Cash Burn (31 page)

A black-and-white pulled up next to them, and the Hawaiian turned and flashed his wallet at the cop.

All of them were cops.

The Hawaiian made a sweeping movement with his arm in the direction of the row of houses. From inside the black-and-white, the uniformed cop nodded. He looked over his shoulder, and the car sped backward and out of Flip’s sight.

He had to get out of this neighborhood.

* * *

The Explorer let out a sickening clunk with every turn of the wheels. Tom coasted to the curb. He turned off the ignition and joined Hathaway on the sidewalk.

A block down the street, uniformed LAPD officers swept the houses for Flip. It would take them half an hour to work their way back.

Hathaway inspected the damage to the Explorer’s front end. “What’d you do?”

Tom ignored the question. Another patrol car rolled south towards them. No more sirens, just plenty of coverage.

A Hyundai pulled into a driveway two houses up. A woman stood out of the car and went to the trunk. She wore thick-soled white shoes and hospital scrubs—a print top and baggy blue pants. She added a duffel and a plastic bag to the purse she carried, and with all three bags dangling from her arms, she slammed the lid.

Tom slapped Hathaway’s arm. “Come on.”

She sped up when she noticed the strangers approaching. Tom called out to her and convinced her they were cops. She introduced herself as Liz Kite and wanted to shake their hands.

“We’ve got a parolee at large in the neighborhood,” Tom said. “Do you mind if we take a look inside?”

She shifted the duffel onto her shoulder and looked up the street as if she’d see something all the cops trolling the streets had missed. “Sure. It’s not my house, but I’m sure Mrs. Capiccio won’t mind. She likes company.”

She led the way to the door and unlocked it. Before the door was closed, she called out the woman’s name. A faint voice floated from upstairs. Liz dropped her keys in the middle of a set of dusty, framed pictures on the table next to the door. She started hauling her bags up the staircase.

Hathaway followed her up. Tom began a sweep of the downstairs, living room first. He heard the old house give with the steps Liz and Hathaway took upstairs. He went into the kitchen.

Everything in here was wrong. He felt it before he saw exactly what it was.

Broken glass covered the counter. He went to the curtains above the shards of glass and drew them aside. No pane.

He pulled out the Glock. “Hathaway!” No cabinets in here big enough to hide in. He bolted from the room. “He’s here!”

A coat closet next to the front door stood ajar. Hathaway was at the top of the stairs. He started to say something. Tom held up a hand. Hathaway’s smile disappeared. He brought out his gun.

Tom crept to the closet and flung the door back.

Just coats.

He put his back to the closet and looked over the room. Something here was different. Liz’s bags were still piled next to the front door. The pictures on the table were undisturbed.

But her keys were gone.

He went for the front door.

The driveway was empty.

50

Jason’s tie was draped over the back of a chair, still knotted. He folded his collar up and slipped the tie over his head, tightened it, and flipped his collar back down.

Brenda watched him as if she’d never seen him dress before, her hands folded on a bare leg crossed before her. “I should get ready too.”

“Yeah, this is turning into a long lunch hour.” He sat next to her to put on his shoes, but her fragrance and closeness distracted him. Desire rose in him all over again.

They kissed, and her hands moved over his shoulders, his neck, through his hair.

But her lips moved less.

He drew back. “Something wrong?”

A smile, a dip of her eyes. They returned to him. “I guess I’m not as brave as you. This is scaring me a little.”

“Sure. That’s good.” He stroked her arms. “We should be scared. This is once and for all. We’ll only get one chance. It’s got to be perfect. We have to think through every angle. Every possible roadblock. The transfers have to look completely routine.”

“I’ve been practicing the signatures. Want to see?” She went to her nightstand and scratched out a signature on a pad of paper, held it out to him.

He studied it. He’d seen Randy Sloan’s signature a thousand times, on Northfield’s account signature cards, loan documents, letters. He knew the spike of the letters, the flair of his S and the slender loop of the L next to it, the way the rest of the letters died out into lumps. She was getting close.

“It’s good. Getting much better. Keep practicing.” He handed the pad back to her and wedged his feet into his shoes. “What about the ID guy?”

“Oh. I’m still trying to reach my girlfriend. I hope he can do it.”

“I thought you said . . .” He grabbed her elbow. “We’ve got to have good IDs.”

“I know. But like I said, I’ve never even met him. All I know is he does fake drivers licenses. Passports are a whole different thing.”

“You said you knew somebody. If we don’t get good IDs, it all falls apart. We need them for the accounts, and we’ll need them to travel. They have to be good. They have to be
perfect
.”

She put her hand on his, tried to loosen his grip. “Jason—”

“If you can’t do it, say so. We’ll call the whole thing off.”

“No. I’ll call her again. Right now.”

He let her go, and she went for the phone.

“I’m heading back.” He straightened his tie in the mirror.

“Maria!” Brenda spoke into the phone.

Jason watched her in the mirror. The conversation with her girlfriend from college took off. He leaned over and kissed her cheek. She stroked his jaw as she asked Maria about other friends—catching up, making small talk. She would get to the ID question soon enough.

He waved and walked out.

A thousand details flitted through his mind. They needed a network of overseas accounts. He’d reestablished old contacts and gotten referrals to lawyers in six countries. As soon as they got the IDs, he would open the accounts with his own money, grease them with transactions back and forth to make it look like real business was being conducted. His personal account and his retirement accounts would be gutted, but $30 million of BTB’s loan proceeds were all the funds he could ever need for retirement. And a very pleasant life with Brenda. Islands. Europe. Africa. Travel wherever and whenever they wanted.

No rules.

His BMW was lodged between a pickup and a Honda. He unlocked it and slid onto the leather. When he had the motor purring, he slid his hands over the steering wheel. Soon he would leave this car behind.

Never mind the car. It was Serena he was leaving. The sweat glands pricked in his back. She had cheated on him.
She
had gone to another man. He would not allow himself to feel anything for her, especially this regret, this nostalgia for what they had together before she destroyed it.
She
had ruined their marriage, not him.

Her only defense was this absurd conspiracy theory. It was the Kennedy assassination all over again. The man on the grassy knoll—
he
wrote a love letter and left it where Jason could find it.

Sure.

He uttered a short laugh and shifted gears to begin the back-and-forth of extracting the car out of the space.

He forced his mind back to the details. Brenda was getting good with Randy’s signature, but every curve had to be just right. And she had to jot down the title
CFO
in his printing on the line underneath.

A call to BTB’s mail room had redirected all of Northfield’s outgoing mail to Jason’s office. As for the incoming stuff, nobody had ever been able to train Randy to go direct to anyone but Jason, so all his advance and paydown requests came straight to Jason’s office anyway. But for the false request to get past the wire room, the signature had to match perfectly.

The foreign accounts had perplexed him at first, but then he’d hit on the idea of dropping Northfield’s name to open them. Doors of foreign banks would fly open when Northfield’s banker called to assist the company with creating new accounts offshore. The company already had a half-dozen foreign subsidiaries operating in countries all over Europe and Asia. One more subsidiary wouldn’t be suspicious at all, and any bank would be glad to get a toehold in the Northfield relationship. Jason had access to the company’s organizational documents, and if Brenda could get Randy’s signature right, with an unsuspecting attorney’s help and IDs of fake corporate officers to sign alongside Randy, they could set up a subsidiary and then open an account to receive the loan proceeds. BTB’s wire room wouldn’t be suspicious if the thirty million was going to another Northfield account. Jason would have authority under the false name to wire money out of that Northfield subsidiary account to fund a phony acquisition, the money sliding away as easily as moving figures in an Excel spreadsheet from one cell to another. It would go to an account of the phony company being acquired, in another country, followed by distributions to other accounts in other countries with treaties unfriendly to US law enforcement. By the time the thirty million finally settled in Switzerland, the trail would be cold enough for Jason and Brenda to stroll into the bank and make a sizable withdrawal. Not the whole thing. Just pull out a few million Swiss francs, convert a few million to bearer instruments they could deposit at other banks, and leave the rest for another day when the dust had settled.

It could work. It had to work. Because if it didn’t, if they were caught, there would be handcuffs, jail cells, disgrace. The end of their lives.

He pulled into the garage underneath BTB. They still held his spot for him, despite Vince’s threats and schemes. Another few weeks and all that would be over. Forever.

They would make the transfers the day before Thanksgiving. The bank would be open the following Friday, but nobody worked long or hard that day. No one would raise any issues. No one would be surprised that Jason and Brenda were both off on that Friday. It would give them four days at least—four of the busiest travel days in the US—to lose themselves.

The elevator took him to the second floor and he stepped out.

He stopped.

Hawaiian shirt. Coach. The two parole officers loitered around outside his office. He almost retreated into the elevator.

No. Let’s get this over with.

51

Tom let Hathaway start in. “Where’s your girlfriend?”

The brother didn’t answer. Tom watched him. The tie was a little off-center, the slacks not crisply creased. Things had changed since their last meeting. Jason stopped inside his office, holding the door. He nodded them in.

Tom led the way. “Your boss doesn’t like us hanging around. Must be bad for business.”

Jason Dunn slammed the door. “I told you to stay away from here.”

“You see?” Hathaway slapped Tom’s chest with the back of his hand. “I told you.” He turned to Jason with a smirk on his face. “He thought you said keep coming by. I told him you said stay away, but he didn’t believe me.”

Hathaway sat on the sofa and kicked his feet onto the cushions. He looked like he should be holding a TV remote. Tom stood with his back to the door.

Jason faced Hathaway. “You want to look under my desk? Phil isn’t here. I haven’t seen him. Same thing I told you last time. If I see him, I’ll call you. There’s nothing else I can do.”

“Where’s your girlfriend?” Hathaway asked again. He tossed a wad of gum across the room and missed the trash can.

The brother turned to Hathaway. “If you’re asking about Brenda, she’s not my girlfriend. She’s my administrative assistant. And I don’t know where she is. Lunch, I guess. Can we get this over with? What do you want?”

“We want to talk to your girlfriend.” A stick of gum went into Hathaway’s mouth. He stripped the foil back from another, his eyes on Jason.

“I told you—she’s not my girlfriend. What do you want with her? I thought this was about Phil.”

“You ever peel an onion?” Hathaway asked.

“Oh, come on.” Jason took off his jacket and wanted past Tom to hang it up. Tom didn’t budge. He caught a whiff of perfume drifting up from Jason. So she was his girlfriend after all. And they’d just been together. Hathaway was right. Again.

“Will you excuse me?” Jason gestured with his jacket.

Tom stepped aside.

Hathaway went on. “You peel one layer, there’s another one. Then another one.”

Jason turned from the door, his jacket on a hanger in its proper spot, keeping free of wrinkles while he worked the afternoon away at his desk. Tom wondered how these guys kept their sanity, locked up in buildings all the time.

“I’m familiar with the analogy, but it’s weak.” Jason said. “The thing is, you keep peeling them, and there’s nothing inside but more onion. There’s nothing under all the layers. That’s your problem.”

He sat behind his desk and reached for a pen. He held it in his fist, his thumb clicking the end. Between that and the snapping of Hathaway’s gum, Tom didn’t think he could stand being in this room too long.

“Yeah, but we’ve got something here. I can feel it,” Hathaway said. “You lie to me. Your girlfriend lies to me—and don’t bother saying she’s not your girlfriend.” Hathaway scanned the room, the ceiling. “I told you, I can tell when people are lying.”

“It’s a gift.”

Hathaway smiled at him. “Right.”

Tom stepped to the desk. “Something stinks around here. We’re going to find out what it is.”

A knock on the door, and Tom turned. The blonde leaned in. When she recognized what was going on, her face lost the look of warm expectation and turned into a frown.

Hathaway stood. “Come on in, baby.”

She hesitated.

“Or we can talk in front of all your friends out there.”

She looked at Jason and must have gotten some kind of signal because she stepped inside and closed the door behind her.

Tom watched her move. Chin up, shoulders back, she carried the image of the enduring salary slave all the way across the room.