by Beverly Long
They walked back to their vehicle and backed down her driveway. However, two blocks away, A.L. pulled off. He studied the receipt. “This is the opposite of skimming.”
“Skimming?” Rena asked.
“Yeah. Restaurants, dry cleaners, dog walkers, hair stylists. Hell, I don’t know, probably just about any small business and probably some large ones, too, underreport sales. Then they don’t have to claim income or subsequently pay taxes on their real revenue, but rather on some reduced amount. But it looks like Troy is overstating his revenue. Why do that?”
“To make his financials look better. So he could qualify for more financing,” Rena said. “From his friend Steven Hanzel.”
“I’m a simple guy but overstating your revenue doesn’t do anything to improve your actual financial position. You don’t end up with more cash on hand. In fact, wouldn’t it make you look worse? Like you’re making all these sales but where’s the money?”
“We need a better look at his financial records. Or should we say, his cooked books?” Rena said. “It’s already pretty late on a Sunday night. We’re going to need a warrant and some resources to help us if we’re going to do this right. Maybe we wait until morning.”
“Absolutely not,” A.L. said. “I want those records and I want them now.”
* * *
At 1:13 on Monday morning, they knocked on Troy and Leah Whitman’s door. It was opened promptly since they’d called ahead. The young FBI agent motioned them in. They found both Leah and Troy in the living room. She was standing by the bay window that looked out into the dark backyard. He was sitting in the chair. They didn’t appear to have been talking.
A.L. handed him the signed warrant. “You can ride with us down to the garage. A technician will be meeting us there. We will take custody of your computer and any other electronic or paper records that are deemed financial in nature.”
“This makes no sense,” Leah said.
“Are you ready?” A.L. asked, looking at Troy.
“Yeah,” the man said. He looked at his wife but didn’t say anything to her. Didn’t say anything to anybody for the next hour as a force of seven, three from the FBI and four from the Baywood Police Department, descended upon his business. Simply stood to the side and unlocked things that were locked and pointed to other things when asked a direct question.
* * *
“Did you think that was odd?” Rena asked later, when they were back at their desks. It was 3:30 in the morning.
“I don’t know. If he’s innocent of wrongdoing, then he was in shock. You know, how had it come to this when he and his family were the wronged party? If he’s not innocent, then he might have assumed that anything he said now would come back to haunt him later.”
“Leah seemed pretty confused,” Rena said.
“Yeah.” He was staring at the screen.
“How can you still see?” she asked. “We’ve been awake for almost twenty-four hours.”
He didn’t answer.
Seeing no choice, Rena pushed back her chair and walked around the desk to stand behind him. She looked at his screen. It was some kind of spreadsheet with multiple columns and rows. She looked at the column headings. Date. Work Order Number. Last Name. First Name. Phone Number. Quote Amount. Sale Amount.
July 1 through July 31. Bunch of different work order numbers. Bunch of names and phone numbers. The columns for the quote amount and sale amount were sometimes the same, sometimes different. She understood that. The quote was given before the mechanic really got into the guts of the problem. He found something else wrong and the price went up.
“I need to find the spreadsheet where these numbers tie into the money he’s taking in,” A.L. said. “Damn. I should have studied harder in accounting class.”
“You took an accounting class?”
“Yeah. I was going to get a business degree before I switched over to criminal justice.”
“You’d have hated being a businessman.”
“Yeah, probably.” He was opening new tabs on the worksheet. “Bingo,” he said after a minute. “Here it is.”
“What?” she demanded. She was tired and hungry and not in the mood to be kept in the dark.
“Do you remember when I told you that I met Troy’s neighbor, who delights in his dog shitting in Troy’s yard?”
“Yes.”
“He told me that the catalyst to that was an outrageous quote for $1,000 in July that he’d given to his wife. Her name was Lois Martin.” He flipped back to the original tab he’d been on. “Here it is. Lois Martin. Quote was $1,080. Final sale was $1,080. And here,” he said, flipping back to the second tab, “is where he shows it in his daily deposit as a collected payment.”
“But she never had the work done. There was no money exchanged.”
“Exactly. This is another form of what we saw with Peitra Jonet. In that case, he padded the amount of the invoice. Here, he made it look as if work he quoted was completed and paid for. Christ, Rena. This is not good. I think he’s laundering money.”
“Laundering money,” she repeated. Running illegally obtained money through a legitimate business to clean it. “Drugs? Prostitution? Porn. Oh God, please don’t let it be adolescent porn.”
“Sick fucks,” he said in agreement. “I don’t know. I think the only thing we can do is ask him.”
“Now?”
“Yeah. My guess is he’s not sleeping anyway.”
It was a fast drive back to the Whitmans’. Not a lot of traffic on the roads at four in the morning. They were just blocks away when Rena’s cell buzzed. “Who is texting me now?” she said, pulling her phone from her bag.
She read the message. Read it a second time to make sure that her tired eyes weren’t playing tricks on her. “It’s from Corrine Antler’s mom. Remember how she said that she’d been to Baywood once, to a wedding shower for her sister. It was hosted by a bridesmaid.”
“Yeah.”
“The bridesmaid was Kara Hamilton. Now Kara Wiese.”
A.L. turned to look at her. “Kara Wiese hosted a bridal shower for Patsy Antler’s sister. I’m guessing if she was a bridesmaid, then she was a pretty close friend of the sister. What do you think the chances are that she didn’t know that her friend’s niece had disappeared from her day care when she was five?”
Rena had opened her notebook and was reviewing the notes they’d taken that day. “Sister’s name is Toni Krider. Lives in Denver. Bridesmaid who hosted was her sister’s college roommate.” She closed her notebook. “Kara knew. There’s no way she didn’t know. But I guess we ask the sister to make sure.”
“Yeah. See if you can get the sister’s contact information from Patsy.”
Rena sent the text to Patsy Antler.
“What the hell does this mean?” A.L. asked. “Kara never mentioned it to us. Never said that what happened with Emma Whitman was eerie because it had happened before to someone she knew. You know how earlier you were pissed because everything had a reasonable explanation. Well, that’s the reasonable thing she should have said to us. But she didn’t.”
A.L. was right. “I think we need to be watching her,” Rena said.
“Agree. Get Faster to approve,” he said.
Rena picked up her phone again. She was getting a lot of people up early this morning.
Twenty-Two
When A.L. pulled up in front of the Whitman house, there were lights on inside, maybe proving his theory that Troy wasn’t sleeping. They hadn’t called ahead this time because they hadn’t wanted to give Troy any time to prepare a story.
They knocked and the door was opened by the same FBI agent who’d opened it just hours earlier. “Making a habit of this?” he asked.
A.L. took a minute to fill him in. Then they walked downstairs and found Troy sitting in what must have been his favorite chair. He didn’t look partic
ularly surprised to see them.
“Troy, we have some questions for you.”
He gave no sign that he even heard them. Nevertheless, A.L. forged ahead.
“We’ve looked at your financial records. And we’re confident that you’re inflating customer invoices and recording sales where the work was never completed.” A.L. stopped. Let that sink in. “I need you to tell me why we’re seeing that. I need you to tell me the truth. And I need to know if it has anything to do with Emma’s disappearance.”
Troy glanced at the stairway leading upstairs. “Listen, you cannot tell Leah this. I have loan payments due at the bank that I can’t make. I owe money to suppliers. Money has always been tight but I’m in real trouble.”
“Get an extension. Make small payments,” A.L. said.
“I’ve already done some of that. Steven Hanzel told me that the next time I went to the bank, his boss would probably want to see my financials.”
That made sense given what the VP at the bank had told him. “None of that explains what we’re seeing,” A.L. said.
“Yes, it does,” Troy said. “Months ago my brother told me about somebody else who would loan me money. But he’s a fucking CPA and he warned me that I couldn’t just dump the money into my account, I had to dribble it in because any big cash deposit would be scrutinized. If the Baywood Bank found out that I had debt elsewhere, I wouldn’t have any hope of working with them.”
“So you were going to trick your friend, Steven Hanzel?”
“I was going to do what I had to do to keep my family from losing their house, to keep my wife from realizing that she’d married a damn fool.”
“Leah knows nothing about this?” Rena asked.
“Leah knows about the initial loans from Baywood Bank. She knows business has been slow. But she doesn’t ask a whole lot of questions. She trusts me to handle it. If she were to find this out right now, fuck, it could kill her. I love my wife. I don’t want to lose her.”
“So you borrowed the money and for months you’ve been using it to keep the garage afloat. What now?” A.L. asked.
“I was sure I’d be in better shape, but it was a bad summer. I don’t have the money to pay these people back.”
“People?” A.L. clarified.
“Yeah, people,” Troy said, his tone now belligerent. “If you don’t want to go to a bank, there are people who do this.”
“Have the people,” A.L. emphasized the word, “that you borrowed from made any threats toward you or your family? I’m just guessing, of course, but I assume they’re not licensed lenders.”
Troy ignored the last part. “No, there’s been no reason to. The loan was set up so that I make regular installments with a big payment at the end. I’ve been able to make the regular installments. That’s where I was on Wednesday morning, before I went to the shop. I met them at a restaurant over on Lawrence Street. Most times I meet them late at night but a couple times it was early morning, like that Wednesday.”
“When is the balance, the big payment, due?” Rena asked.
“Two weeks.”
“Or?”
Troy said nothing. Then finally, “My brother said these are not the people to disappoint. This house is almost paid for. I inherited some money from my grandparents. But I put it up as equity against the loan.”
Rena and A.L. exchanged glances. “How are you going to meet the loan demand if you don’t have the money?” Rena asked.
“I’m probably going to have to ask my parents.”
That surprised him. “Do they have the money to give you?” A.L. asked.
“I don’t know. They own their house, too. Maybe they’ll be willing to take a mortgage. I’ll pay them back.”
A.L. felt sick. Troy’s dad was going to fucking dialysis three mornings a week.
Cops didn’t make big money but he’d been a good saver. Even had gone to a guy who’d run the numbers and told him that he’d be okay at retirement. What the hell would he do in twenty years when he was ready to live the good life and Traci came crawling home asking him to take out a fucking mortgage?
Ask for his damn job back.
“I need your lenders’ names,” he said.
“No,” Troy said.
“I think you want us to do everything we can to get your daughter back. What are their names?”
“They had nothing to do with this. Don’t you think that I already thought of that? First of all, I saw one of the people just that morning. He gave me no indication that anything was wrong. But just in case, I called my brother right away. Let’s just say that he’s got several clients who work with these people. He knows them well enough to call them. They swore that they weren’t involved.”
A.L. remembered that Troy had been talking to his brother when he and Rena had first entered the classroom that Wednesday evening. But not so that his brother would break the news to Troy’s parents. No, Troy had had to do that later.
He really wanted to rip into Troy and he forced himself to speak calmly. “Let me get this straight, Troy. You’re taking the word of a loan shark on your child’s life?”
“They don’t have Emma. I’m not late yet. They don’t know that I don’t have the money.”
A.L. stared at him.
Troy wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Oh, Christ. You got to make sure that they know that I don’t think they had anything to do with this.”
It wasn’t his job to protect idiots who got involved with loan sharks. But A.L. tried to remember that this man’s daughter was missing. “I’ll do what I can. Names?”
“Marco and Silva Savayanah. Brothers.”
A.L. didn’t think they were local. He’d have heard of them if they were. Maybe they worked out of Milwaukee or Chicago. “You got a contact number?”
“For Marco. He’s the one I always talk to.” Troy pushed some buttons on his cell phone and then held it out for A.L. to see. “He’s the one I met on Wednesday morning.”
He copied down the number. “These guys got an office?”
“If they do, I don’t know where it is. When we set the loan up, they came to my shop.”
“Do your employees know that you’re in trouble?” A.L. asked.
“No. I mean, they know the money is tight. But I haven’t told anybody about this.”
“How much are you in to them?” A.L. asked.
“Eighty grand.”
He didn’t think Troy’s parents would make that as Walmart greeters. “And what do you need to satisfy your loan payments to the bank?”
“Another fifty grand.”
“That’s a lot of money, Troy. And now, suddenly, there is a lot of money coming in your direction in the form of contributions to the fund-raising site that Steven Hanzel set up.”
Troy stood up in outrage. “I wouldn’t touch a dime of that money for this. What kind of father do you think I am?” Now he was waving his arms around. “I’ll spend every cent of that and borrow from anybody if I need more. I want my daughter back. I want her back more than anything. Jesus, I can’t even look into Leah’s eyes anymore. They’re like a goddamn black hole.”
He sucked in a breath of air and then sat again, as if the sudden burst of denial had taken every bit of his energy. His eyes looked bleak. “My fucking world is falling apart. And I can’t do anything to stop it.”
* * *
When A.L. and Rena got back to their desks, A.L. emailed the loan sharks’ names to the FBI and requested some assistance. He didn’t want to call the number Troy had given him without having a little more information about the pair.
“Do you believe him?” Rena asked.
“He’s a pretty good actor if he knows where Emma is,” A.L. said. “It was stupid to borrow money from Marco and Silva Savayanah. But he was desperate. And if you think about it, it’s sort of consistent with wh
at we’ve seen all along. Troy doesn’t seem to see things as they really are. His relationship with his employees. His relationship with his parents. Hell, even his relationship with his wife. He’s overly optimistic. I can see him thinking that if he could just get some quick cash, surely in six months he’d be in a better financial position.”
“Insanity,” Leah said. “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Their old boss Toby used to have a sign with that saying on his desk.
“Do you think the Savayanah brothers have anything to do with Emma’s disappearance?” Rena asked.
“I really don’t. Like he said, he’s not late.”
“He’s not too smart, either. I’m no business major and I never took an accounting class, but common sense tells me they set the loan up that way anticipating that he’d fail. They get to keep all the installment payments he’s made along the way and then at the end, when he can’t make the final payment, they now own a modest house that can be flipped quickly for a nice tidy profit. They probably are scary enough that most people this happens to don’t take the chance of turning them in to the police.”
“Do you think it’s possible that Leah might know more than she’s letting on? Maybe that’s the basis of her anger?” A.L. asked.
“Maybe. That reminds me that we never followed up on whether Elaine knows that Leah changed her work.”
A.L. looked at his watch. “Elaine said she was an early riser.”
They arrived at Elaine’s house shortly after six o’clock. A.L. knocked on the door. Elaine opened it, looking as if she was dressed for work.
“What? What’s happened?” she asked immediately.
“No news,” Rena said quickly. “May we talk with you for just a minute?”
“Of course,” she said, stepping aside. “Would you like coffee? It’ll just take a minute?”
“That would be great,” A.L. said. It had now been more than twenty-four hours since he’d slept.
Elaine led them into her kitchen and they took a seat at the table while she started a pot of coffee. Once she’d sat down, A.L. wasn’t sure how to start. Leah and Elaine had some bad history. Were he and Rena going to open new wounds?