Free 14 BOOK 2 by J.T. Ellison Page B

realized she would have enjoyed working with this man, had she ever gotten the chance.
    He puffed, sucking the fire into the tobacco, ruminating. “That damn note. I swear, we went over it and over it. Didn’t have all the fancy tests y’all have nowadays, but we could do a fair amount of work back then. The computers were young, and the printers weren’t as plentiful. Just the fact that it came off a computer told us something. He was well-off. It came from an IBM 8580, PS/2 Model 80 386, one of those early desktops, and the printer was a Hewlett-Packard Deskjet Inkjet.”
    Fitz shook his head. “You remember that offhand?”
    “Yeah.”
    Taylor was beginning to understand the reputation Kimball had acquired as the detail man. He continued his recitation.
    “Top-of-the-line printer, too. Those things were a thousand bucks a pop when they first came out. At the time, not too many people here in town had one. We traced the ownership, came back to a fellow in Green Hills, man by the name of Mars. Wasn’t him doing the killing, but it was his computer that the note got written on, his printer that spit it out.”
    Burt Mars. Taylor knew that name. He was a friend of her parents. An accountant, if she remembered correctly.
    “But it wasn’t Mars who wrote the note, right?”
    “We never could prove it was him. Never thought so, either. He just didn’t seem capable of pulling off something so elaborate as ten murders. Now, he could bilk Uncle Sam out of a pretty penny, I’ll give him that. No, we always thought it was one of his clients. Someone who had access to his office.”
    “Why a client? Why not an employee?”
    Kimball gave her a look, then smiled at Fitz, who had rejoined Taylor on the couch. “Because whoever this guy was, he had money. Now, Mars was a generous guy, but not that generous. His employees didn’t have the cash flow that Snow White did. No, it was one of Mars’s clients, all right. Someone who paid other people to do his work for him. I’ve always been confident about that.”
    “Why? What was so special about him that you think he came from money?”
    “The signet.”
    Taylor shook her head. “What?”
    “The signet ring. Jesus, that wasn’t in the files, either?”
    “I know nothing about it. Fitz, what about you?”
    “Don’t remember anything in there about a ring.”
    “Found it at one of the last scenes, let’s see, I believe it was Ellie Walpole. When they rolled the body, the ring was caught in her hair. It was a gold ring, scroll work on the sides, big sucker, with a monogrammed F in the crest. That’s all. Just an F. We went through Mars’s files with a fine-toothed comb, interviewed every single person whose name started or ended with an F. Didn’t get anywhere, but that didn’t mean too much. It could have belonged to the killer’s parent, grandparent—hell, cousin or friend, for all I know. It looked old, like it might have been passed down, you know what I mean?”
    “Now, that isn’t in the files, I know that for sure. I went through all of the evidence by hand three weeks ago when we pulled some of the boxes for our investigation. There’s nothing about a signet ring. And nothing in the interviews about a ring, either.”
    “Don’t know what to tell you, LT. It was there. Saw it with my own eyes. I wrote a lot of those reports myself—that’s why I know they were there. I’m getting the feeling you aren’t working with a full deck on this one.”
    Taylor looked at Fitz. This was a problem. Kimball took a last puff on his pipe, emptied it out in a clay ashtray that looked homemade, and stood.
    “You can take these files, just be sure you get them back to me in one piece, okay? I want to go be with Sabrina now. We don’t get to see her as much as I’d like, and she’s growing up too fast. Pretty soon she won’t have any desire to make gingerbread houses with Gramps, you know?”
    Fitz carried two boxes, Taylor one. Kimball escorted them out