“Again, this is a guess,” Rivera said.
“Yes. Absolutely. A guess,” Lucas said. “Except that we haven’t found anything at Sunnie so far. We’re really having some problems nailing down anything that looks like a laundry. So maybe it isn’t.”
“You know the president of this bank?” Martínez asked.
“Yeah. Good guy. I really believe that,” Lucas said. “If there’s a money laundry here, he didn’t know about it.”
“We’ll see,” Martínez said. “If this vice president is missing, and if he worked with Mrs. Brooks, there must be a connection.”
“Or the Criminales think there is,” said Rivera.
“There must be,” Martínez said to her boss. “For somebody so high up to be involved.”
Lucas said, “He wasn’t that high up. Americans … banks especially … sometimes give titles instead of money. You could ask Bone, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were dozens of vice presidents. It impresses the clients, to be dealing with somebody … so high up.”
SHAFFER AND O’BRIEN, the DEA agent, were sitting on a narrow red designer couch in Bone’s office. Bone and a tough-looking woman, who Lucas thought must be the lawyer, were facing each other across a cocktail table, on separate red chairs that matched the couch.
Two other men, who Lucas didn’t know, one short and bald, the other tall and long-haired, both in good suits and ties, sat on the third side of the table, while three empty non-matching chairs were at the fourth side. Lucas, Rivera, and Martínez took the empty chairs and Lucas said, “Thanks for waiting.”
Shaffer, who already looked unhappy, registered another few degrees of unhappiness when he saw Rivera and Martínez, but he didn’t say anything.
Bone, a thin athletic man with a strong nose and thick black hair, introduced the unknowns—the woman was the lawyer, the two men worked as an account manager and a systems director—and then said to Lucas, “We’ve already been over a few of the ground rules here. Kate will jump in if you ask any questions that would suggest that I, or the bank as an institution, were knowingly involved in any kind of illegal activity. Other than that, I need to get this figured out as badly as you do.”
Shaffer: “You said you found something.”
“I did,” Bone said. “We went through all of the accounts that Pruess helped sell, and I found one called Bois Brule Software. When I spoke to Agent O’Brien after I talked to Lucas, he said the name has some significance to the Brooks murders.”
“Nothing direct,” O’Brien put in. “The Brookses had a cabin on the Bois Brule River up in northern Wisconsin. We saw it when we were going through their assets.”
Lucas nodded, looked at Bone. “And?”
Bone nodded to the man whom he’d introduced as Martin Brown, the account manager.
Brown said, “I took the account apart. The notation on the account said that it was designed to hold monthly receipts from software sales, and that the money would be dispersed at the end of each month to Bois Brule’s creditors, with some of it going to a tax holding fund and other amounts going to investment accounts. There’s nothing unusual about any of that, except the amount flowing through the account. Some months as much as thirty million dollars would go through it.”
“Holy shit,” O’Brien said. “I need to get my guys over here.”
“What else?” Lucas asked.
“A couple of things,” Brown said. “First, it doesn’t look to us, after we took a really close look, like any money was dispersed to creditors. All of it went to stock or bond mutual funds. The second thing is, while the money was always dispersed at the end of the month, with a few small exceptions, this month, and only this month, the money was moved almost as soon as it came in. There’s an additional problem here: when I tried to find out where it went, I couldn’t. When I try, I get a system error. The people down in Systems don’t know what’s going on, either. We can’t find out where the money went. Somehow, the wire numbers have been sequestered.”
“What are the bond funds that it usually went to?” O’Brien asked.
Brown picked up a yellow legal pad and rattled off a bunch of techie-sounding names. “I’m having my secretary type up a full list, with account numbers and so on. That would be the place for your guys to start,” he said, and passed the paper over to O’Brien.
“How much did they get?” Lucas asked.
“Twenty-two million,” Bone said. “Something else: the last withdrawals were the day before the murders. At first, I was thinking, well, they knew about them. But then I thought, maybe, maybe, what happened was that they heard about the murders on the morning news and bailed out. Didn’t come back for the rest.”
Shaffer said, “Huh,” and Rivera said, “Is it possible that your Pruess was involved in this money movement, and now is running?”
Bone spread his hands: “He had no direct access to the account. He was a salesman, not a manager. It’s more likely that, God help us…”
“What?” Shaffer asked.
“That the people who killed the Brookses knew about him, and have taken him away,” Bone said.
Shaffer said, “They’ve taken him away because…”
“Because they think he was involved in stealing that money,” Bone said. “He wasn’t, but because he sold the account, or he and Mrs. Brooks sold the account, they thought he was. They may not know the difference between the salesman and the account manager. But if they’ve got Pruess, they probably know now.”
Lucas looked at Brown: “You got a wife and kids?”
Brown’s Adam’s apple bobbed and he said, “Yeah.”
“Get them out of town. Take them to a resort somewhere. Jim will pay your expenses,” Lucas said.
“Absolutely,” Bone said. “Find a nice place.”
“You don’t think they can find us?” Brown asked. His voice was shaky.
“No. These guys are a bunch of hoodlums, not the FBI,” Lucas said. “Not even the FBI could find you, if you’re careful. Find a place where you can get back here in a hurry if you need to. A few hours…”
“If it’s all right to fly…” Brown looked at Bone.
Bone said, “Marty, you can go anywhere in the country. Go to a resort near a big airport with direct flights back. We’ll pick up every nickel.”
Brown nodded, looked at the paper in front of him. “I will.”
O’BRIEN LOOKED at Lucas, then Shaffer, and said, “You know what’s strange? We can’t find any sign of this over at Sunnie. They must have separate books out in a cloud somewhere. They use their system to take the money in, and kick it back out.”
“We’ve got ICE looking at it,” Lucas said. “If it’s there, she’ll find it.”
O’Brien asked Brown, “Doesn’t somebody have to direct the dispersal of the funds? Don’t you deal with somebody from Bois Brule? I mean, who was that?”
Brown looked into a file folder, a bunch of paper torn from yellow legal pads. “A person named Sandor Gutierrez, who apparently has been in to the bank only once, to set up the account, through Pruess,” he said. He was sweating, Lucas thought. “Since then, he’s operated on the basis of encrypted instructions sent via the Internet, along with a code word as verification. This was all very routine.”
“And profitable, for you,” Shaffer said.
Bone jumped in: “Of course—we’ve made several tens of thousands of dollars on the account every year. We’ve made about as much on the account as we drop around the cash register every day.”
“You’re saying that the money was no big deal,” O’Brien offered.
“It wasn’t a big deal. Not for us. It’s chicken feed,” Bone said. “The fact is, we were used. We’ll cooperate with any law enforcement agency that wants in. We will press charges against anyone involved, and we will cover any loss claims.”
The attorney nodded, and added, “We don’t expect to see any of this in the media. We won’t, will we?”
“Not from us,” Shaffer said.
>
“I’D LIKE to see a loss claim,” Rivera said, picking up on Bone’s comment. “A loss claim would be very interesting—but I can promise, this is one claim you won’t see.”
Shaffer asked Brown, “Wasn’t this all very unusual? Didn’t you flag…?”
Brown was shaking his head. “Looking at it the way we did—the way we do—it was simply a successful business, processing bills. Pruess was supposed to have vetted him, and after that, it ran on autopilot. Bois Brule would accept credit charges, would run them through us, money would come in, and at the end of the month, they’d move their money out.”
“And it’s not nearly the biggest account we do that for,” Bone said. “Best Buy runs more money through here in a day than Bois Brule did in a month.”
The long-haired man, who’d been introduced as Ron Vaughn, held up a finger. Everybody looked at him, and he said, “We’re tearing the system down now. Like Mr. Bone said, Pruess sold the account, but he had no access to it. As far as we know, anyway. They may have trusted him with the dispersal codes, of course, which would explain just about everything—”
“Everything except why they didn’t snatch him first,” Shaffer said. “If you’ve got a guy handling the money for you, and the money disappears, wouldn’t you talk to him first?”
Lucas: “We don’t know the details. We just don’t know. Maybe they called Pruess to ask what the hell was going on, and he convinced them it had to be the Brookses. Maybe the Brookses passed it back to him … we just don’t know, and there’s no real way to find out.”
“And if you were handling the money, and you knew that the Brookses had been slaughtered, maybe you’d just run,” O’Brien said. “Maybe Pruess is on his way to Italy.”
“No. Not Italy, anyway,” said Bone. “When we had his partner look for him, he called back to say that Pruess’s wallet and car keys were in his bedside table, along with a money clip. I asked his partner to look, and Pruess had two hundred in the clip, and four hundred in the wallet. He didn’t take his cash card, either, his debit card, and he has sixteen thousand in his account. He also said that Pruess’s passport was there. So not Italy.”
“Is sixteen thousand a lot, for a vice president?” Shaffer asked.
Bone shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t think so. He had an account that allowed you to move money around online, and most of it was in a cash investment account, the rest in what was a bill-paying account. It looked okay … at least, superficially.”
“Let me go back to this guy,” Lucas said, pointing at Vaughn, the systems manager. “Were you about to say that whatever happened, it had to go through your computer system?”
“Yes. And Pruess didn’t have that kind of access—the access needed to move that money directly.”
“Who did?”
Vaughn chewed his upper lip for a moment, like men do when they’ve just shaved off a mustache, then said, “About a dozen people in Systems. In my department. There’s a vice president named Tiger Mann, I don’t know his real first name…. He and his assistant could do it, but their access is also very limited, and they’d leave tracks. Everything is designed to make sure that people leave tracks. We haven’t had time to look, but if it was either of them, we’ll know in an hour. We’re looking now. If it was somebody in my department, I don’t know how they would have found out about the account. Maybe just stumbled on it. The important thing is: somebody had to have access.”
Rivera frowned and said, “Wait. Could it not be that this money man, who moves the money, the man who talked to you, this Gutierrez. Could not somebody have spoken to Gutierrez with, say, a blowtorch in his hand, and convinced him to give up the codes?”
Vaughn seemed to go a whiter shade of pale: “Yes. That would be another way. But…”
“What?” asked Shaffer.
“Then, wouldn’t Gutierrez be dead? If somebody forced him to give up the codes? And if he was killed or disappeared a month ago, wouldn’t the narcos have done something to protect their account? Maybe even stop putting money in it?” Vaughn was tentative, uncertain of his ground when talking about criminal behavior. He added, “If Gutierrez himself was stealing it, would he do it this way—actually depositing it in an account, then stealing it back? That seems way too complicated … too risky, when you’d have other ways of doing the same thing. You could just send it out to your regular investment accounts, but then divert a check to an anonymous account somewhere.”
“These are very good points. I congratulate you,” Rivera said. “But it seems that you are arguing that the criminal here is in your department.”
“I’m not arguing for it, I’m afraid of it,” Vaughn said. “These killers … do you think they’re after all of us?”
Rivera smiled and said, “Yes, that’s likely. If twenty-two million dollars went away, plus more money that they can’t ask about, I believe they would be very angry, and would continue their investigation until they got to the bottom of it.”
Martínez said, quietly, “I think they would have some reason to come after a specific person. These people are somewhat crazy, but not entirely stupid. If they were stupid, all we’d have to do is watch each of you, and they would come to us. This, I do not think will happen.”
That was the first time that she’d ever said anything that in the slightest way contradicted her boss, as far as Lucas remembered. He looked at her for a few seconds, then turned back to Vaughn. “So let’s rip up the systems department. Mr….?”
“Vaughn.”
Lucas continued, “Let’s get a list of names, addresses, and phone numbers for the systems people, from Mr. Vaughn, and start running them through the mill. If he says that somebody must have known, I’m willing to believe that.”
Shaffer said, “My guys can handle it.”
“Okay,” Lucas said. “You might want to work out some kind of cross-checking strategy, get them to rat on each other.”
“We can handle an interrogation,” Shaffer said.
“Great,” Lucas said. “Let’s get it on the road.”
THE WHOLE discussion circled around Richard Pruess, but it would do Pruess no good at all. As they sat and talked, Richard Pruess was already dead. He’d been effectively chopped to pieces by Uno, Dos, and Tres, and now the three killers sat and looked at the remains of the banker’s body and Dos sighed and said, “The cleaning up is always the hardest.”
“True, but we have to do it,” Uno said. “The owner here, he’s a friend of the Big Voice. We cannot just leave it.”
They’d killed Pruess in the basement, on a blue plastic tarp that they’d bought at a Home Depot. That kept the mess somewhat confined. Dos, who was sitting on the basement steps, pushed himself onto his feet and said, “So, let’s get it done. He is making a stink.”
Uno was sitting in a lawn chair, a blood-spattered pruning saw next to his feet. He’d used it to cut deep grooves in Pruess’s shins. “They don’t know, do they?”
Tres said, “They don’t know anything. Nobody could be this brave.”
Pruess had denied knowing anything about the stolen money. Then, after a while, he’d agreed that he’d taken it, but they knew he was lying, to make the pain stop. So they continued the pain and he went back to denial, and all through the pain and the death, they got absolutely nothing useful.
“If he knew nothing, and if the family knew nothing…” Dos began.
“They knew nothing,” Tres said.
“Then what happened to the money? Somebody knows something,” Dos concluded.
“This is not really our problem,” Uno said. “We call Big Voice and report. We do what he tells us. Knowing where to send us, and what we ask, this is the Big Voice’s problem.”
They were all wearing gloves, to avoid the slop of the butchery, rather than to prevent fingerprints. They wrapped Pruess’s body in the tarp and bound the tarp up with duct tape, and when they were done, the body looked like an enormous blue joint. After dark, they would throw the body in one of the
garbage dumpsters that seemed to be everywhere. After finishing some minor cleanup with paper towels and Lysol, they carried the body up to the kitchen and washed their hands and started talking about dinner.
“Pizza?” Tres asked.
“If you go get it,” Uno said.
They’d happened across a pizza place a few blocks away, on an avenue called Selby; a pizza place that had two Mexicans working behind the counter. They’d eaten there twice.
“I will go,” Tres said. “Anchovies?”
SO TRES went down to Zapp’s Pizza and ordered two extra-large pizzas, one anchovy with mushrooms and olives, and one pepperoni, sausage, and corn. The man behind the counter told him that because of the dinnertime backup, it would be thirty minutes, and would that be okay?
“Is there a church where I can pray?” Tres asked.
The man behind the counter, who wasn’t Mexican, but was extremely white and wide across the shoulders, gave him a smile and said, “Man, you are a five-minute walk from one of the phattest churches in the United States of America.”
“Yes? Fat?”
“Yes. St. Paul’s Cathedral. They’d be happy to have you come and pray.”
THAT THE church should be so close was like a sign, Tres thought, as he walked along the street. In five minutes, like the pizza man said, he came to a large but ugly church, sitting on the edge of a hill, like a frog ready to jump into a pond. There were thousands of churches in Mexico, and he was not intimidated either by the cathedral’s size or by its holiness, although the gray, stark walls were somewhat forbidding. He found the heavy fort-like doors open, and people walking out, trailing the scent of incense. A religious service had just ended, he thought.
He stepped inside, intending to find a pew, to recite an Ave Maria or two, and perhaps a Gloria Patri, and to check the place out. And inside, he found the most glorious vision of his life:
Three rose stained-glass windows glowed like fire, the Jesus and the saints and the martyrs reached down to him. He turned and turned and turned, in the church aisle, looking at first one and then another, then stopped, breathless, transfixed, as the saints began to move, like willow trees in the wind, gracefully, a dance even.
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