Chapter 14 #3
She nodded. “It was somewhere between two and three million dollars, but the forensic accountants were never able to pin down an exact amount unaccounted for. It’s one of the reasons I studied forensic accounting. I wanted to understand why they never found that money.”
He nodded and took a deep breath. Confession the first, completed. Now for the second and potentially harder one.
“They were looking for Winston Perry’s money, right?”
She nodded.
“Did anybody ever look for a bank account in the name Winston used on his fake passport?”
Sunny froze. “I never told anyone but you and Reno. Well, and Grace, who was there the day I told Reno about the passport or what I did to it.”
“Do you happen to remember the name that was in the passport?” Hank asked evenly.
“Yes. David Merrill.”
“Since you became a forensic accountant yourself, have you ever gone looking for a bank account in that name?” Hank asked.
“No. I would have no idea where to begin looking. I do know the trustee had banks all over the West Coast run facial recognition searches of their security footage to see if Winston had ever gone into any of them. That search came up empty.”
He watched her mental gears starting to turn. For three full seconds she didn’t breathe, and then her eyes went somewhere else entirely as the forensic accountant arrived in his kitchen and started forming a plan.
“He would’ve opened it early on,” she said, low, mostly to herself. “He’d have had to. You can’t build a clean identity in a hurry. The passport was the last piece, not the first. There would have been a bank. Something private, discreet, fee-based, no statements ever mailed to the house.”
She broke off and looked at him, and her face was pale and lit up at the same time, like a window with weather moving behind it.
“Hank. If that account exists, it’s been sitting dormant for years.
Banks are required by law to report dormant accounts.
Owners get listed, published by name, so they can be found.
It would be findable. By anyone who knew the name. ”
“By the one person alive who knows the name,” he said.
She was up and out of the chair before he finished, hunting through the office desk, and came back with a yellow legal pad.
She wrote the name, David Merrill, at the top of a fresh page in her neat handwriting and then sat looking it the way he’d seen her study a wall she was about to strip to the studs.
Hank asked, “Do you remember where the plane ticket you tore up went to?”
“The first leg went to New York, the second went to Amsterdam. That was it. Just the two one-way flights.”
Hank frowned. “From Amsterdam he could have boarded a ship to go somewhere else, or he could have gone overland to his final destination from there.”
“He hated boats. Got sick as a dog even in a rowboat,” Sunny declared.
Hank pulled out his cell phone and did a quick search. “The only countries in Europe that don’t have extradition treaties with the U.S. are Belarus, Bosnia, Herzegovina, and Montenegro. And technically Russia, although is it considered to be in Europe or Asia?”
“I think it’s considered to be on both continents,” Sunny answered.
Abruptly, she snapped her fingers. “Not long after Presley was born, Winston took a business trip to Montenegro. He said it was one of the most beautiful places he’d ever seen and promised to show it to me someday.
” She snorted. “He probably was checking it out as someplace to go when he ditched me and the baby.”
“It’s possible he actually had business there, and it was an innocent comment.”
She frowned “Still. It’s worth running a search of banks there for a dormant account in the name of David Merrill.”
“Do you know how to do that?” Hank blurted.
She grinned. “I’m not your average bookkeeper, Good Sir. I’m trained to find money wherever anywhere the world it’s hidden.”
“If I find it,” she said slowly. “If it’s real . . . there are no claims left standing against Winston. Which means anything recovered now would pass to . . .” She stopped.
“To you,” Hank said. “And the kids.”
She looked down at the name on the pad for a long time. When she spoke again, her voice had gone quiet and raw. “I spent years trying to forget that name. And for the first time ever, I’m almost glad I couldn’t.”
“I’m handing you a key,” he said carefully. “Whether you ever try it in a lock is yours to decide. I just figured it wasn’t mine to find and then keep from you.”
She didn’t stay long tonight. She obviously wanted to get home and start digging. When she rose up on her toes on the porch and kissed him goodnight, her mouth was already a thousand miles away, tracking a dead man’s footprints.
Hank watched her taillights disappear around the corner and went back inside.
He was glad he’d told her to think about a search in the name of that fake passport. But as he climbed into bed, he got a sudden and powerful premonition that he might live to regret having done so.
Why that might be, he had no idea. But the feeling stubbornly refused to go away.