Girl of Vengeance (19 page)

“Yes. We were on our way to the States to spend Christmas with my sisters.”

“How do you explain your signature on these notarized documents?”

“I can’t explain them. This is the first I’ve ever heard of them.”

Smith nodded.

Kelly leaned forward and said, “Can you think of any reason why someone would go to this much trouble and expense? After these accounts were established, more than twenty million dollars was deposited into them. We haven’t been able to trace the source.”

Julia frowned. Then she said, “Do you know when my father was first approached about taking the Secretary of Defense job?”

The three federal agents looked at each other, mystified.

Julia nodded once. “From what I’ve been told, it was in December 2013. Right around the same time these documents were signed.”

Neither Anthony Walker, not Bear Wyden were accustomed to staying in luxurious accommodations. So after they left the county jail, Bear suggested they check into the local Days Inn there in Bellingham and make that their base of operations for the next couple of days.

“Sure,” Anthony had said. An hour later, they had checked in. Anthony went to work on his laptop, making phone calls and generally making a nuisance of himself.

At one point, he looked up from his laptop, his eyebrows scrunched together and a line running down his forehead. “Didn’t you say you ran the security detail for the Thompsons in the nineties?”

“Yeah,” Bear had replied.

“What were the girls like? Julia and Carrie?”

Bear shrugged. “Kids. Julia was the oldest; she was typical eighth grader. Pissed at the world and especially her mother. Carrie was a sweetheart. Why do you ask?”

Anthony shrugged. “Just wondering.”

“Yeah, well wonder quietly.” Bear, who had an incurable sleep deficit, lay down to take a nap. He closed his eyes, lulled by the clickety-click sound of Anthony’s keys on the laptop.

It was tranquil for a change, and Bear found himself drifting off shortly after noon. That made it all the more alarming when the door to the hotel suddenly burst inward and someone shouted, “Freeze, FBI!”

Bear froze. So did Anthony, his fingers still poised on his laptop, cell phone at his ear.

Five seconds later the room was full of fully armed and pissed off federal agents. Bear was thrown rudely to the floor, where his hands were cuffed with zip ties behind his back and his sidearm was taken away. Anthony was also face down in the carpet, his cell phone beside him face down. Bear instantly found himself wondering—was it still connected to whoever Anthony had been talking to? Hopefully they were connecting a recorder.

Footsteps. He craned his neck as far as he could, but he could only make out a pair of not very well polished wingtips and grey suit pants.

“Let him up,” a voice said.

He was hauled upward by his arms and came to rest face to face with a tall man with swept back salt-and-pepper hair and a hawk nose.

“Agent Wyden,” the man boomed. “I’m Wolfram Schmidt. Internal Revenue Service—and I’m in charge of the Thompson investigation.”

Crap
.
That was quick.

“Hey,” Bear said, giving Schmidt a disarming grin. “Great to finally meet you!”

Schmidt narrowed his eyes. “It’s not that nice to meet you, Wyden. You’re suspended. And no longer associated with this investigation. What brings you to Washington?” His eyes flitted toward Anthony. “And in the company of a journalist, I see.”

“Well, you know, you can’t always pick your friends…”

“Shut up. What the hell are you doing here, Wyden?”

“Officially?” Bear asked.

Schmidt rolled his eyes. “Yeah.”

“Nothing. Nothing at all, officially. I’m suspended. But, the thing is—”

“Shut up.”

“It’s hard to answer your questions if I shut up.”

“Jesus,” Schmidt said. “Untie them. Wyden, sit down.”

An agent cut the zip ties holding his wrists. Bear didn’t argue—he just sat down on the end of one of the beds. Anthony was maneuvered to sit next to him, and Wolfram Schmidt with his swept back hair sat down opposite them.

“Seriously, Wyden. Quit screwing around and answer my question or you’ll find yourself arrested for obstructing justice. You showed up before anybody else to question Larsden, and now he’s dead.”

You showed up before anybody else to question Larsden, and now he’s dead.

What the hell? “What happened to him?” he blurted out.

Anthony’s mind crowded with questions. If Larsden was dead, then their only link to Oz was Marky Lovecchio, and they still hadn’t identified him. Was that actually the guy’s name? If so, they should be able to find him on Google or some public records. Facebook, some other social networking, credit checks. No one was completely invisible.

Schmidt gave Anthony a withering look. “I don’t even know why you’re part of this discussion. This is an ongoing investigation and—”

Bear interrupted Schmidt. “Yeah, I get it, ongoing investigation, can’t comment, yada yada yada. What the hell happened to Larsden? He was the picture of health four hours ago.”

Schmidt said, “Off the record, someone shanked him, and naturally no one saw anything. He bled out in the county jail before anyone even knew what happened.”

Bear looked at Anthony and both said the same word at the same time: “Oz.”

Schmidt blinked. His response was sarcastic. “Oz? Are we going on a trip?”

Bear looked at Schmidt. “I’ll tell you everything I’ve got. I mean everything. But I need you to know, I know for a fact the sisters weren’t involved in whatever is happening here. Their father is a complete slime bag, but they weren’t involved.”

“Yeah? What about Julia Wilson? She’s got an enormous stake in whatever the hell is going on.”

Anthony shook his head. He was certain Carrie and her sisters weren’t involved. “I’d stake my reputation on it. They’ve been set up. The question in my mind is when did you start your investigation? When did this whole thing kick off?”

Schmidt looked back and forth between Bear and Anthony. Then his posture changed, very subtly—his shoulders lowered just a fraction of an inch, as if he’d relaxed just slightly. His eyes darted back and forth between Bear and Anthony. “For the record, our investigation began officially in January.”

“What kicked it off?”

Schmidt said, “Banks are required to report suspicious activity. We received a notice in January of what looked like a strange pattern of activity in a set of corporate accounts in Atlanta. We followed up and what we found was money churning. Small deposits and withdrawals, all of them less than a few hundred dollars to a few thousand, but many of them a day. Someone was funneling a busload of money through these accounts. The company we were looking at didn’t even really exist. Shell company, owned by another shell company, and none of the officers and directors were real people.

Bear asked, “When were these accounts opened?”

“All of them in December and January.”

“And how did it lead back to Thompson?”

“Stock transactions. There were half a dozen equity sales in one of Julia Wilson’s accounts, which had already been flagged by the IRS, but only for verification. But then we saw a large cash transfer from one of Wilson’s corporate accounts to the Caymans. That led us to pull records there, and they matched up. The accounts in the Caymans were the destination of the cash transfers out of Atlanta. But the only link we had was to Julia Wilson. And there wasn’t enough there.”

Anthony asked, “How do you get from there to seizing their assets?”

“No more,” Schmidt said. “I’ve got questions for you. What is Oz? Or who?”

Bear said, “Oz is British or Irish. We don’t know anything else about him, except that he hired Larsden.” Bear summarized the questioning for Schmidt, including the news that Oz had been introduced to Larsden by an Army buddy named Marky Lovecchio.

“That ought to be easy enough to follow up,” Schmidt said. “We know when and where Larsden was in the Army—process of elimination from there. He can’t have served around many people with a name like Lovecchio.”

Bear said, “So, now that we’re working together—”

Schmidt shook his head. “Nobody is
working
together. I’m conducting an investigation. You’re obstructing justice.”

“Bullshit,” Bear said. “You haven’t even looked at
why.
Why would someone with a forty million dollar successful company get involved with cheap money laundering? Or for that matter, why would Richard Thompson?”

“Greed. Simple as that. Who the hell knows why any people do this stuff?”

Anthony shook his head. “Not Thompson. He’s greedy for power—not money. I think you need to ask what happened here. Because it looks to me like someone duped you in an effort to discredit Thompson.”

Schmidt shook his head. “I don’t buy it. I’m willing to explore it, but I don’t buy it. What I do know, Wyden, is that
you
aren’t on this case anymore. And I don’t want to get wind that you’re going around questioning my witnesses, or butting your fat head into this investigation. Larsden was an
essential
witness and now he’s dead. I’ve got half a mind to arrest you right now.”

Bear growled, “You’d be better off putting your resources into finding out who the hell had him killed.”

“I intend to do that. But you stay a thousand miles away from this investigation. Do you understand me?”

“Yeah, Schmidt. I get it. Just tell me one thing first.”

“What?”

“What was your mother thinking when she named you?”

Schmidt stood up, irritation on his face. “My father and grandfather were named Wolfram, thank you. Once again, Wyden, I’ll thank you to mind your own business.” He looked at his compatriots and said, “Let’s go.”

Schmidt and his bevy of IRS and FBI agents left the room. One overenthusiastic FBI agent gave Bear the finger on his way out. Bear shook his head.

So much for interagency cooperation, Anthony thought. “Was that smart?”

Bear shrugged. “It’s the IRS. What else can you do?”

Anthony chuckled then shook his head. “What now? Larsden was our best lead. Who the hell is Oz?”

Bear sighed. Then he said, “I think we go see Adelina Thompson now. Otherwise, I’m out of options.”

Anthony thought about how Carrie and her sisters reacted every time their mother was mentioned—an almost palpable tension. He hadn’t been able to work out why they were so sensitive about their mother. But now it looked like he was going to get the chance.

“Sounds good,” he said.

Anthony thought back to his last sight of Carrie, calmly going through the disaster of her ransacked home, baby strapped in a sling at her side. She’d been calm, collected and organized, even in the midst of disaster. She had lines of strain and stress around her eyes, but she was a beautiful woman.

He shook his head. He didn’t have time to be thinking about Carrie, nor would she be interested in the midst of her grief and worry about her daughter.

But still.

Dylan spun around after pacing the length of the room for the five hundredth time. His back was a line of strain and anger, his hair still tousled from sleep.

“What I don’t understand is why she didn’t say anything. Or leave a note. Are you sure something didn’t happen?”

Alexandra sank into a chair as Prince George-Phillip answered Dylan’s question. George Phillip was sitting in a chair across from Alexandra. “Of course I’m not sure. How could I be? All I know is that she went out the back window shortly before one am and ran across the grounds, climbed a tree and went over the wall before anyone could get to her.”

“Something must have happened,” Dylan said. “Don’t you have security cameras?”

“Outside. Not in the residence. But nothing unusual showed up. No one came or went.”

“Then it must have been someone in the residence, sir. That’s the only option. She wouldn’t run on her own.” Dylan’s voice was sharp, unpleasant. “I need to go find her.”

“I wouldn’t advise that,” George-Phillip said. “You’re still a fugitive. The moment you leave the Embassy you’ll find yourself in jail until they finish the investigation. You did kill a federal agent.”

Dylan shook his head. “I can’t just stay here and do nothing.”

“Dylan,” Alexandra said. Why did he have to be so stubborn? There was nothing he could do. She was just as worried about Andrea as he was, but
someone
needed to keep a cool head.

“Stop,” he said. “I
have
to do something. Can you imagine Ray just standing around waiting?”

“Dylan,” Alexandra whispered, her heart sinking. “Stop. If Ray were here, there’d be nothing he could do either. We don’t have enough information. She could be anywhere.”

Dylan stopped and stared at the ceiling and sighed. “This is so frustrating,” he groaned.

“I agree,” George-Phillip said. “But I’ll tell you that I’ve got all possible assets looking for her, and the search is being run directly by my assistant, who is the most competent man I know. If anyone can find her, O’Leary can. And there’s absolutely nothing you can do to help Andrea or Alexandra or their sisters if you are in jail.”