MOIRA DROPPED ME home after we landed in San Diego the next day. She still wasn’t completely onboard with my Keenan Powell/Chuck Baxter theory. I’d have to make my next move alone.
I took Midnight for a walk after I picked him up from my neighbor’s house. We took the same route as the other night. Venturing beyond the bounds of the cul-de-sac. The limp from my twisted ankle was now just a slight hitch. The sun was uncluttered by clouds and throwing shadows I could actually see. Midnight’s body, doglike. His movements familiar. I could follow his head from side to side and down sniffing the sidewalk, then back up. Both our shadows angled to the right. I avoided a rock on the sidewalk and managed curbs.
We got back home and I sat in the living room with Midnight facing me. I pressed my face toward his snout. I looked at his eyes. Close. Millimeters away. I could see the curve of his eye socket. Blurred, but visible. Closer still, his eyeball, his pupil. He licked me in the face and I hugged his neck.
I allowed myself hope.
I went upstairs, got on my computer, and voice-searched Charles Baxter, Blank Slate Capital as a starting point on a paid investigative search site. There are a lot of Charles Baxters in the United States and the one who founded Blank Slate left very few breadcrumbs out in cyberspace. But, after a half hour or so, I tracked him down. Charles Lawrence Baxter was sixty-three years old and lived on a five-thousand-acre ranch outside of Casper, Wyoming. If he really was Colt Benson, he’d shaved six years off his age. I guess the nose job and whatever plastic surgery he may have had made him feel younger.
Maybe it worked because his wife, Lyndsay Katherine Baxter, nee Shutler, was twenty-five years his junior. No children. The earliest history I could find about Chuck Baxter was that he earned a degree in Business at the University of Montana Western in 1979. Nothing before that. The only job history I found was financial consultant until he started Blank Slate Capital in 2010.
The three consulting agencies he’d worked for were no longer in business. Convenient for someone creating a new identity and a fake history. Apparently, he began running his own one-man shop in 2000, then closed it to start day trading in the stock exchange full-time in 2007 until he founded Blank Slate.
No phone number other than the one that matched Blank Slate Capital. A very private man.
The only office I found for Blank Slate was in La Jolla, but Baxter lived in Wyoming. Maybe Keenan Powell ran the day-to-day locally and Baxter flew in a few times a year to check in and wrangle new investors from the La Jolla elite. His preferred hotel being La Valencia. He was staying in the Sky Suite the night Shay was murdered, not Powell. I was sure of it.
The police must have already known that and they didn’t seem to care. They had their man. Tunnel vision.
I was more convinced than ever that Chuck Baxter was Colt Benson. He stole $861,000 from June Sommers, faked his own death, then created a new identity that yielded little information for anyone to find.
And he had Shay Sommers murdered when she figured it out.
I needed a closer look at Chuck Baxter.