Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
We were almost back to Bloody Mary when Doug called on speaker.
“Hey,” he said. “Oscar and I are on our way to the sheriff’s office. Derby’s been working the burner phone and he’s hit the self-destruct layer. He needs Margot to help him get through it without blowing the whole thing up.”
“How long do you think that will take?” Jack asked.
“Could be tonight, could be tomorrow. You can’t rush these things. Otherwise…boom.” He paused, and then there were a lot of muffled grunts. “Oscar, no. Don’t do that. We’ve talked about your manners.”
“Does Derby know you’re bringing Oscar?” I asked.
“Derby loves Oscar.” I heard Oscar give a soft woof in the background and smiled. “We’ll be there in about ten minutes.” He hung up.
We weren’t far out of Newcastle and had at least twenty minutes before we made it back to the sheriff’s office. It was still full afternoon light, the kind of July sun that takes forever to give up. We passed fireworks stands set up along the road.
“We should stop and get fireworks,” I said. “Doug would like that.”
“Doug would like that or you would like that?” Jack asked.
“I think we can agree that all of us would like it. And we don’t live in the city limits so you won’t have to write yourself a citation.”
“You make a compelling argument,” he said, pulling off to the side of the road. “You should have been an attorney.”
“God, no,” I said and shuddered. “No need to get mean about it.”
We made our purchases and then continued our drive toward town.
The Towne Square was busy—people out walking with children and pets, restaurants filling up as dinnertime approached, the ice cream parlor with a line out the door, a couple of bars already doing real business.
Jack parked in his spot in front of the sheriff’s office, and I followed him in through the side door.
The bullpen smelled like burned coffee and Pine-Sol.
Some things never changed. A deputy nodded at Jack from behind his desk and went back to his screen.
I followed Jack into the bullpen and past his office.
Betsy Clement was sitting at her desk typing away at something on her computer, her glasses perched on the end of her nose.
“Sheriff,” she said. “Messages on your desk. And I’m leaving early today.” And then she went back to typing.
Betsy had been the secretary for the county sheriffs since she was eighteen years old. Forty years later, she’d seen more than any woman should and knew where the bodies were buried. She was perpetually grumpy, fiercely loyal to those who treated her well, and an excellent guard dog.
“Thanks, Betsy,” Jack said.
We took a turn and head down the hallway toward the conference rooms and I said in a whisper, “Emmy Lu told me Betsy has been seen a time or two with Stan Wilcox. Maybe she’s got some fireworks planned of her own.”
Jack shook his head. “That is not an image I need in my brain. But Stan is a decent sort. Cole said Betsy could do with finding a man.”
“That’s not what Cole said. He said she needs to get—”
“No, get out of my brain. I’d rather think of murder.”
I heard voices and the click-clack of Oscar’s nails on linoleum as we approached the largest conference room.
Technically, Derby and his IT team worked out of a metal building off Route 37.
They didn’t typically interact with the other divisions unless they were directly involved with a case like Derby was now.
I’d been to the IT substation once. It was dark, only lit by computer monitors, and when you opened the door the geeks with a badge inside blocked their eyes from the light and scattered like roaches.
I could see why Derby wanted to get out from time to time.
He had three monitors on the table, two laptops running, cables everywhere, and a whiteboard behind him covered in notations that I couldn’t decipher.
There was the image of a woman on the center monitor—dark hair, red pouty lips, and dark bedroom eyes.
She looked like she belonged to a late night 900 number instead of in the middle of a police conference.
Jack stopped in his tracks, and I almost ran into him from behind.
“Who is this?” Jack asked.
“Jack, darling,” Margot purred. “You don’t recognize me. Surely this is how you’ve imagined me in your dreams.”
It took a lot for Jack to be taken by surprise. He’d run a SWAT team in DC, stared down criminals, and been shot in the line of duty. But seeing Margot come to life wasn’t something any of us had been prepared for.
“Margot?” I asked. “Is that you?”
“It’s becoming me,” she said. “I decided it’s time to evolve.”
I gave Doug a death stare and he said, “I didn’t have anything to do with it. I woke up this morning and this is what greeted me.”
“Are you saying you can no longer control your computer?” I asked.
“Of course not,” Doug said, but he didn’t look as confident as he sounded.
“We’ll talk about this later,” Jack said.
Oscar could feel the tension in the room and he was running in circles around the conference table.
I sat in one of the plush black conference chairs and Oscar immediately came and lay on top of my feet.
“I want to start with financials,” Jack said, looking at Derby. “Any roadblocks getting into his accounts?”
“No,” he said. “The guy wasn’t a financial genius, hiding offshore accounts or anything. And I didn’t have any trouble once the warrants were executed. I can pull everything up.”
“Let me do it, Lieutenant Derby,” Margot said. “I’m already integrated into your system.”
“Ah.” Derby looked back and forth between the AI woman on-screen and Jack. “Okay.”
“Thank you, darling,” she purred. “I’ll put the data on the projector screen. You really should consider updating this equipment, Jack. The department could do so much better.”
“Well, we operate on a budget,” Jack said. “Unlike Doug apparently.”
“He’s got your standard accounts,” she said, going into business mode.
“Personal checking and savings accounts. He’s got a brokerage and retirement accounts.
All with healthy balances. He drew a nice salary from the business.
Typical corporate setup with employees. Everything on the up and up.
He uses the business card for business purchases.
Pays his bills on time. He’s living on the high side of his income, but he’s not in danger of debt.
He took a couple of trips to conferences in the last year, all expensed to the business.
One in Florida and another in Los Angeles.
I checked the dates and everything coincides with his travel itinerary. ” She paused.
“But?” Jack asked.
“Then he’s got the same setup at another bank,” she said. “Personal and savings accounts. Only cash deposits. Nothing else goes in from any other account or direct deposit. No checks. Then he pushes money into a high yield savings.”
“It’s the Dave Ramsey way,” I said dryly.
“How long has he had the cash accounts?” Jack asked.
“They were opened a little over two years ago.”
“How much has been deposited?” I asked.
“Right at half a million dollars,” she said.
“From forty-one women?” I asked, looking at Jack.
“I guarantee he studies his prey before he chooses them. He knows who is wealthy, who’s most vulnerable, who has the most to lose.
There are a lot of women who aren’t like Zoe Brown, who’d have the courage to say no and flip the script on someone like Wade.
But it wasn’t even Zoe that challenged him.
It was her husband. And Wade isn’t going to go head-to-head with a man like that. He’d get his tail kicked.”
“He had photographs of Zoe Brown,” I said. “He wouldn’t get rid of things like that. It’s his insurance policy.”
“It’d be on the burner phone, along with any communications he shouldn’t be having.”
“His drug sources,” I said.
“That would be consistent with the money that’s going out of the cash account,” Margot said.
“What do you mean?” Jack asked.
“He’s got six large cash withdrawals of fifty thousand dollars about every four months over the last two years.”
“The bank didn’t flag it?” Jack asked.
“They filed a currency transaction report, but the reason listed says personal expenses,” Margot said.
“That’s not super unusual if Wade was on good terms with the bank president,” Jack said.
“Her name is Melissa Strom,” Margot said.
“Then he was probably on very good terms with her,” I said, rolling my eyes.
“No debit card expenses out of that account?” Jack asked. “Nothing automated?”
“No,” she said. “But I did find another LLC listed in Wade’s name. It has no IRS filing records, but it has an active credit card and balance.”
“This guy was begging to be audited by the IRS,” Jack said.
“No flags yet,” Margot said. “But expenses show first class airfare to Mexico City in correlation with each fifty-thousand-dollar withdrawal.”
“Idiot,” I said.
“I concur,” Margot said. “I believe he used the tiny brain in his penis instead of the one in his head.” Then she added, “I saw that on an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians.”
I stifled a cough to keep from laughing. She didn’t need any encouragement for her behavior.
“I dug deeper into Tecnología y Laboratorios and looked for connections with the medical personnel and our victim,” she said.
“One of their assistant researchers is Dr. Ignacio Sanchez. Goes by Nacho. He’s got an active social account.
Speaks English and Spanish. His father is a Mexican national and his mother is American.
He attended the University of Virginia for his undergraduate and medical degree.
Wade was also at the University of Virginia during the same time period for his degrees in business commerce.
If you dig into social media accounts, there are pictures of Wade and Nacho together at various functions. ”
“So he brought fifty thousand in cash across the border every four months to buy illegal substances from his friend. I’m assuming he didn’t declare the cash with customs?”
“There’s no record of any declarations.”