Page 39 of A Billionaire Dom

Linsey

I hated this.

I’d never really felt guilty digging into anyone’s past before. If they were connected to a cold case, whatever I found could either condemn or vindicate them.

If it was the first, then I didn’t care that I’d been snooping. If it was the second, chances were they’d welcome the clearing of their name. Besides, it wasn’t like I shared the information I found with anyone but the cops, and only what was relevant. If I discovered someone was cheating on their spouse or liked kinky sex, I kept it to myself unless it was connected to the case.

Kinky sex, of course, made me think of Davin, and that was where the guilt came in. The life I was currently researching was Jude Holden’s, and I couldn’t lie to myself about whether or not Davin would be affected by what I found here. If his grandad had done something to Heidi, it’d destroy Davin. If Jude hadn’t been involved, but Davin found out what I’d been doing, whatever this thing was between us would implode.

I always tried to be objective when it came to these cases, not letting my personal feelings get in the way of the facts, but with this one, I found myself hoping that Jude was just the victim of a jealous husband. It was the only scenario that would give me even a chance of keeping this thing with Davin going.

The good news was that I’d been able to get into both the business’s and Jude’s personal email and phone records from that far back. The saying went that nothing on the internet was ever really gone, and depending on the tech people working on the system, that could also apply to records stored on servers. A person just had to know where to look, and I did.

Some of Holden Enterprises’s call logs showed calls to the Titan home, but not often, and none were to Jude’s personal extension. Since both Heidi and Mark had worked at the company for a while, and then Heidi had continued working right up to her disappearance, it wasn’t that strange.

At least half of the employees had used company phones to make and receive calls to and from their homes. Since there was no way to directly prove who had made and received those calls, it didn’t necessarily mean that Jude hadn’t been careful and used a regular company line, but it didn’t prove anything else either.

Jude’s business emails were completely clean, and all of them had still been stored. He hadn’t tried to hide anything. Not an affair and not any shady business dealings. While that didn’t prove he hadn’t done anything to Heidi, it did speak well of his character.

At the moment, I was going through Jude’s personal emails from 1993. In the early 90s, it hadn’t been quite as common for people to have a personal email, so it wasn’t a surprise that Heidi hadn’t had one. I was looking more for Jude writing to someone about her, but I wasn’t holding my breath.

As tech-savvy as he was, Jude was old-school enough that he’d have been more likely to have talked about an affair than to have written about it. Especially since his wife at the time had already suspected he’d been having an affair.

I didn’t find any direct mention of Heidi or of any sort of romantic flings, but between the phone records and emails, I did find a name that kept popping up.

Royd Kichner.

A quick search revealed that he was a private investigator, and that gave my investigation another lead to follow. I recorded each communication between Jude and Kichner, laying them out to create a timeline. A few of the emails contained details about the jobs Royd had been hired to do, but they’d been for things like background checks on employees who worked for Jude or Walter personally. Nothing that even hinted at an affair.

Some of the emails, however, had contained cryptic comments like “I found what you’re looking for. Call me.” Usually, within twenty-four hours, there had been a call between the two, lasting anywhere from five to forty-five minutes.

A handful of those emails and phone calls had occurred around the time Heidi disappeared.

Going into both the company bank records and Jude’s personal finances showed that, while Holden Enterprises did use Kichner’s services from time to time, the bulk of his payments had come directly from Jude’s accounts. While the fact that he hadn’t been using company funds to pay for Kichner to do personal investigations, it didn’t tell me what those investigations had been.

Royd Kichner himself had a good reputation. Highly recommended. The only negative things I’d found about him had been people angry that they’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t have been. Husbands or wives who’d had affairs. People who’d been stealing from their jobs. Someone who’d been involved in a hit-and-run. Nothing suggested he’d dabbled in anything untoward.

But that didn’t mean he hadn’t made an exception for a client or two, especially since there did seem to be some hints that he didn’t always play by the book. More bending the rules than breaking them, but the problem with someone like that was that it was easy to go from bending to breaking.

I leaned back and closed my eyes, rubbing my forehead as if that could ease the headache I’d had from the moment I’d started looking into Davin’s grandfather.

I could hack Kichner’s files and read through every case that Jude had hired him for, but there was a chance Kichner was old school enough that he didn’t keep his records online, or that he’d only started doing so in the 2000s. And while I knew I was good enough to get past pretty much any firewalls people could set up, I wasn’t sure it’d be worth the work to get into his system and then go through his files only to find out that he only had paper records.

I refused to let that discourage me, though. Jude had hired Kichner fairly recently, and the airfare Jude had paid for had been from Houston to Las Vegas and back. Kichner was not only still working, but he was still in Houston.

After a moment, I picked up my phone and dialed the number. He answered on the second ring.

“Kichner Investigations, how can I help you?” The man’s voice was pleasant enough to make me think he probably wasn’t Royd. This guy sounded too much like a receptionist.

“I was wondering if I needed an appointment to come in and speak with Mr. Kichner about a case.”

“Not at all,” the man replied. “We do recommend appointments if you need to speak to him at a specific time or if something is time sensitive, but walk-ins are always welcome.”

“Thank you. Have a nice day.” I hung up before he could ask if I wanted to schedule something.

Thirty minutes later, I was being sent back to Royd’s office by the same young man who’d answered the phone. If my abrupt end to the call had annoyed him, he didn’t show it.

The man in the office who rose to greet me appeared to be in his late fifties or early sixties, and his features had the sort of rough, weathered look that came with hard living, and it was only enhanced by the scar through his left eyebrow. His eyes were coal black and gleamed with the kind of shrewd intelligence that told me underestimating him would be a grave mistake.

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