| |
For the third time that morning, I drove along River Road, and once again my brain was occupied with thoughts of Doug Guilfoyle. The poor guy had been so determined to reestablish a connection with his kids that he’d turned his life upside down, leaving a successful career on Wall Street and taking the job with Beauceron.
It reminded me of my own situation, when I left prison and returned home to Stewart’s Crossing. I’d been fortunate that the chair of the English department, who’d taught me as an undergraduate, took pity on me and hired me as an adjunct. President Babson was willing to overlook my police record and trusted me to run Friar Lake.
What would I have done if I hadn’t had those chances? If I hadn’t adopted Rochester, or become friends with Rick, or met Lili? Imagine all the good things Doug Guilfoyle could have done if he’d had the good luck I had.
I went back over in my head every interaction I’d had with Doug, from our first meeting by the canal to our breakfast the day before. Was there anything else I could have done? Something I could have done differently? Or was someone watching him and tracking what we’d done together?
I still kept up with the chatter on some dark web sites dedicated to hacking, where I’d heard of companies that were integrating physical and digital security, keeping track of where their employees were and what they were doing, looking for anomalies that might indicate unauthorized activity.
Was someone at Beauceron tapping Doug’s phone calls or monitoring his computer usage? Doug had zipped up and downloaded all those property spreadsheets on Saturday night at Friar Lake, and that log-in from a different IP address might have triggered an alert.
A few minutes after that, I had used Doug’s ID and password to log in to the Beauceron server from my own laptop, and tried to follow the hyperlink in the first spreadsheet to the second one. I’d discovered it was protected and that I couldn’t download it without the password. Had there been some kind of flag on that protected spreadsheet that set an alert?
Then on Monday morning, I’d hacked into the Beauceron server and downloaded the file from the root directory. I was pretty sure that even though the server might have noted my incursion, the raid couldn’t be tracked back to me. But suppose someone made the connection to Doug?
All my other work had been offline, even when I opened all those other spreadsheets to check for hyperlinks. But I didn’t know what else Doug might have done. I did recall him saying when he asked me to meet for breakfast that Shawn had been asking him a lot of strange questions.
When I parked at Friar Lake, Rochester left Joey’s side at the edge of the parking lot and raced across the pavement to me. He jumped up and down as if I’d abandoned him there for days. It took several minutes of tummy rubs, sweet endearments and a jaunt around the property for him to forgive me.
I tried as best I could to recreate the conversation Doug and I had and typed it into an email to Rick. “I have the spreadsheets if you, or some fraud investigator, wants to see them,” I wrote.
After I sent the email, I realized Rochester wasn’t in his normal position on the floor by my desk. When he wasn’t around me, I knew he was up to mischief. “Rochester!” I called. “Where are you, puppy?”
I found him in the gatehouse lobby, where a stack of glossy brochures about Friar Lake had fallen to the floor. I’d written the text and Lili had taken the photos, as well as incorporating historic ones from back when the property was an abbey called Our Lady of the Waters.
Rochester’s head was resting on one of the brochures, open to a list of alumni donors to the project. “I can find you a better pillow,” I said to my dog, as I tugged the brochure out from under him.
Shawn Brumberger was an Eastern graduate, I recalled, as I wiped a glob of Rochester’s drool from the page. Could I find anything about him in our records, or on line, that might indicate a predilection toward crime?
From the alumni database, I learned that Shawn was nearly fifty, about five years older than Doug and I were, and he had majored in economics, though without distinction.
Looking back through his file, I discovered that his first job after he graduated from Eastern was as a stockbroker with a firm called Best Capital Advisors, in Long Island City, New York. I looked up the firm, and discovered that it had been the subject of a fraud investigation in the late 1970s. I clicked through a bunch of links until I found the details of the fraud. BCA had been a “boiler room,” a high-pressure call center. Brokers called people on “sucker lists” of potential investors and tried to convince them to buy high-risk stocks.
Shawn had stayed at BCA for two years, then gone to NYU for an MBA in finance. While he was there, a Federal investigation had shut BCA down, and I couldn’t find any evidence that Shawn had been implicated in the probe. But clearly working at BCA had been Shawn’s introduction to financial fraud.
He had interned at an investment bank during the summer between his two years at NYU, and then returned to that firm for a full time job after graduation. He had climbed the corporate ladder in fund management, and five years before he had left a position with a big Wall Street firm to found Beauceron. After some industrious digging I found that he’d been divorced at about that time, and remarried soon after. I wondered if the job shift and the divorce and remarriage were connected, and remembered Doug mentioning that he and Shawn had bonded over their bitter divorces, the way Rick and I had.
Doug had been saddled with crippling alimony and child support payments. Maybe Shawn was in the same boat, and couldn’t afford to write off those bad debts at Beauceron.
How could I find out if he was having financial trouble without hacking somewhere? I went back over everything I’d found, and saw a mention of his kids. Shawna Brumberger was in her final year at SUNY Binghamton, and Shawn Jr. was a freshman at Westchester Community College in Valhalla, New York.
I shook my head at that. You had to have a pretty big ego to name both your kids after yourself. And what about the confusion when someone called?
If either of them had applied to Eastern, there might be something about Shawn’s finances in their applications. I didn’t have authorization to access our admissions database, so I called Sally Marston, the director of admissions, who I’d worked with in the past. “You have a minute to talk?” I asked.
“This is a momentary lull in the craziness,” Sally said. “Offers went out April first, so we’re just waiting to see what our yield is and how far we have to dip into the wait list.”
I didn’t want to tell Sally my real reason for looking into Brumberger, so I spun a story about meeting him and trying to determine if he was worth courting as a fund-raising prospect. “Can you see if either of his kids applied here? If they might have been looking for financial aid? That could tell me if he’s got money or not.”
Sally said she could look, and I gave her Shawn Brumberger’s name and class year. “Daughter’s name is Shawna, and the son is Shawn Junior.”
“We don’t hold onto detailed records once a class is admitted,” Sally said. “There’s been a big boom in Freedom of Information requests from students who want to see their admissions folders, so President Babson decided that it would be safer for us to destroy the materials rather than have something embarrassing come out. But I can look up these names, see if they applied and if they filed the government forms for aid.”
I thanked her and hung up. While I waited I did some searching on Shawn and both his wives. There might be details that could add to the puzzle I was assembling.
Shawn’s ex, Barbara, lived in Westchester County in a house appraised at $5.2 million. He had transferred the deed to her for a dollar a few years before, most likely as part of the divorce settlement.
Barbara Brumberger did not appear to have a job, though she was on the committees of numerous charities. She was a plump woman in her early fifties with a pretty face and well-coiffed hair, and I found a lot of photos of her at events, wearing ball gowns and what looked like a diamond necklace and matching earrings.
I also found photos of Brumberger and his second wife, Svetlana, at similar charity events in Pennsylvania. She was a stunning beauty, a couple of inches taller than Shawn in her high heels and blonde bouffant, and she wore diamonds that looked bigger than Barbara’s.
Sally called back. “Shawna Brumberger, the daughter, applied to Eastern three years ago, but her grades and her scores weren’t very strong. She was wait-listed for admission but ended up going somewhere else. Shawn Junior was admitted last year, but his FAFSA was incomplete so we weren’t able to offer him any financial aid, and he never matriculated.”
“What does that mean, his FAFSA was incomplete?”
“The FAFSA is the common financial aid form for all college admissions,” Sally said. “It could be that his parents refused to list their income, or provide copies of their tax returns. Unfortunately, we can’t make an aid decision without it.”
I thanked Sally and hung up. Why would a kid with wealthy parents apply for financial aid at all? Was it because his father refused to pay for his education? Maybe Shawn Junior had taken his mother’s side in the divorce, and his father held a grudge. Or maybe Shawn Senior didn’t have the money. But then why not fill out the form?
I remembered my college admissions process, when I first got to see my parents’ financial information—how much each of them earned, how much they had put away for my education, and so on. Maybe Shawn wouldn’t fill out the forms because he didn’t want his son, and by extension his ex-wife, to know that he was broke. Or that he was depending on the illicit income from Beauceron to pay his bills.
Was Shawn Brumberger the kind of guy who could commit murder? It wasn’t hard to believe that he was cooking the books at Beauceron—it seemed like every Wall Street company had some kind of scam going on. But murder was a big step from cheating some investors, wasn’t it?
It all came down to motive, I thought. What was Shawn’s motive in stealing from his investors? To maintain his lifestyle? To protect his reputation? Were either of those strong enough to motivate him to kill?
