Mystery Writers of America Presents the Prosecution Rests (35 page)

Lauren made a face. “Very funny, Tommy.”

As hilarious as the Fourth Amendment, Lauren. Bad guys aren’t the only ones who think the end justifies the means.
I pulled at my drink.
Galletti knows it, too.

Outside, headlights were yellow smears in the downpour, and a foghorn mooed. I knew I shouldn’t spill the beans, but I couldn’t
resist.

“As a matter of fact, the watch is a going-away present to myself. Good-bye, perpetual rain; hello, eternal sunshine.”

Lauren tilted her head. “You’re moving? Where?”

I picked up the Prada sunglasses from my desk—another recent purchase—and put them on.

“Next week I’ll be sitting on the private beach of one of the ritziest golf communities in Florida.” Harbour View or Vista
or something like that. Harbour with a
u
of course, and a gated entrance even more pretentious than the name.

Gated, alarmed, rent-a-copped.
Drop-ins at the office were one thing, but I’ve never been keen on clients—or anyone else—showing up at my house. “And I
won’t be back,” I added in my best
Ahnuld
imitation.

A small crease appeared between Lauren’s brows. A big reaction, if you knew her. I took off the glasses, prepared to launch
into my sun, beach, and golf riff. None of these things actually mattered to me, but the explanation had satisfied everyone
else.

Few people ever surprised me like Lauren.

“So you’re walking away before things are finished,” she said.

“What do you mean? The practice is all wrapped up. Not that there was much to do. After what happened to Nick, things went
into the crapper pretty fast.”

When my partner got shot in our parking garage, the local news feasted on it for a week. There was a lot of speculation—fueled
by an anonymous source—that it was a mob hit. That was enough to scare off old clients and keep away new ones. I regarded
Lauren. And with my other reason to stay in Seattle leaving too…

“I’m not talking about your accounting firm,” she said.

I looked at my watch, no longer giving a damn what she thought of it. “Aren’t you supposed to be at Galletti’s roast?”

Lauren tossed back her prodigal curls. Usually she wore her hair in a ponytail. I decided I preferred it loose around her
face.

“I want to arrive late.” Her tone turned coy. “Besides, don’t you want to hear why I came to Seattle?”

It was impossible to stay annoyed with her. Besides, this could be our last evening together before I left. “Go ahead.”

“Ever play Monopoly when you were a kid?”

You could get whiplash trying to follow her train of thought. “Sure.”

“Did you know it’s the only game where going to jail is an accepted risk?”

I put on an Uncle Sam scowl and pointed at her.
“Do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars.”

Her eyes sparkled. “I used to really rub it in when my brother pulled that card. Sometimes I made him so mad, he’d kick me
out of the game.”

You’re still pissing off the other players, Lauren
. “All I cared about was collecting rent,” I said.

“Spoken like a true accountant. So, Tommy, did Monopoly make us what we are today?”

I wasn’t exactly sure what she was getting at, so I sipped my whiskey and stayed quiet. The rain increased its patter on the
windows. It sounded impatient, like a dealer’s fingers drumming on the felt.

Lauren broke the silence. “Private placement offerings put together by Merrill Bache—coal-mining deals. That’s what brought
me here.”

She was talking about PPOs. If the investment banks won’t touch you, they’re a way to raise capital without jumping through
too many government hoops. Lawyers and accountants vet you and your numbers, then brokers sell the deal to “accredited” investors,
rich people who’ve been around the financial block a few times.

I always thought private placements were small-time. Give me a REIT any day. You pool investor funds to buy commercial rental
properties or mortgages—that’s serious money.

“I don’t remember hearing anything about coal.”

Since meeting Lauren, I’d made a point of keeping up with local financial and legal news. The deals must have gone down before
I moved to Seattle.

“It was a pretty standard fraud. The geology was faked—there wasn’t any coal. The investors got stuck with worthless holes
in the ground.”

I shrugged. “So a few of the privileged class spent the summer at their lawyers’ offices instead of the beach.”

“Not so privileged,” Lauren said, her voice like ice. “The brokers sold units to anyone who walked in the door, even if they
weren’t accredited. Retirement savings, college funds, cushions against medical emergencies—they took in millions, tens of
millions.”

Although we’d never talked about it, I sensed that Lauren took investors’ losses personally. I wondered if there was private
history.

“The money was gone, of course.” I tried to sound sympathetic.

“I followed the funds through three banks before the trail went cold. As usual, nothing was left stateside. Rich crooks don’t
need walking-around money.”

“Promoter disappear, too?”

“As soon as the deal went south, he followed it.”

I swirled the scotch in my glass. “So you were left with the professionals. I assume you picked the obvious target.”

She nodded. “The brokers who peddled the deal. You know how I hate white-collar types who think the rules don’t apply to them.
When these guys tried to play games during discovery, it really ticked me off. I wasn’t going to settle for a fine after that.
I wanted them in prison.”

“Any defense?”

“The usual.” Her voice became singsong. “Each investor received documents describing the risks, the brokers had no way to
know the attorneys hadn’t done the due diligence or that the accountants had inflated the numbers, it wasn’t their fault unqualified
investors bought into the deal, blah blah blah blah.”

“Did the jury buy any of it?”

“Not after it took the head broker a full five minutes to locate where the lawyers had buried the risk disclosures in the
offering memorandum. The print was so small, he couldn’t read it without borrowing the judge’s glasses. Meanwhile, the projected
returns were smack-dab in the middle of the first page, in typeface as big as the top line on an eye chart.”

“I take it you won.”

“Don’t I always?”

That had been true for as long as I’d known her. Lauren was a real buccaneer. She tried cases other prosecutors would have
passed on, and she was willing to do whatever it took to win, even if it meant sailing to the edge of legal boundaries, or
beyond.
I get the message, Lauren.

I took a long pull from my tumbler. “A criminal conviction makes a civil suit practically a slam-dunk. I bet some class-action
attorney had a complaint on file the same day your jury came back.” I could feel my neck getting red.

She plucked at a thread on her dress and looked bored. “Probably.”

“What did the investors finally end up with? Ninety, ninety-five cents on the dollar?” I heard the edge in my voice, so I
gulped some of my drink. I had to choke back a cough as the whiskey scorched my throat.

Lauren hitched up her dress so she could cross her legs. “A little more than a hundred, actually. The jury was generous with
punitive damages.”

I forced myself to look away from her slender ankles. “I bet you went after the attorneys and accountants, too.” I set the
tumbler down hard on my desk. Amber liquid sloshed over my hand.

“The law allows—”

“To hell with the law! The investors got back
more
than they put up. And they’re no less greedy than the professionals you’re so hot to put in prison. Most people wouldn’t
go near these deals if they didn’t think they’d get a big tax write-off, plus beat the market. Why not be reasonable? Dial
it back after things are more or less even again, go after
real
bad guys.”

“I do! Lawyers and accountants are supposed to be the watchdogs who make sure offerings are legit. And the ones in these deals
did more than look the other way. The promoter was smart, but not that smart. He couldn’t have put the fraud together without
professional help.”

I made a calming motion with my hands, I was determined not to argue with her. Besides, it was an old debate. “Okay, okay,
these
lawyers and
these
accountants were dirtbags. You have my blessing to prosecute them.”

She grimaced. “Easier said than done. I barely had enough evidence for a search warrant. By the time it was executed, they
had shredded all the documents. I needed the promoter’s testimony that the attorneys and accountants were in on the scam from
the get-go.”

I rubbed a thumb against the rubberized band of my watch. “Those guys can be hard to find once they’re in the wind.”

“The coal mines were in Kentucky, so I started there. I went to the town, talked to the guy’s landlord, the people who leased
him office equipment, even the waitresses at his favorite diner. Wasn’t hard—I was raised in a place like that. Turns out
the guy’s Norwegian, grew up working on a family fishing boat. He immigrated to the States about ten years ago with plans
to make it big.”

“Let’s hear it for the American dream!” I took a mouthful of scotch and let it sizzle on my tongue. I was feeling good again.
“He must have played Monopoly when he was a kid.”

Lauren glared at me. “I expected him to go back to Europe. But Immigration didn’t have a record of him leaving.”

“How about Canada?”

“They said he wasn’t there either. So that left Seattle.”

“Seattle? What made you think—”

“When we went through his office in Kentucky, we found a bunch of blank Seattle postcards and some country-western CDs in
the back of a desk drawer. Apparently he missed them when he cleaned out the place.”

“You thought he came here because of some
postcards?
”

“Don’t give me a hard time, Tommy. It was all I had to go on. The databases—”

“I was wondering when you’d get to those.” I heard that edge in my voice again. “Do you feds even bother with warrants anymore?
Or do you just whisper the word
terrorist
and wait for the sysop to hand over the master password?”

Lauren’s expression told me she wasn’t in the mood for my privacy-rights rant. “Oh, we got the password all right, but the
databases were a bust. There was nothing in the computers—no driver’s license, no address, no credit cards.”

I was impressed by Lauren’s quarry. Despite disposable cell phones, false identities for sale on the Internet, and banks that
were more interested in fees than references, it was harder than ever to live off the grid. “So what did you do?”

She flashed that luminous smile. “Drove around in the rain, hyped on caffeine. I went to bars, hotels, used-car lots—anywhere
he might have gone or done business.
Nada.
It was as though he’d never been here.”

Despite myself, I was getting interested. “Why not give up?”

“I almost did. I was running out of places to look. But I knew—I just
knew
—he was here. The local Norwegian community, the climate, the fishing, the postcards” —she ticked each one off on a finger—
“made Seattle the most logical place for him to go to ground.” She shook her head. “Thank goodness for clams.”

“What do clams have to do with this?”

“I was eating lunch at this tiny joint downtown—”

“The one next to the bridge? You ever have the chowder?”

“Every Tuesday. White, with extra crackers.” She ducked behind a grin. “And an Elysian Fields Pale Ale, no glass.”

A noontime beer should be the least of your worries, Lauren.
For half a second, I wondered if she would go to lunch with me. Maybe if I called it a bon voyage thing…

“Anyway, I was eating on the patio when the ferry came in from Bainbridge Island. That’s when it hit me.”

“A boat,” I said.

“A boat,” she repeated, clearly relishing the memory. “And I had five days to find it before I had to start working another
case.”

“The State of Washington must have a hundred thousand registered vessels. How did you think you were going to come up with
the right one in time?”

“Make that three hundred thousand, plus transients.” Lauren flicked invisible lint from her dress. “Still, it was no problem.”

“Okay, I’ll bite. How did you find the needle in a third of a million boats?”

“Did you know the DMV is in charge of maritime registrations? It handles them just like cars. I sat in a back office and scrolled
through the listings for vessels over thirty feet—the DMV guy said that would be the minimum size for someone to live on.
I found it the second day.” Her tone was only slightly smug.

“He couldn’t have been stupid enough to put his name down as the owner.”

Lauren looked offended. “Of course not. Besides, I didn’t look at the owner registry. I figured title would be held by some
offshore corporation. I went through the list of boat names instead.”

“
Boat names?
Why would you do that?”

“Because men aren’t sentimental, except when they are.” She looked at my watch. “They can’t hide the things that matter to
them.”

I tugged my cuff over the gold dial. “So did he go for a name from the old country? Or something dumb, like
Other People’s Money
or
Sucker Bet
?”

“Wrong, and wrong. But I knew I’d found the right one as soon as I saw it.” She grinned, and I half-expected to see canary
feathers sticking out of her mouth. “The
Loretta Lynn
.”

“Isn’t that a country-western singer?”

“You got it. Born and raised in Butcher Hollow, Kentucky.”

“Why would this guy name his boat after her? He’s Swedish.”

“Norwegian.” Lauren hugged herself happily. “Remember when I told you the coal mines were in Kentucky? Well, guess what town
they’re in.”

“You’ve
got
to be kidding. I still don’t see how the hell you made the connection with Loretta Lynn. I didn’t think you were a country-western
buff.”