Chapter Twenty-Three
“I hear you had a little excitement,” Swanson said when Chris arrived the next morning. Hunter almost asked, Where’d you hear that? but knew the answer would be a shrug or “You know.” When it came to gossiping, cops could give a bunch of grandmothers in a beauty shop a run for their money. “Did you get anything out of Venza before you punched him out?” Larry asked, not quite able to hide his smile.
Chris decided to treat it as a serious question. “He claimed Darja stood him up and I don’t have any evidence to prove him wrong.”
“Proof, schmoof. Do you like him for it?”
“He’s mean enough to have strangled a woman and put her in a wood chipper. Physically . . . .” Chris tried to picture Ralph Venza heaving Darja’s limp body into the machine’s chute. “It would have been a stretch but he probably could have done it. The problem is that I can’t figure out how Venza could be linked to Brian Truman.”
“Maybe Truman took his girlfriend. . . .” Swanson flipped through Truman’s file, “Genine Urquhart, to Venza’s bar and, what’s that lawyer language? ‘A fight ensued.’“
“Or, Truman met Darja at Venza’s bar and the two men got into it over her and Truman won the fight, until Venza tracked him down and got even. He’s a punk with a chip on his shoulder. Hanging Truman from his own flagpole is the sort of thing I could see him doing.”
“All right,” Larry said, pulling out his yellow pad, “I’ll add that to our to-do list: ‘Check for links between Ralph Venza and Brian Truman.’“
Chris noticed that the top of the page was already filled with notes.
“What else have you got?”
“I was thinking about the vic’s trick book. A lot of the names just had a cell number and a bunch of them were burner phones. Most of those burner-phone names came up empty which means that they’re probably aliases.”
“Twenty-eight of them,” Chris said.
“Yeah, OK, twenty-eight guys we haven’t identified, but,” Larry tapped the flash drive taped to one of the pages in the file, “you copied Johnny-Boy’s hard disk and most of these schmucks charged their dates to one of Johnny-Boy’s front companies. Unlike the aliases they gave Darja for her trick book their credit cards should have had their real names. So if we—”
“Two databases with one common field,” Chris interrupted.
“What?”
“The names in Johnny-Boy’s list and the names in Darja’s trick book don’t always match. Johnny-Boy’s list is organized by date and Darja’s trick book doesn’t have any dates. But both documents have one field in common, the John’s burner-phone number. We can tie the alias names in Darja’s trick book to the credit card numbers in Johnny-Boy’s database because the customer would have given both Darja and Johnny-Boy the same burner-phone number. Once we run the comparison and check with the credit card companies we’ll have real names to go with the fake names in Darja’s book and then we can run the Johns’ real names through the system and see if any of them have criminal records.” Chris grinned now that the job had returned to his comfort zone of databases and computer searches.
“Actually, I was thinking of something else,” Larry said. Chris’ smile took a turn toward confusion. “Look, even when we get done we’re still going to end up with a bunch of cash customers like that Warren Henderson. In fact, Johnny-Boy probably encouraged cash payments. They’re simpler, more profitable, and tax exempt. No, it’s the human factor I want to check out.”
