“The number’s been disconnected. Why should I care?”

“Put the incident in context. This unseen guy carts Pete’s boxes away. Four months later you receive a letter from the IRS.”

“What’s one have to do with the other? I’m not getting it.”

“We’re talking about three men you never met. The junk dealer, the IRS agent, and the guy who broke in. Doesn’t that bother you?”

“No.”

“Well, it should. I mean, think about it. The junk dealer walks off with Pete’s business records. Then the IRS agent comes along and expects you to find documents that date back fifteen years. And now you’ve got some thug going through everything you own.”

“I agree it’s creepy.”

“Not my point. What if they’re the same man?”

“Like they’re in cahoots?”

“I’m saying one man instead of three. And not just any man. We’re back to Ned Lowe.”

Her expression was pained and included a rolling of the eyes.

“Don’t roll your eyes at me. Just listen. Two days after Dietz and I finish searching Pete’s boxes, this anonymous junk man leaves a note in your door and you jump at the chance to have the same boxes carted off. End of problem as far as you’re concerned. Meanwhile, the guy is now in possession of all Pete’s files. He goes through everything at his leisure, trying to find what he’s looking for.”

“How do you know he’s looking for anything? He took a bunch of crap to the dump.”

“You don’t know that. All you know is he’s taken it off your hands. I’m asking you to consider that the arrival of this flier was more than serendipitous. What if Lowe was looking for something in those cartons? No luck, so he comes back around posing as George Dayton from the IRS. The letter specifically asked about Byrd-Shine, insisting on documents and records from 1978. That seemed nutty on the face of it, and I said so at the time.”

“You told me there weren’t any Byrd-Shine records, so I turned around and told the IRS guy the same thing.”

“But suppose he didn’t believe you. ‘Dayton’ told you he talked to Pete last spring and Pete swore he had paperwork in storage, which may or may not have been true. Pete might have been bullshitting, or maybe he was too lazy to actually hunt up the files in question. Whatever the case, ‘Dayton’ assumes you’re holding out on him. As a last resort, he breaks in and has a go at it himself.”

“George Dayton’s a real guy. Honestly. I didn’t create him out of whole cloth. I talked to him myself.”

“But you never met him, and I bet you never saw any IRS identification. You don’t even know what that would look like. What’s he got, a badge? A business card? You received a notice on IRS letterhead with an address and phone number, but that could have been faked. The day the two of you are finally supposed to meet, he’s a no-show.”