Chapter Twenty-Three
“Thank you for coming out here,” Eliot said when he opened the door to Ben, still feeling guilty for having asked him to go out of his way like this.
“Hey, if the source can’t come to us, we go to the source, right?” Ben responded, as if it was no trouble at all.
He was a good man. Eliot didn’t know much about him—and every time he learned something new, it was a surprise—but he did know that Ben was one of the good guys.
That was just what he and Danny needed right now.
“We’re set up in the living room,” Eliot explained, leading Ben toward where he had his laptop and notes spread out, connecting the dots between everything he’d learned so far.
“Danny gave me access to his financial records,” he continued as he sat down on the couch opposite the one Danny was lying on. He’d had to pull it over from the other side of the room, but now they had a setup where Danny could lie down, taking the weight off his knee, and Eliot could talk to him.
Or they had, until Danny had fallen asleep. Eliot didn’t have the heart to wake him, knowing that he was still in pain despite the painkillers. They’d knocked him out, which was really the best either of them had hoped for.
“Found anything yet?” Ben asked, settling next to Eliot on the couch.
“Well, I’ve found that Danny really needs to keep a closer eye on his money. He’s been making a payment to a company that doesn’t exist for the past two years. When I asked, he told me it was an investment management fee. But that fee comes out of his investment accounts, so…”
“So someone’s stealing from him,” Ben said. “Could it have been anyone other than Walter?”
“Well, that’s where it gets tricky,” Eliot explained. “Like I said, Danny’s not great at keeping track. He has more money than he could ever possibly spend right now, but that won’t be true if he keeps paying out a few grand a month to a company who aren’t actually doing anything for him. Walter is the one who told him it was an investment account fee, by the way.”
“He didn’t notice a few grand a month going missing?” Ben blinked at him.
“I know, right?” Eliot smiled wryly. “I don’t evenmakethat much.”
“Neither do I,” Ben said. “Shoulda stuck with football.”
Eliot paused, looking up at Ben. “You played football?”
“Uh, yeah. In college, for a while. I actually wanted to be a journalist, though, so…”
“Huh.” Eliot smiled at the new information. “You’re a man of many layers.”
“You have no idea,” Ben said.
“I’d like to,” Eliot responded softly. “I mean that. You’ve been a good friend, more than I realized. I’d like to know you better.”
Ben shifted awkwardly, a faint blush creeping up his cheeks. Eliot had never seen him blush before. “I’d like that.” He cleared his throat. “But after we’ve figured this out.”
“Right, yeah, so, and this is the cool part where you’re gonna tell me how proud you are.” Eliot pulled up the fake company website on his laptop. “See, whoever this is—and I think it’s fair to say it’s Walter, you’ll see why in a second—they went to the effort of putting up a website. It actually looks pretty good, but all the photos are from stock sites and the physical address is bullshit. The contact email is real enough, but I’m guessing it goes to an unchecked mailbox.”
“How does this help us?” Ben asked.
Eliot grinned. He was proud of himself for this, and he hoped Ben would be, as well. Now that he knew he’d been Ben’s choice, he wanted to impress him even more. The other man had taken a risk on him, and he wanted him to see it paying off.
“I saw a documentary once where someone had used their website backend as, like, cloud storage for all their personal documents and got busted that way, because the directory files of a website are publicly accessible. I thought no one was actually that stupid, but as it turns out…”
Eliot opened up the file full of documents he’d found on the fake website. He gave Ben a moment to take in what he was seeing, and then double-clicked on the web hosting invoice.
With Walter’s name and address on it.
“Holy shit,” Ben said. He turned to look at Eliot, a broad smile spreading across his face. “Holy shit. This is amazing work, Eliot. I wouldn’t even have known to look.”
He took the laptop from Eliot when it was offered, getting close to the screen to peer at the invoice. It was all there in black and white.
It wasn’tallthe evidence they needed, but it was a start.
