Death, Taxes, and Cheap Sunglasses (A Tara Holloway Novel Book 8) (7 page)

I pulled a business card from my breast pocket and held it out to the man. “I’m IRS Special Agent Tara Holloway.” I tilted my head to indicate Eddie. “This is my partner, Eddie Bardin. Are you Quentin or Kevin Kuykendahl?”

“I’m Quent.” He took my card and looked it over, even going so far as to turn it over to see if there was anything written on the back. “This says you’re from Criminal Investigations.” He looked back up at us, and he didn’t look happy. “What the hell, man?”

“Just a routine check,” I lied. Our investigation was anything but. Still, no sense getting the guy all riled up, not when he had that knife on his belt and appeared more than capable of gutting us on the spot. “May we come in?”

He hesitated a moment, as if mulling over his options. Finally, he stepped back a foot or two to allow us inside. We headed up the rickety stairs and into the trailer, which smelled like sweat, dogs, and pork rinds thanks to an extra-large bag sitting open on a table inside next to a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew with the cap off. The air inside the building was still and stifling. Why didn’t the guy open a window? Was he trying to save electricity? Or was he just used to living like this?

The only chairs in the place were cheap folding canvas lawn chairs. Quent flopped down into one behind the table, while Eddie and I grabbed a couple situated haphazardly in the room and pulled them over to face Quent.

Seated now, I took a quick glance around the place. An ancient fridge stood along the left wall next to a short countertop housing a small stainless steel sink. A toaster oven sat on the counter. An uncovered trash can overflowed with paper plates, plastic utensils, and empty Mountain Dew bottles. Along the right wall stood a flat-screen television, what looked to be a forty-inch size. It was tuned to
Let’s Make a Deal
. On screen, Wayne Brady negotiated with a woman in a Little Bo Peep costume while her husband or boyfriend, dressed as a sheep, stood by her side, offering advice. “Take the box, honey! Take the
baaa
x!”

The woman took the box. The pretty assistant lifted the lid with a smile, revealing a plate of spaghetti and meatballs.
Some prize.
Bo Peep turned to her sheep partner and brandished her staff as if ready to beat the woolly thing to death. That would be the last time she’d listen to him.

While I opened my briefcase and pulled out my notes, Quent tugged the walkie-talkie from his belt and pushed the talk button with a dirty, jagged-nailed thumb. “Kev. Come to the office. Folks is here from the IRS criminal department wanting information.”

The radio’s speaker crackled and a man’s voice came back. “What the fu—” He stopped himself, apparently realizing we might be able to hear him. “I’m down at the crick but I’m headin’ your way.”

Quent set the radio down on the table and turned his crazy eyes back on me and Eddie.

“I’m sure you’ve got a lot to do,” I told Quent.
Like bathe or get a manicure.
“We might as well get started.” I pulled out a pen and clicked it open. “The auditor noted that your records were incomplete.” “Incomplete” was an understatement. The records were
nonexistent.

He rocked back in his chair until he was leaning against the wall and put one mud-caked boot up on the table. In one smooth movement he pulled the knife from the sheath on his belt.
Swiff.
My hand instinctively went for my Glock, relaxing only when he began using the knife to dig dirt from under his nails.

He wiped the dirty blade on his pants before moving on to the next fingernail. “Incomplete how?”

“You didn’t have any.”

Though the Kuykendahls had offered not so much as a single receipt to the auditor, she had been able to scrape together some information by contacting their bank for account statements. The information contained therein had shed some light on their expenses, but provided virtually no information about their income, which consisted of sporadic cash deposits ranging from a low of $800 to a high of $9,600. The deposits were made shortly before the expenses were paid and were in commensurate amounts, as if they’d purposely deposited just enough to cover their impending debit card transactions. The average balance maintained in the operating account was a mere $63. The pattern was suspicious. Wherever the cash was coming from, it was unlikely that all of it had been deposited into the bank account.

The only indication Quent had heard me was a flexing of his foot on the table. Looked like he was expecting me to carry this conversation by myself. That or he was waiting for his cousin to show up and answer my questions instead.

“Do you take care of the financial matters, or does Kevin do it?” I asked.

“Depends,” he said.

“On what?” I asked.

“On who’s around to take care of things.”

“So you two take turns? Share duties?”

The ankle flexed again. “I s’pose you could say that.”

“We’d rather not suppose anything,” I said with as much goodwill as I could muster. “We’d rather you gave us the facts straight.”

Quent’s only response was to use his knife to fish a pork rind out of the bag on his desk. He put the knife to his mouth, used his tongue to maneuver the pork rind off the blade, and proceeded to eat the fried skin.
Crunch-crunch-crunch.
He washed it down with a slug of Mountain Dew straight from the bottle.
Glug-glug.

Eddie chimed in now. “We noticed that you two aren’t paid a salary to run the organization.”

“We both got other jobs,” Quent said. “We’re fishing guides out on the lake.”

Each of them had reported net income from their guide business of only $17,000. Barely enough for a person to live on. Whether they had accurately reported their personal income was another matter, but for now I planned to focus solely on the nonprofit organization. One step at a time.

“Besides,” Quent continued. “Kevin and I don’t run this place for the money. We do it out of the goodness of our hearts.” His dry, cracked lips curled up in what was equal parts smile and snarl.

“Of course,” I said, though I had my doubts. I might have believed him had his woolly beard and hat been paired with a tie-dye shirt and his pork rinds replaced with trail mix. But he didn’t give off that kumbayah vibe indicative of do-gooders.

“Can you tell me about the organization’s income?” I asked. “The sources and amounts?”

Quent gnawed on his chapped lower lip now. “We’ll have to hold off on this inquisition until Kevin gets here.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

Another flex of his ankle. “He can answer your questions better.”

“You seem to be doing just fine yourself.”

He pulled his boot off the table now and set it firmly on the ground. “He might think of something I missed.”

I suspected Quent wanted us to wait for Kevin more to ensure that the two of them got their story straight than to be forthcoming with additional information. But I also knew that the more I pushed, the more the guy would push back. Sometimes it was better to let the targets think they were the one in control. You can catch more flies with honey, after all. And once these flies were stuck in the honey, they’d be all mine.

We sat without speaking, the only noise coming from the game show. As we waited, a young man dressed as a frog won a Ford Fiesta, while another in a spaceman getup sacrificed five hundred dollars in exchange for a plastic toy harmonica. That was a deal he should never have made.

A few minutes later, Kevin pulled up outside in a long-bed Chevy pickup. Through the dirty window I saw him hop down from the truck. He wore the same type of rubber boots as Quent. Having been raised in the country with a small herd of goats and half a dozen barn dogs, I knew rubber boots were the best thing to wear when you’d be stomping through poop. They might not be fashionable, but they hosed off easily. Like Quent, Kevin wore camo pants and a belt with a knife strapped to it. Kevin’s belt also contained a holstered handgun. I was glad I’d had the foresight to wear my hip holster for easy access to my Glock should the need arise. Instead of a black T-shirt like Quent, Kevin sported a white undershirt
à
la Bruce Springsteen, though Kevin’s was adorned with assorted holes and yellowed pits.
Bruce Sweatstain.
Like Quent, Kevin was tall, thin, and bearded beyond belief. The tangled mass of hair on his head appeared as if it hadn’t been washed or combed since the Bush administration. The
first
Bush administration.

The stairs clanged as Kevin stomped up them. He stepped through the door, his eyes first finding his cousin and holding a moment, then shifting to me and Eddie. At least his eyes weren’t crazy like Quent’s. Nonetheless, they didn’t quite meet mine. Instead, they seemed to focus on a spot about an inch to the left, along my temple.

A broad smile appeared in the beard as he stuck out his hand. “Hello, there.” Eddie and I introduced ourselves and shook his hand. I made a mental note to stick my hand in boiling water later to kill any germs I’d contracted.

Apparently the brains of the outfit, Kevin took over the conversation. “Quent says you’re hunting for information?”

“Routine stuff,” I said. “Gotta make sure our auditors have done their jobs right.”

“So this is like, what?” he asked. “Some kind of performance review for the auditor?”

“Exactly.”
Not at all.

Kevin sat on the table, one long leg stretched to the floor, the other crooked up beside him. He looked now at the center of my forehead, which was unnerving. “What would you like to know?”

“The audit file contained little information on the organization’s income,” I said. “The auditor failed to collect data on the sources and amounts. Can you show me what she missed?”

Kevin stroked his beard as he appeared to be mulling over my request. “That information may be hard to come by. Quent and I know how to deal with animals, but we’re not so good when it comes to keeping track of our finances.”

“Where does most of the organization’s income come from?”

“Donations,” he said, after a short hesitation. “You know, charitable contributions.”

I nodded in acknowledgment. “Makes sense. And most of these contributions come from third parties, correct?”

His furry brows formed a V. “Third parties?”

“What I mean is, you and Quent aren’t putting your own money into the organization. You’re getting the contributions from other people.”

Kevin stroked his beard again. “Right,” he said tentatively, as if hoping he’d given the right answer.

“Show me your list of donors,” I said, “along with copies of the receipts you’ve issued to them.”

“Receipts?” Kevin repeated, this time twirling the end of his beard around his finger.

“Nonprofit organizations are required to issue a receipt to any donor who makes a contribution of two hundred and fifty dollars or more in any given year,” I said. “You know that, right?”

He glanced over at Quent. “Nobody ever gave us that much,” he said. “Least not all in one year.”

It was my turn to glance at my partner now.

Eddie picked up the questioning. “Your records show that you spend around thirty grand a year running this place.”

The figure should have been much higher given that the bank statements showed checks written or wire transfers to various parties for the purchase of forty-three animals, including three panthers, four black bears, a cheetah, and a lion, in the last five years. From what I could glean, most of the animals had been acquired from private parties, either people running roadside zoos or those who’d thought, wrongly, that a big cat would make a fun pet or protect their meth stash. Yep, in many parts of Texas it was still legal to own a large cat, even if you had no idea how to properly take care of the thing. To paraphrase Keanu Reeves from the classic movie
Parenthood,
any butt-reaming asshole could own a tiger in Texas.

Such concerns aside, how the Kuykendahls could provide food, water, and vet care for such a large number of animals on such a relatively small budget was beyond me. Things definitely didn’t add up. It was up to me to figure out the math.

Eddie continued his questioning. “You’ve got to cover your expenses somehow.”

The cousins said nothing and just stared at us. More accurately, Quent stared at us with his crazy eyes and Kevin simply stared through the space between me and my partner, failing to directly meet our gazes.

As if realizing a direct question was needed in order to get a response from the two, Eddie asked, “If you don’t have any major supporters, do you receive a lot of smaller donations?”

“Small donations.” Kevin pointed a finger at Eddie’s face though his focus was on Eddie’s shoulder. “You got it, bro.”

Eddie cast me another glance that said
Did this lying piece of white trash just dare to “bro” me?

Why yes,
my return glance replied.
In fact, he did verily “bro” you, bro.

I jotted a note on my pad that read “small donations
=
BS” and looked back up again. “Who did these small donations come from?”

“People.” Kevin waved his arms around. “From all over the place.”

I held my pen poised over my pad. “Can you give me some of their names?”

“Oh, I can’t do that,” Kevin said.

“Why not?”

“’Cause I don’t know who they were.”

“Not a single one? None of them were local? Friends? Family?”
Fellow members of the East Texas Dipshit Society?

He shook his head. “Nope.”

I played along. “How did your contributors get their money to you? Did they write you checks? Give you their credit card information? Send the money through PayPal?”

He stroked his beard again. “They was all in cash.”

“All in cash?” I repeated. “Every single one of the donations?”

“Uh-huh.”

How stupid was this guy that he’d thought Eddie and I would believe this crap? Little did he know that he was actually making things easy on us. It was much more difficult and time-consuming for us when we were given partial records than when we were given none at all. This matter would be a slam dunk. No records. No tax exemption. We’d seize their assets and shut them down. Case closed.