. If the embezzlement is linked to the hit woman, who is most capable of accessing the dark web? I don’t see Howard Gabay as being very techy.”
“Makes two of us. The guy must be in his mid-sixties. But here’s the thing. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Howard Gabay could afford to pay someone to do this.”
Her eyes widened. “Or he already is? He does have a computer guy on the payroll.”
“Corey Shea,” they said together.
“And he was rather cagey when we walked into Sullivan Gabay’s office,” Amanda said.
“So Howard Gabay, as we’re presuming here, paid Shea to do this.” Trent took out his tablet. “I’m going to pull a background on Shea right now.”
He rarely used his device for this purpose, but it was police-issued and capable of accessing all law-enforcement databases.
Trent moved his finger around the screen and stopped a few seconds later. “All right. Here we go. Shea is twenty-five, graduated MIT.”
“So he’s a tech genius. Continue.”
“He’s single and rents an apartment…” Trent did more sweeping of his finger. “He has a new BMW X4 M. Registration records show he just got it two weeks ago.”
“Okay, that’s an expensive car for a law firm IT guy. I doubt his regular salary would allow for that extravagance. They cost close to eighty K.”
“Right, so how could Shea afford that car unless he came into some sort of payday? He’s young enough that he probably still has student loans to pay off.”
“Although, there is the possibility that we’re wrong here. He might have family money behind him.”
“One way of getting a picture of his finances is a credit check.”
“Which would require a warrant, and I’m not sure a judge would approve one based on what we have so far. It’s nothing more than speculation and circumstantial.”
“So close, yet so far away. It’s maddening. I think you’ll agree with me it’s likely that Shea was paid to go onto the dark web and hire a contract killer.”
“I can get behind that. So, I say while accounting is pulling the account requisitions, we have a chat with Corey Shea. See if we can get him to roll on whoever put him up to this.” She just hoped they were on the right path with this.
FORTY-THREE
Amanda and Trent returned to the front desk for directions to Corey Shea’s office and instructed the receptionist not to call ahead of them. The first time they spoke to him, they’d done so in a meeting room.
