He scrolled across his track pad and the screens moved again. “So, I’ve only gone back through the files eighteen months…”
That news had me sitting up straight again. “Eighteen months? You’ve been through eighteen months’ worth of emails already?”
He nodded. “Yeah.”
“How? You’ve only had this since yesterday.”
We’d just been through one of those periods of ‘much needed national security’ so Cody hadn’t been here as much as usual, and hadn’t had enough time to start on the Johnson Maynard case; one of the reasons I was feeling less calm than usual.
“I might have borrowed a program which reads for key words in content.”
I raised an eyebrow. “Borrowed?”
He didn’t look at me as he replied, his gaze firmly trained on the screens. “Yeah, technically it’s mine because I wrote it, but I wrote it while I was doing some work with the NSA, so they think they own it. I thought it would help speed things up.”
“You’re using NSA spy software?”
He shrugged like he hadn’t added several more felonies to his tally. Although Cody’s unparalleled levels of nonchalance was probably how he’d got to where he was today, instead of incarcerated. It was also what made him so likeable.
“Anyway, I’ve only been back eighteen months and I haven’t found anything, which is weird.”
“Maybe the software isn’t that good,” Diego smirked before taking an elephant sized mouthful of his sub.
“It is that good.”
“Then what’s weird?”
“Because when I say nothing, I mean nothing.”
Diego and I followed his gaze to the screen as he nodded at it.
“I found client accounts for Johnson Maynard and it all looks legit, but get this, there’s not one email about his divorce – except this from a couple of months ago.”
We all watched as the bottom screen expanded to fill the rest.
Duke,
I need you to set aside time today to discuss business with me.
Now our kids have grown, my wife and I have been drifting apart and we’ve sadly decided to divorce. I won’t contest anything; we will split everything evenly.
We have been married a long time. I want this to be fair.
Call me.
Johnson
We sat in silence as we read, until it was broken by the loud slurping of Diego sucking his soda through the straw, pointing it to the screen when he was done.
“Johnson Maynard wrote that?”
“Yep, and it’s the only email I can find relating to his divorce. There’s nothing since, only correspondence between his team regarding day-to-day business, because they manage everything for him alongside his in-house counsel.”
“Bullshit! How’s that possible? For a multi-billion-dollar divorce there has to be a paper trail.”
“I’m not sure yet, I’m looking. So far, I haven’t found a single thing. They don’t have additional encrypted servers, second email addresses, or anything out of the ordinary. Everything is done correctly; too correctly, if you know what I mean. It’s possible they don’t use the same network so I can’t find how they’re doing their work, but they’ll have a tell. Something will trip them up and I’ll find it; I just need to keep looking.”
“What do you mean about a network?’