Brad ordered an FXO port. The FXO port was never found, was it? Where did it go?
First of all, I agree that he could have had the router and the FXO card required for the call on 7/12, even if these items weren't found when the house was searched. However, I want to dispel this notion that since the FXO card was not in the house and not in the office, he had to have done something suspicious with it (like throw it away).
To be sure that we are on the same page when talking about a "lab" at a networking company like Cisco,
this is a tiny slice of what such a lab looks like. Now, picture row after row of racks of equipment that look like that. The labs vary in size, but some Cisco labs are about 20,000 sq feet (almost half an acre). The RTP campus has 12 buildings, 2 to 4 stories with many such labs across all those buildings.
So, we are talking many millions of dollars worth of equipment of all sorts spread across 100's of thousands of feet of lab space as well as engineers offices, cubicles, homes, etc. This is a postcard-sized card with a street price of $200-400, so probably a cost to Cisco of $50 or less. If Brad bought it in Jan '08 and had it at home but at sometime returned it to work, it could be anywhere. No one tracks such small ticket items as this. And, just because Brad ordered it doesn't mean it's "his". It's a company asset so he could have loaned/given it to anyone or someone could have seen it sitting around and "borrowed" it. No one tracks that kind of thing. It could be somewhere in all of that lab space or sitting on someone's desk or someone else could have taken it home.
So, again, who knows whether he had it at home on 7/12. But, the mere fact that it is no accounted for now is not very surprising.