by Diane Kelly
Credit card counterfeiting was a booming underground business. Counterfeiters could produce cards en masse for next to nothing and sell them for a pretty penny to unscrupulous thieves. Using a counterfeit card was safer than outright shoplifting since the party attempting to use the card could simply leave the store if the card were declined. The risk of being caught was small, nearly infinitesimally so.
As Eddie read the notes from the FTC files, a slow smile spread across his lips. “You may be on to something here, girl.”
All three victims earned significantly above-average incomes. All three had perfect credit prior to the fraud. And all three held checking accounts with online bill pay at North Dallas Credit Union.
Coincidence?
We didn’t think so.
More than likely, an NDCU insider had stolen the victims’ credit card information from the financial institution’s online bill pay database and supplied it to an outsider, who in turn manufactured and sold the bogus credit cards. But was that NDCU insider working on his own, or was he Marcos Mendoza’s minion?
My money was on minion.
After the fraud had been reported to the FTC, the FTC in turn reported it to the IRS. The counterfeiting income and stolen property represented taxable income to the thieves and surely had gone unreported. If we could find the parties who’d used the counterfeited cards, perhaps, with a little persuasion, they would point us to the person responsible for manufacturing and selling the cards. And, perhaps, that person would then lead us on a trail to Marcos Mendoza’s door.
I was thrilled to discover these new leads, yet I felt uneasy. The cryptic voice mail message had referenced the files from the trade commission. As much as I wanted to chalk this up to coincidence, doing so would defy logic. The caller apparently knew I was after Mendoza. George Burton, the Lobo, Eddie, and I were supposed to be the only ones privy to that fact.
Someone in the IRS had gotten wind of the investigation. Not good. At least the person seemed to be on our side.
Who was it who had called? And why had the person called from a coed’s cell phone? Another mystery to solve.
But first things first. The first step was to find the identity thieves. And the first step to finding the identity thieves was milking the victims for information.
Eddie and I jumped on our phones and set appointments to interview the three victims. Fortunately, all three were eager to nail the assholes who’d screwed up their credit scores and got bill collectors calling them nonstop. Each of them agreed to meet with us that day.
We poked our heads in Lu’s door and told her the news.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” She pointed out the door. “Get going!”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Charging Ahead
Our appointment with the first victim, an elderly widow named Ernestine Griggs, was scheduled for five o’clock that evening at Ernestine’s home.
I changed out of the maternity clothes and into a peach-hued blazer, white silk camisole, and a faux-pearl necklace, along with a pair of slacks, top button undone to accommodate my newly acquired girth. Eddie wore a basic navy suit, crisp white shirt, and red tie, looking every bit the conservative Republican that he was, God save his soul. We appeared professional but not intimidating.
I sang along with the country music on my BMW’s radio as we made our way to Ernestine’s house. Eddie had the good sense not to comment on my choice of music or lack of vocal ability. He’d learned it only made me sing louder. After no less than three songs referencing tequila, pickup trucks, and blue jeans, we pulled up to the curb in front of Ernestine’s house.
I switched off the engine and Eddie and I turned our heads, taking in the fifties-era ranch-style gray brick home. Something didn’t look quite right, but it took us both a few seconds to figure it out.
Eddie’s mouth hung open. “You seein’ what I’m seein’? Plastic daffodils?”
“Yep. And lots of ’em.”
The front yard was AstroTurf, the flower beds filled with fake flowers and small white rocks instead of dirt. Not exactly yard-of-the-month material. Brett would cringe if he saw this place.
Eddie swung his door open. “What kind of person puts plastic flowers in their yard?”
“We’re about to find out.”
We climbed out of the car and made our way up the cracked concrete walkway to the front door. Mother Nature had turned her hairdryer on Dallas, and the warm winds had quickly dried up the morning’s drizzle. The heat made my blazer feel too thick, too heavy. I lifted my shoulders to free my back from the cami that was now sticking to it. A skinny, solid orange cat emerged from the bushes next to the porch, made a chirping sound, and followed us to the door.
Mrs. Griggs jerked the door open as we came up the steps. The cat darted inside.
“You’re six minutes late,” she barked. She wore mismatched slippers over knee-hi panty hose and a blue housedress, her gray hair pulled up in a dozen pink sponge rollers. You’d never know from looking at the frump that she pulled in a cool sixty grand a year in dividends and interest.
“Sorry, ma’am,” I said. “We ran into traffic. Hope we haven’t interfered with your plans.”
Eddie cast me a sidelong glance that said What kind of plans could this woman have dressed like that?
She impatiently waved us in. “Judge Judy starts in twenty-four minutes. We need to wrap this up by then.”
We stepped into her house. The décor was baby blue and pink, as if the entire house were a toddler’s nursery. The pink velour couch was so worn in places that the fabric sported a sheen. The blue carpet was threadbare in the high traffic areas. Wallpaper with alternating blue and pink stripes covered the walls, with dusty braided wreaths of twigs and paper roses hanging here and there.
The room was too warm, the ineffective ceiling fan overhead emitting an irritating skree-skree as it made its slow rotation. For God’s sake, why didn’t this woman have the air conditioner on? She was loaded. She could afford A/C. Then again, maybe years of penny-pinching is how she’d amassed her fortune.
Ernestine plopped down in a glider, propping her feet up on the matching ottoman. An oversized Siamese cat appeared out of nowhere, announcing his arrival with a quick meow before jumping into the woman’s lap.
“This is Tom,” she said, pulling the cat toward her. “Say ‘hi,’ Tom.” She turned him around to face us, grabbed his paw and held it up, moving his furry little foot back and forth in a feline wave. The poor beast’s expression was humiliated yet tolerant. He knew better than to bite the knobby old hand that fed him.
When she’d finished playing pussycat puppeteer, she gestured toward the couch, where a gray tabby lay, one leg kicked straight up in the air like a furry Rockette, happily licking his genitals. “Sit there.”
Eddie and I took seats on the couch on either side of the tabby. I set my purse down on the coffee table next to a copy of AARP Magazine and pulled out my notepad and pen. Another cat wandered into the room then, this one a long-haired calico, primarily black, with white paws and an orange spot under her chin. The cat paused a moment, stretched out her front paws and fluffed her tail, then waltzed over to sniff my purse.
“Hello, kitty.” I gave the cat a quick scratch under the chin and turned my attention to Mrs. Griggs, clicking my pen to take notes. “How did you find out you’d been a victim of fraud?”
She glided back in her chair. “Got a call from one of those smart-ass bill collectors. You know the kind. Threaten to toss you out of your house and take your retirement accounts if you don’t pay up.”
“When did this happen?”
“Let’s see…” She looked down at the cat on her lap as if the answer were written on his back. She stroked the kitty a couple of times. “Last fall. October. I remember because he called right after I got back from visiting Martha Potter in the hospital. She fell and broke her hip. What a bitch.”
I wasn’t sure if the bitch was the broken hip or Martha herself, but since
it wasn’t relevant to the case I didn’t ask for clarification. “What did you tell the bill collector?”
“That I hadn’t used my Visa card in years and he could go fuck himself.”
“And what did he say?”
“That I was the third person that day to suggest he fuck himself and if he could figure out a way to do it he would because women were too much trouble.”
Eddie snickered. “Amen to that.”
I elbowed him in the ribs. Oomph.
“What happened next?” I asked Ernestine as Eddie rubbed his side.
“The guy claimed I’d run up a bill of nearly ten thousand dollars. What a bunch of horse hockey. I called the lawyer who’d handled my husband’s probate when he passed away—” She looked skyward and waved the cat’s paw toward the heavens this time, a little “hello” to her hubby in the hereafter. “The lawyer sent a letter telling them to…” She squinched her eyes closed in thought and snapped her gnarled fingers as if the action would make the words she was searching for magically appear.
“Cease and desist?” Eddie filled in for her.
“That the legal term for ‘eat shit and die’?”
“Pretty much,” my partner said.
“That’s it, then.” The woman impatiently waved her own hand around now. “The lawyer got them to back off, got the delinquency removed from my credit bureaus. Which had been perfect by the way, never been late on anything in my life. The lawyer reported it to the Trade Commission, too. ’Course they didn’t do nothing about it.”
Unfortunately, with credit card fraud being the crime du jour, the FTC simply couldn’t keep up. Instead, the staff at the commission had passed the information on to the Treasury. The other federal agencies treated the IRS staff like the cleanup crew at a rodeo, expecting us to take care of the shit they couldn’t handle. Any crime resulting in financial gain to the perpetrator, most of which went unreported, was a potential tax case. So when federal agents couldn’t nail someone for other violations of law, they counted on the Treasury to bring the bad guys in for tax evasion. Not necessarily a bad strategy. It had worked with Al Capone, after all.
“At the time this fraud occurred, where did you maintain financial accounts?”
“My retirement was with Charles Schwab,” she said. “Had a checking account at North Dallas Credit Union. Certificate of deposit at Wells Fargo. Big ’un. Also a college fund for my grandson at Vanguard. Not that he’ll ever use the money. The kid’s dumber than mud. We’ll be lucky if he graduates from high school.”
She gestured to her gray brick fireplace. On the mantel sat a framed eight-by-ten photo of a skinny, shaggy-haired boy wearing a stained white T-shirt and a vacant expression.
“Maybe he’ll surprise you,” I said hopefully.
Ernestine snorted.
We continued our interrogation, asking how long she’d held each of her financial accounts, whether there had been any suspicious activity on any of them. Of course the only one we were really interested in was the NDCU account, but we didn’t want to tell her that. Couldn’t have her running down to the credit union and confronting the staff, blowing our case.
She picked up a piece of paper from her end table and jabbed it in my direction. “Here’s the credit card bill you asked for.”
Eddie moved the tabby cat and slid closer to me on the couch, reading over my shoulder as I reviewed the account statement. The bill revealed the standard MO. The thief had hit the card hard in a short period of time, running up charges at various gas stations, a grocery store, a pharmacy, and a half dozen shops in Collin Creek mall.
The grocery store and the mall were likely to be dead ends. Too many people coming and going and no way to identify them from a film clip. But the pharmacy posed possibilities and the gas station could have a security camera tape that would give us a license plate.
I stuck the bill in my briefcase for safekeeping.
When we were through asking questions, I jotted down the facts she’d given me on an affidavit form. We’d need her sworn statement to show Magistrate Judge Alice Trumbull when we went before her later to request a wiretap on NDCU’s and AmeriMex’s phone lines. I slid the affidavit and pen across the coffee table toward her. “Sign this at the bottom, please.”
“If it’ll put the bumfuckers who caused me this trouble behind bars, I’d be glad to.” Ernestine plopped the cat down on the floor, where he stood angrily whisking his tail back and forth while she picked up the pen and signed the document.
“You’ll need to keep our investigation confidential,” I warned Ernestine as I took the signed document back from her. “If anyone gets wind of this, it could blow our case. Understand?”
She rolled her eyes. “I watch Law & Order. I get it.” She made a motion as if zipping her lips then throwing away a key. She’d mixed her metaphors, but she’d made her point. She’d keep mum.
By that time, Judge Judy was coming on. Ernestine didn’t bother seeing us to the door, just picked up her remote, pointed it at the television, and ignored us as we walked outside, yet another cat, this one a smushed-face gray Persian, trotting out the door with us.
* * *
That evening, we interviewed the other victims and obtained similar affidavits from them, as well as similar promises to keep quiet about our investigation. The other victims were a single hi-tech consultant in his early thirties and a married, middle-aged insurance salesman. Neither had a clue why their information might have been targeted or who the identity thief might be.
The fraudulent charges on their accounts were similar to those on Ernestine Griggs’s billing statement. Grocery stores. Gas stations. Stores at local malls. Whoever had the insurance salesman’s counterfeit card had spent a grand at one of the big box electronics stores.
Merchants had grown lax in asking for identification, making it easy for thieves to get away with credit card fraud. Then again, if the stores had asked for ID and rejected the counterfeit cards, Eddie and I wouldn’t have some new leads to follow, would we?
When we’d finished for the day, I dropped Eddie at his minivan in the IRS employee lot. I glanced at my watch. It was 8:45. Just enough time to make a quick nooky run to Brett’s. I dialed Brett on my mobile. “Get naked,” I told him. “I’m on my way.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Making the Rounds
On my drive to Brett’s, I placed a call to Lindsay McFarland’s cell phone.
After three rings, she picked up. “Hello?”
There was no music in the background this time, only the sounds of girls shouting and laughing, a door slamming. Lindsay must live in the sorority house.
“Hello, Miss McFarland. My name is Tara Holloway. I received a call from your number a few days ago.”
“Tara who?”
“Holloway,” I repeated. “I work for the IRS.”
“IRS?”
“Right.”
“I never called the IRS.” Her tone was confused.
“Actually it was a man who called from your phone. Someone with a deep voice.”
There was a short pause as the young woman seemed to be thinking. “Oh yeah. It was probably the dude I met at Coco Bongo.”
“What’s Coco Bongo?”
“Only the best club ever! I went down there with my sorority sisters. We needed a weekend away, you know?”
If anyone knew about needing a weekend away, it was me. “When you say ‘down there,’ where do you mean?”
“Mexico.”
Holy cucaracha. My heart rate doubled. “Cancún, Mexico?”
“Mm-hm. Coco Bongo has the best margaritas on the planet!” Assorted whoops sounded in the background. Sounded like the girls of Alpha Chi Omega were in agreement about the margaritas. But I was more interested in the guy who’d used her phone.
“So you let a man borrow your phone?” I asked, steering Lindsay’s focus back to the caller.
“Right. He bought a round of drinks for me and my friends. It was the least I could do, yo
u know?”
My mind whirled. Could it have been…? Surely not. But what if…? “Did he tell you his name?”
“He did.” She hesitated a moment as if trying to recollect the information. “Gosh, I can’t remember what it was, though.”
Not surprising. Margaritas aren’t exactly memory enhancers.
Lindsay polled her friends. “Anybody remember the name of the guy at Coco Bongo who bought us drinks?”
There were various voices in the background. None seemed to remember the man’s name for certain, though they all remembered he was “totally hot” and at least two of the girls “would do him.”
I changed lanes on the freeway to avoid an ancient Dodge sedan spewing a gray cloud of exhaust.
“Could his name have been Eddie?” I asked, tossing out the name only to have a control by which to judge the conviction of her responses.
“No,” she said. “It wasn’t Eddie.”
“Josh?”
“No,” she said again. “That doesn’t sound right, either.”
I tried to sound casual, though my heart was pounding. “Any chance his name was Nick?”
“That’s it!” she said. “I remember now. When he bought us the drinks we teased him that he was like Santa Claus. We called him Saint Nick. My friend Kaitlyn tried to sit on his lap but she was so drunk she fell off.”
Looked like Kaitlyn would be on Santa’s naughty list this year.
That was all Lindsay could give me.
But it was enough to blow my mind.
* * *
I rolled off Brett, panting, and settled my head against the soft, plump pillow.