A Criminal Defense

Chapter 37

Money.

More and more Donnally was convinced the route to whoever killed Mark Hamlin would follow a money trail-

And he hated money trail cases.

As a cop, he hadn’t lied to himself. He knew he didn’t have the talent, he didn’t have the mind for it. He couldn’t see patterns in numbers and abstract the character of human actions from deposits and withdrawals and balance sheets.

He had a hard time just keeping track of the pluses and minuses of his cafe’s money flow.

And now he found himself sitting at Hamlin’s conference table surveying stacks of bank statements. Eight bank accounts, personal and business. All with connected ATM or credit cards.

Donnally felt straitjacketed. Paralyzed. Hamlin could’ve laundered money just by moving it among these accounts and Donnally knew he wouldn’t be able to figure it out.

Sensing motion in the doorway, he looked up to see Jackson walking in. She’d undone the top two buttons of her blouse. He felt a surge of annoyance. He wasn’t in the mood for the manipulation. He was interested in the truth she was in a position to expose, not the cleavage she was intending to reveal.

Jackson stopped at the opposite side of the table, leaned over at the waist, and tapped one of the piles of bank statements with her fingernail. “There’s an easier way to get the answers you’re looking for.”

Donnally fixed his eyes on hers, resisting the temptation to let his gaze fall where she wanted it to. Her maneuver made him recall a female suspect who’d cozied up next to him in the bar where he’d sought her out, and had asked, “Is there any physical way we can resolve this?”

“How do you figure?” Donnally asked.

“We have a sophisticated accounting program, not your in-a-box, buy-it-off-the-shelf kind. We bought it to make it easy to export the financial data to Mark’s accountant so he could calculate his quarterly tax payments and prepare his returns.”

“How complicated is it?”

“Not too. I can show you how to search it and to create reports.”

Donnally wished Janie was around to sit Jackson down and take her back to the critical moments in her childhood and then return her to the present so she could understand what she was doing.

As he looked at her, he wondered whether her behavior was just an expression of grief and dislocation after the loss of a father figure, for Hamlin might have been the most important person in her life.

At the same time, maybe she’d begun to fear Hamlin, as she feared her own molesting father, even before Hamlin’s death, perhaps as though he was her own Peoples Temple Jim Jones.

“Maybe you can give me the manual to look at,” Donnally said.

Jackson straightened up, but lowered her gaze, her lips pursed into a little girl’s pout. She folded her arms below her breasts, forcing them up into the opening in her blouse, her skin reflecting the fluorescent light shining from above.

Donnally thought he had better give her some encouragement until he could figure out how to deal with her.

“After I get familiar with the program, maybe you can show me some of its tricks.”

Jackson smiled and headed back toward her desk, nearly on her toes, almost like she was skipping.

Donnally followed her and waited while she located the manual on her bookcase. He turned away after she handed it to him, but before she could offer any more help, and then took it into Hamlin’s office.

But it was hard to concentrate.

He felt like Jackson was looking over his shoulder, breathing against his ear and neck. It made him feel like she’d won a round, gotten into his head, but he wasn’t going to show it.

He found the application icon on the screen and activated the program-

And she won another round.

Jackson knew he’d need to come to her to get the password.

In order not to have to do it in person, he called her on the intercom. She insisted on coming into the office to give it to him.

Donnally rose and stood by the wall behind the desk. She slipped by him, leaned over, entered the password, and then clicked a box on the screen to make it visible: “showmethemoney.”

He didn’t need to write it down.

Jackson straightened, gave him a we’ve-got-a-secret smile, and then returned to her desk. He wasn’t sure whether the secret was the password itself or the fact that the phrase “show me the money” was at least a subliminal confession on Hamlin’s part that he’d left the greater good behind him in his race to the bank.

Or maybe the word Donnally wanted was subconscious, not subliminal, a manifestation of a professional schizophrenia.

Except that Hamlin had to have been aware of his metamorphosis from a soldier of justice into a soldier of fortune. For, eventually, even for people like Hamlin, the self-justifications have to run out.