It felt odd, going through Ajax’s records, as if I were digging into the private details of his life without his permission. I’d seen him on Friday morning here in the office, and he still felt alive to me. He should have walked into the conference room, sat down with his cocky smile, and asked us what the hell we were doing. Instead, he was gone. I’d stared at his body, defiled in a truly horrific way. It seemed impossible. I couldn’t say I was going to miss him, but I didn’t understand why he was dead.

Or who could have killed him.

“Is there anything in the credit card bills?” Darrell asked.

“Ruby’s right about the jewelry store. Ajax spent almost a thousand dollars there last month. If it wasn’t for her, then who?”

Darrell whistled. “A thousand bucks? That’s a lot of money.”

I flipped through more of his statements. “He liked his toys, too. He made a lot of purchases from sports and auto-part shops.”

“Did he have any outstanding balance on the credit card?”

“No, he paid it off each month. In most months that ran to a few hundred bucks.”

Darrell grabbed for the stack of bank records. “Where was Ajax getting that kind of cash?”

He took the most recent account statements and passed the others to me. We paged through them, and I flipped through all the canceled checks that came with each statement.

“His checking and saving balances aren’t high,” Darrell said. “His salary wasn’t paying for most of the toys, that’s for sure.”

“Could Jerry have been helping him out?” I asked.

“Jerry doesn’t make that kind of money, either.”

“Hang on,” I said.

“What?”

“There are no checks made out to the credit card company.”

“What do you mean?” Darrell asked.

“He’s writing checks to places around town, but I don’t see anything made out to Visa. So how’s he paying off those balances?”

Darrell examined the papers spread across the conference table again. Then he frowned and reached for a new stack of bank statements. “He has another account.”

“What?”

“Look at these records. He has a separate checking account at a bank in the next county. Not joint, like the accounts here in town with Ruby. This one is just in his name.” Darrell went through the pages quickly. “The Visa checks came from that bank. Up until late last year, he was depositing five hundred dollars into that account every month.”

“Every month? From where? A second job?”

Darrell shook his head. “He couldn’t possibly have had another job without me knowing about it. There’s no info on where the money came from. He was simply cashing checks every month.”

“From who?”