“Yeah,” the man said. He looked at his wife but didn’t say anything to her. Didn’t say anything to anybody for the next hour as a force of seven, three from the FBI and four from the Baywood Police Department, descended upon his business. Simply stood to the side and unlocked things that were locked and pointed to other things when asked a direct question.

“Did you think that was odd?” Rena asked later, when they were back at their desks. It was 3:30 in the morning.

“I don’t know. If he’s innocent of wrongdoing, then he was in shock. You know, how had it come to this when he and his family were the wronged party? If he’s not innocent, then he might have assumed that anything he said now would come back to haunt him later.”

“Leah seemed pretty confused,” Rena said.

“Yeah.” He was staring at the screen.

“How can you still see?” she asked. “We’ve been awake for almost twenty-four hours.”

He didn’t answer.

Seeing no choice, Rena pushed back her chair and walked around the desk to stand behind him. She looked at his screen. It was some kind of spreadsheet with multiple columns and rows. She looked at the column headings. Date. Work Order Number. Last Name. First Name. Phone Number. Quote Amount. Sale Amount.

July 1 through July 31. Bunch of different work order numbers. Bunch of names and phone numbers. The columns for the quote amount and sale amount were sometimes the same, sometimes different. She understood that. The quote was given before the mechanic really got into the guts of the problem. He found something else wrong and the price went up.

“I need to find the spreadsheet where these numbers tie into the money he’s taking in,” A.L. said. “Damn. I should have studied harder in accounting class.”

“You took an accounting class?”

“Yeah. I was going to get a business degree before I switched over to criminal justice.”

“You’d have hated being a businessman.”

“Yeah, probably.” He was opening new tabs on the worksheet. “Bingo,” he said after a minute. “Here it is.”

“What?” she demanded. She was tired and hungry and not in the mood to be kept in the dark.

“Do you remember when I told you that I met Troy’s neighbor, who delights in his dog shitting in Troy’s yard?”

“Yes.”

“He told me that the catalyst to that was an outrageous quote for $1,000 in July that he’d given to his wife. Her name was Lois Martin.” He flipped back to the original tab he’d been on. “Here it is. Lois Martin. Quote was $1,080. Final sale was $1,080. And here,” he said, flipping back to the second tab, “is where he shows it in his daily deposit as a collected payment.”

“But she never had the work done. There was no money exchanged.”