by Lisa Black
“I told you.”
“You said Evan was your partner. You meant that literally, right?”
She stopped speaking. Maggie continued to stack bundles of bills. The undercover guy in the corner had his chin propped on one hand, its elbow cupped with the other hand, as if waiting for the next twist in a stage play.
Jack said, “He skimmed from Ralph. Then he brought the cash here and deposited it in your account through, what, the night depository? That’s why he wasn’t found on a direct route home, because he came here first. Then what, every so often you withdraw from the account, bring the cash down here, and put it in your box? Transactions under ten thousand don’t have to be reported anywhere, and a simple account withdrawal wouldn’t leave much of a paper trail.”
If he had gotten any of that wrong, she didn’t correct him.
“So here’s the thing, Shanaya. Who did he skim from? Those bogus medical checks? How did he do it without Ralph finding out?”
“I don’t know.”
“You just said you were partners.”
“I don’t have to prove anything to you. You have no right—”
He pointed out, with surprising patience: “I’ve been to the check cashing place. I know what Evan made per hour. You, on the other hand, admit that your take-home pay was commission on a first-degree felony.”
“My boss was fraudulent. He got all the money, I didn’t. I only made an hourly wage—”
Maggie had emptied the bag and now tallied the contents, doing the math three times to make sure she got it right. She had thirty-eight stacks of five, nine-hundred and fifty thousand, plus three extra stacks so—
Jack turned to her.
She said, “Nine-hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars.”
He didn’t bat an eye. Neither did Shanaya, but the undercover guy in the corner sat up a little straighter.
“And what was your hourly wage?” Jack asked the girl.
Shanaya seemed to be desperately calculating in her head to come up with some amount that explained how she or Evan or both of them could legally have made nearly a million dollars over the course of a few years.
Maggie, meanwhile, tried out mental arguments for not processing each of the nineteen thousand, three hundred bills, which would be largely pointless—the money had obviously been bundled by the bank employees. She could process the two outer surfaces of the two outer bills and the band of each bundle, only what Shanaya or Evan would touch when moving them from a teller window to a safe deposit box. That made sense.
Shanaya continued to work on an innocent explanation.
Maggie double-checked the oversized backpack. Other than the cash, the main compartment held only a worn metal box with a wire handle and a simple clasp, the kind a social organization might use for petty cash. She pulled it out, holding it carefully by the edges. It had a duck sticker and a piece of masking tape that had once been some sort of label on the top.
“Don’t touch that,” Shanaya said.
Maggie stopped; the woman had not said a word to her while the bills stacked up, so perhaps this box—
“That’s personal. It’s none of your business.”
“Unfortunately, Shanaya,” Jack said, with the most painstaking show of patience that Maggie had ever seen from him, “everything about you is now our business.”
Maggie decided to fingerprint it, now that she’d finally discovered a decent surface for prints. Superglue fuming would be better, but the box had already been jostled around inside a canvas bag and she didn’t think further transport would help matters. But how to use black powder inside the bank’s conference room without creating a mess for the cleaning staff or, heaven forbid, leaving a dark sheen that might rub off on an executive’s expensive suit?
Shanaya said, “You can’t prove anything about that money.”
“Maybe not,” Jack said, “but neither can you.”
“I don’t have to. I’m innocent until proven—”
“Except you’re not. We’ve already established that you’re part of a criminal enterprise aimed at defrauding innocent citizens. You don’t get to benefit from crime. It’s as simple as that.”
Maggie found a roll of paper towels tucked in a single, sparsely populated cabinet in one corner of the room. She spread that over the table and placed the box on top of it, then applied powder with a light brush, keeping her strokes short and concentrated. No sense throwing the fine dust off in every direction or the bankers would be collecting dark smears on their file folders, fingers, and clothes for weeks to come. Shanaya watched this inexorable process with dread.
Maggie found three prints that might be of value for comparison, spread clear tape over the dark lines, then transferred the tape to white glossy cards. They were distinct with strong lines, fresh. Most likely Shanaya had placed them there ten minutes earlier, but nothing could be done about that.
“You have no right to go through my stuff,” the woman continued to argue, aiming this fury at Jack.
“I do, actually. That’s what a warrant means.”
Maggie opened the box, gingerly; she couldn’t help but expect live snakes or a small explosion after that vehement objection. But the box held only loose papers and a few keepsakes: a scratched gold band, a worn gold necklace with a light blue stone, a picture that must have been Shanaya as a toddler with an older couple—her parents?—and a brown and white feather about five inches long. Maggie spread it out and photographed, while feeling the woman’s eyes burn into her scalp.
“That’s just—stuff,” Shanaya said, her voice small and weak.
“I see that.” Maggie tried to sound soothing. She would have liked to assure the woman that she could have it back, but that would be up to detectives and attorneys. These apparent family keepsakes couldn’t be considered relevant evidence. The stack of fake IDs, however . . .
“I’m not a criminal,” Shanaya told Jack. “It’s not my fault my boss is defrauding people. Did you make the staff at Enron give their paychecks back because it turned out to be one big pyramid scheme?”
Maggie detected surprise in the brief tilt of Jack’s eyebrows before he spoke. “That’s a good argument—except you’ve already admitted that you knew it was fraud.”
“I didn’t know—”
“So you really believed that you were an IRS agent, sending deputies out to arrest delinquent taxpayers?”
That stopped her. The “I didn’t know” defense wasn’t going to fly. She tried another. “You can’t prove I did that.”
“We have a witness in custody who is begging to identify you on the stand.”
“He can’t identify a voice. That’s not proof.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see what the jury thinks.”
She sat back, appraising him coldly. Blanket denial had gone nowhere. Next approach: “You want your cut? How much is it going to take?”
The undercover guy stirred again, either wondering what his percent might be or wondering if that had been Jack’s goal all along. After all, he didn’t know Jack, who might be the kind of cop who assumed every working stiff could use a little extra folding money.
Maggie knew better. Jack had many faults—to put it gently—but avarice was not one of them.
“No one is taking a cut. As I said, this will be inventoried and you’ll get a receipt. If it cannot be established that these are criminal proceeds, it will be returned to you. If they are criminal proceeds but the original owners cannot be located, part or all of it may be returned to you. I truly cannot say. That depends on what else we discover in this investigation and what the state attorney wants to charge you with, and whether you cooperate.”
She looked up, seeing the glint of a life raft bobbing atop a crashing wave. “Cooperate?”
“You’re a businesswoman,” he said. “Maybe we can make a deal. You’re on the inside of a large criminal enterprise. Maybe, if you help us take them down, if we don’t find proof that you had a much bigger role in that enter
prise than you are letting on—”
“I didn’t.”
“If they did not keep records of who was defrauded and how much of that money went to you—”
She snorted.
“Yeah, I can’t see why they’d helpfully maintain all the evidence that we could use to hang them, either. So if no victims can be identified, then there’s a chance that some or all of this money could be returned to you.”
“Seriously?” She didn’t sound convinced. It didn’t sound very likely to Maggie, either.
He said, “If we can’t prove that the money is stolen, we have to return it to you. But, full disclosure, our goal will be to prove where the money came from.”
“Not much incentive for me, then, is there?”
“That’s up to you,” he said, his tone brisk, matter-of-fact. “Here’s the situation: I’m walking out that door with your almost-a-million dollars. You can run, or you can come with me and try to work out a deal with the state attorney. I have no idea if a deal will be doable. I have no idea whether you will or will not eventually be arrested and serve time in jail. I make no guarantees. I hope I have made that sufficiently clear.”
“Crystal,” the girl snapped.
But she didn’t run.
Maggie had been packing the money back into the oversized backpack. Shanaya Thomas watched every movement, her gaze following the tidy stacks of bills as one by one they disappeared inside the black canvas. Maggie could only guess at the mental calculations she must be making. Take the loss and move on? She was young and healthy and most importantly, not in jail. But she had also spent a long time accumulating this cash. Plus Jack now had all her alternate identities, leaving her no funds to buy a new one. She would truly have to start from a zero sum. A year or three formed only a blink on the timeline at her age, but it probably didn’t feel that way. It probably felt like it had taken forever to accumulate that fortune—and she might never see another.
Shanaya Thomas said, “Okay.”
Chapter 30
Monday, 4:20 p. m.
“Let me get this straight,” Patty Wildwind said to Jack. “We have a murdered detective and you want to do an undercover sting op to catch a phone scam ring?”
“Yes.”
She looked tired, Maggie thought, and not remotely triumphant, not the way she should look with a cop-killer in custody and tied up with a bow for the prosecution. Not at all. Neither did Riley, who stood next to her in the hallway outside the homicide unit.
Then Maggie thought, I probably don’t look so daisy-fresh myself—not much sleep the past couple nights, haven’t eaten since breakfast, black powder on my nose . . .
Riley said, “Crazy as it sounds, the phone scam girl’s boyfriend died from exactly the same kind of wound as Rick and Jennifer Toner. There’s got to be a connection, though I’ll be damned if I know what it is.”
Jack said, “And you have a suspect in custody for Gardiner.”
Patty flicked him a glance that said he wasn’t fooling her. No one standing on that worn linoleum thought Marlon Toner had killed his sister and Rick, but not one of them wanted to say so, either. “A suspect who’s a long way from convicted.”
Riley said, “He won’t admit it, but also won’t give an alibi for Friday. He can’t stop crying about his sister but won’t give up his drug connection, Castleman. Won’t tell us where his office is, when he last saw him, whether the guy knew Jennifer existed. Marlon’s all pathetically devastated until we start asking about the good doc. Then he gets this cagey look in his eyes and shuts the hell up.”
“Addict,” Patty added, as if that explained everything. And it did. Marlon Toner felt an overwhelming body blow at the death of his sister, but he needed his pills—now, he would tell himself, more than ever.
“So what are you going to do with him?” Jack asked.
“Let him stew for a while, hope his public defender can talk some sense into him,” Patty said.
Riley held up a plastic bag labeled INMATE PROPERTY. “We have his most current prescription from good old Dr. Castleman right here. He’s already burned through half of the bottle.”
Jack glanced at the other items in the bag, besides the orange pill bottle. “What’s that?”
Riley said, “That is the stub for a reimbursement check that our Marlon cashed this morning, to the tune of thirty-five thousand dollars.”
Maggie said, “Sheesh, what’d he supposed to have had done? A heart replacement?”
“Doesn’t say. Even more interesting is what’s behind the stub—three receipts for money orders, sent out for deposit in the amount of nine thousand dollars each.”
“Staying under the federal reporting rules,” Maggie noted.
“Care to guess where he purchased these orders?”
“A to Z Check Cashing?”
“Bing! The lady wins a prize.”
Jack said, “Time to have another chat with Ralph. You should come,” he added to Maggie. “He likes you.”
“Oh hell,” she said.
Monday, 4:47 p. m.
And Ralph was, indeed, happy to see her. The two cops, not so much. After presenting themselves inside the front lobby and then walking around to the entry door on the other street, he made them wait on his step until Maggie’s teeth threatened to chatter.
When he finally opened the door he greeted them with: “What you want? I already told you, I don’t know who killed Evan. It’s worst for me, I am making myself sick here trying to fill in for missing employee myself. I keep interviewing, no one seems right. Everyone who comes is either stupid or shifty. I can’t let anyone shifty in here, no matter how much I watch them.” He threw a dark look at the opening to the counter area, where a boy with shaggy blond hair had draped his entire upper torso along its surface while he texted.
“Tell us about this,” Riley said, holding up the money order receipt.
Ralph recoiled as if Riley had swung a mace, but then recovered. He spared one quick glance for the slip of paper in its clear folder. “It’s a receipt. So what?”
“From this morning.”
Ralph leaned in, peered more sharply. “Yes. So what?”
Riley ticked off his points with erect fingers. “One, we’d like to have Maggie here download the video from this exchange. Two, we’d like to know where this money went. Three, we’d like to see the check he cashed to get it.”
Ralph blinked, and began to shake his head no.
“Let’s start with the video,” Riley said, his tone kindly. “That will help jog your memory about this interaction.”
“Not me. Let me see the time—eight-thirty, no, you need to talk to Curtis—”
“No, man.” The kid, obviously sharper than he appeared, spoke without even turning to look at them. “I clocked in at nine. I always clock in at nine.”
Three sets of eyes swiveled back to Ralph. “Uh, yes . . . okay. Our video system . . .” His voice trailed off as he wandered toward his desk, no doubt remembering that they were already familiar with his video system. Once again he ushered Maggie into his chair and hovered while she searched the stored video to locate Marlon Toner entering the A to Z Check Cashing store. No one else had been in the lobby. They watched Ralph take a check that Toner slid under the plexiglass barrier. The two men clearly spoke, but the conversation appeared desultory to Maggie. Neither man seemed agitated or conflicted. Marlon Toner waited patiently, signed the papers Ralph handed him, and left as soon as he had secured his thirty-five hundred dollars. Maggie guessed he had done that before, more than once, and had no more questions about the process.
“Okay,” Riley concluded as Maggie saved the video to her USB drive. “So he cashed a check.”
“That’s what we do here.” Ralph couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of his voice.
“He’s a regular customer of yours?”
Ralph shrugged. “Probably. I have a lot of repeat customers.”
“Looked like he knew exactly what to do.”
R
alph didn’t bother to respond.
“Let’s see the check he cashed.”
Real worry sprang into the older man’s face. “Why? No. I don’t think I can show you that. It’s confidential financial information.” Whenever agitated, his slight accent grew stronger, which Jack had never been able to place. Middle Eastern? South American? Atlantic Islands? Who knew, and right now Jack certainly didn’t care.
“We already have the stub. We want to see its other half.”
That argument made no sense at all, but Ralph began to sway. Maggie figured he had to be weighing how much of a fuss he should make. The cops should have a warrant, right? Wouldn’t a cashed check be the same as someone’s bank account or medical file?
“My clients expect security here—”
“And money orders are capped at one thousand dollars.”
“It’s not a money order. It’s a wire transfer. Not capped.”
“True. But if it’s over ten thousand, you have to fill out a currency transaction report. Breaking them into nine thousand apiece doesn’t change that. So why are you bending the rules for a homeless addict?”
This argument had more validity. Check cashing places were meant to provide convenient services to people looking to cash their paychecks or send money back to friends or families, amounts usually written with three digits, sometimes four. But in unscrupulous hands the stores could be easily converted to money laundries, and across the country arrests had been made. Obviously that was what went on here, though even Ralph didn’t know from whom and to whom the money got laundered.
Sweat pricked out of the pores covering the man’s nose, and Curtis peeked at them from the front desk, finally finding the cops’ visit more interesting than his apps.
Ralph said, “The funds came from a government check, so, secured. It’s not my business who gave who what money. You can’t just look at my books—”
“You’re right. We’ll need a warrant.”
A silence fell, during which Maggie watched Ralph weigh his options. He could capitulate and risk the ire of clients who cashed five-figure checks. He could demand a warrant, but that might easily wind up exposing other frequent customers. He could demand a warrant and then torch any documents necessary before they returned with it, but would almost certainly land him in front of a jury, charged with obstruction and money laundering.