Perish

by Lisa Black

  Jack tried to break up the guy’s chain of thought, “Why is DJ Bryan interested in buying them if Sterling is an empty shell?”

  “Ah, excellent question. Why are they? And why don’t the investors who are buying these toxic assets know that they’re toxic?” He didn’t wait for them to answer. “One word: ratings.”

  The cops said nothing, mainly because they had no idea what he was talking about.

  “Securities are rated according to their risk level. Triple-A is the best you can get; that should be a secure investment for anyone, mutual fund, Goldman Sachs, anybody. Most of Joanna’s tranches were rated triple-A by Carter & Poe, an esteemed ratings agency.”

  “Okay,” Riley said. “So they were good.”

  “No, they sucked.”

  “So why did …”

  “… they get a good rating? Excellent question.” He gazed at Riley over steepled fingers.

  “How about you answer it, then?” Obviously Riley had had enough of MBA school. So had Jack. Perhaps they could get the white-collar unit to take on a murder case … nah.

  “Carter & Poe’s have about eight thousand employees, eleven of them here in Cleveland. The one assigned to Sterling drives a Porsche and lives in Gates Mills.”

  “Is that unusual?”

  “A little bit,” Swift said as if he found this amusing. “Their staff makes good money—everybody who works in the financial world makes money that the rest of us can only envy—but I have a friend at the IRS who says he doesn’t make that much.”

  “Does your friend often violate privacy laws?”

  “Every chance he gets. Actually, I’m exaggerating—I don’t know what Mr. Fourtner’s paycheck totals. But he’s either very bad at his job to screw up a rating that badly, or he’s very good at getting side work.”

  Riley said, “You think Joanna paid him off.”

  “I do indeed.”

  Riley switched tacks again. “When did you go to her house?”

  Swift frowned again. “I never went to her house. I don’t even know where she lives. Why—why all the questions all of a sudden? I’ve been trying to get someone to pay attention to Sterling’s thievery for months now.”

  “Where were you last night?”

  “I left the law center about seven, met friends for dinner, went home to my wife. Why? Someone key her car?”

  “She’s dead.”

  Swift looked surprised, or gave a good imitation of looking surprised. “Dead? How?”

  “Last night,” Riley answered without answering, “who were the friends at this dinner?”

  The man remained silent, running through the implications of this question. “She was murdered?”

  “We’re still determining the circumstances. What makes you assume that?”

  “I don’t think you’d be asking me for an alibi if she got in a car accident. Was it—suicide? Are you sure she’s even dead? This deal with Bryan is dragging—if they’re actually doing due diligence for a change. Maybe they found that Joanna is in bed with that nice boy from Carter & Poe. Bryan is too big to fall into that trap again. It would be every bit Joanna Moorehouse to cut and run. She’s probably on a yacht in Malaysia.”

  “I can assure you she’s not on a yacht in Malaysia.”

  “Huh. Well, that’s … interesting. Doesn’t really change anything as far as the lawsuit goes, but Joanna would have been great to put a face on the company. Any jury in the world would hate her on sight. Though Lauren’s nearly as unlikeable.” He gazed again at the protesters on the sidewalk, now worried for their future. For Joanna Moorehouse’s lack of same, no worry at all. But then, they’d hardly been friends. Not at all.

  “Can we have the name of the restaurant?” Riley went on.

  “What, you mean you’re actually going to check—like I’m a suspect?”

  “We’re actually going to check.”

  This still seemed to amuse him more than anything, and he gladly gave up the location, the names of his friends, the name of his wife, and their home phone number. But fingerprints and cheek swab, no. Not a chance.

  Of course, they had no grounds to insist, so the cops and the rabble-rouser parted ways amicably enough. At least on his part.

  “What do you think?” Riley asked as they stepped into the elevator.

  “He talks a good game.”

  “People who spend their time suing other people usually do. But I’m not ready to count him out.”

  “Me neither,” Jack agreed.

  Chapter 9

  From the window above Maggie watched the protesters restart marching in a loose circle. No cries of foul arose and none started using their signs as weapons, so apparently Ned Swift was only too happy to discuss Sterling Financial and Joanna Moorehouse with Jack and Riley.

  Tyra Simmons had returned to her desk. Maggie flipped through the rest of the letters, saw nothing too outrageous. Her stomach growled but she was stuck—she couldn’t leave as long as the detectives might need her, for more prints or in case Ned Swift turned out to have a knife injury on his hand where his fingers slid down the bloody hilt as he stabbed Joanna Moorehouse. If Denny needed her he would call, so she had no reason to insist on leaving. But she also had no reason to starve herself. The lunch break had wound down, and as Tyra promised, a number of containers remained on the table in the corner. Maggie left the conference room, padding silently past the absorbed managers.

  The containers were labeled, a variety of salads and sandwiches, all with the logo “Totally Fresh!” in swirls of green.

  “Help yourself.” Anna Hernandez appeared at her elbow. “They always overorder. I’ve taken leftovers home for dinner practically every night this week. Believe it or not, for alpha types like these guys, it’s pretty healthy stuff. Maybe they think the antioxidants counteract sitting at a phone all day.”

  “Thanks.” Maggie selected a salad topped with grilled chicken.

  “You’re on a break?” Anna snagged a sandwich and a can of iced tea.

  “Sort of. The detectives are downstairs talking to Ned Swift.”

  “That jerk. I hope they arrest him.”

  “Why?” They wandered back to the sitting area, Anna shoving her binders aside so they could set their drinks on the coffee table. Maggie didn’t normally lunch with murder suspects or witnesses or family/friends, but if she went back to the conference room she would eat with her face plastered to the window to make sure Jack and Riley weren’t being lynched from a light pole.

  And large chunks of forensic work involve waiting. Waiting for search warrants, waiting on ME investigators, waiting for firemen to douse the flames, waiting for EMS to extract a driver from their T-boned car. She was used to waiting.

  The young man from DJ Bryan had earbuds and seemed to be listening to music as he worked. It probably helped with his concentration to block out the hubbub. If he noticed Anna and Maggie, he didn’t acknowledge them.

  “He hates us. The Federal Reserve, I mean. That’s his actual slogan, ‘Ned versus the Fed.’ Ridiculous. Like the whole ‘audit the Fed’ movement. We’re already audited by the General Accounting Office, always have been.” She chewed thoughtfully. “But he can get traction because most citizens don’t understand what the Federal Reserve does. It’s probably like how people react to you, at the police department, because you can’t stop all crime. Everyone believes ‘the government’ is this omnipotent, consistent block of law when it’s really a conglomeration of stuff that has grown up over time. The too-big-to-fail banks that got the bailouts? Only half were overseen by the Federal Reserve—JPMorgan, Wells Fargo, Bank of New York Mellon, Bank of America—and half of those didn’t even need the bailout, but they had to go along to avoid stigmatizing and causing a run on the ones that did. Okay, BOA and Citigroup did, mostly because BOA had bought the disaster known as Countrywide—sorry, I’m losing you.”

  “No, go on. I find this interesting,” Maggie assured her. What the heck, she had time to kill, and dwelling on ten-
year-old events kept Anna from asking her questions she couldn’t let herself answer. Such as how Joanna Moorehouse’s intestines looked while spread across her marble floor.

  “My point is the others—Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley—were regulated by the SEC. AIG was an insurance company. Lehman, which of course didn’t get a bailout, was SEC. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were under the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, which Fannie and Freddie kept gutted of any real power because they had a take-no-prisoners stranglehold on Congress. All those subprime mortgages? Only about twenty percent were from banks under Fed regulation. Okay, I have a plastic Ben Bernanke on my dashboard and I think Janet Yellen is the bee’s knees, so yes, I’m biased. But prior to the crash no one had heard the term bubble. Only thirteen percent of mortgages were subprime and the fixed rate subprime was doing fine. Not one bank failed in 2005, for the first time since the institution of the FDIC in 1933. And of subprime mortgages only twenty percent were at banks regulated by the Fed. All the others were SEC, Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, Federal Housing Oversight—which was part of the problem, of course.”

  Maggie curled herself into the leather couch and dug into the salad. It had some kind of dressing, to her initial dismay, as she avoided dressings of any kind. Then she took a tentative bite. “Oh my gosh, this is good.”

  “Told you.”

  “It tastes like they just picked it out of a garden.”

  “Yeah, they’re right up the street. You’ve never been there? You’re in the Justice Center, right?”

  “Yes.” Keep the conversation away from you. “So what went wrong? With the securities?”

  The young woman tucked her feet up under her legs, making herself comfortable on the leather sofa. “Wall Street is like the mafia when it comes to skimming. Every time a financial product changes hands, someone takes a cut. The money is in the fees. Kind of like airlines these days, or medicine. That’s why doctors order a boatload of tests that you probably don’t need—maybe they’re being safe, and maybe they’re purposely racking up the hospital system’s bill. It’s a volume business. Suddenly there was a price war in the mortgage business. Adjustable rates, teaser rates, balloon payments—any way they could get those first few payments, sometimes only the first payment, as low as possible to get people to sign on the dotted line, they’d do it. They’d call up their investors at JPMorgan or Merrill Lynch and ask if they’d buy ninety-five percent—loans where borrowers were only putting five percent down. Yes? What about ninety-seven? What about one hundred, no money down, no income verification? Insanity, right?”

  Maggie speared a cucumber slice and agreed.

  “Except they’d look around at their fellow firms who were making money by the boatloads and they’d say, yeah, I guess we’ll do that. They weren’t stupid—these are really smart, really tough moneymakers, but risk assessment is all about history and subprime mortgages didn’t have much of a history. As a significant section of the loan market, they hadn’t been around that long. Anyway, back to the Fed. Computer trading and statistical models made trading so fast and so complicated that no one knew how bad their exposure was. So when some banks finally got nervous about their subprime exposure and tried to pull it in a little, that was a pinhole in a very weak dike. Banks started dumping their subprime securities, the value of the securities dropped because everyone was selling them at once, and it all devolved into a shame spiral. Banks who had been loaning money to everyone and their brother stopped loaning it to anyone, even each other.”

  “A panic,” Maggie said.

  “An old-fashioned panic. That doesn’t happen at regular old depository banks anymore because the FDIC insures our deposits. But investment banks, bank holding companies, insurance companies aren’t regular old depository banks. Their investments can only be insured using other investments, and when they all went down the tubes—”

  “Crash.”

  “Every economy in the world came to a screeching halt in September 2008. And many other countries don’t have comprehensive deposit insurance like the FDIC. ‘Cats and dogs, living together, mass hysteria.’ ” She finished with the quote from Ghostbusters, and drained the last of her iced tea. “And according to Ned it’s all our fault. I shouldn’t joke—I’m not joking—it was decidedly not funny. DC was like the land of the walking dead, only not the slow-moving out-of-it zombies, the superfast man-eating kind. If I had ever thought I had any genuine friends there, I quickly got disabused of that notion.”

  “You spent a lot of time there?”

  “I lived there for twelve years,” Anna said. “Just a little girl from Kansas, I thought I’d made the big time. Bright lights and monuments. One year I even got to go to the Jackson Hole conference. But fortunes eventually shifted and I got exiled here.”

  “Oh.” Maggie spoke without inflection.

  “And discovered there was a place left on earth where real human beings did real work and really cared about other human beings. People picked dinner companions without thinking about which political party happened to be waxing or waning at the moment. I could live downtown without maxing out my credit cards. I found a boyfriend who actually seems to have a soul. Hell”—Anna slumped until the back of her neck rested on the top of the sofa—“I’m never going back.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Maggie said. “Cleveland has a little bit of a self-esteem problem.”

  “Hah! Try being from DC. Everyone else in the country hates you on principle.”

  Maggie set her empty container on the coffee table. Riley and Jack had not reappeared. She didn’t want to break her don’t-interrupt-police-interviews rule in case they were getting somewhere with Ned Swift, but she still might be able to make herself useful. “And this week you’re here with Sterling Financial. What did you think of Joanna Moorehouse?”

  “A coldhearted snake,” Anna said promptly, then sat up in surprise. “Oh, that’s terrible! I shouldn’t talk about someone dead that way.”

  “It’s okay, she won’t hear you. And the truth is more important than platitudes right now.”

  Anna nodded, but took some time to think over her next words. “Of course, I never saw her anywhere but here, and never discussed anything but which records I needed to review and how long it should take me. So who knows—she could have fed the homeless and played with kittens and thrown marvelous dinner parties in her spare time, but all I got to see was a totally focused, all-business CEO in no uncertain terms. She made decisions instantly and unilaterally, never any comments about needing to discuss something with her staff. She would give me only what I needed and exactly that—needed by her terms, not mine.”

  Maggie steered back to the murder at hand. “But Joanna wanted this merger to go through.”

  “Oh yeah. She seemed … excited. It’s the only time I’ve seen any animation out of her—a sort of humming tension to her body is the only way I can describe it. But a happy tension. That’s what passed for emotion, I guess, for a—”

  “Coldhearted snake.”

  “Yeah. That is mean. I know nobody likes seeing regulators on their doorstep. We disrupt, interrupt, take up space. But most places at least pretend to be friendly. Joanna never pretended anything.”

  “What about the other people here? Anyone against the merger?”

  Anna gazed out at the floor. “Don’t seem to be. I’ve heard some of the more junior managers griping about it, worried that jobs will be cut and those jobs will be theirs, which is probably true. But certainly no one sounded upset enough to kill over it. How was she killed, anyway?”

  Maggie coughed.

  “Oh—you can’t tell me that, can you?”

  “No, sorry.”

  “That’s okay. I get it…. Are you sure it wasn’t some crime of passion thing? I can’t see little Jeremy offing anybody, but who knows what other kind of people—Joanna must have had some personal life, didn’t she? Doesn’t everybody?”

  “You’d think so.
” But if Joanna Moorehouse had had secrets, lies, and passionate entanglements in her life, she had kept them very well hidden—so well buried that she may have helped to cover up her own murder.

  “Your friends are back,” Anna pointed out, as Jack and Riley emerged from the elevator.

  *

  They interviewed everyone else in the office; most conversations went quickly. The managers simply worked there; they weren’t personal friends of Joanna and she didn’t talk to them much except to tell them they were doing something wrong. But the job paid well and only that mattered to them; they didn’t need pats on the back. A few argued with Lauren frequently over this deal or that, but conflicts were purely business and murdering Joanna wouldn’t have resolved any of them. Three young men—the same three Maggie had seen huddling over their desks—banded together and refused to give up either DNA or fingerprints. If they’d hoped for a dramatic stand on civil rights they were disappointed; the detectives merely shrugged and said that was entirely up to them. They did, however, make careful note of their names and general description. Still photos could be seized later from the patrol officer’s body cam. Meanwhile, Maggie helped herself to the copy machine’s store of clean paper to finish the fingerprinting.

  Jack grew tired of hearing about banking and deals and capital requirements but couldn’t shake the feeling that the reason for Joanna’s murder sat there somewhere, visible through those glass walls, if only he could get a handle on the motive or if someone would give themselves away with a tiny slip or a furtive look. Nothing happened, and the Medical Examiner’s office called to say the body had been prepared for autopsy, and did they plan to attend.

  “Yes,” Jack told them. Then he left the offices of Sterling Financial with the sickly feeling that they hadn’t yet learned a damn thing about who had murdered Joanna Moorehouse.

  Chapter 10

  The autopsy suite smelled as it always did, like a very clean slaughterhouse, wafts of disinfectant swirling around the stench of blood and offal. It was not bad, relatively speaking. Postmortems on the day’s other victims had been completed and Joanna’s corpse had the room to itself. Decomposition had only just begun, her flesh still firm and white; but the opened stomach and intestines smelled rank. The air-conditioning was functioning properly today, so all in all, not the worst visit to the morgue Maggie had ever experienced. Relatively speaking.