The Jumper

by Brian H Groover

reason. Jeff didn’t want to do it, but his hand was forced by the captain.

  4 Alicia

  That afternoon, Jeff got the financial statements he had been waiting for. He spent the rest of the day and evening going over them, and could not make heads or tails of them.

  The next morning, he took them to one of the departmental accountants, who owed him a favor. Alicia looked at them for a few minutes, then said, clearly puzzled, “so, what’s the problem, Jeff–aside from the fact that you need a new girlfriend?”

  He winced at the reference. He didn’t think news about Carol had spread already.

  “What’s the problem? I’m in over my head, that’s what the problem is.”

  She snorted. “Lots of pretty girls right here in the department,” she said, twirling blonde hair around a finger. Her eyes were saying, Come on, Jeff, take a hint!

  He chuckled. “Oh, I keep a stick to fight them off with. I meant the old man’s money, Alicia.” He had always liked Alicia, and even fantasized about her a little, but he had already been with Carol when he met her. He could not help his eyes flickering to take in her form again, as he realized he was allowed to think about such things, now. Not as thin as Carol, but . . . No. It was too soon, and this case was too important. He tapped the papers.

  Her eyes were crinkling, but Alicia sighed with good humor. “Okay, Jeff, I surrender. I mean, what are you looking for in the money? These finances seem fine.”

  Jeff stared at her. “He’s broke, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A year ago, he was rich, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, how did he go from being rich to being broke?”

  “Oh. Why didn’t you say so? Look here. It’s a classic scenario. This says he leveraged everything he owned to buy a huge chunk of a foreign company. I expect he thought it would go up quickly. Instead, it promptly went belly up. Because he leveraged, he owed a lot of money. Then he sold the estate to cover his losses...” She trailed off, frowning.

  “Jeff, are you sure these are all the records?”

  “Pretty sure. Why?”

  “He sold off his estate to cover his debts?”

  “Yeah, I think so. Yeah, it says it right there.” Jeff was looking at some notations on a closing statement. Alicia frowned at him, with a quizzical smile.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “That’s just a handwritten comment, Jeff. It doesn’t mean anything. In fact,” and she put the papers in order, “he didn’t have much debt at all, other than the stock loss.”

  “What?”

  That’s right. His estate was fully paid off–and he couldn’t have lost that, even in a bankruptcy, but he wasn’t in danger of bankruptcy, because he hadn’t really lost that much actual money. He could have sold off his estate on the open market, and lived very comfortably indeed, for his remaining years.”

  She flipped some more papers around, “instead . . . well, this is interesting. According to this, he sold the entire estate for about a quarter of what it was worth, to an offshore company, for . . . yeah, for almost exactly what he owed on the lost investment. Except for some living expenses he used to set up his apartment, everything he received from the sale of the estate went to paying off the debt.”

  She frowned, and said, “I don’t think I could come up with a faster and neater way to go from very rich to flat broke, if I tried.”

  “So, what laws were broken?”

  “None that I can see. He paid fees and taxes on the transactions, and registered them, all above board and proper. We don’t actually have laws against losing money.”

  “Dammit, I know that kid is dirty!”

  “Calm down, Jeff.” She placed a hand on his, smiled and opened her mouth, but his eyes widened, and he grabbed the piece of paper she had in her other hand.

  “Alicia, wait. This company that bought the estate–do they have any connection to the company that went under?”

  She paused a beat, sighed, and said, “I don’t know. The banking laws are really tight over there, but I can probably run it down for you.”

  She got up, patted him on the hand, and went out.

  Jeff spent the next couple of days trying to find out who the young man was. Probably long gone, he admitted to himself, but he kept looking.

  It took Alicia those two days and a couple of overseas phone calls to get the answer, but yes. They were both subsidiaries of the same parent company. The owners of the parent company were unknown, and were protected by privacy laws.

  “Thanks, Alicia,” he said when she brought him the news. “I owe you, big time.”

  “Buy me dinner?” she said, smiling brightly.

  He laughed, more easily this time. “I guess I need to start pretending to have a life, don’t I? Sure, but I want to track this guy down first. Then we can, okay? Promise.”

  “Okay,” she said, and glanced around before giving him a kiss on the cheek. “It’s a date.”

  As Jeff watched her swaying out of the room, leaving flower scents behind her, he reflected that it really would be good to move on, even though it had only been a couple of weeks. Carol was right; she never had been able to take his mind off his work, and that would have driven her crazy, if they’d gotten married. I have to look her up and thank her for that, some day. She’ll probably cry, but I still should.

  He was still not ready to start anything serious, but the driving and depressing nature of his work kept him too wrapped up in himself and his work.

  Alicia had called it a date. Maybe it was, at that, he thought, with a little smile. Then he shook his head and opened up the file folder on his desk. Get your head in the game, Jeff.

  5 Vanished

  The connection between the companies was not a smoking gun, but it could not be a coincidence. Somehow, this had to be part of a larger conspiracy to get the old man’s money.

  Jeff immediately put out an alert to be on the lookout for the John Doe, as a person of interest in a suspicious death. He didn’t have the ownership records of the parent company, but he’d be willing to bet his last nickel that all the money was intact, somewhere, and had not been lost at all. When they found out who had the money, they would have their killer.

  At the moment, the John Doe was the only suspect, although given the amount of money involved, Jeff realized he might just be a hired hand.

  It took several more days before they got more information back on the identity of the John Doe.

  His name, apparently, was Gilbert Stevens. He had opened up a bank account, the day he had been let out of the hospital, using a valid driver’s license. That proved he knew who he was, and that he had access to his records and identification.

  Later that same day, some money–not enough to alert law enforcement–had been wired into that account, from a numbered offshore account. The next morning, Stevens had returned to the bank, to withdraw most of it, in cash. Again, the amount was just under what would set off an alert. After he left the bank, no one claimed to have seen him.

  Jeff was able to find out that Stevens had another account at a different bank, but not what was in it.

  Everything had been legitimate on the transfer of the money. Aside from not being truthful about remembering his past, there was not one law that he had clearly broken, yet Jeff was certain Stevens was a killer. They couldn’t even charge him on the technicality of not being truthful about what he remembered, because he could just say he remembered it after he left the station.

  He had probably left the area when they had told him to stay, but they wouldn’t get very far with charging him over that one, either.

  It was a dead end. Jeff kept the alert out, listing him as a person of interest in a possible homicide, but it was a dry hole.

  He figured the guy was probably living high in Monaco, or some such place, never to be seen again.

  He grumbled about it to Alicia over dinner, a month later. “I was told there were some cases that would haunt me,” he said,
“but this is the first one for me, because I had the guy and I knew he was guilty, but I couldn’t prove it, and now he is beyond my reach.”

  The evening with Alicia had been nice, but hadn’t gone any further. Jeff knew he wasn’t getting any younger, but he was bothered by the Crane case more than he let on.

  He continued to try to track down Gilbert Stevens. He had managed to have the guy’s bank account frozen, and had gotten the alert raised to an arrest warrant on suspicion of homicide, but his captain warned him that he was on very shaky ground with it.

  “Just let it go, Jeff. The guy left a suicide note, for god’s sake!”

  “I can’t, Cap. Something is very wrong with this. We’ve known each other, what? Ten years? You know I can’t let go of something like this.”

  His captain sighed. “I know. I just think you ought to do your best, because I don’t think you’ll ever find anything else out about it. I have ones that still bother me from thirty years ago.”

  He clapped Jeff on the shoulder. “Take Alicia out again. That did you both some good.”

  Jeff looked up in surprise. “I didn’t know you knew about that.”

  The captain chuckled. “You both were much happier for a couple of days after it.” He sobered. “Then you both got depressed again. You aren’t in the same chain of command, so fraternization rules don’t apply.”

  “Giving me an order, Captain?”

  “No, no, just friendly advice from an old man who remembers being young and lonely. Maybe Alicia isn’t the one, Jeff, but don’t live your life alone. To do this job, you have to have someone else to go home