Chapter Fourteen

Hunter and Garcia were right – Shaun Daniels's murder couldn't have been about money.

Eleven days after they visited O'Hearn's Bar and Grill, they finally received a report from Financial Forensics. An expert forensics accountant had spent days digging through Shaun Daniels's personal and business accounts. The accountant had checked everything on record and followed every electronic and paper trail that Shaun had left behind. There was nothing there – no large deposits or withdrawals, no steady money drip, no offshore accounts, no investment bouncing, no obscure transactions… nothing. On the contrary, Shaun and his limited company – Daniels Plumbing Ltd – were barely managing to keep afloat. In fact, in the past twelve months, he'd been in the red with his personal account more times than a traffic light, surviving mainly on bank overdrafts and small credit card loans.

The forensics accountant had also looked into Shaun's credit card accounts. He had three of them – two personal ones and one registered to his limited company. They weren't maxed out but, just like his bank accounts, all three credit cards were in the red. It seemed that most of the time, Shaun Daniels got by through mainly paying only the interest that he was being charged every month. Every now and then, he was able to pay a little more, making a small dent into his debt, but soon enough he would overspend on one thing or another and that debt would either grow, or be right back to where it was before.

When Financial Forensics examined Daniels Plumbing Ltd's invoice books, they did find a few discrepancies, but nothing that truly worried anyone. The discrepancies came in the form of inflated invoices for small jobs, just like Garcia had suggested, but definitely not on the same scale. Every once in a while, Shaun Daniels would overcharge a client by as much as $450, depending on the job – hardly a money-laundering operation. Shaun would then create two invoices – an inflated one for the client and a ‘real' one that he would bundle together with several other invoices and file as a single accumulated bill with the IRS.

According to the forensics accountant, that was the most used trick by small businesses. As long as they kept the overcharge under $500 and bundled them into an accumulated bill, detection was practically impossible. They'd have to be properly audited to fall into the IRS net and the IRS simply wouldn't waste time and resources going after such small fish.

All in all, the conclusion of the forensics accountant was that Shaun Daniels wasn't exactly a crook. He didn't really swindle the system. He simply did what he had to do to get by… the American way.