by Desiree Holt
“Unfortunately,” Noah said, “totally possible. Or…” He leaned forward. “Think about this. What if Ruben Madea was the one who introduced them? What if Madea created this relationship with Craig, let him use the island for the photo shoots, then brought in Enescu to meet him? Dangled big, big money in front of him?”
“But Craig’s wife supposedly has plenty,” Lindsey reminded them.
“He could have wanted to build his own fortune,” Taylor suggested. “A lot of men are threatened by a very rich wife.” She looked at Noah and smiled. “I’m lucky my husband isn’t one of them, but…”
“Are you kidding me?” Noah winked at his wife. “Didn’t you know I married you for your money?”
But Lindsey saw the look that passed between them and knew that was as far from the truth as it was possible to get. Everything else aside, Noah Cantrell was one of the most self-confident men she’d ever met.
“Okay, everyone.” Taylor rapped her knuckles on the table. “Time to focus on fixing this. John, if this is true, Craig had to have been making a shitload of money on whatever it was they were doing. Have you been able to trace any of it yet? Where it came from? Where it went?”
“Not yet. I told Lindsey the books for Elite are so clean they squeak and that makes me very suspicious. Even the most honest person in the world makes an error now and then. That’s why they have accountants. But that’s only a first pass. A view of what’s out there in the public eye, so to speak.”
“And now?” Lindsey asked.
“Now I have to do the real work. Digging into accounts, looking for anomalies, comparing billings to deposits and so on and looking for inconsistencies. I pride myself on being able to find anyone’s hidden money anywhere, any time. Lindsey, are you able to work with me for the rest of the day? Are you needed on something else?”
“Whatever it is, we’ll clear you,” Noah answered for her. “This takes precedence. That okay with you?”
“Yes,” she agreed. “I just need a few minutes with the staff to prep them for the police. Then I’m good to go.”
She’d do whatever it took to get to the bottom of this. She couldn’t get rid of the feeling of nausea gripping her. How had she never caught on to any of this? How had she trusted Craig, worked side by side with him and been so oblivious to so many things?
“Good. Taylor, have Sarah pull together everything on every visit to the Caribbean that Craig took where Jerry accompanied him. You and I will discuss this with him together and see just how much he does or doesn’t know. Then we’ll plan our strategy on how to handle the current situation with the few clients we’ve got on the calendar for this afternoon.”
“I agree. Give me an hour to see what’s going on with everyone else and if the departments like art and graphics are up to date on their projects and what needs approval.”
“I can do that.”
“John, go way back in the books to when Craig began using that place for photo shoots. No,” she corrected herself. “Further than that. Right to where Elite began. Track every bit of money. Every single penny in and out. Then go on to his personal accounts.”
“You know I have no information prior to when I joined Elite four years ago,” Lindsey reminded the Cantrells.
“Doesn’t matter,” Taylor said. “It’s your brain we want. Plus, you have enough knowledge of how this business works to spot something out of whack even if you weren’t here.”
“Thank you for your confidence in me.”
More than I have in myself right now.
“One last thing.” Noah looked around at all of them. “You can correct me if I’m wrong, Lindsey. You probably knew Craig better than the rest of us. Whatever he was involved in, I don’t see him as taking the lead on it.”
“You’re right.” She wrinkled her forehead in thought. “He did great with Elite, especially after I came on board, but I don’t see him as someone who could pull together all the strings of a complex international operation.”
For a second there was heavy silence in the room.
“That means we have a lot of digging to do,” Taylor acknowledged. “Noah, that’s probably something else we should bring Charley in on. Meanwhile, John, anything at all you can find in his financials, business and personal, might give us a thread to tug.”
“I’m on it.”
“One more thing,” Taylor added. “Lindsey, we need to talk to Jerry Ortiz and find out what he knows about Madea, what this situation is, and see if he’s involved in this, too. He could be the one who’s been helping cover this stuff up. But when we talk to him, let’s be as casual as we can. If he is involved, we don’t want to send off any warning signals. And I want to wait and see what John finds today, also.”
“Let me know whenever you want to do it. I might just message him and ask him what his schedule is like for the rest of the day.”
“Sounds good. All right, people.” Taylor rose. “We have a lot to do. Let’s get to work. We’ll get together again at the end of the day, unless of course someone finds something before then.”
Lindsey didn’t want to tell her she wasn’t too optimistic about that. If Craig Wainwright had hidden what he was doing so well all this time, nothing would be easy to find. But one thing she did know. When they found it, the effect would be like a bomb going off.
Chapter Eleven
Lindsey drained the last of the coffee from her mug, debated about getting up to refill it and decided against it. She’d already had so much today that she was close to a caffeine high and afraid her nerves would get the better of her. But there was no doubt she’d needed it.
First there’d been the meeting with the staff. To say they’d been appalled about the results of the autopsy and unhappy that the police would be swarming over them was an understatement. At last they’d managed to get past the initial shock and questions, and said of course they’d do whatever they could. Lindsey had kept a careful eye on Jerry while she spoke, watching his reaction. Of course, while he might have been involved with what Craig was into, it didn’t mean he knew anything about the man’s death.
She had to say, the two detectives who arrived to question everyone were professional and respectful. Leda helped her monitor the questioning while she worked with John and let her know everyone was cooperating. However, she was sure this was a dead end for them. At least she hoped.
The work with John was tense and nerve-racking, especially since she had to control her body’s unwanted reaction to him triggered by their close proximity. She considered herself a disciplined person, and it was a damn good thing, because the air between them was so charged with electricity she wondered they got any work done at all. But she had to do it.
The work was tedious and draining, but there was a lot at stake here. The knowledge of how important this was, how devastating what they found could be, had to override everything else.
Yesterday, they’d started working at Craig’s desk, the two of them sharing his computer, but that was too restricting, so they used the passwords to access the mainframe from their laptops. That way they could work at the big round table and be more comfortable. But every time she looked at an electronic ledger sheet or a report, her mind kept going back to what they’d learned about the man who had called Craig.
“You’ve been staring at that same screen for five minutes.” John’s voice held a note of amusement.
“What? Oh!” She leaned back and raised her arms to stretch. “Sorry. I was just—”
“Wondering if Craig got into this before or after Elite?” He rubbed a hand over his face. “That’s the big question, or one of them. There are plenty more.”
“No kidding.” She shook her head, hoping to clear her brain. “I know it’s right in front of us. I just can’t figure out what it is.”
“Obviously new clients were added after the Arroyo deal, but you’ve checked each of them and there’s nothing hinky about any of them. Right?”
She nodded. “Right. And you c
an’t find anything in Craig’s finances or the agency’s that sends up an alarm. At least so far. Also right?”
He nodded. “It’s frustrating, because usually after the first pass through everything, I have some clue as to what I should be looking for and where. But here? Nothing. Damn it.” He went back to looking at the page on his laptop. “So I started at the beginning and went over these accounts again, knowing I was missing something. Sure enough, there it was, but so innocuous I missed it before. Something that’s been sitting right in front of us, but so cleverly disguised we passed right over it.”
She peered at his laptop. “Right over what?”
He leaned back in his chair. “I’ve done a brief profile on each Elite client, just so I could have a complete picture of the agency operations. The billings on almost every client fall within certain parameters, except for one.”
“Which one? I know some are larger than others, but they basically all fit the same profile.”
“What about Masquerade?” He pointed to his screen. “They’re a stand-alone day spa that show an incredible amount of money moving in and out. I’m surprised no one noticed before.”
Lindsey glanced at the laptop screen. “Masquerade? I’m embarrassed to say I’ve really had nothing to do with them, so I can’t tell you much about them. I guess if I looked at the figures, I just thought they were very expensive. They were Craig’s client, so I had little to do with them. And the financials were his responsibility, as the owner. He handled the oversight of all the accounting. Why? What’s the problem with them?”
“They seem to be okay at first glance, but I don’t know. Something makes the back of my neck itch. A lot of money is spent on Masquerade. Usually, for that kind of bucks, you’re advertising an entire chain of spas.”
Lindsey shook her head. “I know for a fact that it’s just the one facility. They’ve been on the books for a long time. It was Craig’s account. The spa was a client before I came on board. Whenever I asked about them at the client review meetings, he brushed off the questions. Said the owner was a longtime friend and he kept them as clients as a favor. Although for the money they paid us and the amounts we spent on them, we should have been reviewing them on a regular basis. But when Craig called them old friends, I just let it go. He handled it himself and they always paid their bill on time.”
He rubbed his jaw, his brow creased in thought. “Maybe I’m seeing something when nothing’s there. There’s two ways you can look at this. It is exactly what it appears and nothing more, or it’s one of what could turn out to be many places where money was being washed. And the more I look at it, the more I think there’s too much financial action for a facility like this. Plus, every other client this size had been purged, and most likely referred to an agency that handles entities more that size.”
“I never really thought about it.”
“I kept coming back to it because it’s the only thing that’s the least bit out of whack. I need to start checking the bank accounts, looking at expenses and deposits. Can you pull up the billing history for Masquerade and we can make comparisons?”
“Sure. Not a problem.” She typed the password into her computer for the accounts receivable. “Okay, I’ve got it.” She caught her bottom lip between her teeth. “Regardless of the billing, warning bells should have gone off when a man as busy as he was didn’t just hand this off to one of the junior agents. Truthfully, though, at the time I was so busy getting up to speed on everything else and bringing in major clients myself that I just didn’t pay much attention to it.”
“Maybe they were just trying to be competitive with all the other larger spas in the area. This whole area is filled with spas, both the day-only ones and those that have facilities for overnight guests. Does your information list what Elite did for them?”
“Yes.” She began reading from her screen, scrolling through invoice after invoice. “Damn, John. We did stuff for them the same size as businesses five times their size. Why didn’t anyone ever catch this?”
“Who would that be? You already said Craig handled all of this himself. He was the head man. Did he ever present you with a complete spreadsheet of income and expenses for all clients?”
“Only sort of. Those sheets wouldn’t include what we did for them as compared to others. And, truth be told, Craig was very proprietary about his personal clients.”
“We’re going to have to look at each one of those, too. Unless he read you in on every detail, all you ever had was his word for anything.”
“And no reason to question it.” The possibilities were making her sick.
“I hear you.” He studied his screen again. “Something else here. All of Elite’s financial records are incredibly neat. I know you said your bookkeeper is manic about it, but, Lindsey? Listen to me. Nobody—and I mean nobody—has financial records that never have so much as one digit out of place. One decimal point. One…anything. And I’ve examined financials of corporations that pay many thousands of dollars for accountants to handle this stuff.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Let me pull up the list I created of each client and the annual expenditures. I’m not saying Craig was cleaning money but if—repeat, if—he was in some kind of business with Ruben Madea and Alex Enescu, you know he was washing the money through Elite.”
Lindsey clicked through the reports on her laptop. “Here’s something else. Their clientele is pretty static. They always report at capacity, but what is capacity for a spa? Do you limit the number of facials? Mani-pedis? Wax jobs? Tell me I’m wrong, John, but doesn’t every business have a fairly uneven graph line? Some months are busier than others. And Christmas? Hold on a second.” She typed in some commands, pulled up what she wanted and turned her laptop so he could see the screen. “For December they spent barely more than the other months. Their income is finite for their size, yet they’re spending huge amounts on marketing every month.”
John began typing on his laptop again. “Let’s see the rest of Craig’s accounts and read me the names. I’m going to look at the accounts receivable and the bank deposits.”
“Wait.” Lindsey jumped up and hurried over to Craig’s desk. “Taylor asked Aiden to crack the password on Craig’s computer for the part not connected to the server. If this is what we think, the regular accounts won’t tell the story, right?”
“Very good.” He grinned at her. “Want to be my assistant?”
She just smiled as her fingers flew over the keys. The password worked, but even then she had to work through layers to find what she wanted. The more she dug, the sicker she got. How was I so stupid as to miss all of this?
At last, when she’d completed her search, she pushed back from the desk.
“Okay, come take a look.”
On the screen were transactions she’d never seen before, with banks she’d never heard of, for huge amounts of money. She moved so John could sit down and work his magic, the sick feeling getting worse as he pulled up more and more information.
“He was doing it, wasn’t he?” she said at last.
John nodded. “All of this is off the books, but he’s covered because he lists them as legitimate clients. But he’s moving three times as much or more to these offshore accounts, then back through something called Litton Industries. Sure as hell that’s a shell corporation. Then it’s moved from Litton to numbered accounts that he can access.”
“Hiding money. Accumulating it. And a fucking hell of a lot.”
“Bingo!”
“They must have a website,” Lindsey said at last. “That would tell us something about the business. I mean, everyone has a website these days, right?” She typed the name into the search bar and, in moments, images filled her screen. “Here it is. Take a look.”
The screen showed a low adobe building, Spanish in architecture with a red barrel tile roof. To Lindsey it looked more like a large home than a day spa, except for the parking lot that had about ten cars parked in it. But agai
n, considering Elite’s client list, it was not what she would have expected the firm to be spending time on.
She clicked on each of the pictures one at a time. They were all professional photos of a typical day spa operation. Then she opened the screen with all the information.
“According to this,” she said, “on paper it’s owned by a woman named Madeleine Cross.”
“Let me see what I can find out about her.” John’s fingers danced over his keyboard. Lindsey slid her chair over so she could watch his screen, but the images changed so fast she almost got a headache.
“How do you even know what you’re looking at?” She blinked. “Are you even reading any of this stuff?”
He nodded. “It doesn’t take more than a glance to know if I’m on the right page or not. Okay. Here we are. Not that it tells us anything.”
“Where?” Lindsey studied the screen. “Oh, okay. I see. The corporate papers for Masquerade. Damn! How did you do that?”
“It’s all in the magic touch,” he teased, flexing his fingers. Then his face sobered. “But as you can see, all it gives us is a place to start. See? It just shows it being owned by another corporation, which is the way a lot of these things work. Shit.”
He went to work on the keys again, Lindsey watching as he moved from one website to another. At last he sat back, frowning.
“What?” Lindsey stared at the screen. “What’s the problem?”
“I’m going to need more time to do this, and even then I have to figure out how it’s connected to Craig. Whoever set this up knows his stuff—or hers—and has layers on top of layers.”
Lindsey sat back in her chair, discouraged. “I don’t know which upsets me more, the fact that we need a shovel to dig up this information or that Craig was involved in something like this. I’m telling you, John, if you’d met him, you’d never have expected this of him. He was bright, funny, great with clients. Creative. Popular in the community. He and Natalia traveled at the top level of area society.”