Shakedown

Chapter Sixty-one

I went back to the same place where I’d had breakfast the other day. The food was good, the price was right, and the Internet access was free.

The place was full and smelled of bacon grease and fresh-baked cinnamon rolls and hot coffee. The chatter at the two-dozen tables clashed with the sounds coming from the open kitchen of banging pots and pans and orders placed and filled. Harried servers dodged between tables, sweating to keep up, their heavy feet slapping on the hardwood?oor, laying down a percussion track.

A few customers wore athletic shorts and T-shirts stained from just-finished workouts. Those who had contented, full faces and round bellies lingered over the New York Times. Three couples in skintight, multihued bicycle gear sat at two tables they’d pushed together, shoveling down pancakes and trading jibes about who had dogged it the last five miles.

Two women, perfectly coiffed and made up, sipped coffee and nibbled on fruit, their tennis bracelets catching the light, their rackets resting beneath their table. A cute, dark-haired woman near fifty sat with a white-haired man, the two of them laughing the way a father and daughter should. One man sat alone, hunched over his plate. He looked up as I passed, his red bleary eyes and haggard jowls testament to an ill-spent night.

A corner booth opened up and I slid in as the busboy wiped the table and the server, a woman with beehive hair, pinched eyes, a sour mouth, and a build that spread out the same way the Mississippi pours into the Gulf scooped up the tip the last customer had left, quietly cursing the few quarters she dropped into her pocket.

“I’ll have two eggs up, crisp bacon, hash browns, toasted rye, and coffee. Hold the apologies to my arteries.”

“Better you hold the jokes, honey. I’ve heard them all,” she said.

By the time my food arrived, I was deep into Jill Rice’s tax records. She and her husband filed separate returns, which was common for spouses who wanted to keep their assets separate. Joy and I never did. Neither of us had had more than lunch money when we got married, and what we’d saved since then, we’d saved together. Money hadn’t driven us apart.

The records Jill gave me didn’t include her husband’s return. Hers was pretty simple. She had interest income from CDs and bonds, dividend income from stocks, and capital gains from the sale of an office building she’d purchased ten years earlier. The interest income and dividends totaled approximately three thousand dollars. She made another hundred twenty-five thousand on the sale of the building. Neither amount was a red?ag.

I didn’t have her returns from prior years, so I had no idea how the income she’d reported compared to the past or whether she’d sold assets to generate cash for living expenses. A lot of wives who depended on their husband’s income would do that after their husbands went to jail.

Jill’s only other income was from a partnership called PEMA Partners. There was nothing describing what PEMA Partners was or did. I looked online and came up empty. PEMA was private and quiet, operating below the cyberspace radar, just like hundreds of thousands of other partnerships all across the country that invested in raw land, strip shopping centers, bamboo farms in Central America, and other can’t-miss opportunities of a lifetime.

The only documentation Jill had about PEMA was her partnership tax return, called a K-1, that itemized the amount of income attributed to her ownership interest. Whatever PEMA was, Jill Rice owned 25 percent of it, which threw off $868,000 and some change last year, more than enough to support her lifestyle regardless of her husband’s legal problems. She may have filed a separate return just to protect her assets from those problems. That was smart planning and good evidence that she knew enough about what her husband was doing to plan for the worst.

I had been hungry when I ordered but lost my appetite while studying Jill’s return. I had staved off my anxiety over Wendy with the certainty that I’d find a lead that would take me to her. When it became obvious that I hadn’t, my gut began to twist, optimism giving way to pessimism that soaked my insides with fear. I had been holding myself together with string and chewing gum, fighting the shakes, and trying not to let the memories of my lost son and the damnation sure to come if I let history repeat itself and claim my daughter take over all my thoughts.

I took a deep breath. My eggs smelled rotten. I shoved the plate to the edge of the table and opened the files I’d downloaded from Wendy’s computer.

She had e-mail files and photograph files, and other files labeled with every aspect of her life, including work, friends, medical, music, recipes, finances, travel, subscriptions, blogs, yoga, downloads, videos, books, Mom amp; Dad, MySpace, and one labeled personal, as if there was anything else that could have been left out of the other files. It would take days to study the contents and extract anything useful.

There were software programs that would perform keyword searches of her files, but I hadn’t loaded one on to my computer. I logged on to the Internet to find one. When the connection failed, I summoned my server, who told me that the restaurant’s system was down.

“It was up a minute ago. What happened?”

“I had a husband used to say the same thing. Like I told him, timing is everything.”

“That’s just great.”

“Hey, it’s free. You get what you pay for,” she said with a smirk that cost her a tip.

“You got that right,” I told her.

I had no choice but to take it one file, one document at a time. I started with Wendy’s e-mail files. She used a program that automatically downloaded her e-mail from her ISP’s server to her hard drive. That was the good news.

The bad news was she had thousands of e-mails stored, including the ones that promised her long-lasting erections, weight loss without dieting or exercise, and several from former high officials in Nigeria who wanted to split ten million dollars with her because she seemed like an honest American. I looked for e-mail with Colby’s name, even though he could have used a screen name different from his own. After an hour, I’d found a handful of innocuous messages confirming dinner plans and other dates.

Frustrated, I closed the e-mail folder and tried her Adobe files. There were hundreds of PDFs, some of them labeled with descriptive terms, many of them anonymous. I scrolled through them, clicking on one dead end after another. When I found a file titled “tax return,” I clicked on it.

The file contained a copy of her tax return from last year. She’d filed a Form 1040, not the 1040EZ that I would have expected for someone working a job one step above entry level at a commodity brokerage firm and who didn’t have enough deductions to itemize. Wendy’s W-2 income was thirty-six thousand.

I skimmed through the rest of her 1040 and understood why she hadn’t filed the EZ return. The reason was her eye-popping partnership income of $434,000. I blinked but the number didn’t change. I clicked through the rest of the pages to find her partnership tax return, my index finger twitching when I found the K-1. My daughter owned 12.5 percent of PEMA Partners. I started to shake and couldn’t stop.