Page 31 of A Billionaire Dom

Linsey

I jotted downanother piece of information and then leaned back in my chair to study my notebook. While I was in the middle of an investigation, I typed out my notes and made a back-up, so I had at least three copies, but I always hand-wrote things first.

Some of it was because, if I wrote it, I remembered it more easily. Mostly though, it was because having it written down gave me the chance to prioritize information, see what fit and what didn’t.

Some people used post-it notes on a whiteboard or a wall when they were putting together stories or crimes or whatever else people used them for. Me, I liked using a table when I could.

My newest section of notes had to do with Mark Titan.

One thing I’d learned in the fifteen cases I’d worked over the last two years, suspects were always a good place to start once I had a handle on the details of the crime itself. With Heidi missing, there wasn’t much in the way of a crime scene…or an actual crime. No body. No sign of foul play. No way to prove that Heidi hadn’t simply walked away from her life.

If something had happened to Heidi, the first place to look was her husband. It had nothing to do with wanting to investigate him first. If nothing turned up with Mark, I’d turn to the next logical suspect, Heidi’s boss…and the man Mark claimed had been sleeping with his wife.

Jude Holden.

But Mark came first.

What. A. Bastard.

Social media twenty-six years ago hadn’t existed. The internet had been in its infancy. The information available online now about the early 1990s had been put online after the fact. If I wanted original documents, I’d have to do some non-computer digging. It might get that far, but what I had was a decent start.

Most of Houston’s newspapers had their archives online. Most people could get access to those records by paying a subscription fee. Small papers that needed the money, I paid the fees but used fake information. The big ones with overpaid CEOs, those I hacked. On principle.

Mark Titan had made both the big papers and the small papers in the early 90s. The first story had been about Mark’s parents, actually. Founders of the Houston Promise of Tomorrow Church, they’d been well-known and well-respected in the community. When they celebrated their fortieth wedding anniversary, the religion section of three papers had written about it, and a smiling picture of them had accompanied the article. With them was their son, and that was how I’d got my first look at the ‘grieving husband.’

It wasn’t the last picture I had of him. Someone had gotten a nice picture of him storming Holden Enterprises with a baseball bat. The story went that he’d gone after Jude Holden because Jude was having an affair with his wife, Heidi.

That wasn’t anything new, though. The police file had said that much.

What it hadn’t contained was a tabloid piece that claimedMarkwas actually the one having the affair with Jude and that it’d been a lover’s quarrel. Heidi had been ‘disappeared’ because she’d caught her husband and her boss together.

If that had been the truth, both Mark and Jude would’ve had a reason to get rid of Heidi. Coming out in Texas back then would’ve killed Jude’s business, and Heidi could’ve taken Mark to the cleaners with a divorce.

It was possible, but I didn’t think it was probable.

Still, it stayed on the table.

After trashing Jude’s car and then punching him, Mark had been arrested. That was public record and had been in the police’s file too. That was where I’d gone next, looking into what had gone on with Mark while he’d been in jail.

According to the officers the detectives had interviewed, Mark had spent most of his short incarceration complaining and accusing, but essentially behaving himself. Still, it’d been obvious that he hadn’t simply been a man who’d lost his temper because he’d caught his wife cheating. There’d been no after-the-fact remorse or even acknowledgment that he could’ve handled things better. It’d been all Jude and Heidi’s fault. And on top of Jude having cuckolded him, Mark was convinced that Jude was out to get him.

Unfortunately, there was evidence to support that claim.

Mark had been held with a bail that had been far too high for a single punch and some vandalism, which made me suspect that Jude had pulled some strings. No judge could’ve gotten away with no bail at all for such minor charges, but since Mark hadn’t been arrested before that day, and his actions had been relatively explainable, any bail at all was excessive.

Even if Jude was guilty of influencing a judge for bail, it didn’t mean Mark hadn’t done something to his wife.

Except the missing person’s report had been filedafterMark had gotten out on bail. Someone named Taylor Ellison had put up the bail, so I added that name to my list of people to look into after I was done with Mark. Considering the sizable amount of money Taylor had put up, he or she had to be close to Mark. If Taylor was a woman, that would put into question Mark’s fidelity. Infidelity on either side would be a motive for murder.

If Heidi was, in fact, dead. Without a body, it was nearly impossible to prove.

I turned the page to look at my notes on the Titan family’s finances.

Mark and Heidi had both worked for Holden Enterprises, which had always paid their employees well. Then, Mark had gotten fired, and their income had been cut in half. Based on the house and cars they’d owned, at least one if not both of them had expensive tastes.

One was a 1993 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am and the other a 1992 Honda Accord. Both cars were in Mark’s name, and my gut said Mark was the spender, but I couldn’t prove that they hadn’t purchased the Firebird for Heidi.

By the time Heidi had disappeared, they’d fallen behind on their mortgage and their car payments. The Firebird was repossessed at the end of 1993, and the Accord appeared to have been sold when new charges had been added against Mark, including vandalism of company property. By late September, he had accepted a plea deal that put him in prison for six months. During that time, his house was foreclosed on.

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