The Path of Silence (13 page)

“He likes you,” Ken observed, holding the door open for me.

“He likes all his customers. It makes his business prosper,” I replied.

“He likes you a lot. You make his day,” he chuckled.

“That may be but at the end of each day, when he closes up, he puts his wedding ring back. There’s a fat, white stripe around his fourth finger where the ring normally sits.”

“You notice things like that?” He sounded shocked.

“I told you I used to do the singles bar scene. Those places were filled with temporarily single men trying to hide their hands.”

We made it to the office.

As we walked into the darkened room, Bourke was showing slides of the murder scenes. Ken told him to continue. We would meet our social obligations when the lights came on.

I sat down next to Clint. He leaned over and murmured that the three shadowy silhouettes across from us were our FBI guests. There were two men and a woman. He was about to tell me their names when Bourke cleared his throat. Clint clammed up and I sipped my coffee and stared at the familiar photos.

Bourke finished the slide show. He flicked on the lights. I concentrated on my coffee. It helped to protect my sanity.

I raised my eyes above the rim of the large coffee bucket that the Urban Bean was renowned for and noticed an alert face. He had prep-school features, light colored hair and an office look—a shirt and tie. The woman was my age. She wore grim navy blue but I saw a flash of gold earrings. That’s as far as she dared to define herself in feminine terms.

The third member had a decent haircut, modern but short. He had sandy brown hair—like his daughter. The light shone through his mellow green eyes as brightly as I remembered. I said a quick prayer of thanks to the manager of the Urban Bean for carrying huge coffee containers. I needed the camouflage. I listened to Bourke’s introduction in silence.

The conference room table was wide. We couldn’t shake hands across it. I nodded in acknowledgement when Bourke introduced Agent Rick Mattis, Agent Courtney Gould and Inspector Fielding Weston, their boss, from Washington’s main district office.

“And these are my Detective Sergeants, Meg Stanton and Ken Leahman.” Bourke stroked us with his eyes, a paternal gesture. I rallied and put on a brave face. The one I would have worn if an asteroid had wiped out all coffee shops on Earth.

Bourke resumed the presentation with the lights on. I couldn’t distinguish his words. I prayed he would not ask me anything. I kept my eyes directed at him to avoid the green eyes I knew were locked on me like a tracking beam and stared into my coffee. A little later, I leaned sideways and whispered to Ken. “I have a horrible headache. If he asks something, you answer it, please—I really don’t feel good. Don’t look at me, just nod.”

He must have sensed it was something else but obeyed. I never got headaches at work. My headaches started when I got home—to see People Finders’ field agents sitting in my kitchen.

This was a briefing meeting. What Bourke was explaining, I knew in detail. I lasted an hour.

Three days ago, a man I had not seen in more than ten years, had stepped through the door in the Prince penthouse. That may have been a coincidence, spun by Fate. To see the man who had left me, ten days after we both said “I do”, in a conference room in my headquarters, a mere seventy-two hours past my first shock, was too much of a coincidence. Fate could not spin things this fast. I touched Ken’s arm, hefted my cell phone and he nodded. I waved it at Burke, smiled and hurried out of the room. By the time I was in the parking lot, I was shaking so badly that I couldn’t hold on to the cell phone.

I spent five minutes taking calming breaths. When I could unlock my knees, I walked back inside. I gave my car keys to Mary Lou at the front desk and told her Ken would pick them up. Outside, I called a taxi. Then I called Ken.

“Listen. Don’t speak,” I said breathlessly into the phone. “I left my car keys with Mary Lou. Take them. I’m going home by taxi. Make excuses for me. Thanks.” I hung up. I knew he would think that I had an emergency with Jazz.

Chapter 16

K
en came over at eight o’clock. I was in my home office, staring at a blank computer screen. I tried to find a focus for the chaos that raged inside my head.

I saw the car’s headlights swing into my driveway and continue all the way under the carport. I forced myself to get up and let him in through the side door. Jazz was in the kitchen doing her homework. She didn’t look up as I passed through. For once, I wasn’t going to offer a truce. I wanted her silence.

“We’ve been putting in too many nights lately. You should get some rest,” Ken said and handed me the car keys.

“It’s just a weather-related headache, nothing serious,” I said, smiling. I knew that I didn’t sound convincing. I kept cringing inwardly. I couldn’t hold back the memories. I hoped he wouldn’t see it in my face.

“Maybe you ought to go see a doctor.” He watched me, unsure whether to continue.

“Yeah, Dr. Martin,” I chuckled dryly. “How did the meeting go?”

“I’ll tell you. Let’s make coffee.”

We went to the kitchen. Jazz looked up and greeted him with a smile. She behaved as if I were invisible.

“Homework?” He tipped his head at the paper mess spread on the table.

“Yep,” she nodded and threw down her pencil.

“Art?” He bent over to see what she was working on, while I went to make coffee.

“Nah. Fiction.”

“I used to like to write stories,” he said. “But I was never good at it. My teacher said my story structure sucked because I couldn’t make up my mind who were the bad guys and who were the good guys.”

“My characters are all ghosts,” she declared.

“That’s interesting,” he laughed. I dreaded what would come next.

“My social studies teacher is not going to think so. She’ll make me stay after school and do it over—with real people. Except I don’t have any real people to put down on my family tree.”

“Family tree?” he echoed.

I turned around and stared at the back of her head. She had to feel the heat but ignored it, as usual.

“We have to make a family tree for our Family Unit studies. I only have two names of real people to put down. See?” She picked up the piece of paper and handed it to him.

He stared at it for a long time. I knew he was searching for something positive to say.

He offered a suggestion. “How about if you just use the titles instead of the names for all the rest? You know, father, grandmother, uncle, aunt, cousin—that sort of thing.”

“My teacher won’t accept it. She’ll say I haven’t done my homework and she’ll fail me.”

“Some people might not know the names of all of their relatives but that doesn’t mean they didn’t exist. Tell that to your teacher,” he advised.

“She’ll send me to the principal’s office for being rude.”

The coffee was ready. I walked around the table to face her. “Ken’s suggestion is good. If your teacher doesn’t like it, have her call me.” I motioned at him, “Let’s go in the office.”

I picked up the tray and walked out of the kitchen.

“It’s not going to get any better,” he said when I closed the office door.

“Did any action items come out of the meeting?” I ignored his comment.

“Is the topic of her father still that painful, Meg?” He reached for the sugar, his voice subdued.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“She has to learn sometime.”

“Sometime is very far in the future. What came out of that meeting?”

“Make up a story.”

“What good would that do? Besides, I’m not going to let her grow up on illusions. That’s far more destructive than not knowing.”

“She doesn’t feel connected to anything. She needs to know her roots.”

“Ken, I’m not going to discuss it.”

He lifted his head and smiled crookedly. “All right. The FBI’s main interest is the banking situation, or more precisely, the instability in the banking system that can be created when huge amounts of money are laundered through the system. This is apparently what Tavistock, or rather his executive assistants, told the FBI when they alerted them to what happened in Baltimore to their Chairman. Weston gave a presentation on the issue. It went over my head. It had to do with a financial summit held four years ago in Paris.”

“The Finance Ministers of the G-7 countries conference,” I murmured. “Everybody who is anybody in the world of banking attended that summit. I read about it,” I hastened to explain when I saw his surprise.

“Something about the financial crime being a key concern in today’s open and global financial world,” he said. I saw he was trying to remember what was probably a challenging topic even for Bourke.

“These days, the global market is characterized by a high mobility of funds. New payment tools are being developed even as we speak,” I said and smiled at him. “We’re talking international financial system, not just national. The three factors that were traditionally blamed for continued proliferation of financial crime are poor regulatory standards, excessive bank secrecy and harmful tax competition. Governments are urged to cooperate, internally and internationally, with all financial institutions to put in place strong measures to combat money laundering and harmful tax competition.

“I would think that Tavistock, being one of the top ten US financial institutions, was spearheading development of some kind of system that would develop higher standards and put a new infrastructure in place that would police money movement and banking routes, worldwide. The cross-border payments are very difficult to police, so are the phantom corporations that establish accounts that can’t be traced to their beneficiaries. Lawyers and accountants are always involved in these schemes, acting as facilitators. They’re the gatekeepers. Banks traditionally maintain a high degree of secrecy. It’s what makes them attractive to their customers. A bank that would develop a reputation for allowing law enforcement agencies access to information on their customers, would quickly find itself out of business. There has to be a balance—a delicate balance—between law enforcement’s and government agencies’ need to know and the bank’s need to protect its own integrity of operations. The combination of market access and obscurity of account ownership can make money laundering a breeze. At the same time, the bank can’t allow free access to its customer information, or it won’t have any customers. I presume that Tavistock, together with other major banking institutions and government agencies, was trying to develop something revolutionary that would protect the bona fide customer and at the same time, red-flag the questionable customer. This system would have given a new meaning to confidentiality, without eroding what the word stands for.”

“You didn’t stand outside that room listening, did you?” He eyed me with suspicion.

“No. I have an investment fund for Jazz. That’s why I keep on top of things like this. I’ve read up on the new developments. It’s interesting,” I added, when I saw that he was willing to believe me.

“I think that’s more or less what Weston said. Tavistock and the other banks started developing this system four years ago. Something went wrong and the project was mothballed. They started up again, six months ago. The Chairman believes that what happened in his suite is the first wave of intimidation.”

“A man dropping dead at your feet is intimidating,” I commented, thinking that my father would have also found it insulting—blood and guts at his dinner table. Such audacity!

“The FBI is going to First Tavistock National tomorrow. They’ll meet with its principal officers. They’ll follow up on the new system.”

“That should be interesting,” I commented dryly.

I reflected that I would give a month’s pay if someone would let me peep through a mousehole into the room where the meeting would be taking place. My father knew damn well who Mr. Fielding Weston was. That had come through loud and clear in our difficult meeting. And though Inspector Weston had never met his father-in-law when he was still employed as a security guard at the Smithsonian, he also knew who Mr. Crossley Morgan Tavistock was. Hell, Inspector Weston’s marriage license, if he had bothered to keep the antique form, had the name of his “beloved” spouse, Ellienne Meaghan Tavistock.

“You don’t think they’ll share the information?” Ken interpreted my comment as skepticism as to whether the FBI would cooperate with the police in this investigation.

“They might. I’d like to find out who was working on their financial security measures system four years ago and who’s doing it now.”

“Do you think those people would be the targets?”

I stared at him with dawning comprehension. “You might be right. If the large banking institutions had joined a syndicate, to develop a super tool to track illegal money routes, then whoever was working on that project might be a target. The banks don’t want to surrender their confidentiality. But if they could implement a sophisticated system that would be endorsed by government agencies and law enforcement, then the gate’s shut. That would piss off a lot of the offshore enterprise. They’d be left with huge amounts of illegal cash and no means to wash it through any international monetary system. Our banking institutions would share their new product—globally—for a price, of course.”

“A whole team of walking ghosts,” he murmured.

“Not all, just the key ones.”

“Jeffries was not a key figure.”

“Chess players need pawns and kings. In fact, they need more pawns to sacrifice than more important pieces.”

“The FBI is going to get all the interesting work,” he mumbled.

I laughed. “Banking conspiracies are boring. We’re going to do the exciting field work.”

“Who else did we miss?”

“What else—the Creeslow Armored Security Automobiles. They’re in Brooklyn Park. We have to check them out.”

“Maybe Brick just liked driving an armored limo.”

“Probably but there’s more to it, has to be.”

“Why?”

“There’s duality in everything we’ve come across. Brick had a job and a part-time job, so did Jeffries. This case may be about money laundering but it’s also about something else. There’s another component to it.”