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“Any luck?” he asked as I opened the passenger door and climbed in.
“Maybe,” I replied, and brandished the key Sara had given me. “This goes to Jeffrey’s office in Mesa. I’m hoping we can find something in his files there that might point us to the actual killer.”
Just the smallest tightening of my husband’s lips, telling me he wasn’t too enthused about the idea of going through people’s private records. However, he must have weighed the somewhat dubious morality of performing such a search against the very real danger of Victoria getting convicted of a crime she didn’t commit, and decided there was only one real choice here.
“All right,” he said. “What’s the address?”
“Lunch first,” I responded. “I can already feel my blood sugar crashing.”
He didn’t argue, of course. We might have been on a mission, but his wife and the child she was carrying came first.
Luckily, it wasn’t quite noon yet, so we were able to slide right into a table at Zinburger, beating the weekend lunch crowds. We already knew what we wanted, so we ordered our beverages and food simultaneously, and were in and out of the restaurant in record time.
“Okay,” Calvin said after we were back in my compact SUV. “Now you can tell me that address.”
I gave it to him, and he programmed it into the Renegade’s navigation system before pulling out of the parking lot and onto Gilbert’s main drag, heading north so we could intersect Main Street and then drop down onto 2nd Avenue.
The drive only took us about fifteen minutes, and soon enough, we were pulling into the strip mall where Jeffrey Sellers’ office was located. It was a shabby place, probably built in the late 1960s or early ’70s, occupied by a nail salon and a CPA, with several of the storefronts vacant, their front windows mostly obscured by large signs advertising affordable office space.
Judging by the very faint lift of my husband’s brows, I could tell he wasn’t too impressed by the place. Neither was I, but our surroundings weren’t important.
No, the really important thing was what we might find in Jeffrey Sellers’ files…assuming, of course, that he didn’t have everything locked down on a computer whose password we didn’t know and probably wouldn’t be able to hack.
However, if getting into his computer had been a possibility, I had to assume Sara would have said something, since she’d been to Jeffrey’s office to feed his fish.
A little sign next to the door said the office was protected by A-1 Security Services, and I shot a nervous glance at Calvin. “What if there’s an alarm?”
“Then wouldn’t Sara have said something to you about it?” he replied.
I had to hope so. Quite possibly, the sign was there for show and nothing else. “And if we do set off an alarm?”
He didn’t look too worried. “Then I’ll show the responding officers my I.D. and let them know I’m here on official business. Not that they’d be real police — an outfit like this is the kind that uses rent-a-cops exclusively.”
There might have been just the slightest hint of scorn in his tone. I brushed it aside, partly because I’d encountered that attitude from him before and knew it was pretty typical, and partly because it wasn’t worth worrying about when we had more important things to do.
No alarm shrilled as I unlocked the door and opened it, telling me that the sign about the security service definitely was for show and nothing more. Maybe once upon a time, Jeffrey Sellers actually had retained their services, but had discontinued them when the cost got to be too much.
Either way, it looked like we were getting inside his office with no trouble.
Calvin followed me in, flicking on the lights as he went. They showed a space that was basically a small ten by ten box, with an old-style metal desk in approximately the center of the room and two worn swivel chairs in front of it. Against one wall were three metal file cabinets, while the other was dominated by the aforementioned fish tank, an impressively large affair sitting on top of a faux-wood cabinet.
“You check the files, and I’ll take care of the fish,” he said, moving toward the cabinet.
I wasn’t sure if that was the best plan — would I even know what I was looking at if I did find something incriminating in one of those files? — but then I realized Calvin probably thought it was better for me to thumb through them, maybe hoping that my intuition would kick in and I’d recognize a key piece of information as soon as I stumbled over it.
Fingers crossed.
The file cabinets were putty-colored, dinged and scratched. I got the impression that they hadn’t been bought new, but picked up at a yard sale or maybe a going-out-of-business kind of event.
Obviously, Jeffrey Sellers had done whatever he could to save money. No wonder he’d thought blackmailing Archie was a good way to pad his bank accounts.
The file cabinets were labeled with the letters of the alphabet, so I decided I might as well start with “A.” However, thumbing through those files didn’t give me any tingles, didn’t seem to have anything in them beyond receipts and a few intake forms, maybe from people who’d thought about hiring Jeffrey to handle their personal problems but had decided against it.
As I made my way through the alphabet, I found more of the same, and did my best to fight back against the discouragement I could feel building somewhere in the pit of my stomach. “There’s really nothing here,” I told Calvin after I’d made my way to the “M”s and had still come up with bupkis.
He came over and gave my tense shoulders a gentle rub. Just the sensation of those strong fingers against my tight muscles made me feel better. Not all the way better, because I was starting to think this trip had been a complete waste of time, but having Calvin next to me always got me thinking there was no problem without a solution, even if I couldn’t yet guess what that solution might be.
“You’re not all the way through the alphabet,” he said. “But how about I start at the end and work back, and we can meet somewhere around ‘R’?”
