Chapter 1
There were two men sitting on the tail of the midsized pickup truck, a third leaning against the side, when Olivia turned in the short driveway to the right of the house. A fourth man got out of the cab, slammed the door, and walked to meet her. Olivia’s shoes slid on the gushy mud, a buildup from the rain the day before. It was very unusual for it to rain enough to produce dirt runoff. She stood and watched the man’s approach, holding on to her open car door.
“Mario. Your call was confusing. And you sounded urgent. What’s going on?”
Olivia glanced to the three other workers, all languishing in unconcern as their boss and her contractor talked.
“Sorry to bother you, Mrs. Cameron. We started inside the house this morning, in that small space next to the kitchen. We thought it was a closet or pantry. Something like that. But when we took off the molding we could see a tiny opening. Javier got close, and he said there’s a space inside. Maybe a room. And there was stuff, like packages or something. We couldn’t tell.”
“Did you take them out? Try to figure out what it was?” She didn’t bother to correct his salutation.
Olivia began carefully walking toward the house, to the wide staircase leading to the front door. She knew the steps had originally been wood, but the prior owners had replaced them with bricks and cement. She had decided that the steps should be replaced, returned to the original look, in her plans for the renovations.
“No, ma’am,” Mario said with a decisive shake of his head. “I didn’t know about that space. I didn’t touch anything before I called you.”
Olivia reached the front door and walked in. She stopped abruptly when she realized she was about to leave a muddy trail on the wooden floorboards. Not that they were in any shape to be concerned about, but she suddenly remembered her great-aunt had lived in this house, and Olivia felt a certain respect was due. Mario rushed to a pile of flattened cardboard boxes and quickly made a path for Olivia, leading through the kitchen and out again, to a laundry room. All, including the kitchen, had been added, probably in the 1940s after the war, and maybe upgraded again later.
Olivia stopped in the hall, not immediately seeing anything that could have raised Mario’s suspicions. The house was empty, with all the evidence of needing repair very visible.
“Show me,” she said, turning to him. He walked around her and into the kitchen and out the opposite door.
Mario stopped, stood back, and pointed to a partial paneling in the wall that was damaged. Because of the rain the day before, Olivia could smell the damp, the rot and decay of age in the old house. Mario reached into the hole of the broken panel and pulled out the remaining wood. It crumbled into small pieces to the floor. Now she could see that the space was small but uniform. Four walls, a wooden floor where there was still water, murky and festering. Olivia briefly pinched her nose and inhaled through her mouth. She peered into the space that was filled from the two inches of water on the floor almost to the ceiling with stacked bundles; some thicker than others. The stacks were lopsided, compressed over time from the weight. She poked at one. Whatever was inside the moldy wrappings was soft. She looked at Mario. He shook his head and shrugged, just as confused as she was.
“We didn’t touch anything,” he repeated.
Olivia believed him. He couldn’t afford to be accused of touching, moving, or taking anything that wasn’t his from a job. She looked around. There were only construction equipment and supplies. Some plastic storage crates, tarps…a half-used flat of sixteen-ounce bottles of water.
“Can you set up some sort of table for me?” she asked, already thinking that she was going to be late to work.
“I have some sawhorses in the truck,” Mario said. “I can put a few up with a piece of Sheetrock on top.”
“That will work.” Olivia nodded, giving permission, and Mario hurried off, calling out in Spanish to his men to help. Olivia returned to the hole, peering through to the stacks, looking for hints as to what they were. She braced herself, angling her torso, and reached in to try to take hold of one of the top bundles. It felt heavy, and as she tugged the long stack beneath, it rocked toward her an inch or two. Olivia let it go, stepping back, afraid that the whole would topple over.
Mario returned with one of his men, and they quickly set up the makeshift table, testing to make sure it was stable and settled flatly on the floor.
“You can put whatever you take out of that hole right here,” he announced.
Olivia nodded her thanks, dusting off her hands from the debris of the bundle she’d handled. Mario looked around, found an open roll of paper towels, and handed it to her.
She murmured an absent-minded thanks, looking around again. “What were you going to do today?” she asked the contractor.
“Work in here. We were going to strip out everything, including the appliances. Remove the old cabinets. You know.”
“Can you work somewhere else for a while? I want some time to check out what’s in the wall. We’ll just be in each other’s way.”
“Sure thing. I’ll have the guys work outside. The rain loosened a lot of dirt on this side of the house, and now it’s all mud at street level.”
“That’s great, thanks. I don’t know how long I’ll be, but I’ll call if I need you.”
“Okay, Mrs. Cameron.”
Olivia started to speak, this time to correct Mario, but got no chance. He and the other worker were already out of the kitchen, Mario shouting orders as they stomped their way to the entrance in heavy work boots. Alone, Olivia left her purse on a counter in the soon-to-be-demolished kitchen. She pulled her cell phone from the pocket of her lightweight jacket and punched in a number.
“Hi, Lori, it’s me. Something’s come up at the house, and I’m going to be late… No, not my place. My great-aunt’s house. The one I’m renovating. I’m okay, but I can’t go into it right now. Is everything okay? Have classes started? Great. Let Mr. Booth know I called in. He can cover if anything comes up. Call me if there’s anything important I should know about… Yes, I hope to get in before the kids get out… Thanks. I’ll check in with you later.”
Olivia put the phone away and then took off her jacket, hanging it over the handles of an equipment dolly. She glanced down at her feet. She was wearing fashionable flats…not sneakers…not exactly adequate protection on a construction site. They would have to do. Then she walked back to the torn-away paneling. Again, she reached for the top bundle, wiggling to move it and carefully lifting the pack down and out the opening in the wall. Olivia held the bundle out in front of her as it dripped water. She set it down on the makeshift worktable. She poked at it again, then felt for an opening, a way to peel away the sodden, dirty cloth.
The rough woven fabric began to shred between her fingers, falling away. She found an edge and started unwinding to a layer of what had been newspaper. It was nothing more than pulp.
She bent, looking for a language, a heading, a date. She could only tell it was in English. But what was revealed stunned Olivia. She stood staring down at distinct green-inked paper bills. Money. The first bill was $50. Olivia smoothed her hand gently on the damp bill. It did not tear; the color did not run or blur. She tried lifting the top bill, but it stuck, and she immediately stopped, afraid of doing damage. Olivia knew the money was real.
Before starting to remove each bundle from the wall, Olivia searched around and found industrial-sized garbage bags and used several to protect the surface of the Sheetrock that made up her table. Then she carried the bundles, one by one, and laid them out on the table in rows of ten. But she didn’t remove the rotten fabric or make any further attempt to expose the contents. At one point, she became aware that there was a black canvas bag on the floor inside the wall, also soaked in water and somewhat hidden in the back of a shelf about level with her neck. When Olivia opened the bag, she found it half-full with loose bills in many denominations. There was probably several thousand dollars inside. After some thought, she put the bag on the counter next to her purse.
It took almost two hours for Olivia to remove the bundles and align them on the table. She only opened the last one, in exactly the same manner as the first, and found more stuck-together wet bills. The top one in this bundle was $100. She couldn’t even begin to guess how much money there was altogether.
Her phone rang, and she scrambled to remove it from her jacket pocket with dirty, wet hands.
“It’s Olivia… Hi, Carl… Yes, I’m fine, thanks. I just had to take care of something this morning I couldn’t put off. My contractor called me as I was driving in… I had to come to the house… No, nothing…nothing…serious.” Olivia hesitated, not wanting to share. “I’m still hoping to get in after… Oh, really? Okay, you’re right. As long as you’re on top of everything I’m going to bag it today. But I will be in tomorrow. Thanks for checking in, Carl. See you tomorrow. Bye.”
Olivia sighed, placing the phone on the table. She needed to wash her hands. She needed to wipe down her phone. She needed to figure out what to do next. Olivia also felt a slight apprehension about what she’d discovered, knowing instinctively what she’d found was going to be a problem, even if she wasn’t sure how. She leaned back against the wall, staring at the display on the table. There were thirteen rows of ten bundles. Not all the bundles were of even height. Then there was the bag.
She heard the thump of heavy boot steps coming from the front of the house.
“Mrs. Cameron?” Mario appeared just outside the kitchen but didn’t step in.
Olivia quickly tried to position her body so that he couldn’t see the table behind her with its spread of dirty packages. “Yes?”
“We’re going to break for lunch. You need me for anything?”
“No, no. You can go.”
“We’ll come back in an hour.”
Olivia smiled at him. “Take two, Mario. I know you hadn’t planned on me coming in and taking over. I’m pretty sure you can get back indoors tomorrow.”
“No problem,” he said and left again.
Olivia went back to her thoughts. She walked slowly around the table, gnawing the inside of her mouth, her arms crossed. The water was still turned on in the kitchen, and she stood at the sink and washed her hands. She checked the wall hole again, just to be sure she’d removed everything that was hidden inside. She still couldn’t get her head around finding money hidden in a house that had only been left to her by a deceased great-aunt a year earlier.
There was a clear moment when Olivia thought she could just keep the money! She owned the house. Whatever was in the house was now hers. What she’d found, so far, indicated the bills were more than fifty years old. And given their condition and the way the bundles had been wrapped, the money didn’t look like it had been touched in the same amount of time. Why hide it? A fear of banks? Hiding a secret? Was the money stolen?
Drying her hands on a paper towel, Olivia again thoughtfully considered the smelly, soggy mess on the makeshift table. How would she explain to a bank if she decided to keep the money and tried to deposit it into her account? Or tried to open a new one? The possibilities began to grow in her mind…along with any number of serious potential problems.
With another sigh, she made a sudden and clear decision. Olivia picked up her cell phone, touched the icon for the camera, and methodically began to record all the bundles of money. From another angle, she photographed the entire table with all the bundles laid out. She took pictures of some of the old fabric and the blobs of pulpy newspaper. She photographed the hole in the wall as seen from the kitchen and then inside the hole, including the still-wet floor. She photographed the two bundles she’d unwrapped with the topmost bills visible and easy to identify. She shot images of the bag and the money inside.
Olivia’s mind was spinning with all that had happened in just three hours. She was hungry, and she felt heated and a little sweaty from the humidity inside the house, the warm fall air, and the excitement of her find. But she knew she couldn’t just leave with all the money packets on the Sheetrock table. She couldn’t take the open bag with her to get lunch. She opened a bottle of very tepid water and, again, slowly circled the table, feeling that there was something she’d forgotten to do. Twice, three times around the table. She finally stopped and checked the time. Her workers would be returning from lunch in just thirty minutes.
Finally, there was really only one action she could take. Olivia reached for her phone and put in a short number. A laconic male voice muttered a scripted greeting.
“911. What’s your emergency?”
“Oh…a…this isn’t an emergency. I need to get in touch with the local precinct for Windsor Hills. Can you connect me?”
“No, ma’am. You have to hang up and call yourself. Here’s the number…”
Olivia repeated the number silently to herself, trying not to forget as she ran off and entered the precinct number into her phone. She got another indifferent flat voice, wondering in amusement if this is how they train officers to answer the phone.
“How can I help you?”
“I have a problem. I think I’m going to need a squad car…or some of your officers…to come to my house.” She gave the address.
“Is this an emergency? You have to dial…”
“No, it’s not an emergency,” she repeated patiently.
“What’s the problem?”
“I’m doing some renovations on my house, and…well, this afternoon I found something buried in the house. I mean, something hidden. In the walls.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Which is it, ma’am? Buried? Or hidden?”
“Hidden. Behind a panel in a wall. It’s a kind of hidden space.”
“And you found something in this space?”
“That’s right.”
Another momentary silence.
“Is it a body?”
Olivia was so shocked at the suggestion her mind went blank. Was that a joke? Was he trying to be funny? But she had to ask herself, had she checked carefully? Completely? The space was far too shallow for that. She laughed nervously. “No, of course not. It wasn’t a body.”
“Okay. What?”
“Money,” she announced simply. “A lot of money.”
“Sorry to pass the buck along, Sloan,” Lieutenant Gary Anderson said, handing a folder across his desk to the man sitting opposite him.
“No, you’re not,” Sloan Kendrick responded evenly, taking the folder and opening it. “One less time-consuming investigation for you and your department.” He quickly leafed through each page, scanning the content, but taking a bit longer at the half dozen or so printed color images. “One more for me that will turn out to be questionable.”
“Looks like an FBI case to me. You decide. There’s a lot of bills in those piles you’re looking at. Maybe the money was embezzled funds or a squirreled-away haul of a robbery? Bank. Business. Even the government. Procurement fraud. Money laundering…”
Sloan Kendrick closed the folder and dropped it on the edge of the desk. “What makes you think that?” He asked it not with indifference but with the knowledge that he was about to take on a case that Sloan had already guessed would be nothing but complicated trouble.
“We collected the money from a house under renovation for the current owner. Are you ready? The owner’s contractors found the money hidden in a fake closet next to the kitchen.”
“That’s creative,” Sloan said dryly. It wasn’t. He’d long ago lost surprise at the number of incidents that came through his office of hidden money found in unexpected or inventive spaces.
His division at the local FBI field office was familiar with the disappearance and reappearance of large sums of money. Yet it wasn’t always possible to establish that a crime had been committed or even who was to blame for the possible crime. That was the first thing to determine. It would all come down to interviewing people, checking the city records for past history of very large sums of missing money. It was now going to be his responsibility to determine the where, if, when, and who of a considerable amount of very old money, Lieutenant Anderson’s report indicated, stuffed into the walls of a vacant house under renovation.
“I’ll read the report. What else can you tell me?”
The officer, in his pristine short-sleeved, white shirt, with its insignia and badge signifying his rank, sat back in his spring-action chair with a shrug. “Well…the call came from a woman who said she owns the house. We haven’t checked that out.”
Sloan showed no emotion other than the slight raise of his brows, of doubt and amusement.
“You left that for me to do. I take it you asked the obvious question.”
The lieutenant pushed forward and rested his elbows on the desk. “Sure did. Wanted to see if I could catch her off guard. She was annoyed.”
Sloan nodded. “She called the police…but she was annoyed by your questions?”
“Yeah.” Lieutenant Anderson considered this with a shrug. “I suspect she believed I was trying to get her to confess or give up more details about how she came to find the money.”
“So I can’t turn this around and hand it back to you…”
The lieutenant gave Sloan a crooked grin. “Not a chance. There’s a lot of money involved, and we can’t determine where it came from. And I don’t have to turn it over to the cold case unit and go hunting through the missing persons backlog. Officers went to meet her, see exactly what she found. Over in Windsor Hills. Nice neighborhood. Mostly middle- and upper-middle-class Black residents. They’re not a demographic for weird and violent crimes in that part of the county. The house belongs to”—he leaned forward to read the name on the police report he’d begun—“Olivia Cameron. Said she inherited the house from her late great-aunt about a year ago.”
“So she doesn’t live there?”
“Never has. She has her own place in Baldwin Hills.”
“Another nice neighborhood,” Sloan responded. “How much money are we talking about? How was it packed? Bills? Coins? Bonds?”
“All cash. I had a couple of detectives try to count the bundles. Took three days, but they stopped. There were too many bills stuck together. We didn’t want to fool around with that in case some of the paper got ruined. There was no rhyme or reason to the way the money was wrapped. I mean, there were no clear ten-dollar packs or fifty-dollar packs. There was quite a haul of five-hundred-dollar bills.”
“That might suggest the money was divided and portioned in a hurry with no concern for order.”
“Or accountability. I see this as a take-the-money-and-run kind of thing.”
“Okay. What about the woman? What have you found out?”
“You have to do your own agency thing, but so far, she seems clean. No criminal record of any kind. There’s a note here about some sort of car accident about four years ago, but no citation, no fault to her. She was cooperative. I really didn’t get a sense of her trying to hide anything. Actually, she seemed more concerned that she had to call out from work for the day we went out to interview her at home and take a statement. I told her we had to take the money. Olivia Cameron was more concerned when I told her the house had to be sealed until we finished our findings and had done up a report.”
“Did she ask if she could keep the money?” Sloan asked.
The officer pursed his lips and shook his head. “As a matter of fact, no. I thought that would be the first thing she’d want to know. I explained the department has a protocol for trying to establish who the money belongs to and that will involve public announcements in the local press. I thought it best not to commit to any more possibilities. At least for now. Actually, it falls into your hands to decide what happens, Sloan. First you have to determine if some crime has been committed. And where the money came from. It’s clear from the paper and the condition that the bills had been stashed in the wall for a very long time. I’m talking decades. The script style is more than fifty years old. The bill date appears to be around 1929.”
“Just around the time of the Depression. I’d like to take a look at the money,” Sloan said, standing and taking the folder from the desk.
“Sure,” Gary Anderson said, standing and leaving the small office, Sloan Kendrick right behind him.
They silently took an elevator to a basement floor, mostly deserted of staff or activity. The lieutenant unlocked a metal door at the very end of a corridor and pressed the wall switch. The only furniture was a large table with its chairs pushed back against the room walls. Oil cloth had been spread on the surface of the table, and on top were the bundles of money, laid out in the same configuration that they were found in Olivia Cameron’s house. The smell of wet, rotting cloth and damp paper wafted in the room, adding a slight damp humidity to the air.
Both men were indifferent, appearing not to have even noticed the smell. Sloan simply stood at one end of the table and silently perused the display. He finally approached and, taking a thin, metal probe from the lieutenant, inserted it along the side of one of the unwrapped bundles and carefully lifted a corner. He bent close to examine the green printed paper, studying the art and calligraphy, the wording and dates.
“We already vouchered everything, and the bundles will be transferred to the property office until the investigation is over. First we have to get all the bills dried and treated. We’ve already contacted a professional water mitigation service. They’ll know how long that service could take.”
“That’s good, but my forensic guys will have to do their own procedure.”
“Got it. I did have someone write down a lot of the serial numbers and signatures from the treasury department. Also photographed a few of the bills full face. They’re in the folder.”
“Thanks, Gary. That’s enough to get me started,” Sloan said as they left the room. “Do me a favor?” he asked as they rode the elevator back to the lieutenant’s office. “I’d like to keep everyone, including the owner, away until I’ve had a chance to review your report. I’ll want to see the house and the space for myself.”
“Like I said, I told the owner that already, but I can’t hold it indefinitely. From our standpoint, there’s no reason.”
“Of course. Thanks.”
“Sure.”
“One more thing. Call Olivia Cameron. Let her know the case is now with the FBI, but don’t tell her why. Just let her know someone will be coming by to have a talk with her. I’ll fill her in as needed.”
“Okay.”
They reached the lieutenant’s office, but Sloan stood at the door, indicating that he was done and about to leave.
“Let me know when you set up that appointment,” Sloan further instructed.
“You’ll hear from me before the day is over.”
“Thanks, Gary.” Sloan started to walk away, but he slowed his steps and suddenly turned back. “What was your impression of Olivia Cameron?” he asked.
Gary Anderson seemed surprised by the question but was thoughtful as he considered his answer. “Okay, I guess. I didn’t get any bad vibes. She seemed thoughtful, intelligent. Asked a lot of questions about how long the investigation was going to take. An average professional African American woman…”
Sloan stared at the lieutenant. “What does that mean? Average African American woman?”
Gary shrugged, not getting the implied judgment or characterization. “You know. Good hardworking citizen, never been in trouble. A little edgy with my officers like, not totally trusting anything they told her about what was going to happen with the money. She wasn’t aggressive or anything like that. I would say Olivia Cameron is…very attractive. She has a nice voice…not sure why you’re asking. Does any of that matter?”
“Just curious. Helps me get a head start on how to handle her.”