Perish

by Lisa Black

  “I don’t know.” They were on their way back to the Sterling offices, the streets busy as lucky people who had time for lunch got to go eat theirs. “Maybe he’d been stalking her, trying to get her to talk to him. Maybe he had an accomplice and the print belongs to said accomplice.”

  Riley brightened. “Maybe the wife didn’t really commit suicide—she’s actually alive and she killed Joanna and Kurt is taking the blame so she can escape to Aruba.”

  Jack stopped for a red light and glanced at his partner. “You do watch a lot of TV, don’t you?”

  “You, on the other hand, probably don’t even own one, am I right?”

  “Do too.” He didn’t add that it had a nineteen-inch screen and spotty color.

  “Never underestimate what a man will do for a woman.”

  Jack glanced again. He didn’t often hear such a grim tone in his partner’s voice. He wondered briefly what had caused the man’s marriage to break up, and wondered if he would ever loosen up enough to ask.

  Maybe. But not today.

  If Riley noticed this scrutiny, he ignored it. “Let’s say our little Kurt did have an accomplice who actually did the murder, told him about the bus and the garbage cans. Kurt confesses, uses the trial to showcase Sterling’s predatory lending practices, then at the last minute with a Perry Mason flourish pulls this unshakeable alibi out of his ass and gets off. Not guilty.”

  Jack refused to say so, but that would not be the craziest thing he had seen in his long career as a cop. It had a ruthless logic to it. He pulled into the Sterling parking lot under the piercing glare of the attendant. “This accomplice—assuming it’s not his not-really-dead wife, would probably be another one of those protesters or someone who also brought a lawsuit against Sterling.”

  “How about Ned Swift?”

  “It would explain Tyra, too. The predator’s lawyer would definitely be on the chief rabble-rouser’s list. Resnick’s blank on her could be faked, another block in his not guilty platform.”

  Riley pulled himself wearily out of the passenger seat. “We’ve got some hot leads now, boy. But first let’s see what the office gigolo has to say.”

  Chapter 15

  Jeremy Mearan had managed to hang on to his private office, even without his boss/girlfriend’s protection. Perhaps he was more than just a pretty face. Or perhaps Lauren Schneider had more important things to do in the wake of Joanna’s death than play musical chairs. Joanna’s office remained untouched as well. Dhaval and Anna Hernandez had moved back into the conference room, taking up positions at opposite ends of the vast table. Dhaval’s dark head bent over various folders, but Anna ignored the ones in front of her. She stared out the window at the blue Ohio sky. Jack wondered if she saw Tyra’s ravaged body.

  The rest of the office workers plied their phones and keyboards in a sort of unchanging bloc. Jack could probably fire a round into the ceiling and everyone would pause, look up, and then go right back to what they were doing.

  Mearan seemed busy as well, his desk a sea of folders and printouts. Whoever thought we’d evolve into a paperless society, Jack thought, had jumped the gun by a couple of centuries. He and Riley opened the office door and entered without knocking, which didn’t seem to surprise the kid or even annoy him; from what Jack knew of Wall Street types, politeness did not concern them overmuch. Indeed, he seemed relieved to see them. “Hell of a thing about Tyra, huh? So the same person killed both of them?”

  “That’s how it appears,” Riley said, helping himself to a seat. Jack did the same.

  “But why? That’s what I can’t figure out.” He let his pen drop to the desk and ran a hand through silky black hair.

  “When we first spoke to you yesterday,” Jack said, “you assumed Joanna had been worried about going to jail. You never quite explained what her legal troubles were.”

  Mearan’s eyes widened as if a teacher had caught him cheating on a test. Normally Jack loved suspects who lacked a poker face, but this guy’s seemed almost too perfect. And his expression went on and on as his brain searched for a way out of this conversation. “Um—”

  “There’s no point in lying to us, Jeremy. Joanna’s dead, it’s not going to matter to her, and anything you two cooked up is going to be found within the week, either by us or Pierce Bowman. So bothering to lie to us is like telling the hangman his shoe is untied.”

  Perhaps not the best choice of analogy. Mearan’s skin paled and he made a slightly choking sound. Jack had meant to shock him into fight or flight, not the third option: freeze.

  But the kid sucked in a few breaths, maybe to make sure he still could, and said, “Okay … I think … I’m not sure, but … I think she might have been worried about the CDOs. There might be a problem with the CDOs.”

  “Uh-huh.” Jack fervently hoped this explanation would be conducted in English.

  “Those are collateralized debt obligations, right? Financial products? It’s our mortgages, which we chop up into tranches.”

  “We know tranches,” Riley said, with a slight touch of pride.

  “The default rate on the mortgages goes into making up the CDO’s rating. Rating is what makes investors buy them.” He paused.

  “And?” Jack prompted.

  “Defaults were rising.”

  “To what percentage?” Riley asked, and Jack had to face the slightly bruising admission that his partner seemed a lot more savvy on this topic than he was himself. But then he took the same advice he’d given Maggie: Stop feeling compelled to admit things. It never helped the situation.

  Mearan pulled at his collar even though, as usual, he didn’t wear a tie. “Thirty-five percent.”

  Now Riley did the wide-eyed thing. “Thirty-five?”

  Apparently that was a lot, Jack thought.

  “That’s a worst-case scenario estimate,” Mearan immediately backpedaled. “At the rate we’re going … and it may be a bubble. Housing had been coming up for a long time; it’s normal to backslide at periods. It will readjust.”

  “And if it doesn’t?” Jack asked.

  Mearan looked ill. “Then Sterling’s investors will lose money.”

  “But Sterling wouldn’t.”

  Mearan nearly rolled his eyes. “Until the investors sell all their other Sterling products and new investors are scared off. Financial firms are like sharks. If they stop moving, they die.”

  “Why did Joanna let this happen?”

  Mearan thought. “Same reason every other mortgage firm did it before the crash. Because it makes a ton of money. And it works—until it doesn’t.”

  “And when it doesn’t, you can kiss a merger with DJ Bryan good-bye.”

  Mearan’s expression changed again, but to what Jack couldn’t put a name to. “Not necessarily. Bowman wants us to split the firm—basically spin the riskier mortgages off into a subprime specialty shop. Which, to be honest, would eventually fail, especially if this recent … difficulty … is any indication. The regular, quote unquote, mortgage business would stay in a different firm, the one Bryan would buy.”

  “Yeah, Bowman told us that. But Joanna said no.”

  Mearan shook his head in agreement. “She said it had to be all or nothing. She didn’t think Bryan would come up with enough money to make the advantage offset the cost of dissolving the bad stuff. She thought Bowman kept implying that he knew about the default rate increase—which he couldn’t—”

  “Why not?” Jack interrupted.

  Mearan’s hands fidgeted with every word. “Because that’s my department. All the default cases come to me, so I’m the only one here who knows how many they add up to. Me and Joanna. I … kept it off the books. Lauren and Leroy don’t even know.”

  “You hid them to keep DJ Bryan’s price up.”

  Mearan’s gaze darted toward the back of Bowman’s head, as if the man might be able to absorb the conversation through the glass. “Yes, because Bowman would use it to lowball their offer, give us way less than Sterling is worth.”


  “But Sterling is worth less,” Jack pointed out.

  “No,” Mearan insisted, without a trace of irony. “Sterling is worth every penny we’re asking for it.”

  Riley said, “But if you split into two companies, then you’d have a reason to get more out of DJ Bryan.”

  Mearan threw out his hands in frustration. “Thank you! That’s exactly what I kept telling her. But she wouldn’t hear of it. They don’t get to pick and choose, she said.”

  Jack said, “So only you and Joanna knew about this default rate?”

  “Yes.”

  “What about Tyra?”

  The hands got even more agitated. “Oh, we could never have told Tyra. She’d have all sorts of problems with disclosure and due diligence…. For a lawyer she was bizarrely …” He searched for a word.

  “Honest?” Jack suggested.

  “Impractical.”

  The detectives said nothing, Jack pondered why, if Tyra hadn’t known about this problem, she had been killed.

  Maybe she’d found out. Maybe she had been threatening to expose Joanna, and—assuming Mearan really was as guileless as his face suggested—there had been another person who knew about the growing defaults. Someone willing to kill Tyra to keep her silent … but then why kill Joanna, who certainly had no reason to expose them. And Joanna was killed first.

  Riley apparently reached the same dead end. “And this is why you thought Joanna might be worried about going to jail?”

  “What? Yes … well, no. As I said, fudging the default rate wasn’t exactly illegal…. If it adjusted in the next quarter we could have explained it as corporate strategizing. Anyway, what can get you in trouble is the ratings. Our CDOs are still rated triple-A, which is why investors pick them. Ratings are everything.”

  “Yes?” Riley prodded, when Mearan took too long to formulate his next words.

  “Ratings agencies are hired and paid by the very firms they’re rating. That brings up some conflict-of-interest issues.”

  “And now? With Joanna?”

  “After the crisis changes were made that were supposed to result in more realistic ratings. I guess what I’m trying to say is a decent ratings agency, certainly Carter & Poe, should have been able to figure it out.”

  “And they didn’t.”

  “He didn’t. There’s one guy on the Cleveland mortgage desk. His name is Sidney Fourtner. He kept slapping a triple-A rating on our stuff even when, in my opinion, it didn’t deserve it.”

  “You think Joanna was paying him off?”

  Mearan shrugged, his expression much less guileless all of a sudden. “That’s my guess. Playing around with default rates, that wouldn’t have worried her. That can be explained. Actual bribery …”

  “That’s the kind of thing people go to jail for,” Riley said. “Or at least they would in a well-run criminal justice system. Out here in the real world she’d probably get a fine or a few months at Club Fed. So you’re suggesting we look at Mr. Fourtner.”

  Mearan shrugged again, in an unconvincing show of nonchalance. “You asked why I assumed Joanna would have been worried, and that’s what I had assumed. I have no idea if I’m correct or not. She never told me. Maybe Mr. Fourtner is incompetent.”

  Jack wondered. Mearan had every reason to shift their attention away from himself. Of course, that didn’t necessarily make him a liar. “There’s another question we have, about Joanna’s Panamanian account.”

  “Huh?”

  Jack pulled out the statement showing Joanna’s $600,000,000 worth of deposits in the Banco de Panama. He passed it over the desk and asked if Mearan knew where the money in that account had come from, or where more than one half of it had gone.

  The young man’s gaze darted over the simple form, top to bottom, then top to bottom again. The skin of his face turned a dark red; his body tensed; and he exploded both physically and verbally, leaping up from his chair and pounding the surface of his desk with one fist so hard it should have cracked the mahogany. “That bitch!”

  *

  Before they could visit the ratings agency, Jack and Riley had an appointment at the Medical Examiner’s office, for which they were late. The autopsy on Tyra Simmons had already worked through the torso and reached the skull. The detectives had requested the same pathologist, all the better to note similarities and differences between the two Sterling victims, but that had not been possible. That doctor had Wednesdays off, and the county never, save for extreme circumstances, paid overtime. So they got a small woman with jet-black skin and a perfect bun of graying hair who said she had reviewed the Moorehouse report.

  “Death is the same,” she told them in sparse language. “Exsanguination. Specifically, the stab wound that sliced open the aorta. She’d have been dead within seconds after that.”

  “But she’d struggled first,” Jack said, more of a statement than a question, given the wounds on Tyra’s arms.

  “Oh, yeah. She held him off for a very short time, even with the choking. But once he breached the heart, it was all over.”

  “Choking?”

  The pathologist peered at him over Tyra’s exposed skullcap. “She had a large hematoma over a partially crushed larynx.”

  “He hit her in the throat?” Riley interpreted.

  “Very hard.” She shouted over the bone saw.

  “With a weapon?”

  “Can’t tell. It didn’t leave any distinct patterns on the skin, like a gun might. Could be a billy club. Or the side of his hand, if he’s in good shape. The throat is a much more delicate area than people realize, easily damaged. This bruised the cartilage, would made it swell quickly.”

  “So she couldn’t scream?” Jack asked.

  The doctor shot him a reproachful look as she gently separated the top of the cranium from the brain. “I can’t say that, though it certainly wouldn’t have been easy. The swelling might have eventually suffocated her if the blood drain hadn’t done it first. Huh.”

  “‘Huh’?” Riley demanded. “What’s ‘huh’?”

  “Bruise to the back of the head.”

  “Would she—” The pathologist eyed him. Riley plunged ahead anyway. “Would she have been unconscious? Don’t yell at me. Anything? Best guess? I promise I won’t quote you at trial.”

  “Detective—”

  “Wild guess, then.”

  “If it will make you happy—”

  “Deliriously.”

  “It’s a bruise. Nothing life threatening. It would have hurt but there’s no real damage.”

  Jack had been mulling all this over. “Tyra had close neighbors. That’s why he had to punch her in the throat, to keep her from screaming.”

  Riley followed along. “With Joanna, it didn’t matter. She could have screamed all night and no one would have heard her.”

  “Tyra’s head landed on the carpet. A thin carpet but—”

  “Still nothing like solid stone.”

  The pathologist let them chatter while she carried Tyra’s brain to the counter. She set it on the thick plastic cutting board and sliced it with what looked suspiciously like a bread knife. Apparently she found nothing of interest, now and then only cutting off a sliver to keep for possible future testing. These slivers she dropped into the quart container of formalin sitting nearby.

  Jack moved closer to ask her, “Anything in the stomach?”

  “About three hundred mil, somewhat digested, so she’d eaten shortly before. Something with grains and possibly milk—like cereal.”

  “Any abnormalities?”

  “None. This girl had been a perfectly, perfectly healthy young woman until someone did this to her.” The petite doctor looked up at him. “Find that someone, Detective.”

  “I intend to,” he assured her.

  Though I have no idea if I can accomplish that, Jack thought as they left the building, hence his wording. A desire to succeed has never guaranteed success. After all, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

  He ought to kno
w that better than anyone.

  Chapter 16

  The receptionist at Carter & Poe told Riley over the phone that Mr. Fourtner was out on a “site visit” but expected back at three. In the meantime they returned to Joanna’s mansion to gather every paper they could find regarding the Panamanian account.

  “So, girlfriend was holding out on Mearan,” Riley said as he pulled into the winding drive of the huge house. “It seemed to hurt his feelings.”

  “Was he more angry because she had made plans that didn’t include him, or because that money could have paid off their toxic assets and sealed the DJ Bryan deal?”

  “Oh, I think his pain was all for himself. Girlfriend intended to retire to a beach in Aruba without taking the boy toy along, ’cause, you know, no matter what they say”—Riley parked the car and opened the door—“they really don’t respect you in the morning.”

  The house had been “sealed,” which meant that tamper-proof evidence tape had been used over the front door. If broken it would be immediately obvious, and this was deemed “good enough” security so that the department didn’t have to waste two patrol officers to guard the property twenty-four hours per day. Of course, anyone could simply enter by another door or window; with such a huge estate the officers hadn’t sealed every single opening, even on only the ground floor—more out of concern for the heirs than from laziness. The tape was hell to clean off. It wasn’t a perfect system, but few things are in practice. At any rate the front door had not been opened since they’d left the day before. Jack used the keys they had in custody and reset the alarm.

  The detectives split up and did a quick exam of the surroundings. Joanna’s blood still marred the white marble floor of the living room and the air had grown a bit rank, but there were no pry marks on any windows or doors. The office’s controlled chaos remained unchanged from their last visit. If the killer had returned to the scene of the crime, he had left no sign of it.

  “Six hundred million,” Riley muttered as he searched the desk drawers for more Banco statements. “I can’t even wrap my head around that kind of money. I could send my girls to Harvard with that. If they didn’t have the grades—which they would, you know—”