Trial by Ambush (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “Hello?”

  It was the woman from the answering machine, but I still couldn’t place her.

  “This is Robin Starling,” I said.

  There was a silence. “Are you all right?” she said at last. “I heard…”

  I waited.

  “I heard you were attacked.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Oh. Brooke Marshall.”

  The network administrator for McCormack Labs, the one who’d run away from me in the food court at Regency Square Mall. I took another drink from the bottle, grimaced, and said, “I was attacked. Cord around the neck, just like Wendy Walters.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You didn’t do it.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  “Unh unh,” I said. “Do you?”

  Again the silence. “When I got back from lunch yesterday, I was pretty upset. I made kind of a big deal at the office about all the questions you’d been asking. Then today people were talking about it.”

  “About…”

  “About you being attacked.”

  It was my turn not to say anything.

  “I wasn’t able to discover how they knew about it,” she said. “There was nothing in the paper, nothing on the internet. I checked.”

  “Who was talking about it?”

  “Pretty much everybody. I don’t know who started it.”

  “What did they say?”

  “The first I heard about it, one of the data entry people said, ‘Hey, Brooke, you know that woman you were talking about yesterday? Somebody broke into her house last night and tried to kill her.’”

  “What data entry person?”

  “A woman named Cheryl, but she’d just heard it from someone else — another clerk, I think.”

  I swallowed another mouthful of beer, by this time hardly noticing the taste. “What did she hear exactly?”

  “Just that someone had broken in and tried to kill you.”

  “Did she hear how he tried to kill me?”

  “No. She had the idea he hadn’t succeeded, but she didn’t have any details. What was stirring everyone up, I think, was that we’d just been talking about you yesterday. Or I’d been talking about you. And there’d been a lot of speculation as to what you were after.”

  When she hung up, I drained my beer in a few long swallows and went back into the kitchen for another. The oven dinged, indicating it had reached 450. I put in the lasagna.

  Did people kill people over accounting irregularities? I asked myself as I squeezed a wedge of lime into another Corona. Wendy had stumbled onto something she wasn’t supposed to know, and she had gone outside the company with it. Wendy was dead. Then I’d known something I wasn’t supposed to know, or, more accurately, I’d looked as if I did. I wasn’t dead, but someone sure wanted me that way. And John Parker was in jail, doing dramatic readings with a tattooed perpetrator of moving violations. John, of course, had never known anything; he’d just let his libido get away from him.

  My beer spiked with lime juice, I went back into the living room and redialed Brooke’s number. She answered with the same cautious hello, and I said, “If I emailed some files to you, could you take a look at them?”

  “What kind of files?”

  “Excel.”

  “I guess so.”

  “They’re what Wendy gave me when we had coffee on Monday.”

  I could hear her breathing.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “Send them on.”

  “What’s your email address?”

  She gave it to me. While the lasagna cooked, I turned on John’s computer, put in the CD, and sent Brooke an email with copies of the files attached. Then I went back into the kitchen for a third beer. For something that tasted like it might be cow urine, it was surprisingly addicting.

  Chapter 25

  The next morning I had German pancakes at the IHOP on West Broad Street, then drove back to John’s place. It had been a long time since I’d found myself at loose ends on a Saturday, but there I was. Last Saturday, I’d had a boyfriend; today he was in jail. Last Saturday, I’d had a home that required regular attention. Today I was dispossessed and hanging out at John’s.

  Despite the reversals of fortune, my spirits were high as I parked my car and walked down the sidewalk toward John’s building. The air was crisp; the sky was clear; I had the day to spend as I pleased…Somehow, it was enough.

  I turned the corner and stopped, because there was a girl in jeans and a T-shirt sitting on the steps. She stood, dusting off her fanny with the palms of her hands, and I recognized her by her thick mop of red hair. It was Brooke Marshall.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked.

  “You didn’t answer your phone.”

  “How did you…” I stopped. I had called her from John’s apartment, of course, so if she had Caller ID, she had the number.

  “I used a reverse directory on the web to get the address,” Brooke said.

  I nodded.

  “I’d assumed you were calling from home. I called there first and left a message.”

  We climbed the stairs to John’s apartment, and I asked if she wanted a beer. “I don’t drink myself,” I said, as I got a couple of bottles out of the fridge. “Or I didn’t. Actually, I guess I started last night.” I held out a bottle to her.

  “It’s nine-thirty in the morning,” she said as she took it.

  I popped the top off my own bottle. “Is your point that we’re getting a late start, or an early one?”

  She gave me a funny look, which I’m sure I deserved. Nonetheless, she took the bottle opener from me, opened her beer, and took a swallow.

  “Just put it on the coffee table,” I said, referring to the bottle cap.

  “It’s been bothering me that I left a message,” she said. “I may have been too…”

  “Explicit?”

  She nodded. “Do you mind if we go by your house and erase it?”

  I shook my head. “Consider me your partner in paranoia.”

  “What will we do with these?”

  “Have a seat,” I said. “We’ll have to finish them first.”

  It was just a few minutes after ten when we drove by my house. I didn’t even slow down. Brooke, who had been following the street numbers, swiveled in her seat. “Wasn’t that it?” she said.

  “That was it.”

  “What—”

  “We’re scoping it out first.” I turned at the corner and came back down the alley.

  My garage door was closed, and the short driveway was empty. All was as it should be. I drove on past.

  “Are we just going to keep circling?”

  “For a while.” And we did. I went out a block and circled, out another block and circled again. We passed a few parked cars, some in driveways, some on the street, nobody in any of them. I turned toward home.

  “Do you know what kind of car your attacker was driving?”

  “Nope. I have a stalker named Eddie Unger who drives a Caprice Classic, but I don’t see it either.”

  She was sitting with her back against the door, studying me. “That’s not a joke, is it? You’re serious about the stalker.”

  I flashed her a grin. “I’m afraid so.” I turned into the alley and from there into my own driveway. “Eddie’s not dangerous, though, or I don’t think he is. He fell in love with me when I twisted his nuts and bashed his head on some concrete steps.”

  “That sounds like a story.”

  “It is. I’ll tell you about it over lunch. Last night wasn’t the first time this week I’ve been attacked.”

  The garage door rumbled upward.

  “When was the first time?”

  “Monday. The day Wendy gave me her disk.”

  We went in. Everything was the way I had left it, but the answering machine didn’t show any messages.

  “Are you sure you left one?” I asked. “Maybe you made a mistake.”

  “I didn’t.”

  I
flipped open the compartment that housed the tape — I'd tried a digital answering machine once and hadn't liked the sound quality — and saw that the tiny cassette was gone. Someone had been in my house that morning, and whoever it was had taken my message cassette.

  Fingers were digging into my arm. I looked around into Brooke’s big eyes.

  “What message did you leave exactly?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “I said I’d looked at the files, and it looked bad. I think I said somebody was going to jail.”

  “So they know we’ve got Wendy’s files.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” she said.

  I nodded.

  Back at John’s apartment, we went straight to the refrigerator. This time Brooke didn’t quibble. She took the bottle from me, used the bottle opener to pop the cap, and started glugging.

  When she lowered the bottle, a third of its contents were gone.

  “It’s not even eleven,” I said, watching her over the misting mouth of my own Corona.

  “That’s why I’m saving the rest of the bottle for my next swallow.”

  I laughed. “You’re a wild thing, Brooke Marshall.”

  In the living room, I took the easy chair, and Brooke sprawled on the sofa, clutching the neck of her bottle in a two-fingered grip.

  “You realize you can’t go home,” I said.

  “I can’t go to work either.”

  “Unh unh. You’re here for the duration.”

  We sipped our beers in silence for several minutes before I asked, “When you said it looked bad, the files, what did you mean?”

  “There are definitely two sets of books there. They both purport to cover the same time period, but each has all kinds of entries that aren’t reflected in the other.”

  “Can you tell which set is the real one?”

  “One set matches the documents on file with the SEC. I checked their website this morning.”

  “So that would be the phony set.”

  “I would assume so.”

  I nodded. After a few more swallows of beer, I said, “Where is your computer?”

  “In my car. It’s a notebook.”

  “I was just thinking. Somebody has been in my house today. Now that they’ve listened to that message, they’ve probably been in yours.”

  Her eyes widened a bit.

  “You’re safe enough here,” I said, but she shook her head.

  “No, I don’t think I am.”

  “How—” I stopped. “You didn’t erase your caller ID, did you? There would have been no reason to.”

  “No. And I’m not the only one who can use a reverse directory.”

  I took a big breath and let it out, then swung my leg off the arm of the chair. “We’ve got to move,” I said.

  Chapter 26

  I drove my Beetle, and she followed in her own car. She didn’t want to go home even to pick up a change of clothes, so we went to Target to get a few things. After picking up some toiletries, a few changes of underwear, a couple of shirts, a pair of pants, and a cute green dress that looked great with her red hair, we went looking for a hotel. We passed three hotels before I pulled into a Courtyard not far from the IHOP where I’d had breakfast. Finding us would not be a matter of contacting the nearest hotel.

  When we’d parked and locked our cars, Brooke asked, “How are we going to pay for this? Do you have cash?”

  “Thirty or forty dollars. Not much.”

  “If we use a credit card, we’ll have to use our own names. They’ll find us in half-a-dozen phone calls.”

  I opened my purse and took out John’s wallet, which he’d given me for safekeeping when they’d booked him. “Allow me to introduce myself,” I said. “Mrs. John Parker.”

  “You’re married? Who—”

  “John Parker is my erstwhile boyfriend.”

  “Cool.”

  We got a room with two queen-sized beds. It had a minibar, too, something I hadn’t seen in a while. Soon Brooke and I were sitting cross-legged on the beds with candy and cracker wrappers on the covers around us, a little bottle of Jack Daniels, an empty soda can, and an open can of Heineken on the nightstand.

  “It’s not the usual kind of thing,” Brooke said.

  We were talking, not about what seemed to be our incipient drinking problem, but about the two sets of accounting records.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Usually, in the scandals I studied in business school, the company’s trying to hide debt and inflate revenue. Enron, WorldCom, Sunbeam — that’s what all of them were trying to do.”

  “That’s what Wendy made this sound like.”

  “Well, there’s some of that. Mostly, though, McCormack seems to be hiding revenue — disguising it, anyway.”

  My head was getting a little fuzzy, and it occurred to me that I might be overdoing the booze and sugar thing. “Why would anybody want to hide revenue?” I said. “I thought that’s what drove the stock price.”

  “It is.” She nodded significantly, but in my alcohol-addled state I didn’t see the significance.

  “So no one would want to hide revenue,” I said.

  “Not without a compelling reason.”

  “A compelling reason like…”

  “The revenue isn’t revenue they can report.”

  “But—” I stopped. I was getting a glimmer here. “Al Capone didn’t report his income from whiskey smuggling,” I said.

  “An ounce dealer doesn’t list what he pays for his cocaine on Schedule C as his cost-of-goods-sold,” she said. “He pays no taxes, which is great, but there are worse things than taxes.”

  “If he tries to pay cash for a car…,” I said.

  “Or tries to deposit it in the bank, or if he lives visibly beyond his means…”

  “Then the feds get him for tax evasion.”

  “Just like they did Al Capone,” Brooke said.

  I got up and went to the minibar for another bottle of something — I thought I’d try a white wine. As I crouched in front of the open door of the little refrigerator, I looked up at her. “So what are you saying?” I asked.

  Brooke giggled. “You’re looped.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but what came out was a bark of laughter. It set Brooke off. She laughed until tears were streaming down her face, and I laughed with her.

  We both stopped abruptly when I snorted a wad of snot onto the carpet. We looked at it, shocked, then our eyes met, and we started laughing again.

  Eventually, the mirth subsided, having worn us both out. I was lying on the floor on my back, and Brooke was sprawled on the bed.

  “What I’m saying,” Brooke began, a little breathlessly.

  “Money laundering,” I said.

  “Exactly. McCormack has money that isn’t reflected in its official set of accounting records. It’s got to be dirty money, or they wouldn’t hide it. Wherever it comes from, they put it into McCormack or one of its subsidiaries, and they report as much of it as they think they can without arousing suspicion. The rest stays hidden until they sell an asset or something that will allow them to show a gain.”

  I thought about it. “Can you tell where the money’s coming from?”

  “Nope. Just that it’s there.”

  “And you only know that much because Wendy stumbled across the real set of books.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “I don’t guess there’s any way to know where she stumbled across them.”

  “No.”

  “Do you think it’s drug money?”

  “Isn’t it always?”

  I was silent, having never devoted much attention to the hows and whys of money laundering.

  “What do we do now?” Brooke asked.

  I thought about it, or started to. Perhaps Brooke thought about it, too, but she was still asleep when I woke up, still on the floor, my muscles stiff and my head aching slightly. It was dark outside, and the digital clock on the nightstand glowed 10:35 through the bottles
and cans that were clustered around it.

  I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and splash water on my face. As I dried my face with a hand towel, I walked back into the bedroom. Brooke’s face was mashed against the bed, her wild hair hiding most of her face, and her mouth sagging open. She grunted, and I laughed. One of her eyes opened.

  “What are you looking at?” she said in a fuzzy voice.

  I gave her a bright smile and went back into the bathroom to hang up my towel.

  “Oh!” Brooke exclaimed, a bit too loudly.

  She was sitting up on the bed.

  “Remind me never to do that again,” she said.

  “Advil?”

  She nodded, her fingers against her forehead.

  I got it out, filled a glass with tap water, and chased down a couple of pills. Then I filled another glass and took it to Brooke with the bottle of Advil.

  She went into the bathroom and came out about five minutes later, her face looking freshly scrubbed.

  “Want to go out for a bite?” I suggested.

  She looked momentarily doubtful. “Okay,” she said.

  About twenty minutes later, we were busy putting ourselves around a couple of half-pound burgers, going at it like we hadn’t eaten all day.

  “We’re going to have to do something, you know,” Brooke said when she’d finished her burger and slowed down a bit on the fries.

  “I know.” I nodded vigorously, still chewing. “We go on eating and drinking like this, they’ll have to get a horse trailer to haul us around.”

  “I meant about McCormack.”

  “I know.”

  “Though the gluttony is going to kill us.”

  “And the drinking.”

  “I think that’s just part of the sin of gluttony.”

  “Sin?” I hadn’t been thinking in terms of sin, but then, my parents had stopped hauling us to church before I was a teenager. Having finished my burger, I took the lid off my Coke and glugged it. “I was thinking of it as a little self-indulgence.”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s a sin.”

  “Well, thank you, your holiness.” I wiped my mouth on the back of my wrist. “What’s the definition of sin, anyway?”

  Her eyes shifted, and she didn’t answer, which I took as an I-don’t-know. We seemed to have plumbed the depths of our combined theological knowledge.