No keys, just the usual amount of middle-drawer crap: pencils, pens, business cards, half-used notepads, an ancient pack of spearmint gum, opened, with two sticks missing, random thumbtacks and paper clips, a four-inch square of what appeared to be lead, a half-inch thick, with nothing on or under it, a mouse pad that looked like a Persian carpet, a Swingline stapler, a yellow book called Essential Verbs/Spanish, and, way at the back, a Post-it note, folded in half, with the number 0770 and the words Security: Bimmer written in a woman’s hand.
And she thought, Ah. An alarm code.
She stuck the paper in her hip pocket, stirred through the rest of the junk to make sure she hadn’t missed anything, and then went to the desk’s file drawers. The files were filled with printouts of spreadsheets having to do with payroll, and individual personnel employment files covering several dozen employees. There was also a drawer full of files on miscellaneous matters, and she riffled through them, and then pulled them out and stacked them on the desktop.
“I think we’re wasting our time, but I’m not sure,” Letty said to Kaiser. “If he was helping steal the oil, he wouldn’t have written anything in a file. What we need is a forensic accountant, and I’m not one. He’s got these miscellaneous files . . . Let me thumb through them. Could you stick your head in Grimes’s office and ask if he has the filing cabinet keys?”
Kaiser went to do that and Letty started through the files. Several of the folders had personal papers: brochures and sales papers on a Ram pickup, a stack of used checkbook duplicates going back seven years, photos of a man Letty assumed to be Blackburn on a variety of well sites and at business conferences. One folder labeled bass boat had only a single piece of paper in it, and she almost skipped over it. But it had thumb smudge marks on it, as though it were looked at frequently, and when she pulled the paper out, she found a single, ten-character non-word, a jumble of letters, numbers, and symbols. A password.
Kaiser came back. “He doesn’t have the keys. I got to run outside, I’ll be right back.”
“Okay.” Letty nodded and turned to the computer, using the password given to them by Grimes. Inside, she found files of correspondence concerning purchase and sales information, a personal file involving travel plans, plane tickets, and reservations, all in the past, and one locked file that asked for a password.
She entered the password from the bass boat folder, and the file opened as Kaiser came back. “What’d you find?” he asked, hanging over her shoulder.
“It’s a trouble file—not going to help us, I don’t think. Confidential files on people who were fired, caught using drugs, here’s one involving a guy who is believed to have stolen a thing called a Ditch Witch, whatever that is . . .”
“Power ditch digger; we had them in Iraq,” Kaiser said. “Good for slit trenches.”
“No help here, I don’t think.”
Kaiser was holding what might have been a man’s travel manicure kit, that turned out to be a lockpick set. He took out a pick and a torsion wrench and began opening the file cabinet locks.
“You gotta teach me how to do that,” Letty said. “I’ve used an electric rake . . .”
“You have?” He was only mildly surprised.
“Never mind,” she said. “I would like to know how to pick a lock, you know, manually. Quietly.”
“Happy to provide you with all kinds of instruction,” Kaiser said. “But, uh . . . what are we trying to find?”
“How would I know?” Letty asked. “Something. A note to an accomplice that says, ‘Meet me at the oil well where we’re stealing the oil this week.’ That’d be nice. A note from his wife that says, ‘Let’s go shoot us some jackrabbits.’ Whatever.”
She pulled out the drawers. More payroll spreadsheets, copies of tax filings and various business licenses, tanker-truck licensing documents, rental and leasing agreements, maps of oil-rights holdings, and a thick file on a lawsuit involving a drilling-rights dispute between a half-dozen companies that had been settled four years earlier.