Hanging by a Thread

by Margaret Evans

  Sabina nodded.

  “No answer. Goes to voicemail. I left several messages that have not been returned.”

  As Sabina Morello went back to her desk, her mind returned to the myriad of activities and decisions that she needed to make for her wedding to Jack Flynn. She smiled as she thought of the money that had been spent on her wedding dress, but she wanted Jack’s eyes to pop out of his head as he watched her come up the aisle. She would feel like a princess.

  Aaron Nilsson was thinking something entirely different as he watched Sabina walk away. He would go into the logs himself this evening after everyone left, including Sabina. He needed answers, and the list of questions was growing by the hour. What the others were doing was something he needed to know.

  The money that disappeared was only discovered to be missing after Dotson vanished. And what about Sabina? Was she telling him the truth? She mentioned “tech-savvy.” How did he know that she wasn’t more tech-savvy than she let on? How much did Sabina Morello really know about what had happened to the accounts in his bank and whether or not the FBI told her the truth when they said that no money was really missing?

  ten

  Laura texted all three of her girl friends that evening, begging for some ideas on the costumes she was supposed to come up with for the members of the SPDP&G committee. Her notes from the meeting were mostly unrealistic, ranging from sparkly orange masks with rainbows looping over their heads to curly-toed shoes. She went back to making more bags of popcorn in between working on the mountain of tax returns. As she completed one, it was saved for a final review, and she loaded up ten more bags of the scrumptious green-coated treat. Next she popped another big load of kernels in the air popper. Then she went back to the returns.

  As she continued to tackle the return for her one customer who had given her the typo on financial amounts, she noticed something else. A handwritten note stuck between two ledger forms mentioned a third account. Now she knew this lady had two accounts, but it gave her an idea that maybe some of the information in the accounts had gotten mixed up not only between the two accounts but also a third, an easy thing to happen if you’re not careful with your finances, as this lady usually was.

  It was late, but Laura texted her old boss in Maryland and told him to contact her as early in the morning as he wished, or after five o’clock the next afternoon, Central Time. She had an important question to ask him about tax fraud.

  She got a call within five minutes of her text.

  “What are you doing up so late, Laura Keene?”

  “I could ask you the same thing, all-time favorite boss! Something came up in one of my local customers’ tax returns about multiple bank accounts. And it made me think about something illegal that happened a few years ago up here, not related to my current client or any of my clients or anybody I know, for that matter. I can’t talk about it because it’s an open police case, but I can ask you a simple question. How easy is it to create a dummy account in a bank and funnel real or fake funds into it without the bank or the IRS or even other customers finding out about it?”

  An hour later, when she got off the phone with her beloved boss who had taught her so much about taxes in her first job, she was up until very late, popping the popcorn, stirring the buttery caramel and mixing in the green food coloring. Her mind was far away as she laid out the popcorn on a jelly roll pan lined with waxed paper and drizzled the caramel over the popped kernels. Once they cooled, she mechanically scooped up the coated, sweet popcorns into the cone-shaped bags and tied them shut with wire twist ties and green ribbons. Tomorrow morning she would take them downstairs and fill up the basket for sale. So far, her sales and the donations to the police station brass railing were going well. They were up to nearly Seventy-five Dollars already. Not much for the project, but a good start. Hopefully, proceeds would be enough that if she started a railing fund for each of the coming holidays, the sorely needed repairs could begin before the year was out.

  Once the popcorn was done, she still sat up, thinking hard about what her former boss had told her. She planned another lunch tomorrow—Wednesday—with Connor.

  •••

  “What have you heard now?” he asked.

  She removed three bags of the green caramel popcorn from her leather bag and handed them to him.

  He eyed the treat.

  “You should put these in the break room so everyone can enjoy them.”

  “I already put six bags in there and gave three more to Colleen for her and the other front desk people.”

  “How much do I owe you for them?”

  “Nothing. I paid for them out of my own pocket so the books can be balanced. This is my treat to everyone at the station, like a basket of fruit.”

  He seemed satisfied.

  “So what did you hear now?”

  “I didn’t hear anything. It’s something that occurred to me.”

  He gave her a look. What had they all missed that seemed obvious to the amazing puzzle-solver sitting across from him?

  “It occurred to me that the bank never pursued what happened to the missing bank funds because there never were any.”

  “Say again.”

  “There were never any missing funds. Somebody just made it look that way.”

  “No missing funds,” he repeated. “How do you figure that? And you know I can’t discuss this with you.”

  “Bear with me. I’m just telling a story. It’s about someone at a bank creating a dummy account in someone else’s name.”

  “You would need a real social security number for that.”

  “Right. They could have used the social from someone who died.”

  “And the picture ID?”

  “I haven’t figured that part out yet. Fake ID maybe or a relative who died and their driver’s license hadn’t expired yet. Lots of options there.”

  “So if they didn’t take any money?”

  “I didn’t say that. I said there were no missing funds. There’s a difference.”

  “How does this help me?”

  “If I were you, and I’m not and I’m just telling you a story, but if I were you, I would look into the backgrounds of everyone who works or worked at that bank over the last several years. Including Sabina just to clear her for the record.”

  “What are we looking for? Unreported income?”

  “No. Nothing as easily found as that. Whoever did this is keeping the funds in cash somewhere, maybe even in a shoebox under their bed. Or maybe an untraceable offshore account.”

  “Then what?”

  “Who,” she corrected. “Someone who has a connection with one of the fraudulent accounts, maybe through a relative’s name, or another connection of some kind.”

  “I thought the FBI already did that.”

  “It might have been covered up. It can be done in any one of several very clever ways. I’m just thinking that if you look into things today, you may find something different in the accounts than the FBI found two years ago when Dotson disappeared.”

  “You think Dotson or Wright are involved or in it together?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe someone else entirely who still works at the bank. Excluding Sabina, of course.”

  “I’ll need a subpoena for this and a damned good reason.”

  “You’ll think of something. Or maybe you just need someone on the inside.”

  “No,” he stated. “Not happening.”

  “Okay, then do some magic to get your subpoena.”

  “You really haven’t given me enough of anything to get a judge’s signoff.”

  “You’ll think of something,” she repeated. “Go through the files and find something.”

  “What are you doing this evening?”

  “Shopping with the other members of the Fab Four for the bridal shower.”

 
“I thought you and I were going together on a gift for that event.”

  “You took too long to get back to me. We can get together on a big wedding gift for them. You have a couple more weeks for that.”

  eleven

  Jessica Wright’s eyes were as big as dinner plates when she saw the man standing next to her car in the motel parking lot in Eagle Junction, a town not all that far from Raging Ford.

  “I knew you weren’t dead like they all said. I knew.”

  “Dead?” he asked, puzzled. His smile at seeing her faded. “I just wanted to get away for a while, you know, like a long vacation.”

  “I’m being accused of that theft at the bank and I haven’t taken anything!”

  “Well, if you didn’t do it, why was your name all over it?” He recalled seeing her digital fingerprints everywhere.

  “I don’t know! I don’t know! I never took a penny from anyone in my entire life!”

  “But your name and login were on every entry. There were phrases and other words you always use. I saw them!”

  “It wasn’t me! I have no idea how my brother’s name got on that account—I swear! I just spent a few days last week trying to clean it all up and get the accounts back the way they were. I think someone was watching me. I had to get away—I couldn’t stand it anymore.”

  He thought about it a minute and a light bulb lit over his head. He himself might be very talented in using the banking system and tracking people’s movements in it as part of his job at the bank, but there were at least two or three more gifted others who worked at the bank. He would need to find out the truth of who was behind the whole fraud thing.

  “So, if it wasn’t you…”

  “It was never me! And you terrorized me, demanding money to keep quiet! You took all my savings! I have nothing left.”

  He stared at her dumbly.

  “What?”

  “You blackmailed me for more than a year for something I didn’t do.”

  His face screwed up.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  She kept talking, hands waving wildly.

  “I thought you were gone—so did everyone else—but you kept sending me postcards from strange places, so I knew you were really someplace watching me. And you kept demanding I send you more money orders so they could be cashed anywhere and not be traced! Why did you do that to me!?”

  He was flabbergasted at her accusation.

  “I would never have done that to you, Jessica. I walked away because I thought you were involved in something over your head. I found your fingerprints on so many fraudulent trails in the system—I didn’t want to know more. And if I had stayed, I would have had to turn you in. I couldn’t do that. So I just left.”

  She finally stopped to take a breath.

  “But I got postcards from you.”

  “I never contacted you,” he said, shaking his head. “I’ve been hiding out on a farm in North Dakota. Staying off the grid. No computers, no newspapers, nothing. Sounds like somebody played a nasty trick on you, Jessica. I’m sure sorry to hear it. Deep down, I couldn’t believe it was you anyway, and now I’m glad to hear it wasn’t. But that means somebody else did this, set you up, and that’s probably the person who’s been blackmailing you. How much money did you give them?”

  “I had to cash out two of my 401(k)s and some bonds. Almost four hundred thousand dollars! Now I have nothing left for retirement! It’s all gone!”

  Wright was now weeping, and Paul Dotson put an arm around her shoulders.

  “People said you were dead,” she continued. “Your apartment was trashed, your phone broken, and your wallet left behind.”

  He pulled his wallet and phone from his left jacket pocket.

  “I never left anything behind. Sounds like someone set me up, too. Duplicated my wallet and maybe cloned my phone. My phone’s been turned off since I left, but these are the originals.”

  “Oh, no!” Jessica sobbed. “I couldn’t believe you would do that to me after all the fun we had at those trivia conventions.”

  “Well, I didn’t,” he told her sternly. “But I am going to find out just who did this to both of us. I’ll try to get your money back.”

  She looked up at him.

  “I just can’t take much more.”

  “I know. Why don’t you leave here for a while—there’s a nice little motel off Route 148 near Mankato. Eagle Junction’s too close to Raging Ford. You need to get further away from here. That’s where I’ve been staying recently, thinking about what I should do next. I just happened to come this way and I stopped in the gas station for a fill-up and saw you and your car.”

  Then something she had said crept its way into his thoughts.

  “Why would anyone think I was dead? Even if my apartment was trashed by someone after I left, I sent an email to Sabina Morello telling her I needed some time off, like a leave of absence. She responded that it was okay, since I had so much vacation piled up.”

  “You told Sabina?”

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I think she’s the one who’s watching me.”

  twelve

  When Connor showed up at Laura’s shop on Thursday around her usual lunch break, his timing was perfect, as she was just closing up and turning the Closed sign outward. She waited for him and locked the front door behind him.

  “Let’s go in the back,” he suggested. He’d parked out front, so there was no hiding his visit to her, but he wanted them to go into the back room.

  As soon as the door was shut behind them, separating them from the public world outside Laura’s shop windows, he pulled her into his arms and kissed her.

  “I like this kind of lunch break,” she said.

  “I wish it could be longer, but I have a surprise for you today that I think you might enjoy.”

  She looked the question.

  “Turn everything off and lock up. We’re going for a ride.”

  “You know I have to be back here in a bit.”

  “This won’t take long.”

  They left in his police SUV and took off for the highway.

  “Notice anything different?”

  She looked around.

  “Well, there’s something on your dashboard that looks like the old dash cam, but it looks a little different.”

  “It’s the updated motion- and voice-activated dash recording system. It’s the next step toward the state giving us body cams.”

  “Wow,” Laura said, looking it over. She touched it lightly with a finger.

  “Don’t touch yet,” he said. “I’ll show you how it works.”

  He took an exit off the highway and pulled off the road.

  “This switch turns it on. See the orange light? That means it’s ready to record when it’s activated by either motion or audio.”

  As he spoke, the light changed to green, recording his voice.

  He picked up the radio.

  “Flynn? I’m out testing, so disregard unless you hear differently from me.”

  He put a finger to his lips and they were both silent. The cam returned to the orange light. When he started driving back onto the road, the light turned green again. Then he switched it off.

  “Cool, huh?”

  She was duly impressed.

  “Did the state cough up the funds for this?”

  He gave her an odd look.

  “No. Another anonymous donation. I don’t suppose you know anything about this third one, either.”

  She shook her head, giving him a blank look.

  “I do not.”

  He turned the vehicle around to head back to Raging Ford, stopped off the road, pulled her close to kiss her again.

  “I want this a lot more often and a lot more besides. I’m up at night thinking about you
.”

  “Me, too. Maybe after tax season is over? You do have your staff back again. We should be able to find more time together.”

  He was silent a moment.

  “That will have to work. It would be easier if…” but he left the rest of his thought unfinished and for Laura to guess about.

  The ride was quiet on the highway.

  “Hey, can I try switching it on and off, just to get a feel for the pressure and resistance?”

  Connor threw a sideways look at her.

  “And you’d need to know that why?”

  “Just in case something happens one day and you’re not in the car or you might need help. You never know what can happen.” She feared she was beginning to sound like Eric Williams trying to sell insurance.

  He picked up the radio and told Flynn he was testing again. “On and off,” he directed her. “No talking.”

  She flipped it on and off, and on and off, and on and off, and on and off.

  Connor put his hand on hers.

  “That’s enough. And don’t touch it again or anything else in here. And, no, you cannot turn on the siren or lights.”

  Laura looked offended.

  “What am I—ten years old?”

  “Sometimes you are, yes.”

  Back at the shop, he followed her into the back room once again.

  Pulled her close once again.

  Very reluctantly stopped kissing her and gave her a look.

  “What?” she asked, wishing this moment could last.

  “Have I told you lately how glad I am that you’re here?”

  “No.”

  “When do you have to reopen for the afternoon? I could show you how glad I am you’re here.”

  She checked the analog wall clock. Ten minutes to go.

  “Not enough time.”

  They held each other for a few more minutes then he turned to go. One hand was on the doorknob to the shop and his other was still attached to Laura’s hand. As soon as the door opened, he let go.

  She followed him through the shop and watched him leave from the front door, watched him smile and wave as he drove off.