When Niko’s message arrived, I forwarded it to Sansen: “Do you read modern Arabic? Can you make sense of this?”
I turned again to Reno’s documents and started to do some digging into them. Legko Insurance was headquartered in the Isle of Jersey, one of the tax haven dream spots of the modern world. An insurance company headquartered there would not be my first choice as a reliable payer of claims. When I dug into the files for Legko’s board, it somehow didn’t surprise me to find they had only two members: the Trechette Foundation and the Trechette Trust.
A. M. Best, the insurance industry bible, told me that Legko’s capital adequacy ratio—whether they had enough money to pay claims if a lot came due at the same time—was not available. They had lent two hundred million to Rest EZ, so they must have some reserves, but where they were banked was a mystery.
Try as I might, I couldn’t find any list of their insurance agents. None of the independent agent listings included Legko, which meant whoever sold for them was a direct employee of the company, but even so, an insurance company needs to sell policies to stay in business. Legko had a website, but every link on it sent me to a contact page, telling me to send inquiries to [email protected].
I put Legko to one side to research the company whose stock report Reno had brought home. Climate Repair International, a company with a Delaware incorporation, had a website that proclaimed their commitment to products that would reverse the damage to fisheries and coastal waters caused by the rising temperatures in seawater. That seemed like an admirable corporate mission.
Climate Repair was interested in genetically engineering bivalves to make their shells resistant to increased acid in the water. Their financial statement said they had eight employees at their factory in Ningde, China. Their website showed all eight happily eating oysters. As was true of Legko Insurance, the links all led to a generic e-mail address.
GGTHP, the stock symbol in the e-mail Reno had hidden, turned out to be for Green Grow Therapeutics, a company that was jumping onto the reefer bandwagon.
Green Grow and Climate Repair were both pink stocks, trading through the over-the-counter bulletin board. In the days before electronic trading, OTC stock sheets were printed on cheap pink paper. Even after all these years, people in the business still call them pink stocks or penny stocks, but unsophisticated investors should think of them as colored bright red for danger. Pink stock can be issued by very small legitimate companies. However, the SEC doesn’t inspect or regulate pink stocks as they do for companies listed on the NYSE; pink-stock financials range from sketchy to imaginary.
Green Grow, which the e-mail urged recipients to sell, had two million shares outstanding. It was trading today at two and a quarter cents a share, its low for the year, but its fifty-two-week high, last December 12, had been five dollars. The e-mail fragment was undated, which was frustrating—I would like to have known when all those investors had sold.
A banner ad on top of the stock sheet read, “Nobody knows this company today, but soon the whole world will. Get in now, before it’s too late.”
The ad sounded familiar. Perhaps it was the language of all flimflam artists. I saved all the files I’d opened to my Pocket List. I was missing something crucial, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.
“Reno, wake up,” I cried. “Tell me why these companies mattered so much to you. Tell me where you found these documents.”
46
Sensitivity Training
My phone rang while I was trying to figure out what I could possibly do next to uncover the actual owners of Trechette.
It was Caroline Griswold, Darraugh Graham’s right-hand woman at CALLIE Enterprises. “Vic, this isn’t like you to be late, but we’ve been expecting a report from you since yesterday morning.”
Damn and hell! My most important client, the man who kept me from drowning in debt and going out of business, and I’d forgotten him completely in the drama of Reno and Felix and the woods.
I apologized but didn’t try to explain—a detective who gets herself locked in a shed in the woods when she should be tracking down a shipment of diamond wheel blades is not someone you trust in the future.
The blades weren’t exactly missing: the shipment had arrived at JFK from Shanghai nine days ago. CALLIE’s shipping agent had cleared them through customs and overseen their loading onto a semi, which drove them from New York to the factory in Elgin, forty miles northwest of Chicago. The shipping agent claimed to have examined the blades, but when the Elgin factory started using them, the teeth broke after a single use.
I didn’t have to test the blades; my job was to examine the links in the delivery chain to see whether the shipping agent or the trucker could have substituted them. If not, then CALLIE would go after the Chinese manufacturer.
I had done some preliminary work on the case last week but hadn’t uncovered anything. Today, though, the lapse in time worked for me. I had been monitoring a dozen tool auction sites, and today, on three of them, I found what looked like parts of the shipment.
I spent the rest of the evening digging into the life stories of everyone on the American end of the shipment. The shipping agent’s brother-in-law had a machine shop near Toledo. The truck had stopped at a garage on the tollway to change a tire, had been there for ninety minutes. I pulled together all the information I could find on the work the brother-in-law did in his shop. He could definitely make blades that would look like the diamond-edged ones. I put the report together for Darraugh.
“It would be worth bidding on one of these blade lots. The serial numbers have been erased with acid, but a good infrared scope should bring them up again. I can fly to Toledo and examine the machine shop there for the blanks he probably uses for making fakes, or you can alert the local LEOs, but it looks as though the shipping agent and the driver are acting together.”
The Toledo scam made me think of Felix and Rasima. They had access to sophisticated equipment at IIT, where it would be easy to make prototypes, or to create a fake. What if they’d made some kind of lethal weapon that looked like a mobile water purifier? Felix hadn’t wanted me to touch his model. Maybe he thought I was knowledgeable enough to detect its real purpose.
What if for once ICE was on the right trail here? If they’d been tapping his and Rasima’s phones, they’d know what the pair were working on. And if they were creating something ugly—I didn’t want to think ill of Felix. I would not think ill of him.
Murray had called twice while I was working on my report for Darraugh, wanting to know about the fire in the woods and the woman I’d found there. Glynis Hadden, Dick’s secretary, had phoned my cell, telling me we needed to speak about Reno. She’d also texted and left a voice message on my office line.
I ignored Glynis’s message, but I phoned Murray while I started shutting my office down for the day.
“What have you been up to, Wonder Woman?”
“The usual, you know, saving the city and so on.” I was cautious, wondering how much detail had made it on to the police reports.
“Did you set fire to a forest preserve?”
“I’ll tell you the whole story, omitting no detail, if you’ll tell me how to uncover the identity of the beneficial owner of an offshore company that’s hiding behind trusts and foundations and whatnot.”
“Who is it?” Murray asked.
He had never heard of Trechette, but after a moment while I heard him typing, he said, “Can’t be done, not unless you have someone like the dude who leaked the Panama Papers. I still want chapter and verse on you committing arson in the forest preserve.”
“Where’d you find that odd tidbit?”
“I follow all local crime. One of the Palos district fire stations had your license plate as the car fleeing the scene at the Cap Sauers Holding when they responded to a fire yesterday.”
“Even private eyes sometimes go hiking in the woods to restore their sanity, Murray.”
“Not when those woods are where a dead body was
found two weeks ago. You haven’t found the killer, right? It’s not Lotty Herschel’s nephew, that’s still all we know?”
“More or less,” I agreed.
“Who was the woman you took out of the woods with you? Your missing niece?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “The woman had no ID on her.”
“But was she about the right age, race, coloring, things that would make a sensible person hazard a guess?”
“I’m not a guesser, Murray, I’m totally fact driven. Later.”
I hung up, but the conversation left me jumpy. Murray wasn’t the only person scanning police and fire reports. If he guessed I’d found Reno, everyone else would, too, even if I’d kept her name off the airwaves. I texted the Streeters, who were camping out in the ICU with her. So far, no one had tried to approach her except for the nursing staff.
“We’re trying to get them to show us their credentials, but they aren’t always willing to do that,” Tom Streeter warned me.
I told him I’d talk to Max Loewenthal—besides being Lotty’s lover, he was the hospital’s executive director; the nursing staff presumably would listen to him.
Cynthia, Max’s PA, promised to do her best with the ICU staff. “The nursing staff put patient welfare first, so if they see it’s part of the protocol for keeping Reno alive, they will help out. But Reno isn’t the only patient in that unit, Vic. If someone urgently needs help, the nurses absolutely have to put that patient ahead of inspecting IDs.”
She was right, of course, which made me so depressed that I answered the next phone call without checking the caller ID.
“There you are,” Glynis said. “It’s important that Dick speak to you.”
“Really? Why?”
She didn’t answer, just switched her phone through to Dick’s line.
“Vic! What’s going on with Reno?”
“Oddly enough, I’ve been wanting to ask you the same question. Remind me of the last time you spoke with her?”
“We’ve been over this, and it’s not relevant. I’ve been reading that you found her in a forest preserve yesterday.”
“Gosh, Dick, where’d you read that? I’m googling ‘Reno Seale’ as we speak and I’m not seeing anything.” I wasn’t, actually, but if Murray hadn’t seen her name, she wasn’t in any report that the cops had issued.
Dick was silent for a beat, regrouping; I could hear Glynis breathing on the extension.
“My niece is at Beth Israel hospital,” Dick said. “But they’re denying that they have her there. Now you’re denying that you found her. What kind of conspiracy are you running?”
“How do you know she’s there?” I asked.
“Police reports,” he said.
“Dick, corporate litigation must be slow if you’re hanging around station houses reading reports. But if the hospital says Reno isn’t there, why are you sure they’re lying?”
“I know you were in the forest preserve yesterday. The same place where that guy’s body was found. I know you discovered Reno in an old equipment shed. What’s wrong with admitting that? If you rescued her, you’re a heroine.”
“Tell me the story, Richard,” I said. “Tell me about the shed, and tell me how I rescued your niece and how you know she’s at Beth Israel.”
“From the police reports I’ve seen, she was in bad shape and you carried her through the woods and got her to Beth Israel.”
“Anything else? Was there someone else at the shed who helped with the getaway?” I was drawing a large chain link on the legal pad on my desktop.
“I heard you were on your own, but that the shed caught fire.”
I added a handcuff to it and drew an arm in navy suiting. Cuffing Dick to the truth.
“These are very interesting reports. I’ll have to check with the cops myself and see what they have to say. What did Lawrence Fausson know about you that you wanted kept secret?”
“We had this conversation. I never met Lawrence Fausson and I refuse to let you take this discussion off the rails. I am entitled to know—”
“It’s easy for a cleaning crew to go through the trash and learn things they shouldn’t know. About Trechette holdings, for instance, and your involvement in the North American Ti-Balt lawsuit—”
“That’s privileged information. Who told you about it?”
“Police reports,” I said. “I read the police report on how senior partners snack on Snickers bars after lunch. It’s funny, when I think of the lunches you eat at the Potawatomie Club—flounder with choron sauce or whatever—and then you’re gobbling candy bars out of the vending machine.”
“How dare you, Vic, how dare you go bribing the cleaning crew into going through my trash—”
“Dick, for a lawyer, you jump to conclusions faster than a rabbit looking for the briar patch. I haven’t bribed the Force 5 workforce, with money or hockey tickets or promises of eternal salvation. I have talked to them, trying to find anyone who knows anything about Lawrence Fausson. It’s easy for cleaners to look at garbage. People like you think cleaners are part of the furniture; you don’t guard what you say or do or throw out. Which makes me wonder if Lawrence Fausson found something in your trash to use against you.”
“I never met him!”
“You might have and not known it,” I objected. “Let me phrase this differently. Has anyone tried to blackmail you within the last twelve months? Glynis, you can chime in. I know Dick has no secrets from you.”
“Vic, when you’re being as insulting as only you know how to be, it’s usually to hide or avoid a topic,” Glynis said. “Why don’t you want to talk about Reno?”
“I’d love to,” I said promptly. “What did Reno learn about Trechette when she was in St. Matthieu? She confided in Dick when she got back, right?”
“She had questions that Dick couldn’t answer,” Glynis said.
“Couldn’t, or wouldn’t?” I asked.
“Oh, Glynis, it’s time to stop dancing around,” Dick said. “Let me put it to Vic straight. I know this is the age of political correctness cubed, but Reno needed—needs to grow up. She took a simple pass as an attempted rape and thought I should step in and advise Rest EZ to offer sensitivity training to their male managers. I didn’t, of course, and she took that in very bad part. I’m afraid we parted rather angrily.”
“That sounds unfortunate,” I said politely. “Glynis, is Dick looking at his fingernails?”
“Talk about rabbits jumping around briar patches,” Dick said, “you are the champion at the long jump and the sideways topple.”
“An unwanted pass is a violation that no one should have to tolerate. And being told to ‘grow up,’ ‘suck it up,’ or any other variation on that theme is a double violation. Especially for your nieces, who were violated plenty already as children.”
Dick protested that my response was an outrage. “I knew it was useless trying to tell you this—you’ve always been on some feminist crusade or other. That’s why I didn’t tell you when you first came to me about Reno. I knew you’d start lecturing me on insensitivity and crap.
“You think I don’t care about Reno and her sister, but they’re my sister’s children. Everyone knows how close you are to the Herschel woman who’s a surgeon there; I’m sure she’d get me into the ICU if you sweet-talked her.”
“You’ve got better sources than I do, Richard: they’re telling you Reno is at Beth Israel, which I don’t know. Even if I were willing to abuse my friendship with Dr. Herschel—which I’m not—she couldn’t possibly let you visit every woman in the hospital in the hopes that you would recognize one of them as your niece.”
“I tried to do this the nice way,” Dick snapped. “I can go to a judge and get a court order forcing you to reveal their whereabouts.”
“Glynis, is he running a fever, or is he psychotic?” I said. “I know you’re good pals with a lot of judges, Richard, but what grounds are you going to give? You’re not your nieces’ guardian, you never had a legal relationship with
them.”
“You really don’t understand, do you, Vic?” Dick’s voice was filled with contempt. “I can make a case because I know the players and I know what court to go to.”
I added Dick’s torso to my drawing, with flames shooting from his rear end. Pants on fire.
“You know members of the Cook County Board, too, don’t you?” I said. “Are you the person who’s pressuring the sheriff to close the investigation into Lawrence Fausson’s murder?”
“I keep telling you, I never knew Fausson and his murder isn’t interesting to me personally. However, I’ve been told that the sheriff’s police have a suspect whom they’re not ready to charge.”
“If you’re monitoring the situation closely enough to know they have a suspect, then you should know he’s ‘the Herschel woman’s’ nephew. If you or a friend is leaning on the sheriff’s department, I can guarantee that arresting Felix Herschel will cut off all possibility of help from me or anyone else who’s close to Dr. Herschel.”
47
Side Tracks
I hung up on that fierce sentence. Afterward, though, I sat for a long time in my dark office, turning the conversation over in my mind. It was credible that someone had assaulted Reno in St. Matthieu: I’d wondered about that when Harmony told me her sister returned from the Caribbean in a troubled frame of mind. Reno wanted to identify Rest EZ’s CEO to see if he had been her assailant.
But the idea that Reno had gone to Dick wanting help in setting up sensitivity training at Rest EZ beggared belief. I also didn’t think he would have kept the story to himself the whole time I’d been looking for Reno. Dick was spinning a fancy web, trying to sidetrack me with a gratuitous attack on feminism and political correctness.
“Richard, Teri, and Glynis, the three of you are like a game of three-card monte, trying to get me to guess which one Reno spoke to when she got back from St. Matthieu. Did she come to your office? To the Oak Brook house? Phone you?”
Shell Game Page 28