by Lisa Black
“So people come here to finance their home loans,” Riley said.
“To one of our regional offices. This is our headquarters, where we oversee the regionals and train their managers. I know it’s small—that’s by design. Having too many chiefs only dilutes the profits—and, um, the product.”
“Did Joanna have any enemies?” Jack asked.
“Sure. Bank of America, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, every mortgage originator in the country hates our market share, which grew again by two percent last quarter. That’s why Bryan wants to buy us. But I doubt any of them would send an assassin to her home.” She seemed to consider her own remark. “I mean, it wouldn’t do any good. Joanna founded Sterling, but it’s not like it’s going to go away without her. It would be like killing one of you. The investigation would still go on, right?”
This seemed an odd analogy, though true. It was her utterly impersonal delivery, with an utter lack of hesitation over the word killing that stuck in Maggie’s mind like a thumbtack.
She went on. “No, if someone murdered Joanna it—are you sure it wasn’t a burglar? She showed me pictures of her house and it looked pretty spectacular. Not like mine, but really nice. I can’t believe she hasn’t been robbed already.”
“It’s a possible theory, but from the appearance of the scene we don’t believe it’s likely,” Riley said, as if he was reading the line out of a manual. Lauren Schneider didn’t seem to notice.
Maggie wondered at someone who described the Moorehouse mansion as “really nice.” But then, she had only seen pictures.
According to her.
“Huh. Well, who knows what Joanna was getting up to in her off hours. She had always been tight-lipped about her personal life. She didn’t tell and I didn’t ask. Seems to me the only suspect from this office would be her little boy toy out there, Jeremy. He’s employed here only because she found him useful in bed. He wouldn’t know a decent tranch if it swallowed him.”
“‘Tranch’?” Riley asked.
Lauren blinked at him, then laughed, which temporarily softened her features. “Oh, sorry. Mortgage loans are sold in categories according to risk and return, called tranches. Think of it as slaughtering a cow. You get filet mignon, flank steak, and hamburger. They take bundles of these mortgages and chop them up. Investors in the first tranch get paid first, as the borrower pays on the loan. They make, say, six percent interest. The second tranch gets paid next, and they get nine percent. The third tranch gets paid last, but since it’s the riskiest because the borrower might repay the loan early before they get their cut, they get twelve percent. Risk versus return is all investing is. The biggest risk is prepayment. Investors want a thirty-year mortgage to take thirty years, because that maximizes the interest paid.”
Riley said, “So one man’s debt is another man’s—”
“Stream of income.”
Maggie could see Jack’s eyes glazing over, and he changed the subject. “Can you think of any enemies? Of Joanna’s, or Sterling’s?”
The woman hooked one thumb over her shoulder, pointing at the windows behind her. “Him.”
“The protesters?”
“Their leader. Ned Swift is our local crusader against the big, bad companies that actually make money. When he isn’t writing op-eds, he’s holding press conferences and handing signs to those people he occasionally gets to show up. ‘Ned versus the Fed’—no? You haven’t—anyway, if you want an enemy, he’s who comes to mind.”
“Had he argued with Joanna?” Riley asked, making a note.
“Mostly via the press and blog sites. He’d call her constantly.… We kept changing her number but somehow he’d get it. This is the third protest he’s staged—there was another last week, the first about three months ago. They think by blocking the front door they’ll interfere with our business, but we come in the back and they don’t dare tangle with Mannie. He’d eat them for breakfast if they tried to pass the gate.” She appeared to take great satisfaction in that mental image. “And, as I said, customers don’t come to this location anyway. He got a few minutes of film coverage and that was it. The housing bust is over, prices are going back up. Ned is old news and he can’t stand it.”
“Any of those protests turn violent?”
“Nah,” she said, then remembered that she alone represented sophistication. “No.”
“Well, we’ll talk to Mr. Swift. Anyone else?”
She shook her head, but uncertainly. Riley repeated the question but she had made up her mind and insisted that everyone admired Joanna. There were no serious internal disputes.
The constant murmur of noise out in the desk pool ebbed and flowed. Lauren Schneider’s gaze darted across that room constantly, looking for … what? Moral support? Opposition? That no one slacked off in Joanna’s absence?
“What about this merger?” Riley asked.
“The merger is a great idea. It will open up our system to new markets. DJ Bryan is the largest and best investment bank in the world. We couldn’t be more secure than to be part of their umbrella.”
“Don’t a lot of people lose their jobs in a merger?” Jack asked.
“Yes,” she said without hesitation. “But we won’t. Loan officers in some of the smaller regionals might become redundant, but no one here will be let go. Bryan will need us. We’re the ones making Sterling so profitable.”
She spoke confidently, but there seemed to be the slightest undercurrent, tremulous and worried, and Maggie noticed the woman’s perfect manicure bite into one folded forearm. Mergers caused reshuffling. People always lost their jobs—and very often the people at higher levels, not lower. The business world was Machiavellian: Don’t keep the old leaders around—they’ll only divide loyalties and delay the conversion to the conquering group’s way of doing things. Unless Lauren’s job had been guaranteed in the merger agreement, she couldn’t know what would happen. With or without Joanna.
It didn’t seem to give her much of a motive to kill her boss, though.
Unless she believed those boots were hers to fill, and a position for Joanna’s with DJ Bryan had been guaranteed.
“Your coworker Leroy Sherman? Will Bryan need him?”
“Leroy barely knows what the name of this company is. He had been a bigwig at Goldman Sachs and Joanna hired him just to get his name, and his credibility, on the letterhead. We don’t need him anymore but he has six more months on his contract. When he’s not playing golf he’s at his desk scheduling tee times.”
The detectives finished their questions and Lauren Schneider gave up her DNA and fingerprints, even though, she insisted, it would do them no good since she had never been to Joanna’s house. She glared at Maggie as she conducted the indignity of swabbing the insides of Lauren’s open mouth. Maggie tried to be as pleasant, downright obsequious, as she could. To roll someone’s complete prints properly it is important that their fingers be relaxed and pliable. If the donor’s body tensed up in an angry knot, it made the process that much more difficult. Lauren Schneider was nothing if not an angry knot. When they were done she looked at her ink-covered palms and then shot Maggie a skewering glance, as if Maggie had dealt a profound and deeply personal betrayal. Not even Riley’s polite thank-you thawed her.
He held the door for her so she wouldn’t have to touch the handle with her darkened fingers. “Would you ask Mr. Bowman to come in?”
“I’ll do whatever I can to help you catch whoever killed Joanna. That does not make me your secretary.” With that she left the conference room, holding both hands away from her as if they now needed amputation.
Chapter 7
“Sweet gal,” Riley summarized. “That was a bunch of nothing. Let’s get this Pierce guy. What sort of a name is that, anyway? Pierce? Sounds like a Hallmark movie.”
“You watch Hallmark movies?” Jack asked.
“Don’t start no nasty rumors.”
Jack said, “And their buddy Ned, too. Sounds like he has a different take on Sterling Financial’s as
sistance in the American Dream.”
“Ned Swift. And what kind of a name is that?” Riley left the room to retrieve the distinguished gentleman from DJ Bryan.
Maggie, now on the other side of the table where she had stood to fingerprint Lauren Schneider, studied the hubbub of the office. The pretty girl, Tyra, watched them, worrying one long fingernail between her teeth. Three other men huddled over a mahogany cabinet and shot glances at the conference room, obviously discussing the situation. No one else seemed to be paying any attention at all, back to constructing spreadsheets on their computers with a phone tucked under one ear, their fingers flying over the number pad on their keyboards faster than the wings on a hummingbird. In the waiting area, Dhaval stayed absorbed in his paperwork, but Anna Hernandez, chin propped on one fist, elbow on crossed knee, gazed back at Maggie.
“What do you think?” Jack asked her.
Startled, she said, “About the murder? I don’t know. It seems like a mess, frankly—like we’ve either got no logical suspects or way too many.”
“I’ll say. Give me a plain drug dealer drive-by any day.”
“Uh, yeah.”
But he moved closer to say, “This killing certainly seemed more personal than eliminating a business rival or stopping a merger. And if the guy staged it to look personal when it wasn’t he would have done a better job—left out wineglasses or something like that, not disappear like a ghost. But someone who had lost their house … people get very emotional about their homes.”
“Or had lost their life savings in a fund backed by bad mortgage loans.” His cologne or aftershave or whatever replaced Lauren Schneider’s expensive scent. Maggie found that she preferred it.
“True.”
Riley opened the door and ushered Pierce Bowman in, who promptly announced, “Let me guess. Lauren said she was Joanna’s right arm and everything at Sterling Financial was hunky-dory.”
Riley and Jack exchanged a look.
Riley said, “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Bowman? And tell us all about it.”
*
Inside police headquarters in the Justice Center on Ontario Avenue, Maggie’s ex-husband, Rick, sat at his desk typing up his final reports on the “vigilante killer” who had offed three of Cleveland’s worst. One of the worst had killed a young girl, too, so that made the whole investigation a mess. Most of it was Patty Wildwood’s case, but the star of the department had moved on to other things. It fell to Rick to continue the search for the vigilante, who had disappeared like a wraith, blown out over the lake to other lands. Which left Rick scrambling to look busy in order to justify his paycheck. He typed slowly.
Another detective walked up and said, “Gardiner, there’s some hot chick here to see you.”
Rick eyed him warily. When cops said that they usually meant his ex-wife. Or someone who personified the utter opposite of “hot.”
But “hot” described Lori Russo accurately. The Cleveland Herald reporter merely had to flick her blond tresses over one shoulder to make every man in the room sit up and take notice. And notice they did, as she wound her way back to Rick’s desk. The conservative slacks and slightly oversized blazer did not dampen their interest in the least. There were two female detectives in the room, who didn’t even bother to roll their eyes.
Rick sat up and straightened his tie, running one hand through his hair.
Lori took the chair next to his desk without waiting for an invitation. “Good morning, Detective. I’ve brought you that list of murders from Chicago, Phoenix, and Detroit. At the bottom I put that horrible elder abuse case in Phoenix that sounds similar to the one we had here, where the vigilante killed that woman.”
“Uh—yeah.” Rick forced himself to look away from her T-shirt to the two sheets of paper she placed in front of him. “This is what your contacts found out.”
“Yes. I was hoping you could talk to the police in those cities to see if they noted any similarities to the murders that took place here.”
“Sure. Of course. I have been doing that anyway, of course—checking with NCIC. That’s the National—”
“I know. What have you found out?” She propped her elfin chin on one hand, giving him the benefit of her long lashes.
Rick tried to calculate how long he could keep Lori Russo coming around, and what he might be able to get out of her in exchange for tidbits of scoop. Bait the hook. “I’ve been working very hard on this, but I’m afraid I can’t share that with you. As you know, this is an open investigation.”
“Yes, but—”
Toss out the line. “However, I can tell you that I have confirmed the five Chicago murders were all done with a twenty-two caliber. Unfortunately, Chicago averages at least one homicide a day, so five lowlifes shot in the back of the head and the body moved, over a number of years—it’s not much of a pattern. They were never connected, and no kind of suspect developed. Cops there don’t even have an approximate description, like we have.”
“But there’s also Detroit and Phoenix.”
“Oh yes, I’m going to check those out, too.” Start to reel. “Thanks for coming by the office here, but you didn’t have to do that. Maybe if I find something I can tell you we can meet someplace quieter. There’s a cool place at Thirteenth and Euclid I’ve been meaning to check out—”
“Cowell? It’s fabulous.”
“Great, maybe we can meet there—”
And the line snapped. “My husband loves it. I’ll bring him along, if we can find a babysitter. Thanks a lot, Detective. I’ll be fascinated to see what you can find out. I think this guy’s got a longer history than anyone has guessed.”
“Uh … maybe.”
She sprung up from the chair, flashed him a brilliant smile. “You’ll call me as soon as you get some answers, right? I can’t wait to hear from you.”
He watched her firm bottom as she marched away. Yeah, sure, I’ll be calling. But you’re going to have to give me more than a flash of a tight T-shirt if you think I’m going to hand you your “breaking news”!
A guy at the next desk smirked at Rick’s expression. Rick glared back. And if this vigilante guy had operated in other cities before moving to Cleveland, so what? Knowing where he’d been didn’t tell Rick where he’d go. How was he supposed to track one guy who had moved from one humongous city to the next and then to the next with nothing but a police artist’s sketch to go on? There wasn’t a handy database of who went where and when. No doubt he had appeared and disappeared from those cities just as he had from Cleveland. And Rick was supposed to track him?
Feeling supremely sorry for himself, Rick went to get another cup of coffee.
*
“I’m an account manager at DJ Bryan. We’re the firm everyone wanted to be bought by when the economy tanked a decade ago. Sterling Financial generated four hundred and fifty million dollars in net revenue—in other words, profit—last year. But Bryan generated five hundred and fifty billion. So whether we buy Sterling or not is a life-changing decision for Sterling but not for Bryan. We can afford to be picky. Joanna didn’t get that.”
“Didn’t get that how?” Riley asked. Maggie could see his struggle to make sense of all the financial dealings and sound intelligent at the same time. Cops had to be chameleons, walking the walk and talking the talk wherever they went. Blending in, establishing rapport. Riley was better at it than Jack, so Jack usually stayed quiet, playing the “heavy backup” to Riley’s “charmer.” But this was a tough crowd, too specialized to give a crap about rapport. They didn’t need the police for anything except finding Joanna’s killer, a vague and secondary concern for them. The business came first, and the business wasn’t even going to pause.
“Remember way back when banks used to issue mortgages, knew who they were lending to and had incentive to make good loans? Then came computerized credit scores so consumers could shop around and get better rates. Then Lew Ranieri took these assets that weren’t liquid—mortgages take a long time to pay back and you can’t cash
them out quickly—and turned it into something that could be bought and traded in the short term.”
“Securitization,” Maggie said.
The two detectives sent her funny looks, but Bowman barely paused. “Exactly. This wasn’t a bad idea—even if housing prices fell in one city, they wouldn’t fall in all cities. Until they did. But instead of spreading the risk, it dispersed the disease.”
Bowman leaned back in the swivel chair, one ankle across one knee, then partially turned so he could look at the detectives, the sky outside, and the managers at their desks with only the slightest shift. “They based everything on the assumption that at the absolute worst defaults would hit six percent. They had historically been one percent. People get very attached to their homes.”
“Ya think?” Riley said.
“So that even if the entire bottom tranch, say twenty percent, defaults, the two top tranches are one hundred percent safe. Except that housing had never seen the leaping increases that occurred in the first ten years of the new century. So historical data might not have been the best indicator, but no one wanted to think about that. People took out home equity loans or bought houses on spec based on the assumption that the value would keep shooting up. Construction workers and waitresses were trying to become real estate moguls. But every market eventually saturates, and defaulting on an investment is not as wrenching as suddenly being out on the street.
“So banks finally realized their mistake and a bunch of mortgage lenders went out of business or got bought by other banks and they all tightened up their lending practices. Well, when the dust settled, people still wanted mortgages. They still wanted refis and home equity loans. They looked around for lenders and found a vacuum. And you know what they say about a vacuum.”