Chapter 9 #2
“Ahh,” Cole said, licking his lips. “I would never want to interfere in what you and Idris have.”
“You’ve always been a gentleman,” she said.
Doug came back with bags of Chinese food balanced precariously in his arms, and for the next few minutes the murder investigation took a back seat to the primal need for sustenance.
Paper plates materialized from somewhere, and the conference table became a landscape of white takeout containers and chopsticks.
“I will never get used to this,” Derby said, dumping fried rice onto his plate.
“It’s only a matter of time before I’m in every household in the world,” Margot said. “Are you single, Lieutenant Derby?”
“Ahh,” Derby said, choking on a piece of rice. “Happily married. Twenty-two years.”
“How lovely.”
Jack set his plate down and moved to the head of the table. The room settled into working mode—this was Jack in his element. Commanding, focused, a leader who could take a room full of strong personalities and turn them into a single functioning unit without raising his voice.
“All right,” he said. “Here’s where we are.
Forty-eight hours in, and we’ve got a lot of pieces but no clear picture.
What we need to do tonight is get it all on the board, run down every lead we haven’t chased yet, and figure out who’s pulling the strings on this thing.
” He nodded toward the whiteboard wall, where Dre’s photo stared back at us.
“Jaye, walk everyone through the autopsy.”
I stood and moved to the board, pulling up the autopsy images and the body diagram with a touch of the screen.
The team had heard bits and pieces already, but I walked them through it start to finish—the execution, the days of torture, the broken fingers, the therapeutic Klonopin that told us nobody had drugged him, the recovered round on its way to Richmond.
I kept it tight and clinical. They didn’t need my feelings about it. They needed the facts.
“Timeline,” Jack said, and I pulled it up on the board.
“Last confirmed alive Thursday. Trained with Vic that morning, visited Tiana at lunch, called his mother Thursday night. Friday evening he misses dinner with Tiana. By Friday night, he’s zip-tied and in somebody’s custody.
Body found Wednesday morning in the dumpster behind Miller’s.
Time of death estimated Tuesday, between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.”
“Three days,” Cole said, his drawl slow and thoughtful. “That’s a long time to keep a man like that alive if all you wanted to do was kill him.”
“They wanted something from him,” I said. “Information, a confession, or they were making an example.”
“Maybe all three,” Cole said.
“And there’s the residue on his feet,” I added.
“Grayish-brown, gritty. Packed deep into his calluses and the creases between his toes. It’s not regular dirt—I could tell that much at the scene.
The samples are at the state lab in Richmond, flagged priority.
Until we get results, all I can say is it looked like some kind of calcium deposit.
Old mineral powder, maybe degraded mortar. ”
“All right,” Jack said. “Let’s move to what we found. The notebook.”
He pulled up the photographed pages of Dre’s notebook on the screen, and the room leaned in. Derby pushed his glasses up and squinted at the neat columns of handwriting.
“Pages one through thirty-eight are a ledger,” Jack said.
“Initials, dates, dollar amounts, win-loss notations, and percentages. V.C.—Victor Caruso—appears most frequently. Five to ten thousand per event, taking a twenty percent cut. T.J.—Terrance James, our friend T-Bone—fifteen hundred at ten percent. R.M.—Marco Reyes. D.H.—Darnell Harris. And a dozen other sets of initials that appear once or twice.”
“The schedule is in the middle section,” I said. “Saturday nights, every two to three weeks. He tracked the dates going back about two years.”
“Daniels,” Jack said. “What did you get off the notebook itself?”
Daniels set down her wonton soup and opened her file. “I processed it this afternoon. Only one set of prints on it—Andre Washington’s. Every page, the cover, the spine. Nobody else touched that notebook.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “He hid it at a gym he didn’t even train at, inside a locked locker. This was his insurance policy. He wasn’t showing it to anyone.”
“Which means nobody knew what he was documenting,” Cole said. “Or how much.”
“Unless they found out,” Daniels said.
Jack pointed to the screen and swiped to the back pages of the notebook.
“Now here’s where it gets interesting. The last six pages are different from the rest. We’ve got two groups of numbers that don’t fit the ledger format.
The first group—” he highlighted a column of figures, “—looks like account numbers. Eight of them. Long strings, different formats. Some look like standard domestic routing and account numbers. Others don’t match any banking format I’ve seen. Doug, that’s your homework.”
Doug was already typing one-handed, a crab rangoon hanging from his mouth like a cigar. “Margot, I’m going to input a series of numerical strings. I need you to identify the format of each one—domestic bank accounts, international accounts, cryptocurrency wallet addresses, whatever they match.”
“Ready when you are, darling.”
Doug read off the numbers from the photographed pages, and for a moment the only sounds were his voice, Margot’s soft acknowledgments, and the crackle of the fireplace. Lily turned a page of her book without looking up.
“Processing,” Margot said. “The first three strings are standard domestic bank routing and account numbers. Two are associated with King George Trust. One matches a Cayman Islands international banking format. The fourth and fifth strings are Bitcoin wallet addresses—I can confirm the format, though accessing transaction histories will require additional authorization. The sixth is consistent with a Swiss numbered account. The seventh and eighth are domestic, but the routing numbers correspond to banks in Delaware and Nevada—states commonly used for shell company accounts.”
The room went quiet. Even Lily glanced up from her book.
“Dre was tracking the money,” I said. “Not just his cut. The whole pipeline.”
“Cayman Islands,” Cole said. “Switzerland. Shell companies. This isn’t some local bookie running Saturday night fights out of his garage.”
“No,” Jack said. “It’s not.”
“The second group of numbers on the back pages,” Derby said, leaning forward.
He’d been studying the photographs with that focused intensity of his, his fork frozen halfway to his mouth.
“There are twelve entries. Each one has two numbers separated by a dash, followed by a letter-number code. Like thirty-eight point two-six-three-four dash seventy-seven point one-seven-eight-two, and then what looks like T-seven or D-three.”
“Those are coordinates,” Doug said, the crab rangoon now forgotten. “Latitude and longitude. Truncated, but that’s what they are.”
“Can you map them?” Jack asked.
“Margot, plot these coordinate pairs and see if it coordinates within King George County.”
The whiteboard wall flickered, and a map materialized—satellite imagery of King George County with twelve red dots scattered across the dock district and the waterfront.
Most of them were clustered within a few blocks of the river, in the older section of town where the warehouses and commercial buildings dated back over a century.
“Every single one is in the dock district,” Derby said.
“Those are the fight locations,” I said. “T-Bone told us they rotate through different sections of the tunnels under the docks. Never the same spot twice in a row. Dre was mapping where each fight was held.”
“The letter-number codes could be specific access points or tunnel sections,” Derby added. “If there’s a grid system or labeling convention for the tunnel network, those codes would correspond to specific locations underground.”
“Which means when we’re ready to move on the tunnels, this notebook is our roadmap,” Jack said.
He stepped back from the board and looked at the room.
“Let’s start running background checks. Every single person connected to this case—people we’ve talked to, people who’ve been named, people who are on the periphery.
I want criminal histories, known associates, financial red flags, military records, the works. ”
“That’s a long list,” Daniels said.
“Then we’d better get started.” Jack ticked them off on his fingers. “Victor Caruso. Terrance James. Marco Reyes. Darnell Harris. Tiana Williams. Danny King. Henry Liu from the Chinese restaurant. The woman at the vape shop—”
“Brenda Kowalski,” Cole supplied. “I got her name from her business license.”
“Brenda Kowalski. The kid at the gym who works the front—whoever he is. Alex Watters, the old man across the hall from Dre’s apartment with the military tattoo. Everyone. If their name came up in this investigation, I want to know who they are and who they’re connected to.”
“I can run the standard databases,” Derby said. “NCIC, VCIN, court records. Give me the names and I’ll have preliminary results within the hour.”
“Margot and I can go deeper,” Doug said. “Social media connections, property records, business registrations, campaign donation records. If any of these people are linked to each other outside of what we already know, we’ll find it.”
“Do it,” Jack said. “And cross-reference known associates. If someone in Vic Caruso’s orbit connects to organized crime, I want that name tonight.”
“You got it,” Doug said.