Cedar Creek, Nevada - Wednesday, June 28, 1995 6 Days Prior . . .

Cedar Creek, Nevada

Wednesday, June 28, 1995 6 Days Prior . . .

SANDY STAMOS SAT AT THE KITCHEN TABLE OF HIS FAMILY’S CABIN. Marvin Mann was across from him. Bottles of Sierra Nevada Pale Ale sweated beads of condensation onto the table in front of each of them. Sandy had noticed the tail just north of town and decided he had two options. The first was to try to lose whoever was following him. The second was to lure them out to the cabin where Sandy knew the terrain and would have a tactical advantage. Because he was certain, some way or another, that whoever was following him was involved with the Baker Jauncey case—on which he was stuck in a stalemate with the Nevada state investigators—Sandy decided to bait the tail into the foothills.

When he arrived at the cabin, he turned on the lights, ducked out the back door, and backtracked through the woods—the trails of which Sandy had hiked hundreds of times. He found the car parked on the frontage road just outside his driveway. Now, he sat across the table from the man who was following him.

“Tell me what you know,” Sandy said.

“Baker Jauncey’s death was not an accident.”

Sandy took a sip of beer. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

Marvin’s lips separated. “You know he was killed?”

“Yes. But that’s about as far as I’ve gotten.”

“Yeah, well, whoever ran him over did it on purpose.”

“I take that back,” Sandy said. “I know a little more than what the newspapers reported. Baker Jauncey wasn’t killed during a hit-and-run accident. Someone cracked him in the head with a baseball bat first. Only after he was dead did they run him over with a car.”

“What? Everything I’ve read about the case said he was killed in a hit-and-run.”

“Everything you’ve read is wrong. I met with the medical examiner in Reno and her unofficial opinion is that Baker died from a brain bleed caused by blunt force trauma to the back of the head. All the injuries from being run over by a vehicle happened after he was dead.”

“Christ on the cross. It’s worse than I thought.”

“The state boys very much want this to be a simple hit-and-run, nothing more. I can’t figure out why that is, which is why you’re sitting in my house drinking a beer and not bleeding to death on the street. I’m hoping you can fill in some holes for me.”

Marvin shook his head. “Here’s what I know. I work for . . . worked for Baker Jauncey. He was a partner at Margolis and Margolis. I was his investigator. A few days ago, the night before he died, he told me he’d discovered financial malfeasance at the law firm and was looking into it.”

Sandy sat forward in his chair and put his elbows on the table. This was news. “What sort of malfeasance?”

“Someone at the firm was stealing client settlement money—and a shit ton of it.”

“How?”

“Skimming it. I don’t know exactly how it was being done. Neither did Baker, but he asked me to help him figure it out. The next day he was dead.”

A web of thoughts congested Sandy’s mind. If someone inside Margolis Margolis had learned that Baker Jauncey was about to uncover financial fraud at the firm, and killed him before he could do it, how the hell did Annabelle Margolis’s car end up on Highway 67?

“Start from the beginning,” Sandy said.

“I just did. That’s the beginning, the middle, and the end. That’s all I know.”

“What did Baker do about it?”

“Took a deep dive into the financials at the firm. He was a partner, so he had access. Once he sniffed out the con and found the paper trail, he started collecting evidence. Printed out every sordid detail of the fraud and created one big-ass file. Problem was, Baker couldn’t figure out which attorney or attorneys were involved, or how, exactly, they were doing it. He could tell there was money missing, but couldn’t figure out how it was stolen or who was behind the theft. There were shell companies and shadow entities and numbered bank accounts, but no names attached to the fraud. At least not that he could find. So he asked me for help. He wanted to put my investigative skills to work and asked me to find proof that one or more of the firm’s attorneys were living beyond their means. He had the dollar amounts that were stolen. It was my job to figure out where that money went and what it had been spent on. I was supposed to look into the private lives of every attorney at the firm, starting with the partners, and look for anyone who had purchased boats, second homes, elaborate vacations. If I could spot someone living exorbitantly, Baker would add it to the evidence he’d already collected, backtrack through the firm’s files, and see if he could pin down who, exactly, was skimming the money.”

“What did you find?”

“Nothing. I never got the chance to look. Baker told me what he needed one day, and was dead the next. That’s why I’m here, Sheriff. Baker gave me all the paper evidence he’d extracted from the firm and told me to keep it in a safe place. He was dead the next day, and I was left with the evidence that killed him.”

“Damn.”

“See why I didn’t want to talk with you in town?”

Sandy cocked his head. “Now I feel like crap for putting a gun to your head.”

“Hell, I’d have done the same thing if someone followed me to my home.”

“Do you have the files Baker gave you?”

“In my car.”

“Have you looked at them?”

“Yeah, but I’m a legal investigator not a forensic accountant. I can’t make heads or tails out of any of it. But if the right people look at the files, they’d be able to figure out who was skimming the money. And whoever was stealing the money killed Baker and made it look like a hit-and-run.”

“And you’re willing to hand the files over to me?”

“Sheriff, I can’t wait to get rid of them.”