by Tom Fowler
“I’m worried we’ll knock a pile over by looking at it funny,” he said.
“We’ll need to be careful.” I examined a heap stacked with a nominal degree of care. Eisenberg helpfully wrote on the covers of the books. If he wanted to protect Rosenberg, he may have written a fake name. It would complicate our search. I flipped through the first few pages to see if anything in the ledger looked familiar to my non-accounting-trained eyes.
“This could take more than forty minutes,” Rollins said.
“We’ll stay as long as we can. Check the covers for anything obvious. I’m also looking at the first couple pages.”
“Roger.” Rollins flipped through a book. I constantly felt a pile or several of them would topple any second. We were playing Jenga with ledgers, Katherine Rodgers’ life being the object of the game. I really didn’t care if we knocked stacks over. Let Eisenberg know someone burgled his place; I didn’t care what he thought.
Thirty minutes and some mound slippage later, I found a shopworn record book with “DR” on the front. A quick perusal showed sums I would expect a loan shark to handle, even if they didn’t portend the financial struggles Rosenberg would encounter. A cooked ledger was still something—there was truth in fiction, after all. Rollins tipped a pile over and tried to recreate the chaos as best he could. “I think I found what we came here for,” I said.
“Good,” said Rollins. “My interior decorating skills are getting strained in this pig sty.”
He walked to the door and opened it, looking around the small lobby. When he let me know, I came out, locking the door from the inside. We’d barely gotten back into the Caprice when Rich sent a text saying Eisenberg would be leaving Miss Shirley’s. My quick return inquired about his financial profile. He didn’t reply.
Eisenberg’s books painted a sunny picture of Rosenberg’s financial situation. My printouts from the bank stated otherwise, and I knew I could get more given necessity and time. I set to working on it while I unearthed Marvin V. Bernard’s business card. He answered promptly. “Marvin, I’m hoping you remember me. My name is C.T. Ferguson. We spoke at a funeral home a few days ago.”
“Yes, of course. Is there something else I can help you with?”
I went over the details of the case, leaving out some stuff he didn’t need to know but making sure he received a clear idea of the situation. “I’m trying to find the girl, and I think the records of a loan shark might hold some information.”
“And you need my accounting expertise,” he said.
“I do.”
“I have an appointment in fifteen minutes, but their situation isn’t nearly as dire as yours. I’ll reschedule. Where are you?”
I gave him my address.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” he said.
Marvin read through the book with his glasses pushed up on his nose and a studious frown on his face. His eyes moved across the columns at a glacial pace. I watched until I decided painting the wall and observing it dry would be more interesting. Marvin probably looked at every ledger this way. If he read a regular tome the same way, it would take him a long weekend just to get through Dr. Seuss.
“You mentioned some other documents?” he said after a few minutes.
“Yes,” I said, “Printouts of bank statements.”
“The police shared those with you?” Marvin arched his brows over his glasses.
“My cousin is a police detective.”
He shrugged. “Must be nice.”
I wanted to say it really wasn’t, but I held my tongue. I handed Marvin the sheets. “Should be some more . . . arriving soon,” I said. “If those don’t paint the whole picture, the extra ones might help.”
“It’s an interesting picture so far.” Marvin took the printouts and got back to work. I turned my monitor a little more away from him and went back to the rest of David Rosenberg’s financials. It took a while, but Marvin the Torpid Accountant needed a while, so it all turned out well. I took care to make sure to erase my e-footprints, printed out my very illegally-obtained financial records, and handed them to Marvin. He took them without looking up.
I scanned the soft copies on my screen. Rosenberg made a few of those mysterious deposits, and they conveniently cropped up whenever he needed the money. I looked at the dates. One corresponded closely to the disappearance of Amy Horton. I wished I’d searched for this sooner. Could it have saved Katherine? I couldn’t think like this now; I needed to find the link between Amy Horton’s disappearance, the payout to Rosenberg, and whether any other money received lined up with other girls going missing.
I moved all the suspicious payouts into a separate document and printed it. Earlier, I located a few sites decrying Rosenberg. I went back through my history to find them again. With what I suspected now, those sites went from the bitter ramblings of people who dealt with a seedy loan shark to cautionary tales. Marvin Bernard’s slow pace gave me all the time I needed to read a few websites, blogs, and local subreddits. I found stories of two more girls who vanished, and those dates lined up with deposits to Rosenberg’s accounts, too. How did the BPD and BCPD miss this? Wouldn’t they ask for warrants to look at his financials, considering his reputation as a loan shark? Or did they get denied because creeps like Rosenberg always have a friend in a high place?
Marvin still kept his nose buried in statistical pages, so I looked up the owner information for one of the websites and made a phone call. When a woman’s voice answered, I said, “Is this Mrs. Driscoll?”
“Yes, who is this?”
“My name is C.T. Ferguson. I’m a private investigator.”
“Oh,” she said, “is something wrong?”
“I’m looking into a case involving David Rosenberg,” I said.
She exhaled into the phone, and it sounded like she forced it through clenched teeth. “That bastard. What did he do now?”
“The same as he’s always done, I suppose. During my case, another girl went missing.”
“Oh, no. Her poor parents.”
“I’ve been looking into some suspicious transactions in Rosenberg’s financials, and I’ve lined a few up with the disappearances of girls.”
“You’re saying someone is paying him to kidnap the daughters of people who borrow money from him?”
“I can’t make the conclusion yet,” I said. “Right now, I’m following the money and seeing where it goes.”
“Where is it going?” she asked.
“I’m still working on it, but I’m trying to learn as much as I can. Could I meet you somewhere?”
“Uh . . . sure, I guess. What area are you in?”
“Federal Hill.”
“We’re in Cockeysville. How about Spro Coffee in Hampden? Do you know where that is?”
“I’ll find it.”
“Twenty-five minutes?” she said.
“I’ll be there. Thank you.” We hung up. Marvin still studied and made occasional notes with a mechanical pencil. When he didn’t need the pencil, he kept it behind his ear. “I have to run out and look into something else for the case,” I told him. “How long do you need?”
“I want to make sure we get this right,” he said. “At least another hour.”
“All right. I’ll be back as quickly as I can.”
“I take it this is a pro bono gig?”
I smiled. “I promise you half of what my client is paying me.”
A smile traced his lips. “I thought so.”
I left for Hampden right away. For the second time all month, I wouldn’t be late for something unless it took forever to park in Hampden, which it often can. Thirty-Sixth Street—packed with shops, restaurants, and places like Spro—has been branded “The Avenue” to make it sound special. I never thought it needed the help, but the closest I got to a marketing class in college was mocking the people who took one. After a few minutes of driving around, I found a spot on a side street two blocks up and enjoyed a three-minute walk to the shop.
Past it
s purple rowhouse exterior, Spro looked like a lot of other coffee joints, only with more wood and paneling. The hipster count was consistent with other java shops, though the ones here dressed the part with more fealty. I walked past a couple girls trying their best to look like a new cast of Jersey Shore. They must have missed the memo.
I looked at the menu. It was about a quarter the size of Starbucks, but the confusing ratio was inversely proportional. I settled on Experimental Dark made via French press and sat several tables away from the shore girls—or whatever they were. They regarded me like I’d been out of touch for a generation. I may as well have worn a velvet smoking jacket and puffed a meerschaum pipe. I tried my best not to feel old well before my time. Handsomeness would cover the multitude of sins.
A few minutes later, a couple in their forties strolled in. Their gray Ralph Lauren coats went with the color asserting its dominance in their hair. They wore matching jeans and shoes you couldn’t buy at a mall. Both walked to the counter and ordered coffee. Armed with a pair of drinks, they sidled away from the counter and looked around. I caught the woman’s eye and inclined my head. She wandered toward my table, and her husband followed. “You’re C.T. Ferguson?” she said.
“In the flesh,” I said, gesturing toward the empty seats at the table.
They both sat. “I’m Sarah. This is my husband, Chris.” Chris gave a curt nod but made no move to put his coffee down and shake my hand. I mirrored the same non-move. “Anything involving Rosenberg concerns us.”
“We know he had something to do with our Stephanie disappearing,” Chris said.
“He probably did,” I said. “I have to be honest: considering the time elapsed, I doubt there’s any chance of me finding your daughter.”
“I know,” Sarah Driscoll said. She let out a breath and looked down at her coffee before continuing. “She’s gone. We’ve come to terms with that. But it sounds like we can help spare another family what we’ve gone through.”
“And if we can get to Rosenberg, it would be good, too,” Chris added.
“Don’t go and do something crazy, honey,” Sarah said.
“The son of a bitch has probably vanished, right?”
“I presume he has, yes,” I said. He had gone silent, and If he were smart, he high-tailed it after we barged into his business.
“Well, if you find him, let me know. We were in a bad way when we went to him. It’s not the case anymore. We have money. If some of it can buy him an early grave, it’s money well-spent.” Chris stared at me, unblinking.
There was no wavering in his gaze. I took him seriously because he meant it. He wanted Rosenberg’s blood, and I couldn’t blame him. “I want to find him, but right now, my concern is with finding the missing girl.”
“Of course,” Sarah said. “Is there anything we can do?”
“You could tell me what happened before your daughter was taken.”
Chris sighed. He shook his head. Sarah squeezed his hand, and he returned the gesture. “We needed money. Banks didn’t want to loan it to us. A guy I used to work with borrowed from Rosenberg and didn’t have any problems. When my business started off slowly, we were forced to make some . . . reduced payments. We were trying, you know? We told him what was happening, and he said he understood.”
“How reduced were the payments?” I said.
“Usually forty percent. Half when we could. We did it for five months.”
“Rosenberg seemed OK with it?”
“He said he would have to add some money to the back end,” said Chris, “but he wasn’t giving us too much grief about it. No one came by and threatened to break our legs or anything.”
“And then your daughter was gone.”
“A week before her eighteenth birthday.” Sarah said. She teared up. “We didn’t get so much as a note from anyone. The police investigated for a while, but they didn’t come up with anything.”
“And Rosenberg still wanted his money?” I said.
“Sure did,” Chris said. “We paid him off when my business started hitting it big. It ended a little ahead of schedule.”
If Rosenberg got money when Stephanie Driscoll was kidnapped and then collected in full from the Driscolls, he was double-dipping. Why not simply kidnap the daughter as motivation? The Driscolls paid him off and still didn’t get their daughter back. What happened to these girls? “I’m going to see what I can find out about all of this,” I said. “I don’t want you to get your hopes up, though. If there’s information somewhere about your daughter, I’ll pass it along to you, but right now, I’m looking for the girl who just disappeared.”
“And Rosenberg.”
I nodded. “If he’s gone, then him, too.”
“Make sure you keep us in the loop,” Chris said.
“I will.”
“Thank you, C.T.,” Sarah said. She shook my hand. Her husband didn’t.
I got back to my house to find Marvin Bernard waiting in the office chair where I left him. He’d closed the ledger book and marked the printouts with more lead than I could follow as I walked by him and sat behind my desk. “Looks like you’ve finished.”
“I have,” he said. “Mr. Rosenberg’s empire, as it were, is a giant clamshell organization . . . ‘shell’ being the operative term.”
“So the books are cooked?”
“To use the vernacular, yes. There are legitimate transactions in there, but some are embellished, made up out of whole cloth, or show deposits resulting from moving money back and forth.”
“Why would Rosenberg need cooked books?” I said. “It’s not like loan sharks are publicly-traded commodities.”
“My guess is to sham a creditor or creditors who might see his finances,” said Marvin. “Or maybe someone within his organization. I don’t know, really. All I know is the books are falsified.”
“Does he have any money on hand?”
“Some. More than the average person but far from a fortune.”
“But he could pack his bags and hit the road if he felt the noose tightening.”
Marvin nodded. “He has enough money to flee town and survive for a while. How long depends on a lot of factors.”
“Those mysterious twenty-thousand-dollar transfers . . . I think they coincide with some kidnappings. Did you notice anything about them?”
“The ledger’s details are not legitimate,” he said. The hard copies you gave me show those sums came from an account marked THC. I concluded it to be The Hong Corporation.”
The Hong Corporation. I knew of the name. Asian kidnappers. I hoped Rollins found some good information about human trafficking, and I wished even harder we wouldn’t need it. “I’ll need to follow the money,” I said.
“If I were a forensic accountant, I could tell you more.”
“You’ve told me a lot already, Marvin.” I extended my hand, and he shook it. “Thank you. If I need more information later, can I call you again?”
“Please do. It’s a shame what happened to that man and now his family. I feel . . . connected in some way. If I can help, I will.”
“Great, thanks.”
Marvin let himself out. I’d been handed a lot of information to digest, and as was becoming the norm, a lot of work to do.
I knew The Hong Corporation would be a shell company. If they were trafficking women overseas, I’d be playing the shell game for a while. I wasn’t sure Katherine Rodgers could spare the time unraveling it would take me. While I started looking up some things online, I yelled for Rollins. He poked his head in the office door a moment later. “What’s going on?” he said.
“I think the human trafficking angle is in play,” I said, “as much as I wish it weren’t.” I filled him in on what I’d learned from the Driscolls and Marvin Bernard. “I know you did some research on it. I don’t need the results now, but I want you to add something to it.”
“What?”
“The Hong Corporation. I’m sure it’s a fake, probably with as many layers as an onion. See ho
w it fits with what you’ve found out about trafficking so far.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then we know something, at least.”
Rollins gave me a thumbs-up. “You got it,” he said and walked away. I went back to my research. I quickly learned human trafficking was a multibillion dollar business. The fact gave me pause. In my time as a PI, I’ve gone after a few rich and prominent local assholes but nothing on this scale. Even if The Hong Corporation only handled a tiny portion of the sum, they could be raking in tens of millions. They wouldn’t even miss the small checks they wrote to Rosenberg.
Hong maintained a negligible online presence, which was no doubt how they wanted it. Rosenberg owned a legit business he could point to; The Hong Corporation couldn’t make the same claim. The ownership data for their website quickly proved to be a dead end. The email address listed as a contact bounced when I sent a test message. They needed to pay their web hosts, however, and they used a small overseas outfit called Brightstar Hosting.
Considering web hosting companies have a lot of valuable data in their systems, you’d think they would do a good job of securing it. Brightstar, for their part, had good if basic defenses, but my network mapping revealed an older Linux server they should have tossed out the window years ago. Pivoting onto that server took only a few minutes. Account information was easy to find. The Hong Corporation’s hosting fees were paid by THC, LLC. This was like a Russian gift box. At least it represented new information. I searched for THC, LLC to see what I could find.
They had a similarly small online presence, but where The Hong Corporation was an obvious shell, THC added more appearances of legitimacy. I set a few scripts to run and left the room to get Rollins. I found him in the living room, frowning at a laptop screen. “Want to pay another visit to Rosenberg?” I said.
“Why are we going to see him?”
“We know more now. Maybe we can use it to our advantage. I’m mining for some data, and it’ll take a little while.”
“Sure, let’s go talk to him.”