“Before you go in,” Dez said, “they confiscated Northwall’s laptop at LAX. We got it this morning.”
“Have we found anything on it yet?” Fenway asked.
“Encrypted hard drive, but Northwall had the password written in a notebook in his bag. Gotta love old-school solutions to modern-day problems.”
“Did the warrant come through for his cell phone?”
Dez nodded. “And Judge Harada signed a warrant for a number he’s called a total of ninety-seven times in the last four weeks. It’s a burner, but we can get any unencrypted texts or numbers that it called too. We might have it by tomorrow.”
“Great.” Fenway stretched her arms above her head. “Do we want to make them sweat a little before we go in?”
The observation room door opened, and a man, about four inches shorter than Fenway, stepped in. He was about thirty-five, with close-cropped hair and a goatee. Wearing a tailored three-piece black suit with a purple-and-gray striped tie, the man carried a thick manila folder. He nodded at both of them. “Sergeant. Coroner.”
“ADA Pondicherry. To what do we owe the pleasure?” Dez asked.
Pondicherry opened the folder and turned to Fenway. “Even without a body, I believe we can get a grand jury to indict Northwall for murder. And if we get a judge to hold him without bail—”
“No way, Vel.” Dez put her hands on her hips. “Half the judges in Dominguez County belong to the Monument Brotherhood.”
“One of them signed an injunction overturning our search warrant of the temple,” Fenway added.
“I’ve asked Emma Northwall to come in,” Pondicherry said. “If I can get her to talk with him—”
“You don’t know if they’re working together,” Dez said.
Fenway shook her head. “After what Emma said to us? How she’s losing everything because of the money he stole? I don’t think so. In fact, I think he’ll react to his wife the same way he did to seeing Haley in the halls—he’ll scream at her and tell her it’s all her fault.”
Dez cocked her head. “You don’t know that—maybe he does think it’s Haley’s fault.”
“Let’s go in and see what they have to say,” Vel said.
“Are we prepared to arrest him?” Fenway asked.
Pondicherry nodded. “We’ll take our chances with the grand jury.” He sighed. “And with the judges. I’ll see if we can get someone assigned who isn’t connected to the Brotherhood.” He opened the door, and Dez and Fenway went out first. Fenway took a deep breath and opened the door to the interview room.
“Finally,” Lynn Hayes snapped. “My client was unlawfully detained—”
“You’ve met the two of us before,” Dez interrupted. “I’m Sergeant Roubideaux, and this is my boss, the County Coroner. And this”—she indicated the man in the suit—“is Assistant District Attorney Vel Pondicherry.”
“Your client,” Pondicherry said, “was caught at LAX attempting to board an international flight on another person’s passport. That violates federal law—”
“You’re not the feds,” Hayes interjected.
Pondicherry raised his eyebrows. “You might be unaware that your client committed a felony punishable by a large fine—and up to twenty-five years in prison.”
“Ten.” Hayes set her jaw. “There’s no way you’ll prove Mr. Northwall’s intention was for terrorism purposes.”
“Still,” Pondicherry said, “that will give us plenty of time to make our murder case.”
“I didn’t—” Northwall began.
Hayes held up her hand. “Don’t say anything, Red.” She turned to the ADA. “The passport was a simple mix-up. I’m sure there are plenty of people in Estancia who would be more than willing to vouch for Mr. Northwall’s character. A judge might fine Mr. Northwall, but for an honest mistake like this?”
“I happen to know the U.S. Attorney,” Pondicherry said, “and fleeing the country with funds stolen from your company won’t be looked at as an honest mistake.”
“I’m willing to take that chance,” said Hayes.
Pondicherry cocked his head at Northwall. “Are you willing to bet the next ten years of your life on that, Mr. Northwall, or do you want to answer some questions? This could go a lot easier—”
“I’m not saying anything,” Northwall sneered. “I was set up by that little—”
“Red!” Hayes barked. “Be quiet.”
“Easy for you to say.” Northwall rattled his handcuffs against the table. “You’re not the one sleeping in a jail cell tonight.”
“My client isn’t saying anything else.” Hayes leaned back in her chair.
“Then you must want to play ball on the murder charge.” Pondicherry opened his folder. Inside were Fenway’s photos of the dead body of Frank Mortimer, including shots of his head wound.
Hayes opened her briefcase and handed Pondicherry a second folder. “You have your photos; I have mine.”
The photos showed a variety of flesh wounds, including one particularly nasty open wound on Haley Sinclair’s forehead. “I’ve got twenty photos of your supposed victim with a well-known member of the—uh, what’s it called? Cosplayer community. This particular cosplayer often dresses up in superhero outfits and uses lots of makeup to make it look like she has—I don’t know, radioactive poisoning, third eyes, a Viking hammer sticking out of the back of her head. We posit that this young woman was likely the architect of these supposed photos.”
“The coroner and the sergeant are more than willing to testify that Mr. Mortimer was deceased at the time of examination—and in their subsequent questioning of Mr. Northwall.”
“Let’s see who the judge believes, then. I believe we could pull the Honorable Michael Haggarty.”
Pondicherry set his jaw. “Haggarty needs to recuse himself. Mr. Northwall holds a position of power over him in a local social organization.”
Hayes cocked her head. “As soon as you provide documentation showing this organization’s power structure, we’ll stipulate to the recusal.”
His nose twitched. “What do you want, Ms. Hayes? I’m not a monster. I’d love to hear an alternate theory of the crime. Do you want to provide us with another—”
“I want my client to go home to his family.”
Pondicherry glanced at Fenway, but Fenway gave a small shake of her head.
“Give us a moment.” Pondicherry opened the door and he, Dez, and Fenway stepped outside into the hallway.
“I don’t like this,” Dez murmured.
Pondicherry kicked at the linoleum floor with the toe of his right dress shoe. “If we let him go,” he said, “Northwall will be on the next plane out of here.”
“So arrest him for murder,” Fenway said.
“Hayes is itching to file a motion to dismiss with prejudice,” Pondicherry said. “The problem is, I think if we get the wrong judge, he’ll get it.”
“Then let the Feds take him on the passport charge.”
Pondicherry frowned. “I know the U.S. Attorney. This statute is used almost exclusively to catch undocumented workers. A rich white man traveling to the Caribbean with his girlfriend? We’ll be lucky if he even gets fined. Why do you think he’s still in our custody?”
Fenway folded her arms. “Well, by all means, we should just give up, then.”
Dez exhaled. “No one’s saying that, Fenway.”
Fenway turned to the ADA. “When was he detained? Last night?”
Pondicherry looked at his watch. “We have forty-eight hours to hold him without formally charging him. That means we have a little over a day to get something on him.”
“Doesn’t look like we have many other options.” Fenway tapped her chin. “We could try applying a couple different kinds of pressure. One—financial. He has all his money in an account in Belize. If we freeze his accounts here, we can guarantee he can’t buy a plane ticket to get out of the country.”
“Unless he has rich friends in some sort of secret society.”
Fenway grunted. “It’s better than nothing, I guess, but it won’t be effective.” She looked up at Pondicherry. “What about his wife? Sure, they don’t get along, and sure, he was leaving the country with another woman—”
“Is this reverse psychology?” Dez asked.
“—but if we bring her in,” Fenway continued, “we can listen in on their fight. You know guys like Northwall are just dying to say something—anything—to twist the knife in. It might give us a place to look for more evidence, maybe even find the body.”
“If they don’t have an underground incinerator at the temple,” Dez muttered.
“I like that you’re thinking laterally,” Pondicherry said, “but so far I haven’t heard anything that keeps Northwall locked up. It might delay his trip by a few days, but he’ll be dipping his feet in the Caribbean by the weekend—and with all the millions of dollars in the account in Belize.”
Fenway nodded. “Then we have twenty-four hours to find something else to make the murder charge survive the arraignment.”
An hour later, Dez and Fenway drove down the streets in the Northwall’s neighborhood. Fenway tapped her phone.
“Would you put that away?” Dez pulled next to the curb in front of the Northwall’s large house.
“There might be some additional financial pressure we can put on Northwall,” Fenway said.
Dez put the transmission into Park. “We’re here. And that’s good news, as long as Northwall stays in the country.”
Fenway got out of the Impala and looked up at the house. The enormous garage lay closed and silent behind the Italian cypresses.
They walked up the stone footpath to the front door, and Dez reached out to ring the bell.
Emma answered the door a moment later, her hair up in a high ponytail and in a tank top and yoga pants. She frowned when she saw Fenway. “Well, it happened. All the money’s out of the checking account. He screwed me just like he screwed the company.”
“We’re so sorry, Mrs. Northwall.”
Emma scoffed. “After this, you better believe I’m changing my name back.”
“Of course.” Fenway cleared her throat. “Your husband is at the sheriff’s office in Estancia.”
“Hmph.”
“We believe he murdered Frank Mortimer.”
“Great,” Emma said, hands on her hips. “What does this have to do with me?”
“He’s transferred all of his funds overseas, and it’s hard to get it back.” Fenway woke up her phone and read off the screen. “But when those funds are gained through murder, sometimes the foreign banking agency will release the money back to their rightful owner.”
“That’s me.”
“Some funds are, I’m sure. But some of them may have been stolen from Radical Familiar.”
Emma exhaled. “It probably won’t keep me afloat very long,” she said, “but I suppose every little bit helps.”
“The thing is,” Fenway said, “the evidence against your husband is thin.”
Emma folded her arms. “Are you asking me to testify against him? I’ll run out of money long before this ever goes to trial.”
Fenway shook her head. “Spousal privilege—you can’t testify as to any communication between the two of you.”
Emma scoffed. “I probably wouldn’t be useful anyway. He barely talked to me for the last two years.” She paused. “What is it you’re asking me to do, exactly?”
“Come down to the station. He’ll be in holding tonight—but we have to let him go tomorrow unless we get more evidence against him. And if we don’t, he’ll be out of the country in a day or two.”
“With my money,” Emma muttered.
“With all the money he stole,” Fenway said. “So—you know how to push his buttons? To get him to start saying things just to, uh, you know—”
“Rub it in? That he’s rich and I’m worthless? Oh, yeah, I can get him to say that.”
“Do you think any of the things he might say would give us a clue how he committed the murder? Or where we could find evidence?”
Emma looked down at her white athletic shoes. “I’m not sure—let me think.” She looked up. “But—surely you found the murder weapon. And doesn’t it match the body?”
Fenway shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. “Well—” She glanced at Dez, who gave a slight shrug. “That’s the problem. We don’t have the body.”
Emma’s eyes went wide. “What do you mean, you don’t have the body?”
“It was—” Fenway’s eyes darted to Dez again, but the older woman had cast her eyes down. “There was a legal issue.”
“It’s still at the temple?”
“We have photos,” Fenway said quickly, “but if you can help us get some additional evidence, you can help us overcome the, uh, lack of a body.”
Emma gritted her teeth. “He just gets away with everything, doesn’t he?”
“Not if I can help it,” Fenway said.
“Nor I.” Emma dropped her hands to her side. “So—you need me to show up at the sheriff’s office tomorrow?”
“Eight o’clock, if you can.”
Emma’s brow creased. “That’s awfully early. Can you do nine thirty?”
Dez stepped forward. “Do you want your money back or not?”
Emma’s eyes widened. “Of course. Eight o’clock it is.”
“How real are our chances of getting this money back from the accounts in Belize?” Fenway closed the door of the McVie Investigations office and turned to Piper.
Dez stepped around Piper’s desk and narrowed her eyes at Fenway. “You mean you said that to Emma without knowing if you could actually get the money back?”
“Hang on, I’m thinking,” Piper said. She pushed her chair back from her desk and rested her chin on her fist. “There’s no chance if Redmond Northwall doesn’t get indicted, so it’s better than nothing.”
“It’s our best chance,” Fenway said.
“Uh…” Piper glanced up at Fenway and creased her brow. “It’s not your best chance.”
“Our best legal chance.”
“Again,” Piper said, “this is a gray area. The money was illegally obtained in the United States and put into an account in Belize. You were hoping to convince the authorities in Belize to release the funds back to their rightful owners if the owner of the account is arrested for murder.”
Fenway crossed her arms. “Right—but we don’t know if the account belongs to Frank Mortimer or Northwall. What happens if it belongs to Mortimer?”
Piper sucked in air through her teeth. “I won’t say it’s impossible to get it back, but the bank will probably hold the money until they get a death certificate. Well—a death certificate they’d accept. It’s unclear whether one from the United States would meet their requirements.”
“Let’s assume they’d accept a U.S. death certificate.”
“Then the money would get paid out to any beneficiaries listed on the account.”
Fenway looked at Dez. “Do you think it’s possible Mortimer put beneficiaries on his account? He probably wouldn’t want his wife to get the money.”
“His kids are grown,” Dez said. “Don’t they live on the east coast?”
“Right.” Fenway rubbed her chin. “I suppose they might be convinced to pay the rightful owners back.”
“Or,” Dez said, “what about Haley Sinclair? Mortimer planned to run away with her.”
“You think Haley would have been the beneficiary?”
Dez shrugged. “She told us she laid it on thick.”
Piper rolled her chair back in front of her computer. “Once I find the account, I can see if there are any beneficiaries listed.” She began to type, her fingers flying on the keyboard.
“What happens if there are no beneficiaries?”
Piper shook her head. “It might go to his wife, but since she doesn’t live in Belize, it could get into some thorny legal areas I don’t understand. My Spanish is pretty good, but not the legalese stuff. I could ask Migs, though.”
Fenway and Dez were silent, watching the screen over Piper’s shoulder.
A banking screen came up. Fenway squinted. There were a lot of transactions—and a lot of numbers in the seven figures.
“There’s good news, better news, and bad news,” Piper said. “The good news is, I found Frank Mortimer’s account. And the better news—you don’t have to deal with the beneficiary question.”
“And the bad news?” asked Dez.
“There’s no money in Mortimer’s account.”
“What?”
She clicked again. “Hang on a minute—no, I’m right. All the money was transferred to a different account at the same bank.”
“Who does that account belong to?”
“A string of numbers in the ID area. I’ll figure it out. Give me just a second.”
“It’s got to be Redmond Northwall’s account, right? How long will it take?”
“I don’t know.” She clicked on a command line interface screen and began typing.
“Haley used a USB drive on Mortimer’s laptop,” Fenway said. “Maybe that’ll help you track the accounts? She said it was a program that Northwall gave her.”
Dez clicked her tongue. “No, she didn’t. You asked her if it was a program that Northwall gave her, and she didn’t answer.”
“Right, but…” Fenway trailed off. “I took that as an implied yes, thinking Haley didn’t want to get herself into trouble by admitting she used malware.”
Dez nodded. “But maybe it wasn’t an implied yes. Maybe she got the program from somewhere else.”
Piper drummed her fingers on the desk. “There was a hacking competition a couple of months ago—a white hat thing. One of the runner-up programs was an anti-fraud banking application. After the money disappeared from a legitimate account, it would track those financial transactions, authenticate them, and move the stolen funds to an escrow account.” Piper clicked onto a browser and brought up a page with a CyberBankingHero logo at the top.
Fenway furrowed her brow. “How do you know this?”
Piper shrugged. “Had to keep myself busy while Migs was studying for the bar. Now, hold on.” Piper typed furiously and several screens came up. She zoomed in on one of the screens, full of code, then clicked on a banking screen, opened another screen of code, and studied that. “Of course,” Piper murmured. “Why didn’t I see this before?” She typed again. “Okay—here it is.” Piper pointed at the screen. “Yes. That’s Redmond Northwall’s account. This is the bank account in Belize that all of Frank Mortimer’s money was transferred into.”
“So Redmond stole back all the money Frank took from Radical Familiar?”
Piper screwed up her face. “But instead of returning the money to the company, it looks like he kept it for himself.” She tapped the screen. “Some of the electronic markers on the online transfers here. Someone with impressive computer skills did this.”
“Redmond Northwall is the CEO of a software company—he has computer skills.”
“Hacking skills, Fenway. Northwall might know his way around a spreadsheet, but I bet he wouldn’t know a SQL injection from a hole in the ground.”
Dez cocked her head. “You think whoever wrote that white-hat banking program did this?”
Piper nodded. “And I’m looking at the code from the CyberBankingHero site. She submitted it under the handle SinCitySuper.”
“Wait—she?” Fenway asked.
Dez scratched her chin. “Isn’t Haley getting her masters in computer science?”
“Some of these time stamps, some of the comments left in the scripts? I don’t have concrete proof, but I think SinCitySuper is Haley’s handle.” Piper turned to Dez, and she pointed at the screen. “And I think she initiated all these bank transfers. Mortimer’s accounts were altered with a script that matches the date and time when she was in the hotel room with Frank Mortimer.”
“Maybe the U.S. attorney will be interested in prosecuting after all,” Fenway murmured.
Piper turned back to the screen. “Now I get how she could take Frank’s money without him even getting a red flag that it was being siphoned off.” She pointed to the screen. “See? This bank is running an old version of the database tools. There’s a script she ran…” Piper’s voice trailed off as she clicked on another screen. “Oh. Open port—and that gave her access to the alerting tools. Brilliant. Let’s see how she got the money deposited in Redmond’s account.” She clicked onto another window, then stamped her feet and squealed.
“What’s wrong?” Dez asked.
“What’s wrong is that I’m not nearly as good as she is.” Piper looked at the screen and sighed moonily.
“No—I mean what’s wrong with Redmond’s account where he put all the stolen money?”
Piper cackled, then clicked the window for the ledger statement for the bank account. “Plenty, if you’re Redmond Northwall and you’re expecting twenty-five million dollars in your account.” Piper zoomed the screen in on the last number in the ledger.
$0.00.