Motion to Kill

CHAPTER SIXTY

“Johnny Mathis?” Kelly asked.

“Yup. It’s not a commercial CD, like an album you’d buy. Somebody copied the songs onto a blank CD.”

“They put it in a CD case from a Johnny Mathis album to make it look like the real deal,” Sandra added.

“I was playing it on a boom box while I was fiddling with these other disks,” Riley continued. “Right smack in the middle of my wife’s favorite tune, he hit that high note-kinda like a warble-then it cut out. Nothing. So I got to wondering about Mr. Mathis and I decided to run some tests on his CD.”

“Riley found two documents that had been imaged onto the CD. We printed them out,” Sandra said, handing copies to Blues, Kelly, and Mason.

Each document consisted of a single page. The first listed the shell companies O’Malley had set up to borrow money from his bank and identified the owners. Sullivan owned half of each of the companies. O’Malley owned the other half. The document would have made St. John’s case against him.

“These must be the documents Sullivan wanted you to destroy,” Kelly said to Mason.

“I don’t think he wanted me to destroy anything. I think he was just testing me to find out which side of the line I walked on. There was no way he could know if every copy of this had been destroyed. Especially if it had been imaged onto a CD. Besides, he wasn’t the only one who knew about this. O’Malley knew. They were partners. What’s on the other page?”

“Another list,” Sandra said. “I recognize the names of some of the companies involved in the fixtures deals. But there’s also a list labeled ‘accounts.’ Each account is a combination of letters and numbers. I don’t know what they mean.”

Kelly scanned the second document. “It’s a combination of bank account numbers and passwords. Offshore banks in the Cayman Islands use the codes to identify account holders and give them access to their accounts without using names. When I was with the FBI, we spent a lot of time breaking these codes down so we could trace laundered money.”

“So break these down,” Mason said. “It’s the key to the fixtures deals. We’ll follow the money and find out who started all of this.”

“It’s not that simple. You just can’t hold the numbers up to a mirror and read them backward. But this is another reason for me to go to Chicago. I’ve got friends there who can decipher them.”

Kelly led the way to the Home Style Cafe on the west side of the square for breakfast. The restaurant was filled with regular customers who made it part of their daily ritual. The men in denim shirts and blue jeans were stretching their last cup of coffee before starting their day. The storefront was dusky brick, unchanged for the last forty years. Kelly and Mason slid side by side into a booth while Sandra, Blues, and Riley chose the counter.

“Why do you think Sullivan imaged those documents onto a CD with Johnny Mathis?” Kelly asked.

“He was hiding them in plain sight. Anyone who found the CD case would see the Johnny Mathis label and think it was nothing important. If they opened the case and saw a disk without a Johnny Mathis label, they might get suspicious and listen to it. There was enough music on the CD to make most people assume there wasn’t anything else on it, but it took a true fan like Riley to listen long enough to find the documents.”

“I respect the man and his music,” Riley said from his seat at the counter.

Mason continued. “Sullivan knew that St. John had him cold when St. John served the subpoena on him. The fixtures documents were his trump cards. Sullivan was going to offer a trade to St. John. Somebody else found out. They must have been looking for the documents when they broke into Sullivan’s house last month.”

“And Harlan was going to try his own version of let’s make a deal. Now they’re both dead,” Kelly said.

The sun flattened out against the water-spotted window. Kelly rested her elbow on the ledge, chin cupped in her hand, her eyes set on some distant place. The sad weariness Mason had first sensed in her had spread in the hours since her cabin burned. She hadn’t talked about it and didn’t have to. It was the last link to her father. He’d died long ago, but now he was truly gone. Mason tried to comfort them both by holding her close. She pulled away, her melancholy smile telling him that he was not what she needed right now.

Breakfast passed quietly. She explained that her chief deputy would handle the investigation while she was away. Another deputy would drive her home to clean up and pack and then take her St. Louis, where she’d catch a Southwest flight to Chicago, getting there in time for lunch. She left the tip and said good-bye.