“He emailed them to me that night and had them couriered over the next morning. They track money moving from one account to another. I don’t know who did the moving, or what the accounts are, but I do know that Peter was pretty upset about it. If he hadn’t been looking for it, he might not have found it. That bothered him.”
“I thought you said that he tracked all financial information?”
“Someone circumvented his system.”
Given what Gus had told me about Peter’s control issues, I realized that wouldn’t have been easy.
“And he didn’t give you any other information?”
“No. We had a meeting set up for that Monday, but of course he was dead by then. The retainer was significant, so when Emma called me today to tell me Eric needed help, I figured I’d use part of it for that.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“What are we going to do, Sully.”
“Gus, I—”
“Don’t. You know some of the players. You have an in with the family. And you’re curious, admit it. What I’m guessing is that Peter had figured something out, and he had a plan. I think that probably got him killed. If someone in the family murdered Peter, they must be pretty desperate. We both know that desperate people do stupid things.”
Then he gave me that look, and I felt my toes curl. Despite the warning bells going off in my head, I said, “I may be able to free up some time to help you out.”
• Eight •
Gus and I agreed to meet on Tuesday so that he could give me copies of the files from Jack. He was hesitant to give me all the records Peter sent him, but was going to give me what he could without breeching confidentiality. We argued a little about dead clients and confidentiality, but we both knew neither would concede.
I texted Connie and asked if she could send someone to pick up Stewart. Sure thing, I’ll do it. I need a break from here anyway, she texted back. I sighed with relief. My time with Gus had been taxing enough, and Stewart required a whole different set of avoidance skills. I wasn’t sure if I was up to it. Besides, Connie wanted to catch Stewart up, give him his script, and talk him through the blocking of his scenes. He was going to have to hit the ground running and needed to know where to go, what props to pick up or put down, and where everyone else was so that the technical rehearsals could continue.
I needed to orient myself to the Peter Whitehall case, so I made a list of all the names that had come up in my conversations and did Google searches for information. I wrote things on Post-its and took notes. None of the information I found was earth-shattering, at least not at first. Basic biographical information. A lot of the family stuff I already knew, but there were a few new morsels of information that provided food for thought.
For example, I learned that Terry had gone to Cleaver Business School and graduated in 1982. I learned that Brooke’s maiden name wasn’t Gooding; it was Goodowski. Her family came from Western Massachusetts, an area of the state with a large Polish population. I also learned that she’d been married before, to a Kent Mackay. The divorce seemed to coincide with her marriage to Peter by a very slim margin.
On a whim, I looked up Kent Mackay. His name came up in a 2004 newspaper article about the guy who tried to ram the gates of the Anchorage. The article named him as a business associate of Peter Whitehall. I wondered what business, aside from Brooke, Mr. Mackey and Peter had in common. Particularly in 2004, the divorce and marriage year in question. Interesting.
I did some research on Larry Colfer as well. Among other things, he’d been adjunct faculty at Cleaver Business School. I double checked my information on Terry. He’d been a student there at the same time. I wondered if they knew each other. I decided to add that to my list of questions for Terry. Questions that I planned to ask in the morning.
I was still making lists when the phone rang. “Hello Stewart.”
“Sully, my love, I thought you were going to pick me up. Not that I wasn’t happy to see Connie,” he quickly added, and I heard her in the background along with a number of other people. “Come have a drink with us.”
“Sorry, I’m in the middle of a project and getting ready for bed.”
“I could come over there.”
“A lovely thought, but I need to rain-check on both. See you tomorrow?”
“Promise?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then I’ll have to make do with the lovely Connie as my companion tonight.”
I ended up spending longer than I intended on the computer, and didn’t get to bed until three a.m. When I was younger, staying up later meant sleeping later. These days, once the clock hit seven I was up. I didn’t know if it was age or routine, but on mornings with four hours of sleep under my belt, it was damned annoying.
I was on my second cup of coffee when Gus came by. He looked as tired as I felt. I handed him a cup of coffee—black, two sugars. He took a long, slow sip, closed his eyes, and smiled.
“I wasn’t sure if you still took it the same way,” I said.
“I do. Considered fake sugar for a while, but the hell with it. This hits the spot. I need it this morning. My car’s engine light came on last night. I brought it to the dealership, and they’re stumped. What a pain in the ass.”
“How did you get here?” I asked.
“Took the commuter rail and walked.”
“With the files?” Gus had hauled in an impressive canvas bag filled with brown expanding files.
“And the doughnuts. It isn’t a bad walk, but in this cold it isn’t a good walk either. I’ll be bumming a ride to the station later today. Anyway, the coffee’s great.”
Not as good as you used to make, I wanted to say, but refrained. “There’s plenty of it. Let’s take this upstairs and look at what you brought.”
I’m sure I seem a little off to most people. Conversations are always on two tracks with me. One of them is aloud, with the people in the room. The other one is internal, with myself. The internal conversation tends to move at a more breakneck speed, so I take shortcuts with the external conversations. The thing is, I think Gus works the same way. When we were married, we would be in the middle of a conversation and I’d jump in with a suggestion for our summer vacation, and he’d take it in stride and go with it. I’d never been so in synch with anyone in my life. I wondered if that connection had been broken with the divorce, but Gus’s first question helped me realize it hadn’t.
“Larry Colfer taught at Terry’s alma mater.” Okay, it wasn’t a question, but Gus had obviously spent some time on his own computer.
“Yes, at the same time. I wonder if Peter knew that?”
“I’d think so. He seemed to know everything there was to know about me, and I didn’t marry one of his daughters.”
“What do you mean?”
“One day he asked me if I had the recipe for the Blue Pearl’s chowder. He said he’d never tasted any that could compare.”
Gus’s grandfather had owned a pub in Woods Hole called the Blue Pearl. Grandpa Lowe was the black sheep of his blue-blood family and Gus’s mother allowed Gus to visit his grandfather two weeks a year, but only because he was her father. Gus’s mother was, and probably still is, socially conscious. Being a barkeep’s daughter didn’t suit her. Being a lawyer’s wife, and mother, did. But Gus loved his grandfather, even after the Pearl was shut down due to gaming activities, which sent Grandpa Lowe to jail for a year when Gus was in high school. Although Gus wasn’t ashamed of his grandfather, he didn’t go out of his way to advertise their connection. He was enough of his mother’s son to be mindful of appearances.
“What did you say?”
“I told him the recipe was a family secret, but next time I made a batch I’d save him some. He never mentioned it again.”
“You passed the test.”
“Yeah, I guess I did. Back to Terry. Peter had to
have known about the connection. We’ll have to ask Terry about it. I rearranged my schedule to be here today.”
“I was planning to go over—
“Terry can meet with us at three this afternoon. I’ve had a meeting with Terry and Emma to talk about the Century Project, so he knows me. He might be more willing to answer questions with me in the room. Not that you couldn’t get him to answer questions on your own.”
“No, you’re right. I think it would be better if you were there,” I said, cutting Gus off. I wanted him there for a couple of reasons, getting answers from Terry only being one of them. “Kent Mackay.”
“I know the name … ” Gus picked up his phone and started tapping.
I didn’t wait. “He tried to drive his car through the Anchorage gates in 2004. He had a gun with him. I’m guessing he was planning on using that as his calling card. At the time, the press listed him as a business acquaintance of Peter’s. I remember the incident mostly because it tickled my father to no end. He even joked about setting up a defense fund.”
“Bryan was always so shy about his opinions.”
“And sharing them. Anyway, I was researching Brooke last night, and she was married to Kent Mackay until 2004, the same year she married Peter.”
“Okay,” Gus said, reading from the small screen in front of him. “I know the name Kent Mackay because he’s one of the players on this Century Project. A minor player, but involved.”
“Did Peter know that?”
“I just found out myself. Peter asked me to research the other interests in the Project. I emailed him that information the Friday before he was killed. I don’t know if he saw the email or not.”
“Hmm. This is turning out to be quite the tangled web.” I tried to keep my tone appropriately somber, but I didn’t completely succeed. My brain was firing on all pistons, like it hadn’t for years. I’d always loved the fact-finding part of an investigation, when an open mind allowed for all possibilities until the truth emerged from the ether. Then I was always a little disappointed when it was over, particularly when truth and justice didn’t work in tandem. It may be the cynical view of an ex-cop, but it repeatedly blew my mind when the bad guys didn’t get their due because of some random loophole that lawyers like Gus exploited.
I piled the plethora of papers I’d printed out into a semblance of order and put them on one of the chairs to make room for the files Gus had brought. I booted up my laptop and moved it to one side of the table.
“Okay, here’s some more fuel to put in that brain of yours.” Gus smiled as he started pulling files out of the canvas bag. Each file was in an expandable folder with accordion sides that were stretched. Jack must have been busy; there were four full jackets total.
Gus read my mind. “It’s not all from Jack. See the yellow paper? That’s from Peter. He always used yellow paper to print stuff. Yellow pads to write. That’s why I brought the hard copies. If nothing else, it might help you figure out how Peter thought.”
The yellow paper outweighed the white two to one. I picked up one of the files, pulled the stack out, and began to fan through the papers, looking at headings and not getting mired down in detail. Yet. I looked back into the file to make sure I hadn’t left anything behind and noticed a plastic sleeve adhered to the inside of the jacket. I pulled out a flash drive and held it up to Gus.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“No idea. Where did you find it?”
“Inside the jacket.”
Gus checked the two jackets next to him and I checked my second jacket. Each had a flash drive. Someone had written a series of numbers on each one, and then labeled them 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4. I put the flash drive numbered 1.1 into my computer and opened it. Gus moved his chair close to mine and looked over my shoulder. I felt his breath on my neck and had a lot of trouble concentrating.
“Can you pull the papers out of the coordinating file jacket?” I asked Gus, partly to distract him, partly for illumination.
“Sure.” He moved his chair back and grabbed the file. “What are we looking for?”
“I’m not sure. I wonder if this is the same information or different from the papers. And also from the files he sent you. Can you pull them up too?”
“Sure. I brought my laptop. Can you give me your Wi-Fi password? I’ll send them to you. They’re all PDFs,” Gus said.
“So are these. At least the spreadsheets are. The notes from Peter are in a Word document. Interesting. He gave you insight to his process, but he’s controlling what you can see.”
“What do you mean?” Gus asked.
“I bet these spreadsheets pulled data from other spreadsheets, and that would give us a lot more insight.”
I opened up the first of a series of electronic documents. They appeared to be case notes from Jack Megan. Gus read the first few paragraphs aloud while I confirmed that they were identical to the printouts in the jacket. I looked at the other documents on the flash drive. They seemed to have some sort of naming structure, which must have been a code Peter devised or understood. I certainly didn’t. One of the files was called 0317T, another called 0318B, a third called 0319A. Gus searched through the jacket until he found the papers. Again, the papers seemed identical to what was on the flash drive, but unlike Jack’s notes, which were dated, there didn’t seem to be any correlation between the naming of the electronic documents and where they appeared within the physical documentation.
“Sully, the flash drives must be backups of these papers … ”
“Um, yeah, they look like it. But I’d love to know what Peter’s system is. Was.”
“Because?”
I looked away from the screen and back toward Gus. “Because of the detail. It makes no sense to me, but it obviously did to Peter.”
“I agree. I think it’s worth looking into, but maybe it should be a project for later? I mean, isn’t it interesting to see what he clipped to Jack’s notes? And shouldn’t we look this over before we see Terry?”
“Okay,” I agreed with disappointment. “How about if I copy the flash drive documents onto my computer and you keep the originals? Won’t take any time … ” I worked quickly, creating folders on my computer that duplicated the numbers Peter had put on each flash drive, and then copying the contents of each flash drive into the correct folder. Gus read Jack’s notes aloud while I worked, and then read the corresponding yellow paper. Sometimes there was a clear correlation, and most of the yellow notes were about money. Jack’s notes would say something about the movement of funds from one account to another. Peter’s notes would include more detailed banking information and some general ledger coding. The yellow papers frequently had cryptic handwritten notes in the margins.
Gus had started making notes on a pad. I had long since finished my copying and replaced the flash drives, so I started to read Gus’s notes over his shoulder. He finally looked up and grinned.
“This is what I think this means,” he said. “Jack noted some initial transfers from one account to another, probably trying to see if Terry was hiding assets.” I nodded. “But in almost every case, the transfers were moved back to another company account within a day or two. This didn’t seem to trigger anything for Jack, since the money in and the money out was the same.”
“Right. But Peter noticed something?” I asked.
“Yeah. The second transfer was minus the interest.”
“On one day? Or two? How much interest?”
“Enough for Peter to try and track it. See the numbers he uses? I think that must be the missing interest. Looks like a few hundred per transaction. You’re right about wanting the spreadsheet. I could track it better if he’d sent the entire spreadsheet, or told us where he was pulling the numbers from. That interest could really add up after a while.”
“Finding the spreadsheets goes on the list,” I said. “Can you see where the interest wen
t?”
“To a different account. From what I can see here, Peter hadn’t tracked it. Part of his notes seem to be questions … ”
Gus’s voice trailed off, and I knew that he needed to work something out on his own. He began to look back and forth through the papers, occasionally stopping to scribble a note or two. I picked up the fourth jacket and perused the contents. Presuming that 1.4 was akin to the fourth section of files, I decided to skip to the end. Peter’s notes were scrawled all over the yellow paper. On the final page he seemed to sum it up with a note, presumably to himself:
TO GK ice 11/28
• Nine •
Rehearsal began at ten. By eleven I hadn’t heard from Connie, and Gus and I needed a break, so I decided to stop in at the high school. Gus volunteered to come with me, and I reluctantly agreed. I didn’t like the idea of him seeping into this part of my life, the part that was a Gus-free zone, but I couldn’t figure out how to prevent it without seeming like a jerk.
We stopped by a deli on our way to the theater to get sandwiches. I also bought a quart of peach cobbler and a pint of rice pudding.
“Carbo loading?” Gus asked.
“You have no idea,” I replied.
The theater seemed to be a scene of controlled but palatable chaos. I ensconced Gus in the back row, put a couple of spoons in my jacket pocket, grabbed the cobbler and pudding, and walked toward the stage where Dimitri was holding court. Apparently the chaos wasn’t as controlled as it appeared from the back of the house. The veins on the sides of Dimitri’s neck were popping, his color was a frightening hue somewhere between gray and red, and his teeth were clenched. His words hissed from between his teeth. Connie, Patrick, and Harry were standing as far back from him as they could, leaning in slightly in order to listen. Before I could hear what he was saying the group disbursed, the actors practically running backstage, and Connie put her hand on Dimitri’s arm either to comfort or restrain him. Probably both.
“We’re canceling the show.” Dimitri’s tone dared me to disagree. I often heard yelling, screaming, ranting, and raving from Dimitri; I seldom heard this flat, resigned defiance. I chose not to take the bait.
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