Chapter 16
The door snicked shut as the four of them piled into Dean and Max’s room. Sam stopped in the doorway and stared. Damn.
“Bloody hell.” Audra stopped next to him. “I didn’t know this place had rooms this fancy.”
Max grinned and walked around them. “It’s nice being rich.”
“I guess so.” Audra shook her head and walked over to the couch. She grimaced as she sat. “It doesn’t make the furniture any softer, though.”
Dean barked a short laugh. “Nope. I tried to tell him he was wasting his money in a place like this, but he didn’t care.” He lifted a shoulder. “I got my own bedroom so I don’t have to listen to him snore. I quit complaining once I found that out.”
“I don’t snore,” Max retorted.
“Just like you don’t flirt with every woman you meet?”
“I don’t do that, either.”
Audra chuckled. “The military really does make you all brothers, doesn’t it?”
“Sometimes, yes,” Sam said. “Can we knock off the arguing and dig into these bank statements?” He walked over to the desk and took the papers from his pocket, laying them out on the wooden surface.
“What’s to look at?” Max asked. “There aren’t any account numbers to tell us who sent him the money. Hell, we can’t even see his account number.”
“No, but it’ll give Asher something to go on. And some of these, there might be enough in the name we can get something from a basic internet search.” Sam rolled the chair out and sat down. He set his phone on the desk and opened his calculator app. “Can one of you read off the larger amounts? I want to add them up.”
Dean walked over and started with the first statement. Sam typed in the numbers and watched as the total climbed ever higher. When Dean read the last one, he sat back and stared at the final tally.
“What did you get?” Max asked.
“Three hundred and fifty thousand.”
“Wait,” Audra said. “Exactly three hundred and fifty thousand? Not three hundred fifty thousand and ten dollars? Or two hundred and forty-two?”
He looked over. She had sat up and stared at him with an intense look. “Yes. It’s exactly that.” He held up his phone to show her. “Why? Does that matter?”
“It might. Can one of you pull up the images I took of Liam’s ledger?”
Sam turned his phone around and logged into the server where she’d stored everything. “What am I looking for?”
“The final entry. What does it say?”
“350G TS DTC.” He looked at her with a frown. She had her lip between her teeth as she stared off into space. Something was going on in her head. That was her ‘puzzle it out’ face.
Suddenly, her expression cleared, and she looked at him with wide eyes. “Liam paid off Theo.”
“What?” Max said. “How do you figure?”
“Three hundred fifty grand to ‘TS.’ The ‘TS’ is Ted Sanders. Theo’s alias.”
Dean cursed. “Then what or who is ‘DTC?’”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But why would Liam pay Theo? Wouldn’t it be the other way around? If Liam knew who Theo was—who I was—why wouldn’t Theo be the one paying to keep us both alive?”
“Unless Liam didn’t know who Theo was and Theo was threatening to take something he had on Liam to the police to extort money out of him,” Max said.
The room fell silent as they digested that. Sam stared at his phone, reading the other ledger entries. “There are other entries here that end with ‘DTC.’” He looked at Audra again. “Do you know what it could be?”
“No. Are there other repeating initials?”
“Some, yes.” He read them off. “Do you recognize any of those?”
“No. I don’t know what they could be. It’s possible they’re someone’s initials. Or it’s code for places.”
“I think you need to sit down and get that list together that Asher wants,” Dean said. “We’ll send him that and what we’ve discovered from this.” He pointed at the statements. “Maybe he and his algorithm can figure it out.”