“What? No way.”
Eton nodded. “Seriously, man, it’s really great to see you still standing. Let’s get to it. So you’ve got a little information but not a whole lot, is that what I’m hearing?”
“We traced Tristan’s particularly interesting cell phone calls to two towns from here,” Garret said. “And, yeah, we could have set up closer, but we’re already pretty conspicuous as it is. Plus these hills here behind us,” he said, “they back onto the other town.”
At that, Eton smiled and said, “So we just go up the hill, and we should have a pretty decent signal to track?”
“Yes,” he said. “We also don’t have any guarantee that the person connected to Tristan is still there.”
“But you got something?”
“Absolutely. Tracked over several days and weeks. That’s how far we’ve managed to go back.”
“Okay, so he is staying there—or at least had been, up until Tristan’s death.”
“Exactly.”
Eton had already brought Garret up to snuff on what had happened in Sicily. And now they were tracking down the rest of the numbers on Tristan’s phone. “Any luck on the driver who pulled away after shooting Tristan?”
“His truck was found a few miles away in a ditch,” Garret said. “It was a rental, rented by Tristan, under Tristan’s real name.”
“But not likely rented by him, I suppose?”
“Could have been, or they could have just set up that rental vehicle like that, knowing it would be a getaway car.”
“And nothing on the ballistics, correct?”
“No, nothing on the ballistics.”
“God, what a mess there,” Eton said.
“Yeah, your face is still showing some of the damage.”
He smiled and said, “Just a sign of my close encounter with Tristan.”
“One side is a little puffy.”
He grinned at that.
“What was that happy look about?”
“Oh, I met a woman on the way here,” he said. “She didn’t appear to notice.”
“Right, I checked that out, from the license plate number you sent. Sammy something.” He quickly brought up what he knew. “No arrest record, so I dug deeper. Architecture degree and is currently working for her father. He’s a famous architect. Both have been really close.”
“So he lives here locally?”
“Yes,” Garret replied and pointed. “It’s basically a twenty-minute walk in that direction.”
“Nice,” Eton said, with a light whistle.
“What? Did she interest you?”
“She was pretty fine,” he said, “but, more than that, she was a doer. Instead of waiting for help, she already had the spare tire on.”
“Did she say what happened, how she got the flat?”
“No, and I didn’t ask. The tire was already loaded before I got there.”
“Wow,” he said. “Won’t see too many women doing that.”
“Not in this world of cell phones and roadside service, no,” he said, “but it was all good.”
“Uh-oh.”
There must have been something in Eton’s tone of voice because Garret was grinning at him. “Yeah, not happening,” Eton said. “I don’t need anything taking me away from this job.”
“Oh, Cain doesn’t feel like what he ended up with took him away from his job.”
Eton changed the topic. “Enough. Now back to the cell phone signals. Where does it trace back to? A house or something?”
“The property has multiple buildings on it.”
“Dang,” Eton replied. “So it’s not like it points to one single person and says, ‘This is the guy.’”
“Not only that, it looks like it’s a company.”
“As in?”
“Bands Securities.”
“Bands? I didn’t think that security company was in Switzerland.”
“Yes, I know,” Garret said. “Bottom line is that apparently twelve people work there.”
“So, either this entire location of the company is involved, or some individual is using it as a base.”
“Or a visitor or a delivery person? There could be a bunch of other explanations, including somebody who does contract work,” Garret pointed out.
“Right, so a simple search won’t necessarily give us all the right answers.”
“Well, I’ve just pulled up a list of all the full-time employees,” he said. He printed it out and handed it to Eton. “These are just the ones here.”
“Bands has other branches, right?”
“Yes, closest one is in Berlin,” he said.
“Right, so it could also be somebody who came back and forth from the other office as well.”
“Exactly.” Garret hesitated but looked at him. “We can’t count out the fact that it could also be spouses.”
“No, we sure can’t,” Eton said. “Okay, do we have any other lists? You take one, and I take another?”
“Unless he is a staffer there. All of them are part-time,” he said, “so the staff list for this town is much longer.”
“Let me start with that one,” Eton said, reaching across for his list. “And you take the permanent employees, who I suppose are the managers and such.”
Garret nodded and found his list to check.
At that, they sat down to research the people involved. After about an hour, Eton broke the silence. “First four of mine have raised no flags,” Eton said. “This fifth one though—”
“What?”
“Well, he drives a Mercedes, a sports model at that. I would really like to know what his salary is and whether he can legitimately afford it,” Eton said.
“If he’s young, it doesn’t mean he can afford it, you know. Just that he really wanted it.”
The way Garret said it was so dry that Eton had to laugh. “True enough.” But Eton put an asterisk beside that name and kept on going.
After a few more minutes Garret sat back. “Not much here.”
“I’ve finished mine,” Eton said, “and the only one who flashed at all is the one I mentioned earlier.”
“Well, guess you better hack into the company and seek out his paycheck.”
“Can get that off his credit reports faster maybe,” Eton noted.
He started working his way through the information databases they could access easily. When that didn’t give him anything, he went to the guy’s bank account. Something supposedly not easy to accomplish, but, for them, it was fairly simple. Terrifying to think of all the people not aware of this, as Eton and others moved around in their finances behind their backs. The general population felt secure in their annual subscriptions for security software, said to prevent identify theft or to prevent hackers from access to their information. Little did they know that Eton and men like him all around the world weren’t deterred at all.
In moments, he had located the man’s bank account and found not a hell of a lot of money. In fact, a large part of his paycheck went to cover the monthly loan payment on that sports car. “Idiot,” Eton muttered under his breath.