“You’re welcome. Goodbye, Leah.”

A.L. put his phone down. “Christ, that sucked.” He sounded weary.

“Yeah,” Rena said. “I really want to be able to call her with good news.” She looked at her watch. “We need to be back for the ten o’clock meeting in Faster’s office.”

It was a good news, bad news kind of thing. Good news in that resources were plentiful. It was raining cops. Federal, state and county. Bad news was that resources were plentiful. Keeping everybody on the same page was a substantial undertaking with a case like this and they needed to be careful not to trip over each other.

A.L. likely didn’t think Faster would be up to the task. She was willing to reserve judgment.

A.L. keyed an address into his GPS. “Nine minutes to Milo’s Motors. Let’s see what he has to say.”

Twelve minutes later, they were inside Milo’s office, sitting in the two guest chairs, while Milo sat behind his paper-laden desk. There was a computer on the desk but Rena didn’t think it was turned on.

“Good to see you, A.L.,” Milo said. “I haven’t seen your dad or your uncle for a while. Bowling doesn’t start for another couple weeks. How are they?”

“Good,” A.L. said.

Rena wondered if he actually knew. He didn’t talk about his family much. Just his sister, Liz, who lived in Madison.

“I was wondering if you could answer a few questions about Elaine Broadstreet,” A.L. said.

“Of course. Hell of a situation with her grandchild. I got four of my own and I think I might lose my mind if something like this happened.”

“We understand that Elaine has worked for you for a number of years.”

“That’s correct.”

“And how would you characterize her work?”

Milo looked surprised. “She catches mistakes that the sales guys make all the time. Catches some of mine, too.” He stopped. “Of course, she isn’t perfect. Lately there’s been some things that might have been a problem for us.”

“Like?”

“Errors in spreadsheets. Documents that promised terms that we quite frankly never promise. That sort of thing. It’s okay. We’ll get past it but I did tell her she needed to be careful. I don’t like to say too much. She’s a real nice lady and everybody makes mistakes.”

“You said ‘lately,’” A.L. pushed. “Does that mean that her work has slipped noticeably in the past few weeks, months?”

“A month or so. But not everything. There’s just been a couple things that, quite frankly, surprised the hell out of me. It’s things she’s done for years without any problem and suddenly we’ve got a hell of a screw-up going on.”

“Any change in her personality?” Rena asked.