Death, Taxes, and Hot Pink Leg Warmers (8 page)

No need to ask me twice. I nudged the door closed and all but flew to his chair.

He pulled me down onto his lap, nuzzling my hair. “Damn, you smell good enough to eat.”

Well, then. Slap some butter on my ass and call me a biscuit!
“It’s my new wild jasmine conditioner.”

“Nice,” he murmured, pressing his lips against my neck just under my ear. He moved forward, his warm mouth under my chin now.

God, that felt good.
How long had I yearned for a moment like this? My nipples perked up and a very unprofessional throb of need erupted in my nether areas. I wished we were somewhere other than the office, but even if this could only go so far I wasn’t going to let that stop me from enjoying the moment.

I pulled back and lowered my chin, forcing Nick to kiss me on the mouth now. His mustache was both soft and prickly, adding another sensory element to what was already a luscious, sensual kiss. We opened our mouths and our tongues joined in a slow, seductive dance I hoped would never end.

Rap-rap.

So much for my hopes.

“Damn,” Nick muttered.

Without waiting for a response to her knock, Viola opened the door and walked in with a fax. She dropped it into Nick’s in-box. “Get a room, you two.”

The mood spoiled, I climbed off his lap and stood to go. “See you tonight at the club.”

*   *   *

After leaving Nick’s office, I called my counterpart at the Texas state comptroller’s office to let them know GSM had amassed a huge federal tax liability and had likely underreported its state taxes, too. Next, I ventured down to Eddie’s digs. His chin bore two Hello Kitty Band-Aids today, the bandages applied no doubt by his young twins.

I gestured to the pink strips. “Cute.”

“That flame-throwing vacuum gave me blisters,” Eddie said, shaking his head. “That woman, Suong? What a nut job.”

She probably couldn’t help herself. If ever someone had a bad case of OCD, it was her.

“Check this out.” I showed Eddie the calculations I’d completed the night before and quickly ran through the paperwork with him.

“Three mil?” Anger flared in his dark eyes. “Let’s nail those guys to the wall.”

My partner and I sang a duet of “If I Had a Hammer” as we headed to the parking lot and climbed into his G-ride. We drove over to the FBI office.

Ackerman led us up to his office again for another strategy session. We were scheduled to meet with Pachuco and his attorney later that day, so we focused on the aspects of GSM’s business the home builder had been involved in.

I handed Agent Ackerman the spreadsheet summarizing my tax computations.

He spent a few minutes looking it over before returning his attention to me. “Good work, Agent Holloway. Get a copy of this over to Ross O’Donnell, okay?”

“Consider it done.”

Ross was a seasoned attorney with the Department of Justice, one who represented the IRS and FBI on a regular basis and had a good grasp on how to present financial evidence without confusing a jury or boring them to tears. With Ross handling the trial, we’d be in good hands. Once he received my spreadsheet, he’d add tax evasion to the list of charges brought against the Racketeers.

“I noted some questionable deposit data,” I told Ackerman, referring him to the dog-eared pages among the paperwork. According to the bank records, a number of checks had been deposited into the GSM account despite the fact that the checks were made out to Pachuco Custom Homes, Ltd. The memo line indicated the checks were progress payments for construction on various houses throughout the greater Dallas area. Jeffrey Pachuco, one of the Tennis Racketeers and thus one of the shareholders in GSM, was the owner of the home-building business. I’d searched the real property records online and learned that GSM owned the land at each of the sites in question.

“Why would checks made out to Pachuco Custom Homes be deposited in the GSM account?” I asked Ackerman.

“Good question,” he said. “Let’s find out.”

I called the bank that had issued the progress payments and asked for copies of the construction contracts. The bank representative informed me the construction contracts were for spec homes GSM was to build and sell. We decided to spend the morning making the rounds of the addresses noted on the checks, see if there was any information to be gleaned at the construction sites.

We first headed north to McKinney, to a new housing development called Craig Ranch. The development included several sections distinguished by the size and price of the homes. The spec home in question was in a luxury section known as the Estate, where houses ranged in price from $1 million up.

We drove past a number of newly finished homes, enormous and beautiful designs, situated among empty lots and partially constructed residences.

Agent Ackerman kept an eye on the addresses. “5801. 5803. Here it is, 5805.” He directed Eddie to pull to a stop at an empty lot between two homes under construction.

I gestured to the two adjacent houses. “Which one is GSM’s?”

Ackerman hiked a thumb at the empty lot. “That one.”

My brow scrunched in confusion. I hated to tell him the emporer had no clothes, but he didn’t. Or, in this case, he had no house. “But there’s nothing there.”

Ackerman’s eyes flared with rage. “Those bastards got an air loan.” He climbed out of the car.

Eddie and I climbed out, too.

“What’s an air loan?” Eddie asked as Ackerman pulled out his cell phone and snapped a photo of the empty lot.

“It’s when someone takes out a mortgage on a house that doesn’t actually exist.”

A loan without collateral? Uh-oh. The bank would be none too happy to learn about this development.

We made the rounds of several more alleged construction sites, finding no evidence of construction at any of them. No concrete foundations. No lumber. No pipes. No stacks of shingles. Not even a Porta Potti.

Only air, air, and more air.

The final property we inspected had not yet been razed. An assortment of scraggly trees and brush covered the property. Among them we found a small structure, though clearly it had not been professionally designed. The flimsy plywood clubhouse had been painted pink and decorated with hearts and flowers drawn in colorful Magic Marker. A hand-lettered sign attached to the outside read
GIRLS ONLY! NO BOYS ALOUD
!

The Freudian slip caused me a slight titter.

Inside the makeshift shack were a bunch of naked Barbie and Ken dolls. Looked like some plastic porn had been acted out in the clubhouse.

Been there, done that.

We stopped for lunch at a neighborhood sandwich shop. When we finished, Ackerman balled up his napkin and hurled it into the trash can. “As long as we’re out, let’s take a look at some of the houses they flipped.”

GSM’s owners had not only sold the houses they’d swiped through their fraudulent mortgage-relief scheme, including the houses they’d stolen from the Nguyens and Marisol Otiz, they’d also dealt in other parcels of real estate. Per the documentation, several of the properties had been bought and sold on multiple occasions, each time at a significant markup. One in particular had caught both my eye and Ackerman’s.

The house had changed ownership no less than a dozen times over the course of three years, the final sales price of $600,000 more than twenty times the initial purchase price of $29,000. Though some of the price increase might reflect improvements such as the addition of granite countertops or a swimming pool, unless a solid gold bidet had been installed I had a hard time believing a house could appreciate so much given current market conditions. I suggested we start with that particular house.

Eddie drove to the site, located in South Dallas near the intersection of Interstate 45 and U.S. 175, otherwise known as S. M. Wright Freeway. The area was an older section of Dallas, with many of the homes having been built a full century ago. Given the neighborhood’s age and deteriorating condition, the area was a target for urban renewal. The Texas Department of Transportation had proposed tearing down the old and potentially unsafe elevated section of 175 and replacing it with a broad boulevard.

The street on which the house was located was an amalgamation of residences and business properties. We eased past a number of buildings that appeared on the verge of collapse.

Eddie pulled to a stop in front of a tiny wood-frame house. “Someone paid six hundred Gs for this shack? You’ve got to be shitting me.”

The house was situated adjacent to the frontage road, the freeway looming over it. Its roof bore a massive hole where a large tree limb had fallen on it. Every window in the house was broken, dangerous shards of glass filling the frames. What siding remained had pulled loose, hanging at haphazard angles and exposing a thin layer of once-pink, now-gray insulation.

Home sweet hovel.

Two rats snuffled lazily along the porch, searching among the accumulated trash for a spare morsel to eat. When they found nothing tasty to munch on, they turned to other urges, one rat mounting the other from behind, giving the female some quick loving then scurrying off, another love ’em and leave ’em type, another deadbeat dad.

We climbed out of the car to take a look around. Traffic on the freeway rushed loudly overhead, the roar of engines punctuated by the occasional blare of a horn. As we picked our way through assorted holes and garbage in the yard, a shadow appeared between us, growing larger. Instinctively, the three of us ducked, throwing our arms up to protect our heads.

An enormous fountain drink cup plummeted like a missile to the ground directly in front of us, hitting the hard-packed dirt and exploding into a barrage of ice and brown liquid that splashed onto our shoes. A soda bomb. Some idiot on the freeway overhead must have tossed it from their car.

We ventured bravely forth, keeping one eye on the overpass.

“Does someone actually live in this house?” I asked.

The most recent purchaser had been a sibling of one of the Racketeers, a sister who lived in California. Judging from the condition of the house, I’d bet the sister was a straw buyer who had never seen the property. I doubted she’d been able to rent the place. Was it even legal to rent a house in this condition? Wasn’t there some type of law to prevent slumlords from collecting rent on uninhabitable dwellings?

Ackerman climbed onto the creaky porch and peeked through one of the broken windows. “It doesn’t look occupied.”

I stepped up next to him while he accessed the Dallas Central Appraisal District site on his phone. He grunted. “Says here the house’s condition is ‘unsound.’ It’s valued at $22,000 for property tax purposes. All of the value is assigned to the land.”

A crappy investment, for sure. I wondered out loud why anyone would agree to be a straw buyer.

Ackerman shrugged. “Lots of reasons. To help a friend or family member. To get a piece of the pie. It’s also possible the sister in California has no idea about the condition of this property. The Racketeers may have lied to her, too, led her to believe the property was a good buy.”

Unwittingly sucking their relatives into their scheme, subjecting their families to possible criminal charges? The Racketeers weren’t just scumbags. They were sleazy, slimy, skuzzy scumbags.

Risking life and limb, we stepped through the front door, which bore no doorknob or dead bolt. Only a frayed piece of rope had been holding it closed.

The inside of the house was even worse than the outside. The floor had rotted through in many places, exposing the pier and beam foundation, much of which was also rotting. The walls bore holes, too, the wiring exposed. Bugs, which I assumed to be termites, crawled around the edges of the holes, apparently eating their way through the wood. All of the appliances had been removed from the kitchen, most likely stolen after the last resident moved out. The floor was littered with the butts of joints, crushed beer cans, and broken liquor bottles, along with several used condoms. Urk. Looked like the home’s absentee owner had unknowingly hosted some wild parties.

While Ackerman stopped to snap photos, Eddie and I continued to snoop around. In the corner of one of the bedrooms was a makeshift altar, a large cardboard box covered by a dusty red tablecloth. The melted nubs of several candles sat on top of the tablecloth. On the wall behind the altar was a spray-painted, downward-facing pentagram, the symbol of Satan.

I stopped in my tracks. “Holy crap.”

Had someone worshipped the devil in here? A chill invaded my body, causing me to shiver. I genuflected and crossed myself.

Eddie glanced over at me. “Aren’t you a Baptist?”

“Yeah,” I said, “but it can’t hurt.”

I pulled out my phone and logged in to the app store.

“What are you doing?” Eddie asked.

“Looking for a crucifix app.” It might just be my imagination, but the air around me felt colder, too.

Eddie rolled his eyes. Or at least I assumed he was rolling his eyes. For all I knew Satan had taken control of his body and the eye rolling was an effect of demonic possession.

We stepped closer to the altar. Several small bones lay scattered among the candles.

My hand flew to my chest. “Oh, my God! Do you think they sacrificed animals in here?”

“No.” Eddie pointed to a to-go box from Chili’s that had been tossed against the wall. “I think they wanted their baby back ribs.”

The place gave me the total creeps. “Let’s get out of here.”
Before the devil steals our souls.

chapter ten

Building Our Case

We left the room and met up with Ackerman in the hallway. He took a dozen photos of the house and a few more of the yard before glancing at his watch. “Time to head over to the attorney’s office.”

We climbed back into the car and returned to downtown, swinging by the IRS office so I could pick up the construction contracts and requests for progress payments the bank had faxed to me. I also retrieved the spare sweater I kept in my desk. Call me superstitious, but I hadn’t been able to warm up since we’d left the Satan shack. My bones felt like icicles inside me.