Perish

by Lisa Black

  “I know.” She stood, wearily. “That’s why Anna almost got shot an hour ago.”

  *

  “That was a waste of time,” Riley muttered, stepping too hard on the brake for the light at Euclid. “That guy could lie until the end of time without batting an eye. I think Joanna bribed him with everything she had and he knows we can’t prove it. Money people know how to hide a money trail.”

  “Absolutely,” Jack agreed. “But it doesn’t give him any motive. Why kill the golden goose? It gives both he and Joanna a reason to off Tyra, if Tyra found out and had too much conscience to ignore it.”

  “But with both Joanna and Tyra gone, he’s doubly safe. And I could picture that guy carving up a human being like a Christmas turkey and then walking away without a hair out of place. He and Joanna must have made quite a team. Like something out of those puppet porno movies.”

  “I don’t even want to know why you’re familiar with those.”

  “And why are you familiar with CDOs and derivative products? You’ve been holding out on me, partner. Here I totally bought your glassy-eyed act.”

  “It’s not an act. But just because this stuff bores me silly doesn’t mean I wasn’t listening.”

  “You make me nervous when you do that,” Riley said without inflection, glancing over at Jack as he stopped at another light. “Makes me wonder what else you’re holding out.”

  “Only a Katy Perry fetish.”

  Riley raised an eyebrow.

  “Light’s green.”

  Riley drove on toward the Sterling building. They had called Ergo Insurance looking for Deb Fischer, only to be told she was at Sterling. Two birds, one stone, since they wanted to do a follow-up with Lauren Schneider as well.

  Jack kept his hands balled into fists to keep himself from drumming his fingernails on the dashboard. They had two extremely dead women and no real leads and now bullets flying and he couldn’t even be sure at whom. He felt like everything they had done since Joanna’s death had gotten them exactly nowhere. The answer had to be at the Sterling office, but Riley was right—experts in a field were also experts at hiding their path through that field. They would never find it without help. Or a whole lot of luck.

  *

  Deb Fischer now shared the conference table with Anna Hernandez. Dhaval and Pierce Bowman had returned to New York, temporarily, to formulate the final offer for the purchase of Sterling. Technically this meant that two of their suspects had left the state without so much as a good-bye, but Jack didn’t feel either to be a flight risk. With his lengthy resume Bowman had certainly weathered more intense investigations than this one, and Dhaval merely crunched numbers with no personal stake in whether DJ Bryan bought Sterling or not.

  Of course, if the sale could be considered a done deal with Joanna out of the way, that provided a motive for Bowman, Schneider, and Mearan.

  Anna Hernandez began to gather her papers, willing to voluntarily exile herself to the waiting area again, but Deborah Fischer could not contain her curiosity and demanded to know what they wanted. A short, somewhat portly woman with a head of unruly curls, she didn’t look like Sidney Fourtner’s type but agreed with him completely. “Sterling has plenty of insurance in CDSs.”

  “Is that normal?” Jack asked, wondering why banks would buy insurance in case their loans turned out to be bad decisions. Wouldn’t it be more effective to not make the bad loans in the first place?

  “Oh, sure. CDSs have been around for decades—went from twelve billion in 2000 to sixty-two trillion in 2007. They used to be super cheap because no one thought a CDO would default. But it’s a double whammy when the value of the CDOs falls, because that means your income, the loan payments, goes down at the same time your insurance costs are going up because obviously there’s a problem with defaulting or your value wouldn’t be going down.”

  “Spiraling disaster,” Riley said.

  “That’s why Ergo is much more careful postcrisis. It had been insuring these risky tranches and investing in them as well, but without the oversight and restrictions that banks have. Everyone was totally complacent about risk. Things had been too good for too long. But guidelines are tighter now, and the ratings agencies have been straightened out so we can make a more accurate assessment.”

  “Speaking of which—” Jack began.

  “If anything Joanna had overinsured, but hey, I work for Ergo so of course I’m not going to complain. She bought another batch of CDSs from me two weeks ago.”

  Jack pulled out his copy of the Panamanian account, showing the $350,000,000 disbursement to Ergo. “You mean this?”

  She checked it out. “Yep.”

  Jack had forgotten Anna Hernandez’s presence until she dropped her files back onto the glossy table. “Wait, that’s not what I’ve been finding.”

  Riley asked what she meant.

  “According to the books Joanna gave me, Sterling was woefully underinsured. Somehow it hadn’t concerned my predecessor, but then it seems not much did.”

  “It’s a recent purchase,” Deb said. “Maybe she hadn’t updated you yet.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us that?” Riley asked Anna.

  “Because it’s not a crime, technically…. It’s a regulatory requirement. I’m preparing a report for my supervisor and he will have to decide whether sanctions are taken.” At the cops’ skeptical look she tried to explain further. “The laws are in a state of flux about CDSs. In one way it’s betting on a firm’s own loan clients to fail. The Senate hearings raked Lloyd Blankfein over the coals for doing exactly that at Goldman Sachs. It’s a very gray area right at the moment.”

  Jack tried to put some pieces together. “Except that Sterling’s triple-A ratings are based in part on having the CDSs to be able to counteract any defaults.”

  Anna saw his point. “Somehow Carter & Poe issued ratings based on CDSs that didn’t exist.”

  “But they did exist. I sold them to her,” Deb said.

  “Her,” Jack repeated. “Not Sterling?”

  “But Joanna—” Deb began, then stopped, obviously replaying events in her mind. She opened a binder she had brought and frantically flipped pages. “The application page—you’re right, it reads ‘Joanna Moorehouse.’ I didn’t think about it, if I even looked at it…. These purchases are so routine—”

  Riley made a choking sound. “Three hundred and fifty million is routine?”

  “At these levels? Yes. But all companies have various accounts so it still could be legit. You’d better confirm with Lauren that Sterling truly doesn’t have these CDSs on its books.”

  “And if they don’t?”

  Deb Fischer said, “Then Joanna was betting on her own customers to fail. Betting heavily.”

  Jack asked, “Did you tell Pierce Bowman this? Or anyone from DJ Bryan?”

  “Heck no. I don’t work for DJ Bryan. Whether they buy Sterling or not has nothing to do with me. It wouldn’t be bad for me if they did, though…. They’re more conservative, they’ll be more likely to stock up on the CDSs… . Oh, I see what you mean!”

  Jack hadn’t been aware they’d meant anything. He threw out questions like multiple fishing lines, hoping that one would accidentally snag something he could use. And in order to sound as if he knew what the hell he was talking about.

  Riley must have been wondering as well. “What we mean?”

  “Why didn’t this person kill me? If Joanna was underinsured, playing fast and loose with the company’s assets, and had some falling-out with whoever had been in on the plot, that person killed her. Then Tyra found out about it so she had to die, too. I might have wound up in their sights—shit, what a thought!—but I have a husband and a big dog so no one’s going to be sneaking into my house to stab me to death. The dog would scare any killer away. The husband, okay, not so much.”

  A thought occurred to her before she went any further with this theory, however. “Of course, it wouldn’t make much sense to kill me. All the CDSs are on our books at Ergo
. If I died any replacement of mine could simply look them up. There’s nothing hidden at my office.”

  “Unlike Sterling,” Riley said.

  My thoughts exactly, Jack thought.

  Chapter 22

  Lauren Schneider looked up in annoyance as they entered her office. “What now? Are you getting anywhere? Two of our people slaughtered in two days, and—?”

  Jack had planned to hit her with the Panama account, hoping Mearan hadn’t already told her, and the information they’d gotten from Deb Fischer, but instead Riley asked if the merger had progressed.

  “Yeah,” she said in confusion, then corrected herself. “Yes. Bowman expected me to cave without Joanna, but he’s starting to come around. He needs to offer a higher price now that we’re spinning off the riskier tranches, not lower.”

  “So Sterling is going to split? Even though that’s not what Joanna wanted?” Riley asked.

  “Joanna is dead,” she said without hesitation, and without much regret either. “It’s the best plan for Sterling, our investors, and our employees.”

  “But Bowman is still lowballing you?”

  “That’s what he was doing in New York, apparently, trying to talk Hernandez’s supervisor at the Fed into an extra discount if Bryan buys Sterling. But Sterling—while we’ve done incredibly well for our size—is hardly in the too-big-to-fail category and the Fed is out of the bailout business. According to Hernandez, they told him to hoist his own petards. No, Bryan gives us a fair price, we pay off the lower tranches and we’re good.” She gave a very human-like sigh and rested her head on the back of her ergonomically designed leather desk chair. “And we don’t have to do the whole going public thing. I hate IPOs. Total chaos. Why are you asking?”

  “We want to ask you about the account at the Banco de Panama.”

  A slow blink of her long lashes. “Which account is that?”

  “It’s an account of Joanna’s. A personal account, apparently, in her name alone.”

  She promptly lost interest. “I wouldn’t know, then. If it’s a personal account then it’s her personal business. Her executor will have to help you.”

  Jack doubted she could fake the indifference, which meant that Jeremy Mearan hadn’t shared his information yet. He probably hoped to find a way to get his own hands on it and didn’t need any competition.

  Lauren said, “Does she have an executor? Who gets that house? I’m just curious.”

  Another trait of fallible humans. Lauren Schneider seemed to be letting her guard down. Perhaps getting out of Joanna’s shadow would be good for her.

  “Probably her family,” Riley said. “Miss Schneider—”

  “What family? Joanna never mentioned family.”

  “Miss Schneider—”

  “Mrs., actually. Unlike Joanna I do have a family, a husband and even a set of daughters.”

  Superior, again, to Joanna Moorehouse. Not quite out of that shadow yet. Riley said, “We spoke with Deb Fischer and Anna Hernandez about Sterling’s CDSs.”

  “What about them?”

  “Anna seems to think your CDOs are underinsured.”

  “Well, she’s a regulator. It’s her job to find something wrong.”

  “You weren’t concerned?”

  “I’m sure Joanna had an appropriate level.”

  “She did. But they paled in comparison to the boatload she’d bought for herself.” Jack showed her the Banco de Panama statement.

  Lauren Schneider glanced at the paper, then pored over it. Her face grew cold. “Excuse me. I’m going to get Deb in here.” She stalked off to the conference room.

  “So we’re thinking Joanna used the cash in her Panama account to bet against her own company,” Riley said to Jack.

  “Which she was about to sell.”

  “But the CDSs were for the CDOs. Whose name is on the masthead wouldn’t change that.”

  Jack said, “Look at you, using the lingo and stuff. So she hides the default rate until Bowman buys Sterling, makes money from the sale. Maybe she resigns. Then the truth about the defaults comes to light, the CDOs crash, she cashes in the CDSs and makes even more money.”

  “Or even starts another company since the crash will happen on Bryan’s watch. Maybe that’s why she opposed splitting the company.”

  “She screws her own customers and employees and still keeps her reputation as a moneymaker extraordinaire,” Riley said as he watched the action in the conference room, where Lauren, Anna, and Deb Fischer had an animated, three-way discussion that none seemed to enjoy. “No wonder somebody wanted to kill this woman.”

  Jack’s phone rang. The voice of a harried dispatcher told him, “You’d better get out to the victim’s house—Moorehouse’s.”

  “Why?”

  “Apparently there’s some sort of riot going on, and they’re threatening to break into the house. Our sealing tape isn’t going to keep them out.”

  *

  Maggie held her breath as she unfolded the white piece of paper containing Tyra Simmons’s fingernail scrapings, not out of any psychological anticipation but to keep from blowing any tiny fibers or broken hairs away with her expelling breath. Fingernail scrapings were one of those exams that seemed as if it should be done much more scientifically than it actually was. The underside of the nail was scraped, gently—they didn’t want to pick up more of the victim’s own skin cells than could be helped—with a plastic pick, and the contents were dropped or wiped onto a piece of sterile filter paper. All fingers of the right hand in one paper, the left in another. The papers were then folded into druggists’ folds so that nothing could escape and sealed in a clean envelope.

  Then people like Maggie would unfold the paper under a stereomicroscope (which functioned as a large and powerful magnifying glass) in the hopes that something useful would be present, such as blood or skin that didn’t turn out to be the victim’s, or some terribly distinctive fiber that would inexorably point to the killer. But people like Maggie usually found only blood and skin and fibers that belonged to the victim; or generic, uninteresting fibers that didn’t point to anyone in particular; or dirt.

  She heard a rustling at her elbow as Carol settled into a task chair at the nearby counter, and the clink of her coffee cup as she set it down. This meant that, elsewhere in the lab, DNA samples were replicating themselves in tiny plastic tubes and Carol had until her timer went off to relax and chat. “Are we having fun yet?”

  “Mmm.”

  “Doing fibers?”

  “Mmm.” Maggie tilted the paper downward to herd the tiny shreds of evidence inside it into a drop of water on a glass slide. Then she covered the drop with the razor-thin cover slip and breathed normally. A wet mount remained delicate—the cover could slide off at the slightest provocation—but it would also be much easier than sticky, viscous mounting medium to remove if she saw something in the scrapings that needed chemical testing. And she could breathe without blowing her evidence away.

  “I had my time on the sunny rock with the snake representing the other snake,” Carol said, and after a moment Maggie sorted this out to mean that she had testified in the Graham trial.

  “Has the state rested?” Maggie asked, adjusting her microscope lens. Her skin ached a bit from the tiny cuts but in simple discomfort, not pain. They would heal quickly. Meanwhile Carol and Denny had avoided the topic, letting her be the one to bring it up. Which she hadn’t.

  “Uh-huh. I was supposed to be the grand finale. More like a sparkler that won’t stay lit.”

  “I’m sure you were totally grand.”

  “My firework personality can’t make up for getting only a partial profile off the trigger. Sure, the alleles are consistent with Graham but they’d be consistent with a lot of people. I said that. Defense kept asking if I was saying that this DNA conclusively matched Graham. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not saying that.’ A few more questions, and he’d come back to ‘So you’re saying this proves my client’ and on and on.”

  “Ad n
auseum.”

  “It certainly gave me nauseum. Got anything good there?”

  “Nothing on the tapings from the clothes. Under the nails I’ve got a pink fiber that looks like the same color as her T-shirt. And a bundle of fibers … white … thin.”

  “Cotton? Fab. Nothing better than white cotton.”

  Which was so ubiquitous as to be useless. “Sarcasm is not becoming in a woman of your stature. Besides, it’s not cotton. Or not all cotton.”

  Carol went back to the Graham trial. “But for you, by the way, he’s calling in an expert.”

  “Denny told me.”

  “I think he thinks there’s no way he’s going to convince this jury that not only did someone else use the gun but that he did so without leaving his own fingerprints and without smudging Graham’s. This jury is dying to convict; you can see it in their faces. Scumbag’s lawyer is going to have to try everything.”

  “Huh.” The bundle of fibers seemed like a clump of clear and dirty white tendrils of varying diameter and cross sections. A hot mess, frankly, but somehow familiar. She switched to the polarized light microscope.

  “Wear your big-girl panties.”

  “I’ll be sure to.” Maggie pulled a long plastic box out of a drawer. It held part of her reference library of synthetic fibers.

  “What are you doing?” Carol asked.

  “These fibers are weird.”

  “Please don’t say that in court. Especially in front of Graham’s attorney.”

  “But I think I’ve seen them before.” With the slide of Tyra’s fingernail scrapings on one stage of the double microscope she began to put slides of the known synthetic fibers she had mounted over the years on the other. “It’s not polyester, or nylon, I can tell that from the polarization, but—”

  Carol’s timer beeped in her pocket. “Gotta go. My micro-tubes are calling me.”

  Maggie murmured a response and continued to try different slides, finally settling on one that seemed to copy the characteristics of Tyra’s clump in every respect. She checked the label. Tyvek.

  Huh.