A Denial of Death

by Gin Jones

  Helen tried to frame a delicate question about Ralph's finances. She'd mostly given up being careful with her words when she'd left the governor's mansion, but Ralph appeared fragile and required careful handling.

  Finally she decided to approach the issue in a more roundabout manner than the direct question she'd have liked to ask. "Are there any other bank accounts or credit cards? Sometimes wives will keep a secret emergency fund that the husband doesn't know about."

  "It's possible, but I can't see why she'd bother," Ralph said. "I never look at the accounts. She handles all the family finances. The business ones too. My officer manager would do those if I asked, but Angie insists on doing it herself. Says she needs to contribute somehow, and she is good with numbers, so it makes sense for her to do it."

  That sort of a reputation for being good with numbers had led many a person to the roulette or poker table, only to find out they weren't as good with numbers as they thought they were. "You said she seemed worried recently. Do you have any idea at all what it might have been about? Did anything unusual happen, either before or after she disappeared?"

  He shook his head and then looked up abruptly. "Nothing since she left, but there was something weird at the beginning of the year. We got a tax form from some company I'd never heard of, claiming Angie had received seventy-five thousand dollars from them. Angie has never had a job outside the home in her entire lifetime, so I figured it was a mistake, and that's what she said too. She took care of it with our accountant."

  "So it wasn't included on your tax return?"

  He blinked. "You know, I didn't check. I assumed it was all straightened out. The income tax returns are Angie's responsibility. She just tells me where to sign, and I do."

  "What if it wasn't a mistake?" Helen said. "What if Angie really did earn seventy-five thousand dollars somehow? Perhaps during her previous disappearances? Winnings at the casino?"

  "She doesn't gamble." Anyone else might have been irritated by the intrusive questions, but Ralph remained calm and pleasant, living up to his reputation as a nice guy. "At least not on cards or dice or roulette. Some people would say the stock market is a form of gambling. She might have invested our savings with some company that did really well, so she hit a jackpot of sorts, selling out when the price peaked."

  "Do you have a copy of the tax return?" Helen said. "You could see if the money is listed on the return, and where it came from."

  Ralph went into another room and came back a few minutes later, staring at a half-sheet of paper stapled to the front of the tax return. He disconnected that paper and handed it to Helen silently. "This is what I was talking about. Even I can see that there’s a seventy-five grand payment to us. Unless I'm reading it wrong. Does it make any sense to you?"

  She recognized the paper as a 1099 form, the equivalent of a W-2 for independent contractors. She'd been responsible for reviewing dozens of them in her political career, issued to various temporary workers at events she'd organized for her husband. The one attached to the Deckers' income tax return reported a payment of just under seventy-five thousand dollars to Angie, individually, not to both Deckers.

  "That can't be right," Ralph said, obviously unable to comprehend that his wife had been cheating on him financially, if not in other ways.

  Helen looked to see who had made the payment to Angie. She'd never heard of it, but maybe Ralph had. "Have you ever done business with a company named SLP? Or anything with those initials?"

  He shook his head, still stunned by the fact that Angie had been keeping a seventy-five thousand dollar secret from him. Or possibly a great deal more if this wasn't the first year she'd received money from SLP.

  "There has to be a paper trail somewhere." Judging by Ralph's laissez-faire attitude toward the family's finances, Angie could have counted on him never going out of his way to check for financial records, so she could have kept them here in the house, as long as they weren't in plain sight. "What about Angie's computer? There might be something on there to explain where the money came from or where it went."

  "She doesn't have a computer. Never really had a use for one." Ralph took the tax return back from Helen and ran his hand over it, as if he could brush the incriminating numbers away. "Maybe you're right, and she really isn't coming back. I'd better go talk to the police and file a missing persons report."

  "I think that's a good idea." It would definitely put a crimp in her own investigation, though. Tate wouldn't like her doing anything that might be construed as interfering with an official investigation.

  "I'll go to the station right now."

  "They'll want a picture of Angie," Helen said. "I would too, actually. The police tend to be slow and methodical. While you're setting things up with them, I can take a drive down to the casino and see if anyone there has seen her."

  Ralph disappeared again, leaving the tax return on the table. Helen flipped it open to the 1099 and used her phone to take a picture of it, making sure she could read the name, address and ID number of the company that had paid Angie. There might be a perfectly innocent explanation for the payment, but that was a lot of money for someone who was a stay-at-home spouse with no known business skills. It wouldn't hurt to find out more about the company. She still had a few contacts who could get her some answers.

  Ralph came back a couple minutes later with a stack of pictures. He handed her the top one.

  "I've seen this picture before, at Charlene's," Helen said. "Do you have another one? Angie's not looking at the camera."

  Ralph laughed fondly. "That's Angie for you. She saw a woman with sneakers with more shiny stuff on them than she had on hers. First thing she did when we got home was to make an even more impressive pair, to take on her next trip."

  "Did she take them with her this time?"

  Ralph blinked. "You know, I didn't look. I assume so."

  Helen didn't have time for him to search his wife's closet. If she was going to the casino today, she needed to leave soon. "I'd better get going. Is this the best picture you have?"

  "It's the only recent one I have," Ralph said apologetically, spreading out the pile of pictures to reveal that they were all prints of the same image. "Angie doesn't like being photographed."

  Helen could see why she wouldn't. Angie wanted to be the center of attention, and it was her personality, not her appearance, that made that happen. Even in this picture, with Angie front and center, it was easy to overlook her and go straight to the taller, more photogenic subjects. Helen knew that experience too well; she herself had always faded into the background when the press photographers surrounded her husband. She hadn't realized how invisible she'd been until recently when she'd gone through a pile of pictures from her days in the governor's mansion, intending to put them into a scrapbook, and couldn't find any of herself. At least Angie hadn't actually been cropped out of the image like Helen had been.

  "This is fine," she assured Ralph. "I'll have it cut down to just her face when I make copies to show at the casino. I've got a lot of experience with cropping."

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Instead of heading straight to the casino, Helen asked Jack to take her home so she could scan the picture of Angie and print some flyers to take with them. While they were printing, she could make some calls to see what she could find out about SLP.

  In the meantime, Jack was better than a wiki when it came to the people and businesses of Wharton and the surrounding communities. "Do you know anything about a company called SLP?"

  "It's not local," Jack said. "Is it related to Angie's disappearance?"

  "Maybe. Angie received some money from them, and no one knows why. She's never worked outside the home as far as anyone knows, and the money was a whole lot more than what she could have earned at some secret minimum wage job, even if she could have squeezed in a part-time job in between her home-making duties and all her various charitable activities. So where else could she have gotten seventy-five thousand dollars?"

  "An
investment?"

  "That's what Ralph thinks," Helen said, "but does SLP sound like an investing company to you? Don't they usually have 'financial' or 'fund' or 'get rich quick' in the name somewhere?"

  "It could be just about anything. For computer guys, SLP stands for Service Location Protocol." Jack was silent for a couple miles. "What if she signed up for one of those work-at-home deals? I've seen ads for them all over the place. You know: make a thousand dollars a day from your home computer."

  "Most of them are scams, though," Helen said. "My ex-husband was always getting complaints about them from constituents. There wasn't anything he could do except refer them to the state Attorney General for investigation by the Consumer Protection Division. I can check with them. They might have heard of SLP, if it is a scam."

  "What about a private pyramid scheme?" Jack turned into the cottage's driveway and slowed to a crawl so as not to damage the expensive car's suspension on the rutted surface. "People who get in on the ground floor supposedly make good money. Not that I know anyone who has. Everyone I know who's invested in them ended up in the red."

  "Angie is supposed to be good with money," Helen said. "She must have known that only the people at the top of a pyramid scheme ever make any money. The only way she'd have made a profit was if she was the one who'd started the whole con."

  "Like you say, she is good with money."

  "But not so good with people," Helen said. "She might have been able to organize the scheme, but from what I've heard, she doesn't have the skills to sell others on buying into the pyramid. Her husband is the salesman, not her. Investors have to like the person at the top for a pyramid scheme to work, and it doesn't sound like anyone likes Angie very much."

  "What about a money laundering operation?" Jack turned the car around so the passenger door aligned with the front walkway. "I bet a lot of cash goes through the insurance agency, and Angie has access to it."

  That made more sense than the idea that Angie had convinced people to invest in anything she was trying to sell. "If she got involved with criminals, it might explain her disappearance. She could be running from them."

  "Or worse." Jack turned off the powerful engine.

  "Or worse," Helen agreed.

  Tate wandered out of the garage and over to the huge luxury car while Helen slid easily out of the passenger seat. He nodded at the car. "Isn't this a bit much for one person who generally doesn't put more than ten miles a week on the odometer?"

  "It's perfect for road trips, though," Helen said. "I anticipate visiting my nieces more often once I have my own car."

  "Right. The nieces," Tate said. "And eventually you can give rides to Laura's children. They're going to love the upholstery on this car. Of course, you might not love it so much once they drop a few snacks and sippy cups on it."

  "What do you know about sippy cups?"

  "Adam isn't my only nephew." Tate pointed at the envelope Helen was holding. "What's that?"

  "A picture of Angie. I'm going to make some flyers."

  "She's still missing then, and the bank statements didn't help?"

  Helen nodded. "Come inside with me while I print some flyers. I was wondering about something. How would a person get into the money laundering business?"

  Tate brushed some sawdust off his jeans. "A person wouldn't. Not if she was my client."

  "I'm talking hypothetically."

  "Being a murder suspect isn't risky enough, so you decided to branch out and get involved with other types of crimes?"

  "I've always been perfectly law-abiding, and it's enough of a habit that I'm not likely to switch to a life of crime now," Helen said. "Angie, on the other hand, may not have had the same qualms as I do. We know she's been lying to her husband. Not just about little things. She received seventy-five grand last year, and Ralph doesn't know how she got it. Money laundering came up as a possibility because she's got a paper trail from some company no one's ever heard of, and there's no sign of the actual cash in any of the Deckers' bank accounts."

  Tate looked up into the treetops for a moment, and Helen thought he might refuse to answer, but then he nodded and made an "after you" gesture in the direction of the front walk. Helen slammed the heavy car door shut and headed for the front porch.

  Tate fell in beside her. "Keep in mind that none of my clients were ever found guilty, and they denied doing anything wrong. Everything I know about money laundering is from the prosecution's claims. The allegations were pretty simple usually. They claimed my clients had made substantial profits from criminal activity, and then, instead of depositing the whole amount of cash into a bank all at once, they broke it into smaller pieces to avoid triggering the ten thousand dollar reporting threshold."

  "That's it?" Helen said. "Their big criminal scheme was to divide their loot into several small bags instead of keeping it in a single big one?"

  "Pretty much."

  "I can't believe you charge me for this kind of advice," Helen said. "If Angie was laundering money, it would have had to be more sophisticated than what you described. There wasn't seventy-five thousand dollars' worth of unexplained deposits into any of the bank accounts I saw, and the money was reported to the IRS. The only one who didn't know about it was her husband."

  "In that case, there are two other schemes I've heard of. If she was the one laundering the money, not the one producing the illegal cash in the first place, she could have done something with fake invoices or run the money through a cash-intensive business like her husband's insurance agency. She'd have needed Ralph's cooperation for that last one, though, and I can't see him agreeing to anything illegal."

  "How do the fake invoices work?"

  "The person with the illegal cash would write up a fake invoice, as if Angie had bought something from him, usually services, which are hard to prove were never provided. So, for instance, he'd write a fake invoice for fixing Angie's home computer, and if anyone asked, she'd say she'd paid him for the work."

  "That's backwards, though," Helen said. "Angie's the one with the documentation for receiving money."

  "Maybe she was the one with the illegal cash."

  "As far as I can tell, she only has the documentation, not the actual money."

  "Then either she wasn't engaged in money laundering," Tate said, "or she was really bad at it."

  "It was just a theory." Discouraged, Helen carried the photograph Ralph had given her over to her computer and placed it on the scanner bed. While the equipment warmed up, she said, "My first thought was that the money was from gambling, anyway. Angie wouldn't have known how to explain the winnings to Ralph when she's supposedly got religious objections to gambling, so she might have stuffed the cash into a mattress instead of a bank."

  "If I were in court, I'd point out that you're indulging in speculation, not offering any admissible evidence."

  "I don't have any admissible evidence," Helen said in frustration. "Isn't there a pre-trial stage when you're still brainstorming a case, establishing a theory and gathering up evidence? That's what I'm doing now."

  "Fair enough," Tate said. "It's called discovery."

  "That's it. I need to discover more about the company that paid Angie. They might know where Angie is."

  Tate appeared to be warring with his better instincts and then spoke cautiously. "What's the company's name?"

  "SLP. Recognize it?"

  "I've heard the initials in a couple different contexts. The first time was when a client did something stupid and had his gun collection confiscated. One of the weapons was called an SLP, or self-loading pistol. A British import, apparently."

  "And the other time?"

  "Nothing criminal," Tate said. "The local library gets me to contribute to it every year: the Summer Library Program. I've never heard the letters used to describe a business, though."

  "No one else has, either." Helen pushed the button to scan Angie's picture. "The Secretary of State could probably find them, but I've lost touch with my best contacts
there. My niece Lily might have better luck."

  "That's it?" Tate said suspiciously. "You're going to sit back and let Lily do the work for you?"

  "While she's following that lead I'll be checking out the casino where Charlene dropped Angie off."

  "Have you ever been to a casino before?"

  "Sure," Helen said. "My ex-husband was taken on tours of the most successful places every time the issue of legalized gambling came up in the legislature. I went along a few times."

  "What did you play while you were there?"

  "Nothing."

  "But now you're going to take up gambling in order to find Angie?"

  "I still need a retirement hobby," Helen said. "I could learn to play poker."

  "No, you couldn't," Tate said. "You couldn't bluff someone to save your life."

  "Slots, then. They don't take any skill."

  "Which is why you'd be bored with them in three seconds flat." Tate glanced out the front window at Jack, who was lovingly polishing the hood of the luxury car. "Casinos are easy to get lost in. If you're going to have any chance of finding Angie, you need to narrow the search to wherever she's most likely to be. Do you even know what games Angie plays?"

  "As far as I know, she doesn't play any of them."

  Tate opened his mouth and shut it again. "I'll say one thing for you. You never bore me by being predictable."

  "It's just a guess that she won the money gambling. Everyone says she goes for the glitzy experience and to show off her rhinestone sneakers, not for the gaming. If that's true, then as a non-gambler myself, I'm in the best position to look for her. There can't be that many non-gamblers there, so they're bound to run into each other."

  Helen turned her back on Tate to check the quality of the scanned photo. It was fine, so she opened a photo manipulation program. It had been a while since she'd used it, though, and she'd forgotten what most of the icons represented. She could hear Tate fretting behind her, which didn't help her concentration. That man worried about everything. It was a miracle he hadn't had a stress-induced heart attack long before he could retire and enjoy his woodworking.