Brain Storm (A Taylor Morrison Novel Book 1) (19 page)

“It’s fine. In fact, you have better taste in clothes than I do.” I pointed to the shirt I was wearing, causing Trinity to give me a disdainful look as she helped Mama D dish up the last of the omelets. “Well, he does,” I told her.

“You can thank Julian for that,” Mac announced, referring to his gay alter ego. “He is really into clothes and has quite the keen fashion sense.”
 

“What about Julian?” It suddenly dawned on me that I wasn’t the only missing person from the condos.
 

“Oh, Julian met a wonderful man and they ran off together,” he explained. “He’s donating all his worldly goods to charity. It’s all in the note he left behind. If it didn’t burn, that is. And before you ask, it’s been sitting on the kitchen table, ready to go, ever since Marcus came onto the scene.”

Well, that pretty much covered the bases, as far as I was concerned. Satisfied, I moved over to the table, along with Mac, so Mama D and Trinity would sit down to eat. Jonas stayed in the kitchen to clean up. That had to earn him some points with Trinity, but she was ignoring him. On purpose, I suspected.

“So what happened with the banks?” I was curious to know what was on the agenda for today besides staying alive.
 

“We’ll know soon,” Mac said, checking his watch. “We should be able to confirm the transfers in a little while.”

The plan had been to have Mac’s contact set things up to move all our funds into the offshore account as soon as possible. That would have worked fine with Mama D’s account, but it turned out the rest of us were a little too diversified to move the funds easily. Besides my checking and savings, I had a business account and a separate money market with Keith’s life insurance funds squirreled away along with the money I had pulled from the stock market when things started going wonky. Trinity and Jonas were pretty much in the same boat except Trinity had a safe deposit box full of gold coins. Insurance against a total economic meltdown, I guess.
 

“Mac and I spent most of what was left of the evening, doing a little web banking.” Jonas had finished in the kitchen and took a seat at the table, coffee pot in hand.You had to love the big guy. He shook his head at me in disgust, but filled the cup I held out to him anyway.

“We managed to set up transfers for everyone, basically consolidating everything into one account for each of us,” Mac continued. “Once we confirm the transfers went through, my guy will snatch the funds into my offshore account,” At Trinity’s glare, he quickly added. “He’s setting up a numbered account, even as we speak, to which we’ll all have access. Once the funds are in the offshore account, he’ll move them into the numbered account after routing the funds through the system several times. With any luck, they’ll be untraceable.”

Get out. You had to love web banking. I looked down at the pad of paper Mac pushed toward me. Looking at the information they had jotted down, between the five of us, we’d have a considerable amount of funds available, if everything went as planned. I thought it was a pretty big ‘if’, but Jonas and Mac seemed almost elated with the whole thing. Probably lack of sleep, I decided.

“You’re sure you can trust this guy to do it and keep quiet?” I asked. I may have decided to follow my gut and trust Mac, but trusting his contact was asking a lot of anyone. “All he has to do is send the money to a different account or make a simple phone call and we’re up the creek.”

Mac hesitated. It wasn’t much, but it was long enough for me to feel my skin flush and the sweat start to break out on my forehead. He was having doubts now?

“He’ll do it,” Mac finally assured us. “He’ll do it and he’ll keep quiet about it. He owes me.”

He said it slowly and quietly and looking at him, suddenly there was no doubt in my mind. Not that the guy would do as promised, but that Mac would kill him if he crossed us. The knowledge sank in with a shiver down my spine. Jonas might be big and mean, but Mac was the scary one. Not for the first time, I was glad he was on our side.

“What about the gold?” Trinity demanded impatiently.

“Uh?” I sounded like I didn’t have have a brain in my head, but I was still focused on Mac.
 

“I said, what about the GOLD?” Now she had my attention, along with everyone else’s at the table. She was talking about the gold coins she had in the safety deposit box.
 

“What about it?” I asked, and watched as her head practically started spinning.

“What about it? I’ll tell you what about it. It’s sitting there in the bank vault waiting for us to get it and I’m not about to let it stay there. There has got to be a way to get it out.”

I doubted seriously that there was. We would be lucky if we managed to pull off moving funds into the offshore account. Waltzing into a bank where they were bound to be looking for us, was suicide. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her that though. She had that tone in her voice that said she wasn’t backing down.
 

The guys choose that moment to go check on the transfer, making their excuses and all but ran from the room. Had I said they were mean? Scary? Yellow bellied cowards, was more like it.
Jerks
. I might have expected it from them, but when Mama D got up and excused herself from the table, I was flabbergasted. I had expected her to try to talk some sense into her granddaughter and instead she had hightailed it out of there right behind the guys. That she had left, told me one very important thing. The guys might be avoiding confrontation, but Mama D was backing Trinity on this and I was left standing out there all alone.

“Trinity, you know there’s no way we can get to your gold. They’ll be watching for it,” I started in, attempting to try reason first. It might work. She was a lawyer after all.
 

“I’m going to get it,” she informed me. “If I have to, I’ll take Jonas with me, but I’m going.”
 

Was she serious?
The fact that she had even thought Jonas would agree to let her go, much less go with her to help, told me how desperate she was. For the life of me I couldn’t understand the sudden turnabout. She’d seen the amount of funds we were moving around. We didn’t need the gold.

“Taylor,” she said, gripping my arm. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. We may need that money later. Then it will be too late to come back and get it.”

She had a point, but I still couldn’t see any way to do what she wanted. Just the idea of her going in with Jonas was ludicrous. At 6’5” Jonas was easy to spot in a crowd. Add in his looks and his swaggering air of confidence and Jonas couldn’t enter a room without being the center of attention.

Trinity didn’t realize it, but she was practically a carbon copy, right down to that crusader attitude they both had. I guess if I really thought about it, we all had that attitude. Fight for the right, truth and justice and the American way. Now, we were all criminals. On the run. Which brought me right back to my main concern. No way could those two get in and out of a bank without being noticed. Big time. I was all for leaving the gold behind. It was a small loss to keep from exposing anyone to danger, but that was just my opinion and it wasn’t my gold. Obviously Trinity felt differently.

“Why is this so important to you? Is getting this gold worth risking your life over? Jonas’ life?”
 

“It’s not like that, Taylor. It’s not even my gold.” She paused and bit her lip. “It’s Kevin’s.”

I shook my head,confused. Her brother was dead and she was saying the gold belonged to him? Kevin had been killed in a drive-by shooting a few months before Keith’s death. He had stood up as best man as our wedding. I liked Kevin, he was a great guy, but he had never struck me as the type to even have a portfolio, much less to have diversified into the gold market. Why he had it was a big question. A bigger one was why she’d kept quiet about it all this time. Warning bells sounding in my ears, I asked the question, even through I was dreading the answer.

“Exactly how much gold are we talking here, Trinity?”

She looked around like she expected someone to be spying on us and then leaned over to whisper in my ear.

“Half a million.”

I couldn’t possibly have heard that right. Did she say half a million? Half a million what? Coins? Dollars? Ounces? Did it even matter? Kevin had worked in a garage. There was no way he had a half a million of any of the above. Not legally. My stomach rolled at the thought that this had something to do with his murder. What was Trinity thinking? She had to know this was trouble, the minute she found it.

“Trinity, what have you done?” I hissed at her.
 

“I found it. After. You know.” She was back to looking around like she expected hoodlums to pop out of the cabinets any minute. If I had any doubt that Trinity knew the gold was trouble, she’d put it to rest. “You know how it was. Gram was out of her mind with grief when Kevin got killed, and whoever did it, got away with it.” Her voice was breaking at the painful reminder of what they had gone through and tears threatened to spill as she blinked them back. “I found the gold in his locker at the gym weeks later. They called to ask me to come clean it out and I found it in his gym bag. I knew it was wrong to keep it, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn it in.”

I couldn’t believe it. All this time, she’d kept evidence from the police. If she’d turned it in, it might have led them to the killers. Instead she put it in a safe deposit box.
 

“What on earth possessed you to keep it? That’s evidence Trinity!”

She flinched like I had hit her and I suppose, in a way I had. What she’d done was just as illegal as whatever it was that Kevin had done to get the money in the first place.
 

“You don’t know that. We don’t know that it had anything to do with Kevin’s death. That was Kevin’s money. I wasn’t going to give it to the police. They would have just put it in evidence and it would have disappeared into someone’s pocket.” She was crying now and I had a hard time understanding the words as she tried to explain. “Kevin was killed, right in our front yard. You remember, Taylor, I know you do. They killed him and the police never found who did it. They never even tried. They didn’t care.”
 

“Trinity, you know that’s not true. Jonas worked round the clock. They all did. I did. It might have helped if we had known the whole story.”
 

“I told you, I didn’t find it for weeks. Taylor, that gold is the only thing we have left of Kevin. I can’t leave it behind. I won’t.”

What a bunch of hooey. She had a lot of things that had belonged to Kevin. It was a lame excuse and she had to know it. Even worse, was that she actually expected me to buy into it. For Pete's sake, she was a lawyer. A good one. She ought to be able to concoct something better than that load of malarky. Then again, none of us were exactly on our game. Jonas was law enforcement and had broken more laws in the past 24 hours than I cared to count. I’d gone from calm and collected to borderline basket case and I didn’t even want to think about the turn around Mama D had gone through.
 

As irritated as I was at what she’d done and that she’d kept it from me, the fact remained that I knew Trinity pretty well. She wasn’t a criminal and she wasn’t stupid, although you couldn’t tell it from the conversation we were having now. Trinity had kept quiet about the gold. Trinity, the warrior for justice. If there was a chance that the gold would have led us to Kevin’s killer, she would have turned it over in a shot. The fact was, she hadn’t, and there was only one reason I could think of that would to cause her to do what she did.

“Mama D knows about the gold?” I asked it, but I already knew the answer, so I was ready when Trinity nodded. Of course she did. That’s why she had left the room when she did. I thought she was avoiding Trinity, but she’d been avoiding me.
 

“I told her not to tell anyone about the gold. Not even you. That it would put you in a bad situation.” She reached across the table, imploring me to understand. “Taylor, she didn’t want to, I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t tell you.”

“She doesn’t know Kevin was doing something illegal, does she?”
 

“No.” It came out in a sob. “I couldn’t do that to her. No matter what. Not after losing Mama and then Kevin. She was so sick Taylor, when Kevin was killed. I thought I would lose her too. She thought it was just a drive-by shooting. If the police had taken the gold and opened a case investigating Kevin, it might have been more than she could take. I’m so sorry Taylor, so very sorry.”

I looked at her sitting there crying at the table and thought about everything she had told me. She had gone against everything she believed, everything she stood for and quite possibly allowed her brother’s killers to go free to protect Mama D. The fact that she had broken the law didn’t really bother me all that much. True, Trinity had tampered with, and concealed evidence, but last night, I had killed four men. I had done it to protect Jonas and Trinity, but that didn’t change the fact that I had done it. And covered it up.
 

Had Trinity been any less justified in what she had done? Truth be told, I was having a little trouble here. What had seemed black and white less than 24 hours ago, was now obscured with hazy gray lines. What Trinity had done had come with a price. Secrets always do and this one, I knew, had haunted her.

It certainly complicated things though. Going to the bank was a tremendous risk to everyone concerned. If we didn’t go, we stood to lose the only chance we might have to find Kevin’s killers. I knew this was the thing that Trinity feared the most. The reason she would go in alone if it came to that. When push came to shove, justice had to be served. It might come late, but it would come.