Martin?” hardly convinced but mildly intrigued.
“Let’s start finding out,” Wire replied as she handed Ring a slip of paper with the plate number.
“Right away,” Ring answered as he pulled out his phone. “Let me call it in.”
Then to Brosel, “Have you talked to anyone around here?”
The detective shook her head, “Only to the CFO of the company just to get the lay of the land. Other managers have started coming in and the shock is written all over their faces. The place is half full because it’s Saturday but you can feel it in the air around here, people are in shock. They can’t believe lightning has struck twice in three days. Darwin told you about the Chief Information Officer, right?”
Wire and McRyan nodded.
“This is a relatively small company, one hundred twenty-two employees. Everyone knows everybody, pretty tight, so people were devastated by Martin’s death, and now this. They’ll have two funerals to attend next week.”
“So who do we need to talk to?”
“Depends on how you want to approach it?” Brosel asked.
Mac considered the detective’s question for a moment. People had been through a lot and he didn’t want to unnecessarily add to their suffering. However, with Checketts and Martin being murdered, it was clear something was going on at this company. In Mac’s mind, that told him that the people working there would put together two and two and start wondering so there was no harm in accelerating that process. “Detective, let’s start with the CFO and go from there.”
Brosel left the room while Ring came back in. “I’ve got someone checking into the Traverse and I’m bringing in two plain clothes guys to watch it while we’re in here. You really think they’re the guys who took out Martin?”
“Don’t know,” Wire answered. “But they are clearly following us.”
Brosel returned to the conference room with Michael Bruzinski, DataPoint’s Chief Financial Officer. Introductions were made around the room, with Ring finishing with, “We’re sorry for your loss here.” Bruzinski nodded as he sat down at the conference table. With Checketts’s death, at least for the time being, Bruzinski was in charge of the company.
Mac got right to it, summarizing what was found at Checketts’s. For the moment, he left things at a suicide. He was more interested in the financial condition of the company. “Mr. Bruzinski, were you at all aware of Mr. Checketts’s dire financial condition?”
“No,” the CFO replied. “Mr. Checketts shared nothing with me about that. You might want to ask his secretary to see if she knew anything, but I knew nothing of it.”
“So you weren’t at all aware of his debts to the casinos in Las Vegas.”
“I was not, although I can’t say that I’m surprised.”
“Why is that?”
“He liked to gamble and gamble big. He talked about killing it in Vegas all the time.”
“But did he?” Wire asked.
“I assumed he was doing all right given he always seemed to have money for the latest toys, whether it was cars, a boat for the lake and things like that,” Bruzinski replied. “He just seemed to like the action and the bigger the stakes the better. Around here, he always wanted to up the ante in our fantasy football league, wanted the NCAA basketball pool to have bigger stakes, wanted to play for big money on the golf course. I’d tell him; hey, your staff around here can’t afford to throw $100 into a basketball pool. They can’t afford to put a grand into a fantasy football league, not unless you’re going to start paying them a lot more money. But he was an adrenaline junkie and always wanted to play for more, more, more.”
Mac and Wire shared a knowing look. That explained how Checketts probably got himself into trouble in Las Vegas. The question was, did the trouble in Las Vegas have anything to do with his murder, and more so, with the election. Mac nodded to Wire to find out.
“Mr. Bruzinski,” Dara asked, “is DataPoint under any financial stress?”
“No, not at all,” the CFO replied. “We are doing quite well. We’re having one of our best years this year.”
“Oh, why is that?”
“The voting machine side of our business has had a banner year. We just filled a massive order for new machines for six different states, so we’re doing really really well. The machines went out about four months ago. We had an immediate glitch with the machines in three states that we had to fix at our cost, but otherwise, things are great. I can