Page 17 of Long Gone

His face flushed slightly. “We didn’t have an auditor review them.”

I stared at him in surprise. “Weren’t you planning on filing fraud charges? Seems to me you’d need hard proof.”

“The state would have filed the fraud charges, but they weren’t interested in pursuing it until we found him.”

“Do you know who owns the offshore account?”

“Not a clue.”

“An auditor could have helped with that.”

“Look,” he said, irritation flashing in his eyes before he quickly covered it. “We’re not a big city. We’re a small county sheriff’s office doing the best we can with limited resources. Why pay an auditor when the state was gonna do it anyway? Besides, that bank transfer was as plain as day.”

I held up a hand in surrender. “You’re right. It’s pretty damn easy for me to come in and play armchair quarterback five years after the fact. I’m sorry.”

He nodded, but it was stiff. Then he added, “And the state investigator who took over the case when it hit a dead end couldn’t find out who owned it, but the consensus was it was Burton’s.”

“Did you entertain the idea of murder?” I asked.

“Of course, but the money transfer was pretty damning, especially since it occurred at nine p.m. and he was supposed to show up at his son’s basketball game at five. Even if we ignored that, there wasn’t any evidence to suggest foul play.”

“Clarice said she got a call from Hugo around four, saying he’d be late to the game. I’m presuming you checked both their phone records to confirm that.”

“We did, and she was telling the truth. There was a call placed from his number at 4:03 that lasted four minutes. It was placed outside of Jackson Creek, around the area of Highway 20.”

Four minutes seemed like a long time to tell someone they were going to be late, but they were married. They probably talked about other things.

“You said he committed fraud,” I said. “What about the investors who lost money? Were any of them pissed enough to have killed him?”

“We interviewed all of them. They had alibis for the window of time when Burton went missing.”

“How many defrauded investors were there?”

“Six. I can’t tell you who they are, but one is known for his own land development deals.”

“Brett Colter?”

He lifted his brow with a smirk, looking impressed. “I can neither confirm nor deny.”

He’d confirmed enough. Besides, Clarice herself had told me about it. “Hugo’s wife said he owned multiple properties at the time of his death. One of them was jointly owned with Brett Colter,” I said. “A strip mall.”

“Yes. The property was owned by the Colter Group, but he had two other properties in the name of his own corporation, Burton Management. One was a smaller property, kind of the centerpiece of a property he’d hoped to use to lure a Japanese automaker into building a parts plant. He was in the process of purchasing the land around it, and he’d been working on it for less than a year. But it was the second property that got him into trouble and sucked up more time and money than he’d likely planned. The Sunny Point property.”

“Sunny Point?”

I was surprised when he pulled a bulky folded document out of a file and unfolded it multiple times to reveal a map of the county. “The Sunny Point property was right here, to the southwest of Wolford.” He pointed to an area outside the city limits. “He was in the process of creating a luxury neighborhood with multiple-acre lots, homes starting right around one million dollars.”

My jaw dropped. “There’s enough money in the county for homes in that price range?”

“The Colter Group was bringing in businesses and corporations with upper management folks who were used to owning homes in California and the East Coast. One million would be nothing to them. But when he started running into trouble, he pivoted and decided to add a separate neighborhood with slightly less expensive homes. He called it Phase Two.”

“So what happened?”

“Burton’s first problem began when he was conducting studies on the original land. Turns out there’s an endangered bird species that lives in a marshy part he’d planned on draining. It sucked up multiple acres and he left him scrambling. The marshy area was where he’d planned on putting the clubhouse and pool, and the drawings of that part of the development and walking trails cutting through the countryside were front and center on the website and brochures. Plus he’d sunk a good couple of hundred thousand or more coming up with the plans and environmental studies. He was pretty much back to the drawing board.”

“So he sought out investors?” I asked.

“He already had a few investors at that point, but he definitely needed more. The two original investors balked at his request for more money. They’d each invested 100K, and the second one had already contributed an additional 50K. The first one still refused to put up more money when Burton came back a third time, but the second investor added another investment of 50K.”

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