by Tim Green
“Hi,” Marty said, appearing from behind them and extending a hand to Jake.
“Marty got fired,” Casey said. “He’s been great.”
“Your own uncle?” Jake said.
Marty shrugged. “He was an asshole, anyway.”
“I bet,” Jake said. “I saw you on TV at the DC airport.”
“My luggage,” Casey said.
“The TSA won’t leave with it if you’re not on the plane,” Jake said. “Don’t worry. Come on.”
They got Casey’s luggage back at the TSA bag check, then took the walk bridge to the garage while Jake told them about a mobster named Niko Todora, John Napoli’s patron, and a man who’d gone from the underworld to legitimate businessman.
“So, where to?” Casey asked.
“Buffalo,” Jake said. “I’ve got a list of all the names and companies. We’ve got to find the link to Graham. We’ve got to prove he’s tied in with these guys and they’re all trying to sink Patricia Rivers because of those gas leases. Once we do that, his whole story about you falls apart.”
“No sweat,” Casey said. “What’s your plan?”
“People,” Jake said. “They can’t help talking. We get a disgruntled employee or someone who got screwed on a deal and we drill down. There’s got to be a money trail somewhere. There always is.”
“Follow the money,” Casey said. “Great. I never heard that before.”
“I can help,” Marty said.
“Of course,” Jake said, stopping in back of his rental Cadillac to open the trunk and load Casey’s bags.
“I mean, I can really help,” Marty said. “To follow the money. I think.”
“How?” Casey asked.
Marty said, “When you’ve got money, you’ve got taxes, right?”
“Taxes and death,” Jake said.
“For some people,” Marty said.
“I remember that,” Casey said. “That’s how he introduced you and your firm, right? Something about a second set of eyes on some tax work?”
“I remember a company in Syracuse while I was clerking one summer,” Marty said. “They had this big office building with statues and fountains, some fiber-optic company. A hundred or so high-paid executives with a thousand people underneath them, but no one local did the legal work, or the accounting. They paid some firm in Connecticut twice the hourly rate they could have gotten around here. It drove the partners crazy.”
“And?” Casey asked.
“The whole thing was a Ponzi scheme,” Marty said. “The shares were worthless. The thing went belly-up. Everyone lost their jobs and when it was over, all the lawyers around said it was no wonder they didn’t use local lawyers or accountants. They didn’t want anyone to know what was really going on. Like Jake said, people talk.”
“And Graham had your law office do some tax work?” Jake said.
“Maybe because we’re a safe distance from Rochester and Buffalo,” Marty said.
“Where his partners are,” Casey said.
“To catch wind of his scheme,” Jake said.
“What scheme, though?” Marty asked.
“That’s what we have to find out,” Casey said.
“And those tax records might be the key,” Marty said.
“Where are they, Marty?” Jake asked.
“That’s a problem.”
61
MARTY’S UNCLE’S house sat back off the road on the better side of town, an enormous three-story Tudor surrounded by a stone wall capped with decorative iron spikes. Casey peered through the bars of the gates at the house’s outline as they rolled slowly past. They’d left Marty’s Volvo outside his apartment and rode together now in Jake’s Cadillac.
“How the hell do we get in there?” Jake asked.
“Every Sunday growing up,” Marty said. “Turn there.”
Jake turned at the corner and followed the side street adjacent to the mansion.
“We’d have dinner at Uncle Christopher and Aunt Dee’s,” Marty said from the backseat. “My cousin Ruth, she’d take us out back and smoke cigarettes. There’s an old door in the wall behind the garden with a lock that must be a hundred years old. You can open it with a tire iron.”
“You think this is Mission Impossible?” Casey asked.
“It’s my uncle’s place,” Marty said.
“You just got fired,” Casey said.
“I’m good with it if he is,” Jake said, pulling over in the deep shadows of the trees overhanging the street. “I’ll go, too.”
“Listen to yourselves,” Casey said. “What are you going to do, break a window?”
“My uncle calls it the men’s room,” Marty says. “There’s a mahogany bar, a pool table, darts, a poker table. He’s even got a walk-in humidor and a wine cellar. There’s an office down there, too. Big leather chairs and books. That’s where he keeps the safe. There’s some steps back by the garage. He keeps a key in the light fixture.”
“And then you blow the safe?” Casey said. “Or are you a safecracker, too?”
Marty blinked at her from the gloom of the backseat. “I know the combination.”
“And you’re sure that’s where records are?” Casey asked.
“I’m the one who put them there.”
Casey nodded. “And you two won’t mind if I stay on the sidelines for this? I’ve got enough charges pending against me.”
“We got it,” Jake said. “Although the prison stripes would suit you.”
“Up yours, Jake.”
The two of them disappeared, leaving Casey alone in the dark. Jake popped the trunk and she watched them jimmy the lock on the metal door, Jake forcing it open with his shoulder. After a few minutes, Casey got out and started up the sidewalk, using a stick she found to scratch the stone wall. When she reached the corner of the uncle’s property, she saw a car slowing down on the street to turn into the gates.
Heart pounding, she tucked herself behind a forsythia bush, its bloom a dull gold in the haze of the streetlight. The headlights blinded her as the car swung into the drive, idling almost silently as it waited for the gates to open. With a grinding shriek, the heavy metal bars began to part. Atop the corner posts, two bronze carriage lamps glowed yellow, and when Casey pushed through the fringe of the forsythia, she could clearly make out Ralph’s face sitting behind the wheel of the pewter Lexus.
The gates clanged and Ralph disappeared through them.
Casey whipped out her phone and dialed Jake, praying he’d answer.
62
AS JAKE’S PHONE rang on the other end of the line, Casey sprinted down along the wall toward the garden gate. It was still ajar. When she got Jake’s voice mail, she tried Marty, peering into the garden and its own smaller wall with an arched entryway on the opposite side. The smell of tomato vines and dirt filled her nostrils. Marty didn’t answer his phone, either, and she stepped inside, moving slowly down a slate path between two rows of zucchinis. Something gurgled and hissed, and she jumped back, searching the darkness until she could make out the foggy mist of a sprinkler.
Beyond the garden wall and through the trees, she could see part of the mansion’s roofline and a smattering of lighted windows. Before she reached the stone arch, Casey heard shouts from the direction of the house. She stepped out of the garden as two figures dashed her way across a broad lawn. A second shout came from behind them, and three orange tongues of flame licked at the darkness, the thundering crash of gunshots hurting her ears. As she turned to run, Casey felt-as much as she heard-the thud of bullets striking the garden wall within her reach.
She stumbled and felt Jake’s hand snatch up her arm, dragging her toward the gate. On the sidewalk, Marty shot past them with a heavy cardboard filer thicker than a phone book under his other arm. They all piled into the car and hadn’t closed the doors before Jake stamped on the gas and they shot down the street.
“Are you kidding me?” Casey said, twisting around to watch out the back window. “That son of a bitch shot at us.”
“We thought we were going to get away clean,” Jake said, breathing hard and checking the rearview mirror. “They went in when we were sneaking out. We heard them shouting at each other after they opened the safe, and that’s when we just took off.”
“That Ralph,” Marty said, glancing over his shoulder as if he expected to see the old soldier chasing them down the street on foot. “Metal leg didn’t do much to slow him down.”
“He shot at us,” Casey said, again.
Jake hit a turn that tossed Casey into his lap. She straightened and pointed at the filer Marty clutched to his chest. “You got it?”
Marty nodded and undid the clasp, reaching into the filer and pulling a heavy ream of paper partway out. “Now we got to dig through it all.”
“Good thing you’re a CPA,” Casey said.
Jake nodded and continued to drive fast, checking the mirror constantly.
“Where we going?” Marty asked from the back.
“It’s your town,” Jake said. “I’m just driving. I figured you’d tell me. Someplace where they can’t find us. Preferably something with bulletproof walls.”
“He almost killed us,” Casey said.
“You keep saying that,” Jake said.
“I keep saying he shot at us.”
“Right.”
“I still can’t believe this.”
“Well, we know one thing,” Jake said.
“What?”
“Whatever’s in there is worth killing for.”
63
JAKE PULLED the car around in back of the Bright Star Motel. Casey waited with Marty until Jake returned with three metal keys on plastic diamond-shaped fobs. Marty helped Casey with her bags while Jake held the filer and the door. Casey set her bag down on the sagging bed and looked around and sniffed at the mold.
“Reminds me of a place we went one time in Galveston when I was a kid,” she said.
Jake moved a rickety round table up to the bed, placing two chairs around it, and served the filer up in the middle as if it were a meal for them to share. Casey sat on the bed. Marty and Jake took the chairs. They stared at the filer for a moment before Casey undid the band that held it shut and removed the contents, serving them out equally.
Jake looked at his watch and said, “Ten o’clock. We should just see.”
He leaned over and switched on the dusty TV set.
Two local news anchors stared somberly into the camera.
The gray-headed man said, “Central New York and the city of Auburn are at the center of a media storm today, after the murder of a woman by a man the courts set free from Auburn Prison. Dwayne Hubbard, sentenced to life in prison twenty years ago, was set free on Tuesday after lawyers from the Freedom Project presented DNA evidence to the court that they said proved Hubbard was an innocent man. In less than twenty-four hours, the woman who was Hubbard’s Internet fiancée has been found mutilated and murdered in her home much the same way as Hubbard’s original victim twenty years ago. Authorities now believe that the DNA evidence used to free Hubbard was falsified by his lawyers, most notably Casey Jordan, a controversial trial lawyer from Dallas, Texas, who is known for her media exploits.”
Casey snorted and shook her head. Marty’s cheeks flushed.
The news anchor looked at his cohost, a young redhead with green contact lenses who said, “Another notable man in the center of the controversy spoke with reporters this afternoon. Robert Graham, the well-known billionaire philanthropist and board member of the Freedom Project, had this to say.”
Graham’s face filled the screen, looking weary with grief.
“In our wildest dreams,” Graham said, “we at the Freedom Project never imagined that someone could take something so good and use it for evil, but that is what Casey Jordan has apparently done by turning loose a completely deranged individual into our society to satisfy her obvious craving for media attention and personal gain.”
Graham paused to shake his head.
“Our deepest sympathy goes out to the family of Sheila Leeds,” he said, his face contorting with disgust as he spit out his final words. “We never imagined or intended to have a hand in freeing someone so repulsive and so utterly sick.”
Graham glared out at his audience for a brief moment before the TV anchors reappeared, droning on about the great works of Robert Graham and how he’d been assured that neither his friendship with Brad Pitt nor that great man’s commitment to the Project would be harmed because of the unfortunate tragedy.
“Most people would be sick at this point,” Jake said, flicking off the TV and taking out his cell phone, “but I’m going to order some Chinese. Anyone else?”
Casey shook her head and Marty muttered something about fried rice.
“I’ll get you a little vegetable lo mein, in case you change your mind,” Jake said to her.
Casey forced her breathing to slow, then began going through the documents, racking her brain to recollect the fleeting knowledge of tax law she learned while studying for the Texas bar exam.
“I guess I should have gotten into natural gas,” Jake said, waving a piece of paper from his pile. “It looks like they made a shitload.”
“Looks,” Marty said under his breath, as if in deep thought as he ran a finger down the page in front of him.
Casey sighed and shook her head. It wasn’t until a knock on the door signaled the arrival of their food that Casey had an idea.
“Marty,” she said, snatching up the paper she was examining and pushing it in front of him while she averted her face from the delivery man, “look at this.”
Marty adjusted his glasses and brought the paper into focus by moving it away from his nose.
“That’s an income statement, right?” Casey asked.
Jake set the food down on the dresser and leaned over Marty’s shoulder. The hot smell of egg rolls, noodles, and cooked chicken filled the room. Her mouth watered and her stomach shifted.
“Yes,” Marty said, glancing at the food. “A K-1.”
“Isn’t there something about passive income and active losses?” Casey asked.
“Active losses you can write off against your losses of regular income,” Marty said, his eyes scanning the page.
“Like a tax write-off?” Casey said. “You make a hundred, you write off twenty-five, and you only have to pay taxes on seventy-five?”
“Sure,” Marty said, “it’d be the same as if you spent it on a new piece of equipment or a business trip.”
“What if it wasn’t?” Casey asked.
“Well, passive losses are just that,” Marty said, “losses on your investment. You don’t get to write those off.”
“But these are active losses this is talking about, right?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Do we have the gains they had anywhere?” she asked.
“I think I might,” Jake said, handing a small pile of pages to Marty. “Is this it?”
Marty examined them, slowly nodding. “This is what they got paid, yes. It’s a lot.”
Marty held up the paper Casey had handed to him and dug through Jake’s pile until he found what he was looking for.
“Holy shit,” Marty said. “Holy. Shit.”
64
WHAT’S HOLY AND what’s the shit?” Jake asked, putting a hand on Marty’s shoulder as he leaned even closer to the pages.
“Holy shit,” Marty said, looking over his shoulder at the door to the motel room like he expected someone to burst through it.
“You keep saying that,” Casey said.
“These guys are screwed,” Marty said.
“Graham?” Casey said.
Marty shook his head. “His partners.”
“Massimo D’Costa and John Napoli?” Jake asked.
“And all the rest of them,” Marty said.
“How screwed?” Jake asked.
“Like, going to jail for a long time screwed,” Marty said.
“Why?” Casey asked.
; Marty looked up and blinked. “They owe the IRS about twenty million dollars.”
“All together?” Casey asked.
“No,” Marty said, “each.”
Jake let out a low whistle.
“Scary thing is,” Marty said, riffling through more of the pages from Casey’s pile, “they might not even know they did anything wrong.”
“Oh, honest crooks,” Jake said, patting Marty and returning to the bag of Chinese, placing it on the table between the piles of papers.
“Kind of,” Marty said.
“I was kidding,” Jake said.
“What do you mean, Marty?” Casey asked.
Marty shrugged and said, “These guys might not have even known. Graham sends the K-1s to their accountants, and active deductions for oil and gas leases are pretty commonplace, but you have be actively involved, actually working at the company to qualify, which these guys aren’t. They’ve just been cashing the checks and not worrying about the taxes. I’m sure their accountants never claimed a dime of income because Graham has been showing them losses equal to the income they’ve received. Everyone’s happy, except the IRS.”
“Why the hell would Graham do it?” Jake asked.
“It’s like a Ponzi scheme,” Marty said. “You get people to invest, start sending them money they think they don’t have to pay taxes on, they tell their friends, and next thing you know, they want in, too. You don’t even have to make money to make the thing work. If people keep investing, you just pay the original partners with the new investment. If no one pays any taxes, there’s a lot left over that you can do all kinds of things with.”
“Like fly around in a Citation X,” Casey said.
“Or give some away to get your face on TV,” Jake said.
“Or buy up other companies for cover,” Marty said. “For all we know, Graham is funding his whole empire on the money these guys are stealing from the IRS. He might be more of a con man than the brilliant businessman you read about in the Wall Street Journal.”
“Why would he keep this?” Casey said, resting her hand on the papers in front of her.