Twenty-Four

Mitch Cosgrove, the station’s resident financial guru, was in Secret Service Agent Wallace Rowe’s make-shift office—at the picnic table in what a week ago had been agents’ breakroom. Each man had a laptop open, spreadsheets before them.

“Lunch party?” Peyton said.

Cosgrove smiled. Always clean-shaven, he was in his late forties and had a pale, fleshy face. He was not six feet but well over two hundred pounds. Originally from Seattle, he’d joined the Army after high school, attended the University of Washington after, and worked as a CPA on the West Coast before missing what he called “the life.” He was one of those—Peyton had known many—who thrived in a rigid, militaristic atmosphere.

Small and wiry, wearing a navy-blue sports jacket, Wally Rowe looked like an accountant who ran 5Ks on the weekends, except his sports jacket gaped when he leaned over his computer, and Peyton saw the Glock 9mm in his shoulder holster.

“This is Agent Peyton Cote,” Cosgrove said.

“I recognize the name,” Rowe said. “You’re the BORSTAR agent.”

The Border Patrol Search Trauma and Rescue team was created in 1998 in an effort to save stranded migrants (and others). The tactical unit was comprised of forty-five agents selected from a nationwide applicant pool. It had been Peyton’s top professional achievement.

She nodded. “I was nominated and appointed, but you really need to be on the Southern border. I gave up my spot.”

“Tough decision?” Rowe asked.

She sat across from him. “El Paso was a great place for an agent,” she said, “not for a single mom.”

“Never knew that was why you left,” Cosgrove said.

“Are you two working on something?” she asked.

“Sort of,” Cosgrove said. “Wally did a lot of white-collar investigations when he was with the FBI—“

“About a hundred years ago,” Rowe interjected.

“—which is sort of what I’m doing here with Dr. Chip Duvall.”

“Perfect,” Peyton said. “That’s what I was hoping we could talk about.”

“You’re looking for a paper trail, I assume,” Cosgrove said.

“I’m looking for twenty thousand dollars that Sherry St. Pierre-Duvall gave her brother.”

“Not sure I have that,” Cosgrove said, “but I can tell you what I do have: Fred St. Pierre was behind on his property taxes for five straight years until about thirteen months ago. Then he paid seventy-eight thousand dollars in back taxes. This payment, essentially, saved the farm.”

She looked at him, waiting.

“That’s what I have so far,” he said.

“He had a good year?”

“An optimist,” Wally Rowe said. “It’s nice to meet one.”

Cosgrove just smiled at her. “I’m sure that’s it,” he said. “Actually, Fred St. Pierre did have a better year. Except, given the price of potatoes that year, it’s hard to see how he had seventy-eight grand left over.”

“Hard to see, or impossible?” Peyton asked.

“Just telling you what I have,” Cosgrove said. “You can devise your own theories. But Wally, who did this kind of work for the FBI, agrees with me.”

She looked at Rowe, who shook his head.

“No friggin’ way,” Rowe said. “That’s a big operation. A lot of overhead. He didn’t have that much of a better year.”

“So now we’re trying to figure out,” Peyton said, “where the seventy-eight grand came from?”

Both men nodded.

“The daughter is married to a dentist,” Rowe said. “They live in Yarmouth, Maine, in a house valued at six hundred thousand.”

“Think Chip and Sherry bailed out her father?”

“That’s the trail I’ve been following,” Cosgrove said. “And it’s the one that confuses me most.”

“Tell me all about it,” she said.