A mortgage broker, eleven tagged files, and an FBI appointment on Monday.
Saturday, 18 October 2008. The housing market has collapsed. Copper Ridge, a gated subdivision on the edge of Henderson, has twelve finished houses and ninety empty pads. Rick Salazar, 46, the mortgage broker who financed most of the sales, is alone in the model home's sales office on a Saturday night with a file box of eleven borrower files, each tagged in his own hand.
On Monday at nine he is due at the FBI's mortgage fraud task force to explain how those loans were written. On Sunday morning the site superintendent finds him on the office floor beside a fourteen-pound granite countertop sample.
Six people had reason to want Monday not to happen: his partner who wrote the loans, the developer who threatened him on voicemail, the straw buyer facing foreclosure, the appraiser, the estranged wife with the insurance, and the son who owed a bookmaker. Each was somewhere with a record: a casino, a gate keypad, a boarding pass, a badge reader, a car that phones home. Read the machines and decide.
Read all 24 documents and name the person who killed Rick Salazar. One accusation. Right or wrong, the solution file opens and shows every document that convicts. There are no hints and nothing is marked.
Press play and choose Create a room. Up to eight of you read the file on your own phones, see what the others have opened, vote in secret and let the host reveal. Only the host needs to own the case; guests play free.