Tara Holloway 03 - Death, Taxes, and Extra-Hold Hairspray (35 page)

The video clip played now, showing Fischer seated at the blackjack table, winning big and raising his hands in the air, proclaiming, “To God go the glory!” Fischer looked up at himself, the image now frozen on the screen. “God sure smiled on the Ark that night. He blessed me with beginner’s luck at the blackjack table.”

Beginner’s luck, my ass. Fischer played like a pro.

Fischer’s e-mail about false witness made sense now. The guy was trying to play things off as if his trip to the casino had been purposely planned as research for this sermon rather than what it really was—the indulgence of a greedy man who wouldn’t be satisfied until he owned the whole world.

“I’ve put the winnings in a special fund,” Fischer announced. “Once the Shreveport Ark is up and running, we’ll use the funds to minister to those who suffer from gambling addiction.”

The crowd applauded again.

“An interesting thing about greed,” Fischer noted. “It’s not just limited to man. As we recently learned, the government gets a little greedy sometimes, too.” He pointed up at the jumbo screen again. This time it wasn’t Fischer’s image on the enormous display. It was Uncle Sam’s. But rather than “I Want You for the U.S. Army” it read “I Want the Ark’s Money.”

The crowd roared with laughter. Some of those around us hooted and whistled. When the crowd finally settled down, Fischer chuckled. “We showed Uncle Sam, didn’t we? Those silly folks at the IRS learned an important lesson. You don’t mess with God’s people.”

The crowd roared again, this time with applause.

Silly folks?
Molten anger welled up in me so hot I’m surprised it didn’t cook my internal organs. I glanced over at Nick. He’d turned so red he appeared to have a third-degree sunburn.

Fischer centered himself on the stage to wrap things up. “I’ll leave you fine folks with one last thought from Mark 8:36. ‘What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?’”

I’ll be damned. The parishioners rose from their seats and, once again, gave the guy a standing ovation.

All Nick, Josh, and I could do was sit there, stunned.

The guy had managed to best us, yet again.

When the congregants finally retook their seats, Fischer wrapped things up with a preview of next week’s sermon. “Next week we’ll cover lust,” he said. “That’s a
touchy
subject.” He gave an exaggerated wink at the camera. The audience tittered.

No doubt he’d use the photos from the Hustler Club in next Sunday’s sermon.

I glanced over at Nick. His eyes were narrowed to mere slits, his jaw clenched so tight he was likely to break a tooth. A vein in his neck bulged and pulsed.

When the collection plate came by today, I was tempted to empty it into my purse and apply the funds to Fischer’s outstanding tax bill. Instead, I contributed a coupon for fifty cents off Cajun blackened fish seasoning. I wondered if Pastor Fischer would see the irony.

When the service ended, we exited the church, swept out in a sea of people buzzing about the inspiring sermon. It was all I could do not to hop up into the bed of a pickup like a roadside preacher and scream, “Are you people idiots? Don’t you see what’s going on?”

Were these people so desperate for someone to believe in that they’d ignore reason?

We piled into Josh’s car, the guys in the front, me in the back.

Nick opened a Bible on his lap.

“I didn’t see you bring a Bible in earlier,” I said.

Nick’s lip twitched as he glanced back at me. “I didn’t.”

“You stole that Bible from the church?” I looked out the window for lightning bolts and locusts. “You’re going to hell for sure.”

“I’m just borrowing it,” Nick replied. “I’ll give it back. Besides, if I end up in hell, it’ll damn sure be for something a whole lot bigger and more fun than stealing a Bible.”

Heaven help me, but I’d enjoy doing things with Nick that would secure us an eternal waterfront property on a lake of fire.

He flipped through a few of the pages, then handed the Bible to me, pointing at a passage. Jeremiah 6:13. “I noticed Fischer conveniently forgot to mention this verse.”

I read it aloud. “‘From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit.’” So true. I handed the Bible back to him.

“Fischer can spin bullshit into pure gold,” Nick muttered.

“What now?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” Nick spat. He looked from Josh to me. “Either of you got any bright ideas?”

I wished I did. But I didn’t. Fischer had managed to use both the law and our incriminating photos for his own purposes. No matter what we threw at him, the guy came out smelling like a rose. I was beginning to wonder if he’d sold his soul to the devil.

But maybe us nabbing Noah Fischer wasn’t what God wanted. Didn’t God say “Vengeance is mine”? Perhaps we should leave things up to Him.

“Look, Nick,” I said. “I’d like to see Fischer get his due. But the fact of the matter is we can’t get every tax cheat. Some of them are going to skate by no matter how hard we try.” Fischer kept making fools of us. Frankly, I’d had about as much humiliation as I could endure. “Maybe we should just move on.”

“No!” Nick boomed, banging a fist on the dashboard.

I was surprised the windows didn’t shatter. Josh instinctively shrank back against his seat.

Nick glanced toward the building, where Noah and Marissa Fischer had finally finished shaking hands with the parishioners and were now descending the ramp to their limo. He turned and looked me in the eye. “Fischer may not be a murderer like Marcos Mendoza was, but he’s cut from the same cloth. Power hungry. Greedy. Arrogant. Thinks he’s above the law. We can’t let people like that get away with it.”

Nick’s obsession over nailing Fischer suddenly made sense. To Nick, this case was about much more than collecting some overdue taxes and bringing one man to justice. It was about evening the score between the forces of good and evil. Clearly, the emotional wounds he’d suffered at the hands of Mendoza were not yet fully healed. Knowing my rejection may have opened new wounds for Nick gave me a sick feeling. The guy had suffered enough. The least I could do was keep this case open.

“You’re right, Nick,” I said. “Whatever it takes, we’ll get this guy.”

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Positioning

On Monday, Nick left his office door open a few inches. I took that as a good sign. He was no longer shutting me out completely. Of course it could also mean he was getting over me. I knew that shouldn’t hurt, but it did.

Bad.

I spent the better part of the day sorting through the bank records of a couple who operated a flooring store. Nothing on the statements matched the information in the store’s bookkeeping records. More than likely, the couple had a second set of books, the real ones, hidden away somewhere. How was I supposed to figure out from this jumbled mess how much they actually owed in taxes? Oh, well. If they weren’t going to help me come up with a good number, I’d pick one out of the air. Or maybe pull one out of my ass. How’s six million dollars sound?

At four o’clock, Josh popped his head into my office. “Fischer’s on the move.” He held up his cell phone, aiming the screen my way.

As if I could read the tiny display from eight feet away. I waved him in and held out my hand for the phone. The screen showed a feed from a GPS app, a small red dot on Interstate 20, heading east from Texas across the Louisiana border.

I’d all but forgotten about the GPS device I’d placed on Fischer’s car.

I stood. “Let’s show this to Nick.”

We stepped across the hall and I rapped on Nick’s door.

“It’s open,” he called.

Josh followed me into Nick’s office. Nick wore navy pants and a white shirt today, the colors tied together by a red, white, and blue belt buckle designed to look like the Texas flag. I handed Nick the phone. Nick glanced down at the readout, then back up at us.

“Fischer’s heading back to Shreveport,” Josh said.

Nick’s brow quirked with interest. He held up the phone, pointing at the screen. “How accurate is this detail?”

“It’s good to within a hundred yards for a moving vehicle,” Josh said.

“What about a car that’s not moving?” Nick asked.

“It’ll pinpoint a location for a parked car.”

“Good to know.” Nick pulled open one of his desk drawers and retrieved a manila file. He held it out to me.

“What’s this?”

“I’ve done some more digging. Looks like our boat captain has a girl in every port. Or at least one in Shreveport.”

I took the file from him and pulled one of his wing chairs up to his desk. Josh tugged the other chair over. I opened the file and began looking through the paperwork, laying each paper aside when I was finished so Josh could see them, too.

The records included printouts of tax data for the Hustler Club, including a list of the club’s employees. Nick had apparently used the data to search for the stripper Noah Fischer had plied with his gambling winnings. The file contained a printout of a Facebook photo of a young woman with long red hair, along with Louisiana driver’s license information identifying her as Leah Michelle Dodd.

“That’s her,” Josh said when he saw the photo. “She’s got the lip mole.”

Sure enough, the woman in the photo had a beauty mark. Small, but big enough to be visible in the picture. She also had the double Ds we’d seen in the video. She’d generously displayed them in a tight, low-cut top for her Facebook friends. No wonder she had over four thousand of them, according to the printout. The vast majority were male. No big surprise there.

Still, nothing in the file directly linked the woman to Fischer.

When I mentioned this fact to Nick, he pulled out another file, a thick one I immediately recognized as part of the Ark’s financial records. He also pulled out a sheet he’d marked with a sticky note. It was a copy of a statement for Fischer’s business credit card account, which was paid each month by the Ark’s bookkeeper. He pointed to an entry on the bill. A sixty-four-dollar charge at a gas station in Shreveport.

“So?”

“See the address for the gas station?”

The statement indicated it was on Blanchard Street. “Yeah?”

He pointed to the address on Leah Dodd’s driver’s license. Apparently she lived in an apartment on Blanchard Street.
An apartment located on the same block as the gas station.
Hmm …

“You don’t think he’d be stupid enough to go see her now, do you?” I asked. “He knows someone followed him around Shreveport last weekend and took photos. Surely he’s being careful.”

“Oh, I’m sure he’s being careful,” Nick said, leaning forward, his body tensed. “But guys like him think they’re smarter than everyone else. Especially us ‘silly folks’ here at the IRS. He’s probably looking over his shoulder. But it’s not going to stop him from getting what he wants.”

“What do you think he wants?”

“What all men want,” Nick said. “Sex. As much as physically possible.”

I suppose I could’ve been angry at Nick for his comment, but I suspected he was merely being crude for effect. After all, if Nick wanted just sex, he could muster up a dozen willing partners in the federal building alone. I’d noticed the female deputy who ran the metal detector downstairs routinely took him aside for an extra frisk.

No, Fischer might be looking for sex-without-strings, but Nick was after something more.

And he’d likely soon find someone else who could give it to him. After all, we lived in a metro area of over three million people, half of whom were female. Surely I wasn’t the only woman in town who could make Nick happy.

Was I?

“Road trip?” Josh asked, looking from me to Nick.

Nick retrieved a black camera case from his credenza and stood. “Let’s hit the highway.”

*   *   *

Since Fischer was surely being more careful, we figured we should be extra careful, too. We snagged a rental car for the trip, a sand-colored minivan so plain it was virtually invisible. Luckily for us, the thing had darkly tinted windows that would make secret surveillance easier.

On the drive to Shreveport, we kept a close eye on the readout for the GPS gadget. The data indicated Fischer had stopped at the convenience store near the Ark’s construction site.

“Think he’s getting gas?” I asked.

“My money’s on condoms,” Nick said.

Josh giggled in the driver’s seat.

“Condoms,” Nick repeated, eyeing Josh.

Josh giggled again.

“Dude,” Nick said. “You so need to get laid.”

After the convenience store, the little red dot continued down the block to the location of the future Ark Temple. It remained there for the three hours it took us to make the drive to Louisiana.

We circled the block in our soccer mom car, passing by the construction site. We could see Noah Fischer’s Infiniti parked inside the fence, but there was no Noah Fischer in sight.

“Think he’s in the trailer?” I asked, gesturing to the small prefab building erected at the back corner of the site.

Nick shook his head. “I doubt it. It looks dark inside.”

I glanced around the area. In addition to the convenience store, there were a few other shops nearby. A nail salon. A pet supply store. A barber shop. None seemed like the type of place Noah Fischer would venture into, though.

We drove slowly around, looking for Fischer. There was no sign of him.

“Let’s go by Leah Dodd’s apartment,” Nick suggested. “But take me to the convenience store first.”

“For condoms?” I teased.

Josh giggled again. Sheez. Nick was right. The guy really needed to get laid.

“No, not condoms,” Nick said. “For a newspaper.”

“What, you want to read the comics?” I asked.

Nick shook his head. “You’ll see.”

Nick stepped up to the newspaper machine on the sidewalk in front of the convenience store, stuck two quarters in the slot, and purchased the daily edition of the
Shreveport Times
. He climbed back into the car and unfolded the paper, perusing the front page. Today’s cover bore a large full-color photograph of a schoolteacher who’d snatched her elderly neighbor’s schnauzer from the hungry jaws of a rampaging alligator, along with the bold headline “All Bark, No Bite.”