Hidden Justice

by J K Ellem

  Shaw was about to ask her again about her job in New York when he suddenly stopped and looked around at the darkness behind him.

  “What’s the matter?” Annie asked.

  For a moment Shaw said nothing, just stared into the night, the silhouette of the dunes crowded around them. “Who knows you live down here, Annie?”

  “Not many people. I like the seclusion, keep to myself. Why?”

  Shaw turned back to her. “Nothing really. Just thought I heard something.”

  “The nearest other property is half a mile away. But no one comes down here, not even during the day. That’s why I chose the place.”

  Shaw wanted to ask her more about herself but left it at that. “I’d like to take Ralph Jacobson’s boat and take a look at Moors Island.”

  “I usually work on Mondays,” Annie replied. “But I’ll call in and swap shifts with someone.”

  “Are you sure?”

  Annie nodded. “Look, I want to come. I’m as intrigued as you are about the Ballard house and where it could fit in with Edward Brenner's disappearance. There's something strange going on up at that house and I think there is a connection between the two families. We just haven't found it yet."

  Shaw resisted the urge to turn around again and look into the darkness. He didn’t want to alarm Annie. But he was certain they were being watched. He couldn’t pinpoint from where, though. It was just a feeling he had and he always trusted his feelings.

  Annie cleared the plates away then brought back a French press with coffee.

  “Can I ask you something, Annie? Not a personal question.”

  “Of course,” she replied as she poured coffee. She liked the way he asked her permission first. Another tick in her book.

  “Yesterday I was in town and I saw something strange.”

  Annie sat back down, “You’ll see a lot of strange things around here at times.”

  Shaw didn’t want to ask Abigail directly and definitely didn't want to mention it to Rudy Kerber until he was certain. Shaw looked up from the coffee cup. “Before I came into the library and saw you, I dropped off Abigail Brenner at a bistro in the main street, a big place, lots of people. She was meeting some friends.”

  “I know the place,” Annie replied slowly.

  Shaw continued, “When I returned to pick Abby up, I saw a woman there, seated at a table outside near where Abby and her friends were. The woman was by herself."

  Something stirred in the pit of Annie’s gut. "So what? Plenty of women sit by themselves at cafes and restaurants."

  "I know, but this woman was different." Shaw paused for a moment, then decided to back his instincts. He looked at Annie straight in the eye. “Can you tell me why someone would be following Abigail Brenner?”

  Annie froze, her own cup held halfway between the table and her lips. A slither of coldness twisted in her gut.

  31

  “What did this woman look like?” Annie asked, trying to hide the mild panic she now felt. It may be nothing. “It could be anyone," she said calmly.

  Shaw explained the woman sitting at the nearby table at the bistro, how he was certain that she was watching Abigail Brenner and her friends.

  “How could you tell she was watching the Brenner girl? She could have been a tourist, or a local.”

  “I know she was watching, Annie," Shaw replied. "Trust me. I can tell when someone is being watched or being followed because that’s what I used to do. I know the signs, the clues, the markers. I’m very good at watching people watch other people without them knowing I’m watching them, too.”

  “Used to do?” Annie asked. “What work exactly did you do?”

  “I used to be in the Secret Service,” Shaw replied. “Protective services.”

  Annie sat back. She had a feeling he was once involved in some kind of law enforcement work but never imagined it would be the US Secret Service. She didn’t want to ask but she needed to know. “Where was she sitting, this woman you saw?”

  “Outside. At a table near where Abby was sitting with her friends. Facing the street, three tables in, four tables away, just off the main walkway that leads back into the inside eating area and bar.” Shaw noticed a sudden change in Annie’s face. She looked a little paler, her smile gone, her eyes lost their sparkle, all replaced with a look of hardness.

  Annie tensed slightly, her mind visualizing what Shaw was describing, and with each passing second she felt a little more nauseous. Her carefully constructed mask was slowly peeling away. All her insecurities, all her paranoia came flooding back. Two years. Two damn years of effort and hard work.

  “I was there.” Annie’s voice was empty, hollow, all her soul gone. “I was seated outside. I closed the library early, after you had left. I drove there as I often do on a Saturday. It’s like a little ritual I have. Every Saturday. It's really the only time I go into town.”

  “You didn’t see me walk in?” Shaw asked.

  “No, but I saw Abigail Brenner and her friends sitting at a far table. They were loud, laughing a lot. They stood out.”

  Annie looked agitated, her hands fidgeting in her lap. Nervous tension. Something was eating the woman from the inside out.

  “I was reading a book, at a table. People came and went. I didn’t look up much or notice you. The place was busy. People everywhere.” Thinking back, Annie couldn’t recall seeing the woman Shaw had described. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was just her mind jumping to conclusions.

  "Where were you sitting?" Shaw said slowly.

  Annie gave a description of where she sat as best she could.

  It was then Shaw realized he’d made a mistake, a small one but nonetheless he had read the wrong angles. Annie Haywood was sitting in the same line of sight as Abigail Brenner, but further away. It was Annie Haywood not Abigail Brenner that the woman was watching from a distance. Shaw’s professional opinion of the woman suddenly increased and so did his threat assessment of her. She had deliberately used Abigail Brenner and her friends as a decoy, making out that it was them she was watching whereas in fact it was Annie Haywood she had under surveillance. The woman was skilled, highly trained, and left nothing to chance.

  Annie looked at Shaw, her emotions at war whether or not to tell him the truth. In the end, she decided she needed to tell him. She needed him. There was no one else she could turn to.

  After all this time of hiding in Erin's Bay, they had found her.

  Shaw sat patiently and listened while Annie purged. It wasn’t his place to judge, just to listen. If she asked him for his advice, he would certainly give it, his professional opinion and not in a self-righteous manner.

  Annie had worked as an accountant in New York, two years back. It was for a large family business based in Brooklyn called Matera Fine Foods. They were importers and wholesalers of European foods, mainly Italian produce -- olives, cooking oils, canned and bottled small goods that they would distribute to the various restaurants in Manhattan and upstate New York, as far north as Maine. The family business was more than a hundred years old, originally started by two Italian immigrants, husband and wife, who had come to America as penniless newlyweds from Sicily. Like most Italian immigrants who flocked to America in the late 19th century, they settled in East Harlem which became one of the largest Italian enclaves in America. Three grandsons of the original family patriarchs now ran the family business.

  At first, Annie was hired as the business accountant tasked with producing the monthly financial statements, inventory tracking, budgeting and taking care of all the IRS filings.

  The company had an office building in Bay Ridge, in the southwest corner of Brooklyn where Annie started to work. The office was attached to a modest warehouse where crates of imported goods were stored before distribution. The business also owned a small fleet of delivery trucks that would deliver goods in and around the city.

  The three grandsons rarely came into the office, preferring to run the food import business remotely by email and phone. That su
ited Annie. She didn’t like to be micromanaged.

  Over the first few months she had restructured the accounting system, updated the monthly reporting and created spreadsheets that would show the profit margin across most of the product lines. The three grandsons were suitably impressed and agreed to everything Annie suggested to streamline the financial reporting side of the business. Cash flow was not a problem for the business, sales were healthy and increasing each month. There was a decent surplus of cash in the business bank account that was growing as well. Annie had the help of a part-time accounts clerk in the office who worked for her and who would handle the data processing of sales invoices, supplier bills, customs fees and purchase orders into the accounting software for Annie to then review.

  “The business was making a lot of money,” Annie said. “Plenty of sales with really decent profit margins which surprised me.”

  “Why?” Shaw asked. “They were distributors of specialty foods, not volume based wholesalers.”

  Annie agreed. “It was like the three grandsons were not really interested in the actual business. I would show them monthly reports for the various product lines and they would just give them a cursory glance.”

  Then one day a Bill of Lading arrived at the office in an envelope, Annie explained. It was addressed to a company she didn’t recognized called Della Bruna. The street address on the envelope was correct but Annie had never heard of the company. So she did some digging. There was a storage room in the warehouse where old company files and records were kept in archive boxes. Annie had arrived in the job just after the previous accountant had left. She found a key to the storage room in her desk drawer but had no reason to look at the old files until now. So one night, after the accounts clerk had gone home, Annie took the key and took a look at the archived files in the storage room. Turns out that Della Bruna was another company that the family owned. Annie found files with invoices for goods sold to the unknown company by Matera Imports. But there were no electronic records on the computer system nor any mention of Della Bruna as a separate entity.

  “There were a lot of sales to it, and money was banked into a separate account that I had never seen before.” Annie went on to explain. “I had no idea another company sat beneath the main company.”

  Annie soon discovered by combing back through the old files in the storage room that Matera Imports was a front. Sure it had a legitimate side to it. It was a genuine food importer but sales were vastly inflated and so were the profits.

  “That meant it wouldn’t raise the suspicion of the tax authorities.” Shaw was beginning to see a familiar pattern emerge.

  Annie nodded, “That’s right, no one, especially the IRS, is going to come knocking if you pay a healthy slice of taxes each year. And they certainly paid their fair share of taxes, let me tell you.” Annie went on to explain that, even when she approached one of the grandsons with some suggestions on how they could restructure the operations to minimize the tax, he wasn’t interested. “Who isn’t interested in paying less tax?” Annie said.

  “So, you got more suspicious,” Shaw replied. Shaw knew where this was going but it was Annie’s story to tell.

  Annie nodded. She found evidence that the sales were inflated, the complete opposite of what you would do if you were trying to avoid paying tax not pay more tax. There was only one reason for this.

  “Money laundering,” Annie said. “Hidden under the main trading business was an entirely separate operation of criminal activity.”

  “By how much were the sales inflated?” Shaw asked.

  “Weekly gross sales were around a million dollars. I estimated that around forty percent of those sales came from legitimate sources, retail food groups, restaurant chains, sales to Brooklyn and Manhattan delicatessens.”

  “And the rest, or close to $30 million per year came via sales to Della Bruna?” Shaw said.

  Annie nodded. “Maybe more.”

  It was still a small operation by Shaw’s standards. Mexican drug cartels easily laundered upwards of a billion dollars a year. Annie's past employer was small fish by comparison.

  “Why didn’t you just go to the police?” Shaw asked. “Take copies of everything and call in the Feds?”

  Annie was silent for a moment. She gazed into the fire, lost in her thoughts, a look of regret on her face. When she spoke again tears welled in her eyes. “Because I’m stupid,” she said, angrier at herself than anyone else. “I made a mistake.”

  Annie had caught the attention of the youngest grandson, Lorenzo Matera. He took a quick interest in her. Took her out to dinner, explained the family history and humble beginnings to her, bought her gifts from Tiffany’s on 5th Avenue. At first Annie enjoyed the attention. But then as the months passed, Lorenzo began to change. He became more controlling, more domineering. He would tell her how to dress in the office even though most days it was just her and the accounts clerk. He would tell her what to wear out to dinner. How she should wear her hair, insist she was dressing too provocatively. "He resented the fact that I had my own cell phone," Annie explained. "He said I should put it under the business name, the company would pay the bills."

  "So he could see the itemized breakdown, see who you were calling," Shaw replied.

  When Annie declined the offer, Lorenzo Matera then constantly hounded Annie, wanting to know who she was calling or texting. It seemed that while Lorenzo Matera appeared on the outside charming, confident and a perfect gentleman, inside he was a raving narcissist. If Annie didn’t wear the jewelry he had given her, he would fly into fits of rage. Throw things. “Once he punched a hole in the office wall because I hadn’t called him that day.”

  “He expected you to call him every day and then put a hole in the wall because you missed a day?” Shaw asked in disbelief.

  “He was a control freak,” she said. “He wanted to know my every move. And when I said I wanted to break off the relationship, he went insane.”

  Shaw took a deep breath then asked the obvious question. “Did he ever hit you?”

  Annie’s silence answered that question. Shaw wanted to very much meet this Lorenzo Matera. “So, what happened next?”

  “I had full access to the company bank account,” Annie replied. She let the statement hang suggestively.

  There was no need for her to explain any further. Shaw knew what was coming next. “So you took some of the money. Their money."

  Annie nodded, wiping away the tears. “I knew it was wrong. But I was vengeful, I was angry. I used to be a strong woman, Ben. Independent, capable of my own decisions, not scared of anyone. Then it all changed when I met Lorenzo. I thought he would be different.”

  It was becoming obvious to Shaw that this wasn’t the first abusive relationship Annie had been involved in.

  “I wanted them to suffer financially, the entire family, for how Lorenzo had treated me, physically and mentally. I wanted them to pay.” Annie looked at Shaw. "I needed the money to escape as well. To get away from him."

  Shaw closed his eyes. Annie had stolen money from a crime family in Brooklyn and was now hiding out in Erin’s Bay.

  “The woman that you saw, at the restaurant…” Annie’s words trailed off.

  Shaw gave a thin smile. “Is now looking for you. She's been employed by the Lorenzo Family to find you.”

  Annie nodded. More tears.

  Shaw leaned forward and took her hand. “Annie, I could be completely wrong. I could be reading more into this than there is.”

  Annie pulled her hand away, shaking her head forcefully. Her words came out in a flurry. “No. You said you can tell, you said you were good at watching people. The woman was watching me. He’s found me, tracked me down. Lorenzo knows where I am.”

  “How?” Shaw asked.

  “Lorenzo often said that if I ever left him without him allowing it, he would come after me, that he would make sure he would find me. There would be consequences.”

  Shaw said nothing for a moment. “Your real name
isn't "Annie" is it?” Shaw knew she would have had to change her name, her entire identity. Not just because she was trying to escape from an abusive relationship. The amount of money that she had stolen would have been cause as well.

  Annie shook her head. “No. It’s Jennifer. Jennifer Ryan.”

  “Annie suits you more,” Shaw replied, trying to make light of a bad situation.

  “Jennifer is gone,” Annie said firmly. “She doesn’t exist anymore. I’m Annie Haywood.”

  One question still needed asking. “How much are we talking about Annie?” It felt strange calling her "Annie" now. “How much did you take?”

  “Ten million dollars,” Annie replied. “I transferred it to a few offshore bank accounts that I had setup in advance.”

  “And they didn’t notice the money gone?”

  “By the time they did, I was gone as well.”

  Shaw could understand that if it was a smaller amount, they may not come after her. But $10 million? For someone like Lorenzo Matera, the shame he would have felt inside the family circle may have been greater than the pain of the money Annie had stolen. His standing within the family would have suffered. Tracking down and making an example of Annie was the only recompense Lorenzo may want. Anything less wouldn't be enough to stop him.

  “I can give it back.” Annie suggested. “I’ve only spent a little.”

  Shaw shook his head. “Believe me, they’ll want it back, and then some more.”

  “More?”

  There was no easy way to tell her, so Shaw just went ahead said it. “If that woman I saw yesterday is working for them. Then they’ll probably kill you as well.”

  32

  She placed a call from her car, pulled over at a gas station before she returned to the motel room where she was staying. “I’ve found her and where she lives.”

  “Where?”

  “Long Island, in a small town called Erin’s Bay. Two hours east of New York.”

  There was a pause. Two years. Two years of looking for her. The time, the money spent, the resources, and now he had found her. But still the disbelief lingered. “Are you certain? Are you sure it’s her?”