Closing Costs

by Bracken MacLeod

  “I thought you said most people used something like ‘A B C password.’ ”

  He nodded. “That’s right. But most people aren’t all people. This is better. Especially if he has a self-destruct failsafe on failed attempts. If I enter the wrong code too many times, it could fry the file.”

  She didn’t know what “this” was, and she didn’t ask. She understood what he did as well as she knew how to overhaul a transmission. Which was not at all. She kissed him on the cheek and said, “How long is it going to take?”

  He shrugged. “I’ll let you know,” he said.

  “I’m going to go read, then,” she said, and left him to work on the file.

  * * *

  Close to an hour later, just as she was really getting into the new book she’d started, he called out from the office, “Got it!” She glanced at the page number and set the book on the end table next to the sofa.

  Evan was hunched over his laptop looking at the file when she walked up behind him. “So, what is it?”

  “It’s a spreadsheet, like I thought. But it’s . . .”

  Nelle leaned over to take a look. “It’s what?”

  “It’s confusing.” He pointed to the screen. “This column here is dates, for sure. And this one looks like it could be money maybe, but it’s, like, crazy big amounts if it is. These last two columns I don’t get at all. They’re just a long string of numbers, and I don’t know what the headers are supposed to be. If they’re encoded, it’s some other kind of encryption the guy had written down or had in his head or something. It’s nothing I can unscramble without a key.”

  Her stomach did a little flip, and she felt slightly queasy. She pointed at a cell in the grid. “That’s an IBAN,” she said.

  “A what?”

  “An international bank account number.” She looked at her husband. “These are offshore bank deposits.”

  “How do you know that?”

  How indeed.

  Nelle sighed. “My dad,” she said, swallowing hard at the thought of him. “He used to work in finance.”

  “Wait. David? I thought he was a teacher.”

  “No. Not him. My bio-dad, Harold.”

  “I thought he ran off when you were a kid.”

  Nelle felt a tinge of defensiveness well up in her. She’d told Evan she was raised by her mother after her parents split, but never explained why he’d left them. She didn’t want to tell him now either, but it seemed inescapable. She’d kept it to herself for so long, it felt like a growth. Something rock hard she felt whenever she pressed her hands against her belly. “Uh, sort of. My dad . . . he uh, went to jail for securities fraud.”

  There. It was out.

  Evan looked at her, mouth hanging open with astonishment. Then his expression melted into that one she loved so much, that he wore so easily and readily when she needed it: caring. He said, “You never told me. I’m so sorry, Nelle.”

  She raised a hand to hold him back as the memories of her childhood flooded her mind. She hadn’t ever told anyone the story. If she didn’t get it out now, she never would. “He left us with nothing. Mom scraped to get by. She couldn’t afford the mortgage on the house, but she insisted we stay there as long as we could. She wanted me to keep going to school in Newton.

  “She pretended nothing was going on, even though all the neighbors watched the news and they knew. The government wanted to take the house—it was in his name—but Mom found my dad’s bank account information and tried to negotiate with them. He’d stashed money in foreign banks all over the world. Money that the government wanted more than they wanted to sell a house at auction. He had it all written down in a ledger he’d hidden in his office. All the deposits were there. He’d recorded everything. Everything except for the account numbers. She tried to bargain with them, get them to leave us some of the money if she could get him to tell her where those were. But you know, that money wasn’t ours any more than it was his; he’d stolen it from other people. The US attorney promised that they’d ‘take care of us if she cooperated with the investigation.’ We couldn’t have any of the money Dad stole, naturally, but they said they’d treat us like informants and give Mom, like, a stipend or something. I don’t know. I was, like, nine, and it didn’t make a lot of sense to me. I just remember them telling us we’d be okay.

  “They sent her to talk to my dad on visitation days at the jail, but he wouldn’t tell her anything. So, after a while, they had me try. They gave me a script. ‘Mom found your account book. We’re going to lose everything. We need money. What’s the password?’ ” Nelle recited the lines she’d memorized more than two decades earlier to her husband, the feeling of betrayal at their utterance as fresh and stinging as a new wound. Her eyes started to well with tears, and she blinked rapidly to hide them. Evan reached out and held her hand. She hadn’t concealed a thing.

  “That’s fucking horrible. How could they make you do that? How could your mother go along with that? You were just a kid.”

  She shrugged, as if to say, What’s there to do about it now? She let go of his hand, wiped her eyes, and continued. “At first, he didn’t tell me anything, but I wore him down, and he told me to tell his attorney to give Mom the accounts in ‘CH’ and ‘LU.’ He made me memorize it. CH and LU—Switzerland and Luxembourg. I did like he said, and the lawyer gave us the numbers. The feds cleaned out the accounts, and me and Mom were left with nothing because the prosecutor lied to us. The money was gone, and Dad never spoke to me again. We went to visit him in jail a couple of times, but he knew what I did. Even if he would’ve listened, there wasn’t anything I could say to convince him I didn’t betray him. He’d sent us the information through his attorney. He was smart enough to figure it out when his lawyer told him the money was gone. And the only way the feds could’ve gotten to it is if we were cooperating with them. If I was. He knew who got him cleaned out. He never spoke to me again. After he was paroled, he disappeared.”

  Evan’s eyes were wide. “Holy shit, Nelle. I had no idea.” He stood to embrace her. She shrugged and took a step back and wiped at her eyes in a way that looked like she was banishing her tears more than drying them. She tried to put on a brave face and act like it didn’t matter, though it did. It mattered a lot and had colored the way she looked at men and relationships her entire life. It affected what she shared with her boyfriends and eventually her husband, and how she thought about the secrets other people kept from each other. And what “unconditional love” meant. She’d always thought her father’s love was unconditional, but it wasn’t. It had conditions. And when she failed to live up to them, he left her and her mother alone and destitute.

  She knew he probably found someone new to love and to marry eventually. Maybe he even had another daughter. And he loved her. Did all the things that dads did with their little girls, except maybe trust her. Nelle thought she could’ve lived with his distrust because she didn’t know any better back then when the prosecutor tricked her, and a part of her never stopped loving her father, because he was her dad and she was his child and they were supposed to be like that forever. That was how families worked, right?

  In concert with her imaginings about her father, her mother eventually remarried, but by the time she found the right guy, Nelle was eighteen, and he wasn’t a father to her. She wouldn’t let him be. He was “Mom’s boyfriend” and then “Mom’s husband,” and when they spoke, he was always David and never Dad. It was too late for that, and the title belonged to someone else, whether or not he deserved it.

  “Yeah, well. It’s ancient history, I suppose,” she said.

  Evan nodded and told her he understood. But he didn’t really, and that was why she’d kept that recollection to herself. He didn’t understand that she’d been willing to lie to her father and get the account numbers so they could take the money he’d hidden, because deep down she wanted to hurt him for leaving them. It had been important to her then to make him hurt the way she did every time she had to visit him in j
ail. The way that he’d injured her mother so she blissed out every night on wine and Xanax. The way Nelle felt having to grow up all at once because she was the only one who ever thought to make her lunch for school the next day or knew when her laundry needed to be done. She’d wanted to hurt him, and since money was the only thing he really loved, that was the way to do it. And then when he left, it hurt worse than anything, and deep down she knew it was her fault.

  “Anyway,” she said, pointing at the screen and trying to get Evan to turn his attention away from her, “I’ve seen these before. When the lawyer gave me those account numbers on a piece of paper, they looked like this.”

  “Wow. So, these are Swiss bank account numbers?”

  She took a deep breath and leaned in. “No. See the one that starts with SG?” She pointed at the screen. He sat back in his chair and looked. “I’m pretty sure that’s Singapore. HK is definitely Hong Kong.” She pointed at the bottom of the screen. “Scroll down.” He did. Her stomach knotted. “That’s the balance.”

  “That’s the balance ?” he shouted.

  She shushed him, even though there was no one around to hear. She nodded.

  “Who is this guy?”

  “I don’t know. Just some dude who killed himself.” She pulled a dining chair from the dinner table up beside Evan and sat. “Go to the web and look up . . .” She had to stop and think for a moment. “Byron Sherman, I think. No. Bryant Shearman.” She spelled it. S-H-E-A-R-M-A-N. Evan did as he was told. Nelle pointed to the first hit. “That one,” she said, “Click it.” The lede made her feel like she might throw up.

  The article left them both feeling breathless.

  Bryant Shearman, 52, Natick, was found dead today as authorities attempted to serve an arrest warrant at his home. Police executed the warrant after another criminal defendant, Arie Jacobi, 60, Cambridge, implicated him as part of a federal trial as an accessory in the operation of an international child pornography ring trading in images and films of torture and sexually explicit material involving children on the “dark web.” Shearman had been previously indicted in state court on charges of rape, three counts of rape of a child by force, and six counts of indecent assault and battery on a child under the age of 14, and was free on $500,000 bail awaiting trial. Jacobi testified that Shearman was “the accountant” responsible for managing the income received by the website, known to its users as The Kinder Garden [sic] and allegedly had access to millions of dollars of cash collected from members of the site globally. State prosecutors filed a motion to revoke Shearman’s bond last week, which was granted by Judge Marisa Dunfries. Though Shearman’s lawyer promised that his client would turn himself in, Shearman was not present in court at the time of the hearing, and failed to appear at the designated time for his surrender early this morning.

  Police discovered Shearman’s body when they entered his home to serve the warrant for his rearrest. A police spokesperson later said Shearman appeared to have died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head, though an official cause of death has yet to be released by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner.

  Evidence of Shearman’s financial involvement in any crimes has not been confirmed by police or the district attorney at this time. Federal prosecutors declined to comment on how Shearman’s death affects their prosecution of Jacobi.

  Shearman is survived by his wife and minor son, neither of whom were home at the time of his death. Sharon Shearman did not respond to a request for comment for this article.

  “You’re embalming this guy?” Evan said.

  Nelle’s face was white; she was shivering and holding her arms like she’d been caught out in the cold without a coat. “Yeah. His family wants an open-casket viewing.”

  “How’s that even possible? It says he shot himself in the head.”

  Nelle straightened up in her chair and rubbed her palms on her pants as if she was trying to wipe them clean, then pointed her index and middle fingers up just under her nose like a gun barrel. “He shot through the roof of his mouth. The bullet came out clean through the top of his skull. His face is totally intact, so Tony only had to reconstruct the top and back of his head. Once I glued his lips shut, you couldn’t tell he didn’t die peacefully in his sleep.”

  “I can’t believe Tony accepted this guy’s body.” Evan took a deep breath. “Are there going to be protesters again?”

  Nelle’s mood darkened even more. The Tremblay Funeral Home had embalmed the remains of the Evacuation Day Killer, Gary Pinsky. He murdered nine people and wounded twenty-two more in his rampage at Quincy Market before the police finally killed him. A half dozen funeral homes turned his body down before Tony agreed to take it. Nelle had just started working there, and things seemed to be going very well. Then, overnight, there were angry protesters outside the funeral home and people were screaming at her when she went to work. A protester had stalked her back to the apartment one night. He followed her onto the subway, glaring at her from the next car until she got off at Davis Square. Though she thought she’d left him on the train, when she looked over her shoulder on the path headed home, he was there, behind her. She sprinted the last three blocks and fumbled her way inside the front door, waiting for the hand to fall on her shoulder . . . or worse. Evan started to tell a joke about her taking up jogging, but was quick to see that she was terrified and jumped up to comfort her. When she explained what happened, he was livid. He ran outside to find her stalker, but no one was there. Next to the door, he found one of the protest flyers stuck in their mailbox. He came back inside clutching the piece of paper in a clenched fist, and they had an argument about her quitting. She couldn’t. Not after only five weeks—she’d never get hired again in the industry, and they had her school loans to pay. He relented, she stuck it out, and things eventually calmed down after Pinsky was smoke and ash. But the memory of it still made Evan angry. She sympathized; she knew he’d felt as helpless as she did. Together they were safe, but apart, he had to trust she could take care of herself. And she could, against all manner of problems. But not if someone pulled a gun or blitzed her from behind. That’s what they were both afraid of.

  “No, hon. It’s all very hush-hush. The family turned down the webpage memorial. Nobody knows we have him right now except the guy’s wife and the clerk at the city morgue who signed his body out to us.”

  He sighed and let his shoulders relax a little. “Can you finish embalming him with something that makes him rot faster? I don’t even want his fuckin’ corpse in the world.”

  “Right? I wish. Oh god, I can’t even believe I had my hands on him. Even wearing gloves, I feel nasty—like he’s on my skin.” She looked closer at the news article and pointed at the screen. Evan leaned closer and read the words above her finger. The Kinder Garden.

  “Yeah? It’s fuckin’ gross. And?”

  “Switch to the memory stick window.” Evan did as she said, and the jump drive window expanded to fill the screen. She pointed at the file name, kinaccts.xlsx.aes. “Kin accts? Do you think this could be the money the police are looking for?”

  Evan didn’t reply, but Nelle knew exactly what he was thinking. It had to be. Eventually, he said, “Why would he put this on a drive and . . .”

  “Shove it up his ass? I don’t know. Why would he do anything they say he did? Maybe he thought we’d find it when we embalmed him and return it to his family. Kind of an end run around the search of the house he knew the police would do.”

  “I don’t . . . It seems . . .” Evan rubbed his hand down his face and leaned back. “Are you going to hand it over to the DA?”

  She stared at the screen for a long moment and shook her head. “Fuck him.”

  “Minha querida?”

  She held her breath for a moment and then sighed quietly. She felt that old familiar sensation creeping up in her. She wanted to hurt this guy, except he was already dead. She had an idea how to hurt a lot of people like him, though. She raised her eyebrows as she trailed off: “What if w
e . . .”

  Evan got what she was suggesting right away, though she was a little disappointed he hadn’t had the same idea on his own. She waved a hand to dismiss what she hadn’t said. “No. It’s a bad idea. You’re right.”

  He didn’t disagree with her. He didn’t say anything at all.

  26

  Evan stared at the computer screen. While it didn’t look like anything had really happened, he could see everything had worked. The display was staid and understated, like everything else about the bank website. It appeared the designers assumed a higher level of sophistication from its users than online banking sites in the States.

  “Did it go through?”

  He pointed to the figure at the side of the screen under the word BALANCE.

  “We’re millionaires.” Nelle whispered.

  “We are,” he agreed. They spoke quietly, as if saying anything too loudly might wake them both from the dream. “Oh my god. We are.” His stomach turned. They’d researched how to do a transfer and looked at whether any of it was traceable back to them. In the end, he decided it was safe enough to try a personal computer over a Wi-Fi network, but paid cash for a brand-new laptop he intended to return as soon as they were done. They found a quiet study room at a library and logged on through a VPN he assured Nelle was as safe as they were going to get anywhere. Chances were good that no one was trawling the signal at the Waltham Public Library for people checking their bank balances. Evan still found it stressful. He expected to watch the account balance drop to zero in front of his eyes as someone in another carrel outside their private study room funneled it right into a different untraceable account. Instead, the number remained constant and unimaginably large.

  “What now?”

  “Now I guess we pretend we’re not rich for a while. We can start parceling out a little bit at a time, but not so fast that it looks like we just . . .” He wanted to say stole almost a hundred million dollars from an international kiddie porn network. He chose instead to say, “Like we just won the Nigerian lottery.”