“Selling what?”
“As far as I can tell, almost everything. It appears that Minnia Marketing — the name comes from ‘Minn,’ as in Minnesota, and ‘Ia,’ as in Iowa — basically owns nothing except some telephones. What it does is advertise on the Internet for all kinds of things, from manufacturers where they’ve qualified for wholesale prices, and then when somebody orders from them, they contact the manufacturer and have the product drop-shipped to the buyer.”
“They’re a boiler room.”
“Yup. Not a very good one,” Sandy said. “They reported earnings last year of twenty-six thousand and change, after expenses and taxes.”
“What else?”
“Okay, this is kind of interesting. I talked to the executive editor at the Omaha World-Herald, who said that when Conley wasn’t high, he was a terrific police reporter, and showed signs of becoming a good investigator. Had very good instincts and big balls. But he couldn’t stay away from the drugs, and finally they had to fire him. I found it interesting that he was supposedly really good… which could bear on your case.”
“Yes, it could,” Virgil said, thinking of the photos. Through the porch window, he could see Johnson bent over the spreadsheets. “Send everything you’ve got by e-mail. This is all good. Now, what about Laughton?”
“Another interesting case,” she said. “Last year he reported income of thirty-one thousand and change. So maybe he got a sweetheart deal on the truck? I wouldn’t know. I do know his income tax returns don’t show either gains or losses from investments, which should mean that he doesn’t have any. What’s more interesting is this guy, who doesn’t make any money, showed a real-estate tax deduction for four thousand dollars for a house in Tucson, Arizona. I checked on a real-estate site, and he apparently bought it two years ago, and probably for cash, for three hundred and ninety-eight thousand dollars — I can’t find a mortgage document anywhere.”
“Send me all that. And, Sandy — you’re a genius.”
“I know. Unfortunately, a low-ranking, outstate investigator whose most often used first name is Fuckin’ is the only one who recognizes that.”
That fuckin’ Flowers took his notes back inside, where Johnson looked up and said, “Well, this is boring. Lots of these whatchamacallits. Numbers.”
“You see anything?”
“A few things,” Johnson said. “It looks like a purchase list from some big nonprofit organization, though I can’t tell you which. County government, maybe, although it seems too big for that.”
“How do you get nonprofit?”
“Because there’s an entry column for taxes, but whoever it is doesn’t allot money for taxes, which means it’s either public or nonprofit.”
“Could be the schools — schools are big.”
“Huh. You’re right. I never think of schools as being much… but they are, aren’t they? Not from here, though, not from Buchanan County. Maybe across the river, in Wisconsin or something. Can’t tell from this.”
“Where do you get that?”
“Clarice said she thought some of it might be diesel fuel, and I think she’s right — but the costs are too high. They’re paying close to retail. With an operation this big, and with no gas taxes, I mean, they should be paying fifty cents a gallon less than this shows.”
“Really.”
“Really.”
Virgil rubbed his nose. “If it was the local school district, and they were paying too much for gas, how would anybody know?”
Johnson said, “Well, they could be doing it two ways. They could be buying fuel from a dealer, paying too much, and getting a kickback. Fifty cents a gallon… I mean, holy buckets, Batman! Give me your pen.”
He scribbled on some paper for a moment, adding up numbers, and when he was done, said, “I had to make some guesses, here. We got six elementary schools in the county system, a middle school, and a high school, and they all use buses. I’d guess… maybe fifty buses. I’d guess maybe fifteen gallons a day per bus, for two trips, one morning, one afternoon… say two hundred days a year…”
“I don’t think it’s that many days—”
“Not too much less, though, plus they use the buses for extracurricular activities. Virgil, if they were somehow clipping money off the fuel, that’d be… maybe seventy thousand dollars a year.”
“If they were taking kickbacks, that means I’d have to find out who was selling diesel to them, and put that guy’s ass in a crack.”
“Who wouldn’t want to talk about it, ’cause he’d go to jail,” Johnson said.
“I could fix it so he wouldn’t go to jail, but everybody else would,” Virgil said. And after a few seconds, “You said there were two ways they could be doing it.”
“Sure. They just cook the books. They take a bid from the diesel dealer straight up, for, say, $2.80 a gallon, then they write down in the books that they paid $3.30. That way, there’s no kickback, and no outsider to know about it. You’d have to see their books to figure it out. You’d have to have an audit and so on — somebody to talk to the diesel dealer, get his records, and match them against the district’s.”
“Okay. Listen, Johnson, we could be on to something here,” Virgil said. “This could be Conley’s big story. I want you to put on your thinking pants and figure out other ways you could clip the district.”
“Don’t know it’s the district, for sure. Not yet, anyway,” Johnson said. “I’ll tell you what you could do, though… you got all these numbers. Get somebody to look at the school budget — it’s public, it’s probably online — and see if you can make any of the expenditures line up. They can’t be clipping everything.”
“I got somebody who can do that,” Virgil said.
And Johnson said, “I’ll think about it: but I’ll tell you, just from reading the newspaper, the big money wouldn’t be in clipping the diesel. It’d be figuring out a way to clip the teachers’ salaries and maybe the state’s pupil payments. Both of those gotta be in the millions of dollars a year. Suppose they had five ghost employees…”
“Bless me,” Virgil said. “If that’s the case, there’d have to be several people in on it.”
“Yes, there would. You know ol’ Buster Gedney? His wife’s on the school board.”
“Do tell. I talked to her, and she didn’t mention it,” Virgil said. He waved at his laptop. “According to my research, he has a fifty-thousand-dollar machine shop in his garage, which he apparently paid for by selling turkey fryers out the back door.”
“That’s a lot of turkey fryers,” Johnson said. “But these spreadsheets… I wonder why there’s no identification on them? They just start, on page 128, and they go on for a while, and then they end. But the end is not the end of the spreadsheet.”
“I suspect it’s because he had several batches of photos, and I only found the last batch,” Virgil said. “Maybe he could only spend a certain amount of time shooting. If that’s what happened, he’d go back home and unload the photos into his laptop. Which nobody can find.”
“I’d semi-buy that,” Johnson said. He added, “If this story was really that important to the guy, a kind of redemption, you’d think he’d make a backup of all his computer files. The story so far. You know, in case his hard drive croaked, or his laptop got stolen.”
“If he backed it up on a flash drive or a Time Capsule, it probably went with the computer,” Virgil said.
“Flash drives are so last year,” Johnson said. “I wonder what the chances are that he stuck them up in the Cloud?”
“Hmm. Maybe Sandy could find out for me,” Virgil said. “I knew there was some reason I hung out with you.”