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The thought of her pushing me away made me sick to my stomach, but I had to quit being selfish and only thinking of how I’d feel. She deserved better than that from me.
But, until I had the opportunity to make things right with her, I had work to do on the Heidi Titan case.
I had one more place to check before I could tie up what I had on Jude. Everything I’d found so far was completely circumstantial. Nothing definitively pointed to him as having been involved with Heidi’s disappearance, but there wasn’t anything that cleared him either.
With a broad timeframe as to when Heidi had gone missing and Jude having spent much of his time alone in his office at that time, it wasn’t possible to have a specific alibi. Not like Mark Titan, who had gone to jail before and been released after the last time Heidi had been seen. It was too big a gap.
The contact between the Titans and Holden Enterprises was easily explained too. They’d both worked for Jude at one point, and even after Mark was fired, Heidi had stayed. There was no way of knowing that any calls made between the two places had been between Heidi and Jude or Heidi and Mark. Or they could have been calls to and from supervisors, etc.
Royd’s employment around that time had been suspicious, but again, nothing that could put a smoking gun in Jude’s hand since Kichner had worked for Jude before and since, both privately and with the company.
One of the things anyone who watched or read crime stories knew to do was follow the money. I already knew that Jude had hired Kichner, but now I needed to look for signs of an affair in his financial records.
Jude had been banking with the same institution for nearly fifty decades, and he’d had a personal money manager for forty. I went for the manager’s files first since he was more likely than the bank to have credit card spending as well as incoming and outgoing cash.
There were a few specific things I was looking for, comparing 1993 with the previous year when he and his second wife had been on good terms. Meals at fancy, romantic restaurants that had differed from the usual dates and places. Purchases of expensive jewelry that hadn’t corresponded with holidays, a birthday, or anniversary. Same with lingerie. Trips for two people when other spending had shown Mrs. Holden had been elsewhere. Strange property purchases or rentals.
I’d already looked at Holden Enterprises’s records for accounts Jude had handled back then, but it’d pretty much all been commercial with the exception of a house the then-mayor had purchased. Based on what I knew of Jude’s personality, if he’d been cheating, he wouldn’t have handed anything off to someone else that linked him to the other woman, especially since his son had been working for the company then. He wouldn’t have wanted Walter to get suspicious.
It wasn’t until I saw the records for two days after Mark Titan had been arrested that the first oddity caught my eye.
Things moved fast after that, and it was less than an hour later that I was printing out what I’d found, my head spinning. It was possible I was wrong, but my gut said I wasn’t.
I had a pretty good idea of what had happened to Heidi Titan, as well as what Jude Holden’s role had been. Now, I just had to figure out what to do with the information. It wasn’t quite as black-and-white as I’d thought it would be.