Chapter 21
These images give me two things I want. First, the face of the new cop, and second, the time stamps for everything that took place. Both feel relevant and I’m sure Reingold will have other uses.
“Vera. Get dressed. You’re coming to Church.”
She goes very still with the coffee mug halfway to her mouth. “Church. As in wash me clean of my sins?”
Fuck, she’s adorable.
“Not a chance,” I chuckle, jerking on a shirt. “It’s your case. You’re gonna sit at the table while we figure it out.”
Her eyes go bright, and for one second she can’t get a word out. Then she says in a practical tone, “I don’t have any pants.”
“Wear mine. Or wear the shirt and hold your head up,” I tell her. “Nobody in that room is gonna look anywhere but your face. I’ll break the arms of any man who does otherwise.”
She stares at me, finally cracking a smile and says, “There is genuinely something wrong with me.”
I’m secretly relieved when she pulls on a pair of my joggers. But I would have kept my word, whatever it takes to protect her.
Church gathers fast, and she looks around wide-eyed as the officers fill the room. We’re a big, mean-looking bunch. Because we are a mean bunch.
Prez turns the memory card over between two fingers like a man checking a coin for teeth marks.
“Walk me through it, Vera,” he requests.
Reingold is on the speaker in the middle of the table. Skull’s down at the far end and he’s not saying much, which is not like him. The man hasn’t looked me in the eye since I grabbed his cut.
Vera sits beside me with a legal pad she found somewhere. She talks for a solid ten minutes without one wasted word.
Someone whistles, impressed. Every hardened outlaw bastard at that table is leaning in.
“The warrant was signed at six-forty in the morning,” she says. “The complaint calls me a flight risk. That’s how they justified moving so fast. Except I wasn’t flying anywhere. I was standing at a scenic overlook in a nineteen-fifties dress waiting to have my photograph taken with a stranger.”
“Because Prince asked about your weekend on Friday,” Prez says.
She says, “He did, then he went back to his office and finished the paperwork that put me in a cell.”
The room is dead quiet.
Reingold chimes in. “The deputies arrived at that overlook at eight minutes past seven in the evening. Which I can now establish to the minute because there is a professional photographer with time-stamped images of them stepping out of their vehicles.”
“That’s one fact that could come in handy,” Prez says. “We also need to know who the ‘Stash’ is.”
Reingold agrees. “It has a bad smell. Get me access, and I will build you the defense. Everything else that matters lives inside Prince and Halstead office. The authorization logs. The document metadata. We need proof Vera reported this to him multiple times.”
“So we go get it,” Skull replies. It’s the first thing out of him all day.
The speaker phone crackles in silence.
“No. No burglary. No breaking, no entering, no beatings, and no shovels.” Reingold’s voice is firm. “I am speaking to one man in particular.”
Prez smiles.
I don’t smile because that means I’m sitting on the sideline.
“There is one more thing,” Reingold says. “And gentlemen, none of you are going to enjoy it.”
“Say it,” I reply.
“I pulled the client roster at Prince and Halstead through my contacts. It’s a small firm. One hundred active clients. And one of them is Wharf Road Holdings.”
The room goes so quiet I can hear the clock out in the hall.
Wharf Road.
Wharf Road. Our property.
Prez sits forward and takes the reading glasses off the top of his head and sets them on the wooden table. “That can’t be right. We don’t work with Prince and Halstead,” he says.
Reingold says, “Your escrow account was handled on the back end by them and from the looks of it, some of this missing money is yours.”
“Our money?” Skull asks, face turning to a scowl.
Vera’s boss didn’t just rob a client.
He robbed us. That motherfucker sat in an office downtown and skimmed the shelter money, the money that keeps beat-up women off the street, and he did it with a smile and a golf tan.
Jesus fuck.
There’s the other matter too.
In this club my job is knowing who has their hands near what’s ours.
“Ace,” Prez says. “How did we miss this?”
Reingold chimes in. “When you got the Wharf Road property, the escrow was already in Prince’s hands.”
“I should have caught it,” I say clearly, owning the failure. “My job is to watch the men who touch our money, and I didn’t know about this guy.”
“Nobody caught it,” Prez counters. “That escrow is set up with an attorney and I should have thought to ask if anyone else was involved. This isn’t on your shoulders.”
“It’s my fucking job.” The words blast out of me loud enough to rattle the window glass, and every man in that room goes still, because I don’t raise my voice.
Loaded silence follows. I have to get up and walk out of Church before I put my fist through the wall.