Calculated in Death (In Death #36)(78)

“To inform you your partner, Jake Ingersol, has been murdered. I’m sorry for your loss. Now sit down.”

“Why would anyone murder Jake?” Whitestone managed. “It doesn’t make any sense. It’s crazy. Is this about the accountants? Is this some lunatic targeting all of us? A client? I don’t understand. I don’t understand. He was just here. Not an hour ago.”

“Sit down,” she repeated, more gently now as she saw the mix of shock and anger on both, and the dawning of grief.

Newton lowered shakily into an old folding chair. Whitestone just sat on the floor. “How? How?” he asked her. “You have to tell us what happened. He wasn’t just our partner. He’s our friend. Rob. Jesus, Rob.”

“He met his killer in the apartment downstairs. Your apartment, Mr. Whitestone.”

Color drained from Whitestone’s face, leaving it a sickly green. “No. No. He was going out for coffee, meeting a client.”

“No, he wasn’t. He believed he was meeting a client—and more than a client, a partner in a land and investment fraud operation. Chaz Parzarri served as their accountant.”

Newton lurched up from the chair. “That’s bullshit! Fraud? Jake’s dead and now you’re trying to make him a criminal?”

“He made himself. We have significant evidence linking Ingersol, Parzarri, and another individual to fraud in several land and property schemes. You don’t look very surprised,” she said to Whitestone.

“I thought he was kidding around. I thought . . . The wrist unit, Rob, he said he got at an estate sale for peanuts. The painting he bought a few months ago after he said he’d hit it big in Atlantic City. And . . . other things. Oh God.” He lowered his head to his knees.

“You don’t seriously believe Jake was involved in fraud?” Newton demanded. “For God’s sake, Brad.”

“I don’t know . . .” He rubbed shaky hands over his face. “About a year ago Jake and I were out at a club, and we got pretty toasted. You were off with Lissa, so it was the two of us. It looked like I might lose the Breckinridge account, remember? I was feeling pretty low. He laid out this whole idea for making money off land deals. Setting up dummy companies, pulling in groups and selling off more shares than you had, then buying up the land yourself. Inflating or deflating the assessments. He drew up a chart on cocktail napkins.”

With a pleading glance at Eve, he rubbed and rubbed his hands on his knees. “I thought he was joking around. I swear I thought he was just messing around to cheer me up. I said it sounded good if you didn’t mind cheating people, or going to jail for a couple decades. I even added a couple of ideas to it, Jesus. Jesus, Rob, I refined a couple of angles. He wrote them down. I thought it was joking, but he wrote them down. And I said something about it being too bad we were honest, too bad we’d worked all those years to get our license, build our business and our rep, things we didn’t want to lose. And he said . . .”

“What did he say?” Eve prompted.

“Big money buys big rep. I just laughed at him, and said something like big talk buys shit, and it was his turn to get the next round.”

“It was just talk,” Newton insisted. “He wouldn’t commit fraud or cheat a client. We built this business together, Brad. The three of us. Look at this place. We’ve done this. We’ve done this together.”

“It’s more than fraud,” Eve told him. “It’s murder. We believe Marta Dickenson was killed out of fear she’d discovered the fraud when she audited the accounts she’d taken over after the accident that put Parzarri out of commission and out of contact for several days.”

“You can’t think Jake had anything to do with that woman’s death,” Newton interrupted.

“I know he did. No sign of break-in? Because he gave the killer the codes. Maybe he thought they’d just take her in, rough her up, scare her, take the files. We’ll never know for certain. But he knew, after the fact. He knew who killed her, why, and that he was complicit.”

“I’m not going to believe that.” Newton turned away, but Eve saw doubt and horror blooming on his face.

“But it’s our building,” Whitestone objected. “Why would Jake let anybody use our place for this? Bring this down on us?”

“She was supposed to be found in the morning. He didn’t know, none of them did, that you’d stop by, bring a potential client. They didn’t count on the police investigation inside the apartment, or finding anything if we did. If it had worked out the way they thought, it’s just an address, just the sad story of a woman, a bad mugging, and the city.”

“I can’t believe he could do this,” Newton mumbled. “Any of it. To himself. To us.”

“Both Parzarri and your partner are now dead, within an hour of each other. Do you really believe that’s a coincidence? Can you give me one viable explanation why Ingersol is dead in the apartment downstairs?”

“We built this place together,” Newton repeated. “If you can’t believe in, can’t trust your partner . . .”

“I understand, but at this time the evidence puts your partner right in the center. It could have put you there,” she said to Whitestone. “It could have put you in the ground.”

“What are you talking about?”