Paper Bullets (20 page)

“I still don’t understand why you needed Melody,” I said. “Can’t you just trace the money? Follow a paper trail?”

Richards seemed to rouse himself from somewhere far away. He gave me a quick glance, and I was surprised to see a sadness in his eyes that didn’t show in his expression. I remembered that Stacy said Melody had flirted with Richards as well, selling her sex appeal. Had Richards fallen for his informant?

“Paper trail,” he said. “If only it was that simple. Guys who work for someone like Gordo, they keep two sets of books. One set’s squeaky clean, kept in an obvious place, like a program on Sewell’s laptop, just in case someone comes calling with a search warrant. That’s all we’d find, a nice, neat set of numbers that tracks all of Sewell’s income from his bank job and the money he gets from the charity and about a dozen other businesses for consulting work. He even reports all that income on his taxes. He’s a smart guy. He doesn’t want to get nabbed for tax evasion.”

He shifted in his seat, tugging at the seat belt where it rubbed against his collarbone. I noticed that he’d started lumping himself in with the Feds as he talked. I wondered if he’d been promised a permanent job with the F.B.I. if he did well on this case.

“Then there’s the other set of books,” Richards said. “The set where he keeps track of the amount of money that comes in and what he does with it. He’d got to keep track of every penny because someone like Gordino, he can smell when someone’s skimming off the top, and Sewell might have to prove someday that he was a good little soldier.”

“So you wanted Melody to find the second set of books.”

“If she could. Mostly I wanted her to get Sewell to live beyond his means. Way beyond his means. If he was doing what the feds thought he was doing for Gordino—”

“Laundering money,” I said.

“Yeah. Running it through the bank into accounts for dummy companies, making enough small deposits to enough different accounts so that nobody would notice. A guy like that, with access to all that money, he starts to think he’s smarter than the boss, and maybe the big guy won’t notice if a couple hundred here or there goes missing.”

“One thing I don’t understand is where he got all this money,” I said. It wasn’t like someone could just send him a check in the mail. Could they?

“Lots of different ways,” Richards said. “Say you’ve got a lot of cash you need to make look legit. You’ve got a guy you can trust, so you give him some of it. He goes into a casino and buys a bunch of chips with dirty money. Not enough to put him on the casino’s radar. He sits down at a table, plays for a while—maybe he wins, maybe he loses, but never enough to draw attention from the pit boss—then he goes and cashes out all his chips. Now the cash in his pocket is gambling winnings, no longer dirty money.”

“Is that what Sewell was doing?”

“We think so. At least that was part of it. Melody told me she’d met him in a casino bar. He’d been throwing around money, bought her and her girlfriends a few rounds. Said he’d won big at the tables.”

The pictures I’d seen on her Facebook wall. Had that been the night she’d met Sewell?

“We also think he’s been getting cashier’s checks in the mail,” Richards said. “He deposits them into accounts for the dummy corporations. At the other end, somebody takes dirty money into a bank, buys cashier’s checks or money orders payable to one of the companies Sewell set up. Probably nothing over a few thousand dollars, nothing that would raise eyebrows. Same thing on this end. Sewell’s an officer or member of more than a dozen companies registered in Nevada. Spend a couple hundred bucks a year in fees to the state, and bam—he’s got himself a new business. It doesn’t matter that all the business does is receive and disburse money. Some to Sewell, some to other consultants or project managers who dummy up development plans for projects that never happen, who hire work done by other companies owned by—”

“Gordino,” I said.

“Or owned by other companies he owns.”

I’d spent a lot of time running down all the companies that owned Breakers, but I’d never searched through corporate records in Nevada to see if Sewell owned any companies here. I knew he worked at a bank. I hadn’t thought far enough outside the box to check to see if he was involved in any other businesses. So much for congratulating myself on my stellar detective skills.

“The companies issue fake invoices to account for the money they receive,” Richards said. “On the surface, it’s business as usual, nothing illegal.”

Sewell was in the perfect position within the bank to handle all the money. He brought deposits to the tellers all the time. He was charming and charismatic. He probably flirted with the single tellers and charmed the married ones, and I’d almost bet he never took his deposits to a male teller unless he had to.

No one ever caught on that the deposits weren’t for the customer whose account he’d just opened. And he never stayed in one branch long enough for anyone to notice a pattern.

“Where he could get himself in trouble is with the cash,” Richards said. “Large sums of cash coming in at irregular intervals is hard to keep track of, especially when he’s spreading it out over lots of different companies. The deposits all have to be under ten grand, or paperwork gets filed with the government. If Melody started making demands, hinting around that she wanted something special, say a ring to outdo the one Ryan gave her, Sewell might dip into that cash to keep her happy. Once that happened, we have people at the other end who can plant a rumor that the numbers aren’t adding up at Sewell’s end. He gets nervous, and that’s when we’d turn up the heat.”

I gave him a long sideways glance. “This whole operation is to get Sewell to flip.”

“Make no mistake, we wouldn’t mind busting him, but we’re really after his bosses. The ultimate prize would be Gordino, but it’s like a game of dominos. Get Sewell to flip on the guys who decide how much money comes his way and from what source, and maybe one of them will flip on a guy higher up.”

“And along the way, people get hurt. People get killed. I suppose they’re just collateral damage, right?”

His mouth thinned into a tight line, and those dark eyes went flat. I’d hurt him, but he wasn’t going to let me see it.

“You know this whole thing is seriously screwed up, right?” I asked. “It’s like a high-stakes game of chess. Only this isn’t a game. You’re screwing with innocent people’s lives.”

“Melody wasn’t innocent.”

“And so what if she wasn’t? Did you tell her she might die? She was stupid and selfish and she cheated on a man who loved her, but last time I checked, those weren’t death penalty offenses.”

He didn’t say anything.

We were nearing California Avenue. He told me to drop him at the corner of Liberty and Sierra, only a block away.

Traffic was starting to get heavy as office workers in the surrounding buildings started to make their way home for the night. Richards’ white SUV sat off by itself now in the almost empty parking lot. I guessed that bank must have closed at four. Only the drive-through windows were still busy.

I’d been gone longer than I thought. I’d have to talk to Norton while I drove home to check on Samantha. I hoped he didn’t mind being on speaker phone.

I pulled into a loading zone near the corner where Richards wanted me to drop him off. Before he got out of the car, I asked him if it was all worth it.

He gave me a long look. “I have to believe the answer’s yes,” he said. “Most days? I just don’t know.”

He was already across the street by the time I got a break in traffic and made the turn onto Liberty. It would be the quickest way home, even if it did put my car on display if Sewell happened to be looking out the front of the bank.

Would he still be there? It occurred to me that I had no clue what hours he worked. Sewell’s bank stayed open until five. Just because he’d gone back to work after his lunch with Melody didn’t mean he worked until the bank closed. What was the old joke about banker’s hours? If he ended his day at four, he could be anywhere.

Like on his way to my house.

Crap.

I fished my cell phone out of purse while I was stopped in traffic. I had just speed-dialed my house when I heard a dull
whump
from somewhere behind me, and then the sound of people screaming.

I saw a cloud of black smoke in my rearview mirror. Even as I twisted around in my seat, some part of me knew where the smoke was coming from.

Richards’ white SUV was on fire.

CHAPTER 26

INSTEAD OF HEADING toward home, I decided to make a quick circle around the block. Well, as quick as I could manage with downtown traffic and one-way streets.

Richards had been in his car when it caught fire, I had no doubt about that. Unlike when a car explodes in the movies or on TV, there’d been no huge fireball rising into the sky. No, this had been a quick, contained explosion designed to kill only one man, and I needed to take a look. Not to make sure that it had been Richards’ car that had gone up in flames.

I wanted to see if Sewell was watching the car burn.

“Hello?”

Samantha’s voice came over the speaker in my phone. In my shock at the explosion, I’d forgotten I’d called her.

“Hi, honey,” I said. “I just wanted to check in, see how you’re doing.”

I tried to keep my voice calm. I must have failed miserably.

“What’s wrong, Mom?”

I took a deep breath. “It’s been a long, very weird day.”

A black Porsche cut in front of me, and I had to slam on the brakes. I felt like honking the horn at the driver, but that wouldn’t get me where I was going any faster.

“Dad never called back,” Samantha said. “I didn’t even talk to Jonathan long, just in case he called me on my cell.” She paused, and I could almost see her biting her lower lip. She used to bite her nails when she was younger. Now her lower lip took the abuse when she was worried. “Do you think he’s okay?”

Any assurances I could have given her would have rung false. “No, I don’t think he’s okay, but I think he will be. We just have to give him time.”

I’d managed to make it about halfway through the loop of downtown streets I needed to take to make my circle. My plan was to drive past the courthouses and take the one-way street that would bring me next to the parking lot where Richards had parked his SUV.

I’d have to move fast. I could hear sirens echoing off the downtown high rises. Rush hour traffic would slow down response teams, but as soon as the cops arrived, they’d cordon off the area, and I’d lose chance to get a look at the crowd.

I took the street in front of the courthouses faster than I should have, and I had to slam on the brakes to let two uniformed deputies cross the street in front of me. They were running toward the fire, talking on their radios as they ran. One of them had a hand on his holstered sidearm.

I wasn’t surprised. A few years ago one of the judges had been shot while he was in his office. The bullet had been fired from a high-powered rifle in a parking garage two blocks away.

As soon as I could, I made the turn onto the one-way street. I took the corner too fast, and the pepper spray I still had on the seat next to my leg rolled off onto the floor. A car horn blared behind me.

“Mom? What was that?”

“Crazy driver,” I said, not mentioning that the crazy driver was me. I didn’t drive like that when I had Samantha in the car. She’d be getting her own driver’s license soon, and I wanted to set a good example.

It shouldn’t have taken me long to get to the parking lot. It was only one long city block away from where I’d turned onto the one-way street, but traffic was already snarled as drivers slowed to a crawl to gawk at the burning car. Well, at least the traffic jam would give me a chance to take a good long look at the crowd.

And there was a crowd. Most of the people who’d stopped to watch the car burn were across the street in front of the bank building where Sewell worked. The people on my side of the street were actually giving the parking lot a wide berth. Like me, they’d probably watched too many movies where burning cars turned into gigantic fireballs.

Driving by, even slowly, didn’t give me as good a look at the crowd as I wanted. My camera had a video function. I could have used it to take a video of the crowd if I hadn’t left the damn thing at home.

Did my cell phone have a video function? I didn’t know, which I should have. It just never occurred to me to figure it out since whenever I needed to videotape something, I knew I could use my camera.

Which was at home.

With my daughter, who was still waiting patiently on the phone.

“Hey, honey?” I said as I inched closer to the parking lot. The sirens were getting louder, and I saw the first flashing lights reflecting off the bank building’s windows. “Can you do me a favor?”

“Um... sure?”

I hadn’t seen Sewell in the crowd, but then again, he could be watching from inside the bank.

“Can you see if you can go over to Maddie’s house for a while?”

She was quiet for a beat. “What’s going on? All summer you’ve been weird whenever I want to go hang out with Maddie, and now you’re...”

The first fire truck raced into the parking lot from the Virginia Street side, bouncing over a speed bump on its way to the burning car. Two police cars arrived on the scene. Ahead of me, the police began cordoning off the street.

“You want me out of the house,” Samantha said.

I wasn’t going to lie to her. “Just for a little while.”

“Does this have something to do with Melody?”

“I’m not sure. It’s just...” I didn’t want to tell her that someone else associated with Melody had just been murdered in pretty much the same way. She’d be too worried about her dad. Hell, I was worried about her dad. “I’d feel better if you were at someone else’s house until I make a few other calls.”

I asked Samantha to call Maddie and then call me back to let me know if Maddie’s mom could pick her up, then I disconnected. Traffic was so thick by now, I really needed to pay attention to my driving. Calling Norton would have to wait until I was through the worst of the traffic. I thought about going by his building, but there was no guarantee he’d be there. Better to connect by phone and arrange to meet later.