Sarah and Aggie watched for another half hour while the team did timed laps in each stroke. When Aggie said she was getting tired on the hard bench, Sarah took her home. On the way, Aggie said, ‘You kids have fun at your dinner out. I’m going to get in my jammies and open a can of soup.’
Sarah drove back for Denny, who curled into a ball on her seat and muttered, ‘Some days I wish I’d never joined this stupid thing.’
‘They bother you, too, huh? The mean little girls with the jokes about Brady.’
‘You saw that?’ Denny sat up with her eyes blazing. ‘Isn’t it just a damn shame? That’s what they did to Amy and she quit; now that she’s gone they’ve decided to pick on Brady. The kid is trying her best! Just because she hasn’t had all the lessons they have.’
‘What have they got against her, do you think?’
‘Oh, I think she’s kind of poor – her clothes are pretty dismal. I remember so well how that felt, that last year with Mom, when I didn’t have clean clothes half the time. Brady’s so shy and quiet but look how hard she’s working! Why don’t their parents make them stop? Or somebody from school?’ Abruptly, she changed tacks. ‘You didn’t say anything, did you? To the coach?’
‘Of course not. I promised, remember?’
‘It doesn’t feel right to me, pretending I can’t see them being so awful to her. But if you get known as a snitch or a suck-up it’s just death for the rest of your life.’
‘Denny, do you think I was never in school myself? All I meant to say is I know you’re between a rock and a hard place and I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah.’ She leaned back with her eyes closed again, then opened them and said, ‘Hey, there’s a fun thought.’
‘What?’
‘Be good to catch Patty’s gang on a hard place and hit ’em with a rock.’
‘Oh, well, now …’
Denny giggled. ‘You can’t go to jail for what you’re thinking, right? I heard that in a song the other day and I like it.’
‘Such an old song – where’d you hear it?’
‘Grandma was playing golden oldies on the radio.’ Then she pulled another of her lightning changes. ‘It’s so nice of Will to want to take us to dinner but do you think I could be excused? I’m really beat. I’d like to heat up some soup and go to bed.’
‘Good, you can keep your grandma company,’ Sarah said and called Aggie to make the deal. Denny rode home the rest of the way curled up in her seat with her eyes closed. In the driveway she opened them and saw her grandmother standing in the doorway.
‘Look at Grandma – isn’t she cute in her fuzzy pink slippers?’ she said. ‘Why is she so anxious about me? Have I got some zits I haven’t noticed?’
‘She’s afraid the swim team is wearing you out,’ Sarah said. ‘Try being cheerful, will you? Make her feel better.’
‘Now I’ve got to cheer up Grandma? Life gets more and more complicated.’
‘I’m almost certain you can handle it,’ Sarah said and called Will to tell him the party had shrunk. ‘Mom and Denny are both too tired to go out so this just turned into a dinner date for two.’
‘Hey, a treat. Let’s shoot for the moon,’ he said. So she changed into the best dress she owned and took time over her hair and make-up.
‘Damn, woman,’ Will said when she met him at the restaurant, ‘you look good enough to distract me from eating.’
‘Good. But hold that thought for later, will you, please? Because every molecule of my body is demanding food right now.’
They had picked the Italian place. As they passed through elaborately etched doors into a gleaming space filled with miles of white linen, Will said, ‘What do you think, babe? Is this place good enough for us?’
‘I believe it is. And I hope they mean to feed us well,’ Sarah said as the waiter seated them with a flourish, ‘so we’ll be strong enough to hold up these menus.’
‘They are a little large,’ Will said, ‘but I see that one of the items they offer is osso buco, so my contentment level is already inching up toward the max.’
‘And if I offer to split a cannoli for dessert?’
‘Better be careful,’ Will said. ‘I might cry.’
Denny’s swim team acquitted themselves very well in the all-city meet the next afternoon. Denny, Mickey and Jean all won firsts in their best events and the team was placed second overall.
Will didn’t go to watch the meet. ‘I’d get too nervous,’ he told Sarah. ‘This parent stuff isn’t easy, is it?’
But when they came home with the great results he told Denny she’d made him proud. He asked her, ‘So do you get to go to Phoenix?’
‘Yup. First weekend in August.’ Her expression wavered between proud and grim. ‘Now we really get to bear down.’
SEVEN
‘Well, it does look like he might have been running a funnel account,’ Lois Johnson said on Monday morning.
Don Belgrave had been right about her appearance. Sarah’s first thought when she saw her was, Grant Wood: American Gothic. But a few seconds later she decided, well, not exactly. Lois was plain-faced like the picture but her body was taut as a drum – if Lois Johnson had been in that picture, Sarah thought, she’d probably have been the one holding the pitchfork. At a minimum she probably did three miles on an indoor track and had a quick swim before breakfast.
When she began to talk, though, Sarah heard the flat Midwestern vowels of the women in Aggie’s family scrapbooks, the female relatives they had once visited on a farm in Iowa. Take away the cottage apron and add fake nails and an assured touch on a mini iPad and you’d have Lois Johnson.
‘It’ll take a crack team of accountants to prove it, of course,’ she said. ‘Luckily, I have one of those.’ When she nodded, which she did often to endorse her own statements, her light brown Dutch bob swayed easily – a subtle cut that fit her head like a cap. She used very little make-up and wore a plain blouse and skirt but had a certain shiny perfection that made you want to keep watching her. Her clothes were all cut from some wrinkle-resistant fabric and fit her slender body closely without being at all provocative. ‘Are these all the bank records?’ She blinked at the coffee cans.
‘All we’ve found so far,’ Delaney said. ‘We just got this case on Sunday.’
‘Ah, yes, your Fourth of July celebration. I heard about that.’ She favored them with a caustic smile that enlisted them into her tough-as-nails team. Her eyes were pale blue and evidently near-sighted, enlarged by trifocals in beige plastic frames.
‘It’s a homicide case with some funny kinks in it,’ Sarah said. ‘The victim has lived in the neighborhood for a long time but seems strangely detached from it. We can’t find anyone who knew him. I’m sure you understand that we’re anxious to continue that investigation.’
‘Of course.’ She smiled around the table, looking for a moment as if she might be going to hand around a plate of brownies. Then the Iron Lady from ICE came back. ‘My office is only interested in the money laundering part of the case, but I’m sure you understand we have to have total control of any portion we agree to accept.’
‘Well,’ Delaney said, ‘Special Agent Belgrave indicated we could expect full cooperation if your people turn up anything on the homicide that we can use.’
‘I suppose.’ Lois rocked her hands. ‘You and Don signed a memorandum of agreement, as I understand it?’ She fixed Delaney in a blue-laser stare through her thick lenses. All the detectives in the room watched Lois Johnson closely, trying to get their heads around her curious blend of country girl and big-city powerhouse.
‘That’s right,’ Delaney said, still pleasant but getting cooler fast. ‘Don and I reached an understanding without much difficulty. I have a copy in my office and you’re welcome to read it any time.’
‘I’ll certainly do that,’ Lois said. ‘I do hope Don didn’t give away the farm.’ She looked back at them thoughtfully. ‘I would have supposed that anybody in law enforcement this close to the border would be runn
ing into these cases all the time and we wouldn’t need all this … dickering. But I guess … We all drive the same highway but in different lanes, don’t we? I actually don’t have much idea how you do your jobs, either. Well!’ She sat up straighter, if that was possible. ‘Let’s get the preliminaries out of the way, shall we?’
She leaned her gym-toned body back in her chair and tented her fingers. ‘Funnel accounts are usually opened by a person or company in a bank near the border. It has to be a bank with branches in at least several, sometimes hundreds of other cities. The account is set up with the proviso that it will receive deposits in certain other locations which are specified in advance but subject to change upon notice. Typically, deposits get made to the account in several of the distant branches and withdrawn from the original branch, usually within a day or two, sometimes within hours.’
Sarah’s initial impression of a thirties heartland hausfrau disappeared as Lois gave them a crisp summary of funnel accounts. She offered to deliver examples, variations and anecdotes if she thought they needed to hear them. She obviously knew her subject cold and was patiently trying to help them catch up.
‘That’s part of the picture we look for – lots of churn. Fast, hard to follow. The money, which is deposited in dollars, is often used to make purchases in foreign countries. The merchandise it buys is sent to a business address in Mexico, where it will be sold for pesos. So the money is converted without going through a currency exchange in this country.’
‘I get that,’ Leo said. ‘That’s part of what’s going on in my box, I guess.’ He told her again about the house.
‘Yes, that’s a good example. A trifle more complex than usual but not the most convoluted I’ve ever seen.’
‘This takes a lot of coordination, though, doesn’t it? You’d think we’d be looking at a lot of computers and cell phones, a whole network of smooth operators. What we seem to have here is one old guy with a Ford pickup and an adding machine.’
‘An adding machine? Are you serious?’
Beaming, Leo showed her the tapes – his favorite part of the puzzle.
‘Well, there has to be more to it than this. If Mr Springer was doing what I think, he works for a highly sophisticated syndicate and has many partners. Not necessarily known to him by sight, however. One feature of this level of money laundering is that many of the players are unknown to each other and play their parts without knowing the whole game. These people adhere strictly to the concept of need-to-know. It’s quite possible your victim is dead because he got some information he wasn’t entitled to.’
‘They’d kill him even if he learned it by accident?’
‘Absolutely. He may not even have known he had it. Drug cartels don’t take chances.’
‘What about the casino chits, though?’ Ollie said. ‘Almost every box has a batch of them. Was he skimming and gambling with the money, you think, or—’
‘No, that’s part of the job, to feed cash into the gambling machines. They don’t care if they win or lose because when they take the money out they have a chit that shows a legitimate source for it. That money can then be sent directly to an account below the border – it has been given a credible source other than drugs, you see? And as you have already noticed, that’s been happening here. Springer occasionally sent a deposit made up entirely of gambling returns to his Mazatlan bagman, Felipe García.’
‘So the neighbor who thought he saw him at the Indian Casino,’ Oscar said, ‘wasn’t mistaken.’
‘Probably not. I’d guess that Springer was gambling to launder the money. Then he brought the chits back to his bank and used them instead of checks as the basis of the deposit. When he sends it across the border he just has to keep the dollar amounts below the currency reporting threshold of ten thousand dollars. You know about that rule, right, that banks have to report—’
‘Yes,’ Sarah said, ‘we know about that rule.’
‘Good.’ Lois sent a high-beam smile to Sarah over the tops of her glasses. ‘Let’s not get testy with each other; I’m here to help.’
‘And we know we need help, and we’re very grateful to you.’ Well, I am grateful, Sarah thought. Doing my best to be, anyway. OK, maybe not succeeding a hundred percent. She shared the street cop’s view that the Feds always managed to flit along the flowery top layer of cases and leave the locals slogging through the grit and gravel below.
‘Your man,’ Lois Johnson said, ‘appears to have been running a hybrid of several forms of funnel accounts. Usually they’re more specialized – just do one or two types of laundering. But he was buying and selling, and gambling …’
‘Plus he seems to have Shylocked the money for a couple of people-smuggling runs,’ Oscar said. ‘At least, I believe that’s what I have here.’
‘I’ll look at that next.’ Lois got up and moved her chair beside Oscar’s. Sarah thought, Oh, I just bet you will, Lois.
‘I don’t usually get to follow anybody quite so resourceful and versatile,’ Lois said. ‘The way he combines the funnel accounts with old-fashioned TBML.’
‘Now wait,’ Jason said. ‘What’s TBML?’
‘Trade-based money laundering.’
Jason laid his face down sideways on the cool table surface and muttered, ‘Had to ask.’
After several more lessons in criminal pursuits, they broke for lunch. Sarah, trying to be hospitable, asked Lois to join them and began naming off the varieties of Mexican cuisine available nearby.
Lois gave her a restraining wave and said, ‘I’m on the road fifty weeks a year. I always stay in a hotel that furnishes me with continental breakfast and will make me a brown-bag lunch. That way I control the calories, the time and the money.’
She pulled a paperback whodunit out of the same bag that held her lunch and retreated behind it, indicating she knew how to fend off random chats, too. Oscar offered to make her tea but she pulled a thermos out of the same handy satchel.
Good, we won’t worry about Lois, then. Sarah went out with the rest of the crew. Feeling gleefully hedonistic away from that relentless nasal narrative, she broke training entirely, went to a Greek restaurant and ate a gyro with plenty of sour cream and a fluffy heap of herbed rice.
When they got back they found Lois already back in her chair at the table, speed-dialing her smart phone, issuing rapid-fire orders to the underlings who seemed to wait somewhere, tablets poised to receive her orders. When she finished the call she was on she clicked off without saying goodbye and resumed the morning’s conversation with Delaney’s crew before they realized she was talking to them.
‘This strategy your victim had,’ Lois said, ‘of somehow doing his jobs with lo-tech and antiquated equipment – have you any idea why he was doing that? Any notes anywhere on how it fits with the rest of the operation?’
‘Haven’t found any,’ Sarah said.
‘My guess is,’ Leo said, ‘he’s been doing this for a long time and he got himself grandfathered in to do it his way.’
Lois looked at Sarah. ‘Did you tell me that – that he’d been doing this for a long time?’
‘I said living in the house a long time,’ Sarah said. ‘We don’t know yet when he got into cross-border crime.’
‘Well, it’s one of the things we’ll find out when we find the rest of the bank records. This must be just the tip of the iceberg you’ve got here.’
‘You keep saying that like you know something we don’t. Why are you so sure?’
‘Because this operation isn’t moving enough money. A few million a year … big-time crime syndicates deal in billions – they’ve got a lot of thugs and ammo to pay for. We have to find a bigger honey pot.’
‘Where do you think we ought to be looking?’
Lois tipped her head on one side and screwed her mouth into an ironic smirk. ‘Maybe in another bank? Under the mattress doesn’t seem to work anymore.’
‘OK. We can go back and crawl through the house again, when we have time. Right now we’re concentr
ating on the homicide and there’s a lot to do.’
‘I agree. I’ve got all your paper records now anyway; my people will be working on it. I’ll let you know what I’ve found when I get back.’
‘Back from where?’ Delaney said. ‘I thought we were going to wind this up today.’
‘Can’t. I’ve got to be in Boca Raton tonight and Chicago by lunchtime tomorrow. Then back to DC for a couple of days, and I have to stop in Dallas on the way back here. Look for me on Friday. I’ll let you know what time.’
Sarah opened her mouth to say that her section of homicide worked four tens, Monday through Thursday, and would not be in the building on Friday. But she met Delaney’s eyes, saw his quick little headshake and realized that rather than tell a 24/7 powerhouse like Lois Johnson that they did not work Fridays he would personally see to it that some of them were in this office whenever she chose to return.
‘We swabbed the truck and the bike last week,’ Gloria said on the phone. ‘And got the latents at the same time. Jody and Sandy went up together to that hellhole of an impound lot. When are we gonna get one that doesn’t have dog shit and spiders all over it?’
‘Don’t know,’ Sarah said. ‘What I called to ask … Are you all done with those items, then? You don’t put it up on a hoist and sample the truck from underneath, do you?’
‘What? No. We’re not a bunch of damn auto mechanics, Sarah. You can’t lift latents off the underside of an old pickup, for God’s sake. What are you looking for?’
‘I just wanted to make sure you were done with the bike and car, that’s all. So if we go up and take another look at them we won’t be messing up your work.’
‘Well, that’s very nice and polite and one of these days I’ll certainly try to return the favor,’ Gloria said, ‘but right now I’m too busy to talk. Goodbye.’
‘It’s too bad she doesn’t have one of those old phones you slam into a cradle,’ Sarah said as she hit OFF. ‘Then she could break my eardrum while she’s at it.’
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