by Rice, Luanne
“Yeah, he has amnesia,” Billy said, sounding more confident. “He's getting medical help somewhere and can't remember his name.”
Peggy's face twisted in agony. “If he doesn't remember his own name, how will he remember us? How will he know how to come home?”
“He'll remember,” Bay said, trying to stay steady and not let Peggy see her own anguish or rage—or her growing conviction that Sean remembered everything and had run away in spite of it.
Billy seemed to enjoy the idea of eluding the press, so he gathered together his and Peggy's beach things and took her out the back door. Bay watched them cross the yard, begin to walk along the marsh's soggy bank toward the beach. She saw them wave at their sister and Tara across the creek, in Tara's garden. Annie had been sleeping only fitfully, crying to think of her father somewhere alone in the world, with only her small green boat to keep him company.
Staring at her kids, aching as she thought of their pain, Bay went upstairs to lie down.
Her husband had very probably had a serious head injury, and no one knew where he was. He seemed to have fallen off the earth. Had he left them, run away because of the crimes he was accused of committing? Or were the kids' and her worst fears true—was he dead?
She cried into her pillow, and although she hated Sean for what he was putting them through, she didn't want to wash his pillowcase, because it smelled so much like him. Hearing a knock at the door, she ignored it. But it didn't stop, so she dried her eyes and walked downstairs.
It was Joe Holmes, with the reporters fanning out behind him. Bay stared through the screen door.
“Hi, Mr. Holmes,” she said.
“Call me Joe,” he said. “How are you?” When she didn't reply, he reddened slightly. “I'm sorry—stupid question,” he said, and she suddenly felt self-conscious about the circles under her eyes, the fact she had lost ten pounds.
“Come in,” she said, opening the screen door.
“Are your kids here?” he asked.
Bay blinked and shook her head. Looking out the window, she could see Annie and Tara watering Tara's garden. A silver stream arched from the hose, sparkling in the sun. Bay's throat felt parched and dry. She hadn't set foot in her own garden for thirteen days, since Sean had disappeared. Joe followed her gaze, and they were silent for a moment.
“We thought we would have found Sean by now,” Joe said finally.
Bay nodded, grasping her upper arms, as if holding herself together.
“Why HAVEN'T you?” she burst out. “You said he was badly hurt—wouldn't he have needed medical help?”
“Definitely,” Joe said. “We've checked every hospital in three states. We've called doctors, clinics . . .”
“Who else was on the boat with him?” she asked. “Couldn't they help find him?”
“Whoever was there knew enough to wipe their prints away. There are other things . . . Can we talk?”
Bay nodded, and he followed her into the kitchen and sat down at a stool at the breakfast bar. A stuffed and mounted bull shark hung above. Sean had hooked it last summer, on a trip to Montauk Point. Bay had objected to a dead creature hanging in her kitchen, but Sean had won out.
“Do you love your husband?” Joe asked.
“Yes,” Bay answered without hesitation.
“Are you sure?”
He stared at her, as if he could read her mind and know whether she was lying or not. Unsure herself, Bay just stared back at him and raised her chin, and repeated, “Yes.”
She had learned how to stand up for her family—at all costs—from her own mother, and from Tara's.
“Then I hope that what I have to say won't devastate you,” Joe said.
“It won't,” Bay said steadily. But inside, she was shaking.
“You probably know, I specialize in major bank embezzlement.”
“I don't know that, Joe. All I know is that you're with the FBI.”
“Fair enough. Well, I'm with the New Haven division. When a major crime comes in, they assign people who specialize in certain types of crime. I'm major—”
“Bank embezzlement,” Bay said, the words strange to her ears.
Joe nodded.
“One thing I know, have learned, is that normally the vice presidents of a bank don't find it easy to embezzle, because they don't handle money. If there's theft, it's more common to look to the tellers. Or, sometimes, the executives enlist the branch managers to help. Or, another alternative, other executives. Bank insiders.”
Bay's mouth was dry. Out the window, she could see her garden. It was horrible, really. In such a short time, she had gone from feeling so blessed, so overflowing with blessings, from having bowers of roses, peonies, black-eyed Susans, sweet peas, delphinium bloom as if by magic, to having the garden of her life, of her family, wilt and turn brown before her very eyes.
She blinked, listening.
“More commonly, vice presidents use their influence . . . lending money to fictitious corporations they've set up . . . or making ‘bad' loans they know won't be paid back . . . collecting kickbacks . . . they use their authority . . .”
“Sean couldn't do that,” Bay said. “He has a whole bank board to answer to. Trustees, other executives . . .”
“People know him, trust him,” Joe continued. He wore a pin-striped suit and navy tie with small white dots; she saw him run a finger around his neck and noticed a film of sweat on his forehead. They didn't have air-conditioning; they didn't need it, with the sea breeze. Summers were spent in shorts and bathing suits. No one wore jackets and ties for long in this house. Every night Sean would walk in, peel off his coat before he got through the kitchen.
“Exactly. They trust him,” she said, watching Joe sweat.
“He goes to the loan committee meeting, puts his stamp of approval on a questionable loan; the others might wonder, but they let it pass. They say, ‘Hey, if it's good enough for Sean . . .' They might suspect something, but if he says it's okay, they do it. They say nothing. Or, and we've just about ruled this out, he had help from one of them.”
“Are you saying there was a bad loan?”
Joe nodded slowly. “Yes, there was. Six months ago.”
Bay felt shocked. “And you're just investigating now? Besides, what makes you think Sean did anything wrong? If someone defaulted, it was their fault, not his . . .”
“The thing fell apart when the FDIC did its internal audit. A high percentage of questionable loans from Shoreline—too many obvious corners being cut. They called us in.”
Us, Bay thought: the FBI. She thought of that movie, The Untouchables, of how the FBI caught Al Capone through an accounting glitch. Was she really having this conversation about her husband?
“There were three different companies ‘on the bubble' with loans approved by Sean. No payments made . . . and we saw what the FDIC knew right away—that the institution shouldn't have made these loans.”
“So, Sean made a mistake.”
“That's unclear.”
“Can't you give him the benefit of the doubt?” Bay asked, her voice a cry. “What about the other officers? Isn't it just as much their fault?”
He gave her a look of pity. Those officers hadn't disappeared, hadn't abandoned their families. Bay dug her fingernails into her palms as she stared at Sean's picture on the bookshelf and tried to stay calm.
“In Connecticut, police departments and the FBI have close contact with security officers at banks. Once a month, bank security hosts law enforcement agencies and we all discuss things.”
“What things?” Bay asked, although Sean had spoken to her of those conferences. “Baby, we're keeping the bank safe for our money and everyone else's,” he would say.
“Just procedures, ways of staying ahead of problems. By law, when the bank is aware of wrongdoing, they have to file a report with the FBI. An SAR—Suspicious Activity Report.”
“Wouldn't Sean have known?” Bay said, tension building in her head and chest.
“
In this case, it was filed by a young woman named Fiona Mills. She took it on herself—perhaps she wasn't sure who to trust, or who the investigation would lead to.”
Fiona—one of Sean's colleagues. Another upper-class young woman, a lot like Lindsey. Bay wondered whether Fiona had also caught Sean's eye.
Now she glanced at an old picture of herself and Sean, stuck to the refrigerator door with a ladybug magnet. Annie had found it, put it there—possibly to remind her parents of happier times. They had been so young, just out of school. She had been so happy, in love, willing to believe anything he told her, willing to overlook his recklessness. Thoughts swirling, she had to look away.
“We were following up on the criminal referral form for this loan situation when we came across some improprieties in the audit . . . several cash deposits of nine thousand nine hundred dollars each, and two money orders.”
“Regarding the loan?” Bay asked, confused, feeling unreasonable resentment for Sean's colleague Fiona.
“No,” Joe said. “It's still possible that the loans were no more than bad judgment on Sean's part. We haven't finished investigating.”
Joe Holmes sat very still, watching her carefully with steady brown eyes.
“What else?” she asked. “Is there something else?”
“Before,” Joe said. “When I asked you about the loans, you said that Sean ‘couldn't' get away with them, because of an overseeing bank board. You didn't say he ‘wouldn't' do it . . . There's a difference.”
Bay's lip trembled, but she refused to let him see. Her gaze traveled to the sink, the family's mugs lined up on a shelf between the windows.
“The money orders and cash deposits,” Joe said, “were the tip-offs.”
“To what?” Bay asked.
“The fact that Sean was diverting money from his private banking clients. He started off small—a hundred dollars a day at first, then two hundred. He thought no one would notice, and why would they? These were good-sized accounts, with continuous dividends coming in. He'd take money from one account, park it in a trust. Later, he would write a money order or take out cash. He'd take a walk at lunch, head down to his boat, deposit his new money in an account he set up down at Anchor Trust.”
“He'd never bank at Anchor. They were the competition,” Bay said, her eyes burning as she watched Joe slide some forms across the counter. She knew before she even looked that Sean's name was on the accounts . . . and his signature.
“His clients trusted him one hundred percent,” Joe said. “First he'd funnel their funds into a trust at Shoreline, and from there, using the money orders, to an account at Anchor, where he had check-writing ability to spend it at will.”
“No,” Bay said, shaking her head. Were her kids going to have to hear this? It couldn't be true; it would kill Annie. “He would never want to hurt people like that.”
“Most people don't,” Joe said. “They don't even think of themselves as criminals. They have a need—right now. Something that they have an absolute need for.”
“We have enough money,” Bay said. “We're comfortable.”
“In his mind, he probably wasn't even stealing—at first. ‘I'll just help myself to a hundred dollars, and put it back Tuesday. Use it over the weekend.' ”
“No . . . we have plenty . . .” Wasn't that always Sean's argument for Bay to stay home? The times she had wanted to go back to school, back to work? He would tell her they were comfortable . . . they had plenty . . . he didn't want the neighbors to think they needed money.
“Then Tuesday would come, and no one questioned . . . so he just kept going. The amounts increased. A thousand, five thousand. Nine thousand nine hundred. See, he knew that any cash transaction over ten thousand requires a CTR—Cash Transaction Report. He tried to fly under the radar, but Fiona noticed. He chose high-asset clients to steal from; perhaps he thought they wouldn't miss it. They didn't. None of the clients even noticed. He had a need—it was just a need that kept him going.”
“No!” Bay said. What kind of need? The mortgage, vacations, two cars, three kids, the boat . . . an affair? Why would he risk everything they had to steal from the bank?
“It mounted up, over time,” Joe said.
“Months?”
“We're investigating that now. The amounts increased dramatically about eleven months ago.”
A need. Just a need.
“By law,” Joe said, “anyone who handles money in a financial institution—tellers, branch managers—has to take a two-consecutive-week vacation. Financial advisors and trust officers just handle paper, so they're exempt.”
Bay understood the rationale. Sean had explained it to her. Any financial misdeeds would come to light within two weeks.
“But these thirteen days since Sean's disappearance have revealed quite a bit. He didn't cover his tracks.”
“Something terrible must have happened to him,” Bay whispered, her throat as dry as the stalks outside. She thought of the blood on the Aldebaran. The blackness of all that blood on the blanket. “A reason he can't come home. What if he's . . .”
“You're afraid he's dead,” Joe said.
Bay held herself, nodding.
“His body hasn't been found,” Joe said. “If it were winter, with a lot of snow and ice, that would make more sense. But it's summer. Excuse my insensitivity, but bodies don't stay hidden in hot weather. We think he found medical help somewhere, and that he's hiding.” He slid a paper toward her, the account statement from Anchor Trust.
Bay glanced down the debit side of the page. There had been one hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars in the account fourteen days ago. As of thirteen days ago, the balance read “zero.”
“Our family accounts are at Shoreline,” she said shakily. The first thing she had done, after absorbing the idea that Sean was missing, had been to check the status of their bank accounts.
Joe Holmes removed a second sheet of paper from his folder. He hesitated, then handed it to her. “Twenty-seven thousand dollars,” he said. “Checking, savings, money market.”
“That's plenty,” she said, echoing her husband. She had expected there to be more.
“No stocks, bonds, other investments?”
“The market has been volatile. Sean takes a lot of risks, investing. We've had some big losses. But he's saving for college—three kids.”
“And he likes his boat, and he likes the casino, and he likes . . .”
Bay lifted her eyes, to see whether he would say “other women.”
But he didn't. The FBI agent looked tired, hot, sorry about everything, as if he wished this day would end and he could just go home. Did he have kids, a wife? He wasn't wearing a ring. . . . The sea breeze had stopped blowing. The air in the house was very still, and Bay suddenly felt as if she could dry up and turn to dust.
“Where do you think he is, Bay?” he asked.
She just sat very still, staring at the two account statements. She had done the math herself, over and over during the past days. With mortgage payments and insurance premiums and taxes, with feeding the kids and paying for electric, heat when the cold weather came, with paying the minimum on the credit cards, they had about five months before the savings would run out.
How long would that hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars last Sean, and where had he taken it?
“When someone violates a trust,” Joe said, “it's heartbreaking. All checks and balances go by the wayside.”
Was he talking about people at the bank? Or about her and the kids? Bay wondered.
“Who is ‘Ed'?” he asked.
Bay just frowned and shook her head. “I can't think of anyone.”
“I'm going to ask you something else,” Joe said. “What do you think the words ‘the girl' mean to Sean?”
The girl. The words sounded familiar, and Bay remembered the folder on Sean's boat. He's talking about that note Sean doodled, Bay thought, her pulse beginning to race as she remembered the drawing of the delivery van and the
name Ed.
“I don't know,” Bay said, aware that he was watching her carefully, not knowing why. “Something to do with one of our daughters?”
“I don't think so,” Joe said.
He thinks “the girl” is about another woman, and he's probably right, Bay thought, feeling her shoulders fold forward with shame. A small breeze again stirred the sheer white curtains at the picture window. Upon it were carried the salty scents of sea and marsh, the fresh tang of sea lavender and beach roses. Bay heard Tara and Annie's voices carrying across the marsh and felt Tara watching over her.
“You might think of something,” Joe said, gently sliding the papers back into their folder. “Something that will help us find him.”
Find whom? she wanted to ask. Who was she supposed to help Joe Holmes find? She didn't know this Sean McCabe at all. What was worse, she didn't know herself. Somewhere during her marriage she must have made a deal with herself to stop paying attention, to start looking the other way. To shut down.
Because how could any of this have happened without her knowing?
“If I knew anything,” she said very quietly, so he wouldn't be able to see the panic flooding through her, “I would tell you.”
AS JOE HOLMES BACKED OUT OF BAY MCCABE'S DRIVEWAY, he saw her friend Tara O'Toole watching him from her house across the marsh—the consiglière. Her eyes were dark blue, her gaze so penetrating even at this distance, he felt a shiver go down his spine—Bay had a true friend. Joe had the feeling Tara was barely holding herself back from sprinting across the tide flats to confront him herself.
He'd like to tell Tara that this was one of the parts of the job he hated most—questioning fine, innocent people about their spouses' criminal activity. The look in Bay's eyes was enough to make him think about taking the next month off. Hitting some golf resort in Tucson, somewhere far from here, where all he had to do was tee off and work on his game.
His father had worked for the Bureau, and he'd been the one who first taught Joe that golf went far toward easing the stress of the job. Joe had grown up thinking his dad was the coolest hero, a spy just like James Bond only bigger and stronger and without an English accent, and there had never been a chance that Joe wouldn't follow in his footsteps.
