Clawback

by J. A. Jance

  “Of course, Agent Ferris,” Haley Jackson told him. “You’d be more than welcome to join us.”

  64

  It was two thirty in the morning before Ali dropped Cami off at her apartment in Cottonwood and made it back home to Sedona. The phone awakened her five hours later at seven thirty. Through sleep-blurred eyes, she saw Dave Holman’s number in the caller ID screen.

  “You’re up early,” she croaked.

  “Up early and on my way to the jail in Prescott, but I wanted to run something past you. During the interviews in Peoria last night, Eric Drinkwater and I were present but benched. We were able to watch the proceedings but didn’t participate. My assessment says Jason McKinzie is scared witless while Jessica Denton is one cool customer. So here’s my idea—the oldest trick in the book.”

  “A plea deal?” Ali asked.

  “Right, and, the first one to talk gets the death sentence taken off the table.”

  “But—” Ali began.

  “Wait a second,” Dave said. “Let me finish. I was talking to Stu a little while ago about the Phoenix traffic cam issue. He mentioned something about unlocking some kind of encryption codes and finding out that McKinzie has secreted sums of money in hidey-hole banks, institutions, and property scattered across the entire planet.”

  “That’s true,” Ali said, “and thanks to Haley Jackson I believe we’ve got a line on those, chapter and verse—not only the account numbers but also recent balances. I haven’t put it all together, but the total is going to be sizable. High Noon is about to sign on to help recover those monies. We should have confirming paperwork on that later today.”

  “I may be able to help with that,” Dave said. “I’ll be meeting with the county attorney as soon as I get to Prescott. I’m going to suggest that we offer Jason McKinzie a deal, first rattle out of the box. He gives us a full confession—not only on all four murders but also on the OFM swindle. He has to give us everything and agree to testify against Jessica Denton. In addition, he has to grant access to all of his offshore accounts and agree to return the money, which is to be brought back to this country and placed in an escrow account for the benefit of OFM’s creditors and investors. Otherwise we charge him with four counts of murder in the first degree, death sentence included.”

  “What if he asks for a lawyer?”

  “He hadn’t as of late last night, and that’s why I’m suggesting we make the offer before we ask him anything else. That way he won’t have a chance.”

  “Good luck with that,” Ali said. “If you can make it work, it might bring about the best of all possible outcomes. Keep me posted.”

  Ali dragged herself out of bed, threw on her robe, let Bella out briefly, and then wandered into the kitchen to pour herself a cup of coffee.

  “Good morning,” Leland said. “And what would you like for breakfast today?” he asked.

  Ali answered without a moment’s worth of hesitation. “I can’t think of anything I’d like better,” she said, “than several cups of coffee and one of your meat loaf sandwiches.”

  65

  “B. Simpson and Ali Reynolds to see Mr. Lowensdahl,” B. said, laying a business card on the receptionist’s desk. Ali happened to be wearing a linen pantsuit that day—a deliberate wardrobe choice on her part. The receptionist was wearing another sweater.

  It was a full week after Ali had signed the paperwork designating High Noon as recovery agents working on behalf of the chief restructuring officer for Ocotillo Fund Management. By now there was no question about the company’s being “restructured.” The bankruptcy proceedings were now focused strictly on dissolution.

  Ali and B. had talked long and hard about what they were about to do. Was it moral? Maybe not. Was it right? Absolutely. And now it was time to lower the boom on Eugene Lowensdahl, with Ali doing the heavy lifting. Their planned strategy was partially a bluff, but they knew enough about the timelines involved to believe it might work.

  Investigators searching Jason McKinzie’s private office had uncovered a private security monitor, one that was in no way connected to the one covering the remainder of the building. On that they had found footage of Dan Frazier’s surreptitious entrance during which he had downloaded the memory file. Naturally that week’s footage had been taken in as evidence in the Frazier homicide, a bit of information Dave had been kind enough to pass along to Ali.

  “Could I see it?” she had asked.

  “You’ll have to ask Eric Drinkwater. That’s in his bailiwick.”

  “Great,” Ali said. “Wish me luck.”

  To her surprise, when she showed up at Sedona PD and asked to see it, the detective had agreed with very little argument. “I don’t see why not,” he said. “You’ll be able to view the file footage but not edit it.”

  Ali’s father had told her that he and Detective Drinkwater had buried the hatchet. Evidently the peace treaty between the two men extended as far as Ali.

  Drinkwater showed her into a small, poorly air-conditioned room, sat her in front of a computer monitor, and called up a file. Once it started, Drinkwater left the room, closing the door and leaving Ali alone. It broke her heart to watch Dan Frazier sneak into the room, locate McKinzie’s computer, and insert the drive. At the time, he had thought he was doing something that would help the SEC finally bring Jason McKinzie down and see to it that he was held to account. In the long run, that’s exactly what had happened—he was being held to account—but Dan Frazier had died in the process, and that hurt.

  Ali started to exit the file, but then for some reason she fast-forwarded through the rest of the Thursday-night footage and on into Friday morning, where she slowed it again. A young woman Ali assumed to be McKinzie’s secretary showed up and set a pile of correspondence on the desk along with a hot drink container of some kind. The office was empty for a spell, then Jason McKinzie showed up. He looked at his desk and then, without touching the cup or the correspondence or even sitting down, he opened a drawer in the desk and pulled out a laptop.

  For a period of time, he was offscreen entirely. Then he went back to his desk and made several calls. There was no audio. Ali couldn’t hear what was being said, but he looked anxious, upset. Ali continued to scroll through the day. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary until sometime well after six, presumably after most of the other employees had left for home.

  Just after 6:30 a female, one Ali now recognized as Jessica Denton, entered the office carrying a stack of paper that had the look of some kind of legal documents. She and Jason proceeded to kiss in an entirely inappropriate fashion, then she pushed away and left the room, returning a few minutes later with a second man in tow. Ali’s eyes nearly popped out of her head when she realized who he was—Eugene Lowensdahl. He sat down in a visitor’s chair. There was some silent back-and-forthing, then, after considerable discussion, McKinzie picked up a pen, centered the document on a blotter on an otherwise clear desk, signed it, and passed it over to Lowensdahl.

  “Aha!” Ali said aloud. “Gotcha.”

  And today she and B. planned to put that “gotcha” moment to good use.

  With B. along, Eugene Lowensdahl respectfully rose to his feet, buttoning his jacket as they entered the room. “Back from your travels, I see?” he asked, shaking first B.’s hand and eventually Ali’s as well. He motioned them into chairs.

  “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

  In answer, Ali pulled a single piece of paper out of her purse and slid it across the table. On it was a single column of figures.

  “What’s this?” he asked.

  “That’s a list of Jason McKinzie’s offshore bank accounts—the ones we’ve located so far,” she said. “It also includes all current balances.”

  His eyes scrolled down the page. When he reached the bottom line, his eyes widened and he whistled. “That’s way more than I thought it would be,” he said.

  “We’ve also located a number of properties and several large caches of diamonds,” Ali continued. “We’re
having both the properties and the diamonds appraised.”

  “We’ll be able to sell them?”

  “Over time,” B. said. “And not for fire-sale pennies on the dollar, either.”

  Lowensdahl nodded. “But this is incredible,” he said. “I had no idea you’d be able to amass so much information in such a short time.”

  “We have our sources,” Ali said.

  “It’s going to make for a hell of a payday,” he said.

  “Actually, that’s why we’re here. Given the circumstances, our twenty percent fee seems out of line. What’s your percentage, Mr. Lowensdahl?”

  “Twenty,” he said.

  “We’re willing to make our twenty percent go away. We’re prepared to change over to an hourly fee, and we think you should, too.”

  “What are you talking about?” Lowensdahl said. “Why should I?”

  “Because this money belongs to someone else. The people who invested it deserve to get their money back without losing another forty percent in the process.”

  Lowensdahl sat up straight in his chair. “Ms. Reynolds, you’re more than welcome to relinquish your share, but you have no right to dictate what I do with mine.”

  “You knew McKinzie was leaving before he left,” Ali said quietly. “You knew that late Friday afternoon when you came by his office to pick up the bankruptcy paperwork. I’m sure the SEC would be interested in knowing that you had advance knowledge of his departure, and that you made no effort to stop him.”

  “You have no way of knowing that.”

  “Yes we do,” Ali said. “And we also know that there was a witness in the room at the time who might be willing to testify to that effect.”

  “What is this? It feels like blackmail.”

  “And your collecting twenty percent of people’s hard-won savings seems like highway robbery,” Ali replied. “This isn’t so much blackmail as it is a plea deal with a little give-and-take. You might even call it a clawback of sorts. We drop our twenty. You drop yours. As an added bonus, we won’t speak to the SEC or the State Bar Association of Arizona.”

  There was a pause. “Okay,” he said finally, conceding defeat. “Done.”

  “What’s your hourly fee?”

  “Five hundred.”

  “You should be able to shave quite a bit off that when it comes to doing simple accounting and administrative work,” Ali said. “And to help you with that, here’s something else.”

  She pulled out a memory card and slid it across his desk. He caught it just before it slid off the far side.

  “What’s this?”

  “I believe that’s a complete listing of OFM’s clientele along with all their contact information as well as some helpful accounting info.”

  “Where did you get this?”

  “Does that matter? What really matters is that we have it. That’s only a copy by the way.”

  “All right,” Lowensdahl said finally, conceding on the issue of his hourly rate, too. “One fifty.”

  “Great,” Ali said, smiling, rising to her feet, and brushing the wrinkles from the legs of her pantsuit. “Sounds good, Mr. Lowensdahl. I believe we’re done here. Do stay in touch.”

  66

  “So this is where you think it happened?” Bob Larson asked.

  “That’s what Cami said,” Stu Ramey answered. “She was starting to slow down to make the turn when Jessica threw the memory card out of the car.”

  Bob’s Bronco was parked on the shoulder of Highway 179 just east of the I-17 entrance ramp. Armed with matching metal detectors, Bob and Stu had waited until late afternoon to tackle the project. Some of the heat was beginning to dissipate, but it was still hot.

  “I did some computerized reconstructions on this,” Stu said, “trying to estimate speed, weight, and wind factors to come up with possible distances. If Cami’s right, and she had already started slowing down, the object wouldn’t have traveled as far as it would have if they’d been going fifty-five. We’re going to do this in three-foot-wide sections, thirty feet long, on either side of the fence line. Got it?”

  Bob looked at the fence line stretching off into the far distance. He looked at the sea of dried grass on either side of the barbed wire. What he really wanted to say was that Stuart Ramey was absolutely, 100 percent nuts. But of course he couldn’t say any such thing. He and Edie owed this guy far too much for that.

  “Got it,” he said.

  “Which side of the fence do you want?” Stu asked.

  Bob didn’t know exactly how much older he was than Stuart, but when it came to climbing over barbed wire fences, he was in far better shape than the younger man. “I’ll take the far side,” he said.

  They worked for the better part of two hours—back and forth, back and forth. The sweat ran into Bob’s eyes and down his shirt. His back ached. His legs hurt. But Stu wouldn’t give up. He was relentless. He was going to find that damned USB adapter or know the reason why.

  And just when Bob was ready to give up—when he was ready to say he couldn’t take another damned step—his metal detector alerted. It wasn’t an aluminum can this time or a bottle cap, either. It was, in fact, exactly what they were looking for—the USB adapter with the memory card still tucked safely inside.

  “I’ve got it,” Bob shouted. “Here it is.”

  With more speed and agility than Bob would have thought possible, Stu clambered over the intervening fence and covered the distance between them at a dead run.

  “Don’t touch it, whatever you do!” Stu commanded, panting and out of breath. “We need to take photographs of it. If Jessica Denton’s prints are on it, we don’t want to lose them.”

  67

  Cami sat in her oversized first-class seat and stared out the window as first the bay and then the airport runways materialized out of the fog. She had relented after all and agreed to come home for Papa’s birthday party, but she hadn’t caved completely. She was coming for the party only, would spend the night—at a hotel of her choosing—and fly home the next day. She had assured her mother that there was no reason to pick her up at the airport. Cami would get herself back and forth on her own, thank you very much.

  In actual fact Ali was the one who had chosen and booked the Four Seasons and had insisted on buying Cami a first-class ticket and had made arrangements for a limo pick-up and drop-off as well. “It’s a perk,” she had said. “Let’s just call it retroactive combat pay.”

  It was an afternoon party. Papa had agreed to close the restaurant for the afternoon, but not for the evening. The place would be open again for regular dinner service. By the time Cami set out to walk the mile-plus distance between the Four Seasons and the restaurant, the morning fog had burned away completely. She walked well-remembered streets, looking in familiar shopwindows, peering at strangers, watching the traffic. And all the while, her heart was filled with dread.

  Her parents would both be there. Cami wasn’t sure who had blown the whistle on her, but somehow her mother had learned of Cami’s exploits in Peoria weeks earlier, and Sue Ling Lee was not a happy camper. The mere fact that Cami had finally agreed to show up for her grandfather’s birthday celebration hadn’t done much to improve mother/daughter relations.

  Cami had timed her arrival so the party would already be in full swing when she got there. She had planned to slip in through the back door. That would give her a chance to blend in with the crowd and be involved in conversation before either of her parents spotted her. What she hadn’t counted on was the fact that the birthday boy himself was no more enamored of the party than she was.

  Papa, seated on an upturned lettuce crate and smoking a forbidden cigarette, hailed her as she made for the door. “Meili,” he called, patting the top of the crate. “Come and sit with me.”

  Cami’s grandfather had never approved of the name his daughter had given her daughter. In a way, Cami saw it as an appropriate bit of “what goes around comes around.” She had always called her grandfather Papa, and he had always cal
led her Meili—“Beautiful.”

  Cami sat.

  “Your mother would not like it if she knew we were sitting out here in the alley,” Papa said.

  “No,” Cami smiled. “She would not. And Nainai”—“Grandmother”—“would not like it if she knew you were smoking.”

  Papa smiled at that. “Then we shall not tell them.”

  He took another drag on the cigarette. “I’m glad you came.”

  “So am I,” Cami said, realizing suddenly that she actually was glad.

  “Did you know that when I was a boy I wanted to be a doctor?”

  Cami was floored. “I had no idea.”

  Papa nodded. “My father said to me, ‘Boy, you are too stupid to be a doctor. You must learn to cook.’ ” Papa paused and shrugged. “And so I cooked. I have cooked all my life. It is what I do.”

  It came as a shock to learn that her mother’s version of their family history was a total fabrication. To hear Sue Lee tell it, her parents had loved running their restaurant and had insisted that she grow up and become a part of it. Given Papa’s history, Cami somehow doubted that was true.

  “What do you want to be, Meili?”

  “What I am,” she answered. “Someone who helps people.”

  “Like you are helping all those poor people get their money back?”

  Cami was floored again. How did Papa know about that?

  “George, our new cook, is on the Internet all the time. I asked him to—what do they call it again?—oh yes, google you. He found many articles about you and read them to me. It sounded very exciting.” He took another drag on the cigarette. “And then, I’m afraid, I did a very bad thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I had George send them to your mother.”

  Suddenly Cami burst out laughing. She couldn’t help it. Leaning over, she kissed her grandfather’s weathered cheek and hugged his neck.

  “Thank you, Papa,” she said. “I think this is going to be the best birthday party ever.”