Shakedown

Chapter Sixty-six

Credibility is the most valuable asset any suspect has. It can even be more valuable than innocence, as anyone who has spent half his life behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit will tell you. It comes from a lot of things, including demeanor, motive, opportunity, and means. It also comes from cooperation and the investigator’s ability to corroborate what the suspect says.

Credibility allows the suspect to be heard, to give shape and meaning to facts that, in other hands, would condemn rather than exonerate. I had a story to tell and the way I told it would mean more to Wendy than to me. I began by taking the?ash drive out of my pocket and setting it on the table.

“I didn’t take Wendy’s computer, but I did copy her hard drive onto this.”

Troy snatched it off the table, picked up the phone, and summoned a secretary.

“What’s on it?” Yates asked.

“I haven’t had a chance to look at much of it. There’s some routine e-mail between Wendy and Colby. The only thing of interest I saw is Wendy’s tax return from last year. She reported more than four hundred thousand in income from something called PEMA Partners.”

“Who or what is PEMA Partners?” Troy asked.

“I’m hoping you guys can figure that out. The only other partner I know of is Jill Rice. Her tax records are also on the?ash drive.”

“Isn’t she the one who turned her husband in for dealing drugs?” Yates asked.

“The same,” I told him, adding a quick summary of my conversations with Jill Rice about Colby’s purchase of her house and car.

Gina Tomkins, a secretary who had covered my bureaucratic backside more times than I could count, knocked and entered. She was a sturdily built, wide-bodied woman who’d raised five boys on her own and wasn’t about to be intimidated by Troy Clark.

“Copy this onto a hard drive and print everything that’s on it,” he told her, handing her the?ash drive. “If any of it is encrypted, get all the help you need to open it up.”

She nodded, gave me a wink, and left without speaking.

“What’s the connection between the Rice case and this one?” Yates asked.

“I assumed you knew that by now. I asked Ammara to get me the Rice file a few days ago. She told me that Troy had embargoed it. I figured he wanted to review it himself.” I glanced around the room. “Isn’t it in here somewhere?”

Yates’s disappointed-parent look turned into a narrow-eyed glare aimed at Troy, who shifted in his seat like he had diaper rash. Yates let him twist until Troy picked up the phone again and asked for the Rice file.

Yates only knew what Troy had already told him. Even if I told him the same thing, I knew that facts were like food- presentation counted for a lot. I started at the beginning when the FBI put me on the shelf. I told him about my visits back to Quindaro and freely confessed how I’d gained access to Thomas Rice at the penitentiary and used the same phony ID when I first questioned Jill Rice. I finished with Latrell Kelly’s death.

Yates didn’t move the entire time I spoke. As soon as I had finished, a wave of shakes ran through me. I closed my eyes. He still hadn’t moved when I opened them.

“You say that Jill Rice knew what her husband was doing,” Yates began, ignoring my condition. “And that he put assets in her name and had her file a separate tax return to protect her. Not that it would have protected her if you and your team had done a proper job tracing Rice’s assets. But your daughter doesn’t have that excuse.”

“Actually, she does,” I said. “I think Colby and Rice used PEMA to launder their drug money. I found out this morning that Colby and Wendy were secretly married last year.”

Yates leaned forward, dropping his chin, the worry in his voice almost enough to convince me that he was being sincere. “Jack, you have to know how this looks for Wendy.”

I nodded, ready to take what was coming, hoping that Colby was long gone by now.

“Yeah, I do. But not in the way you mean. You think she’s involved. I think she’s in trouble.”

“There’s not much difference from where I’m sitting.” Yates said.

“It makes all the difference. Wendy wanted Colby to quit the Bureau. She grew up in an FBI home and didn’t want to grow old in another one. She told me that Colby said he’d hit it big with some investments. He probably convinced her the money was clean and to prove his love for her, he put it all in her name. Only it turns out that the money was twice dirty. In the first place, it was drug money. In the second place, Colby stole it. The people he stole it from want to kill him, except he has an insurance policy.”

“Meaning he’s probably put everything he knows on paper and left it with someone who will deliver it to us if anything happens to him,” Yates said.

“That’s the way it usually works. Colby’s future former partners snatched Wendy and are using her to cancel Colby’s insurance. Trouble is Colby doesn’t care if they kill her.”

Troy bounded out of his chair and planted his hands on the table palms down, his arms rigid. “How in the hell do you know all that?”

“I saw Colby last night. He told me enough that I could piece the rest of it together.”

Troy reached across the table and grabbed my collar, pulling me out of my chair, our faces close enough that I could taste what he’d eaten for lunch.

“You had him and you let him go!”

I wrapped my hand around his wrist. “You can let go or I can break it. Doesn’t matter to me.”

We stared at each other until Yates interrupted.

“Troy,” he said. “Make up your mind.”

Troy let go and I gave him back his wrist. Yates nodded his approval.

“I’m waiting,” Yates said to me.

I ran through the rest of the story, telling them that I’d gone to Pete’s Place looking for Colby, that I’d seen Colby running from the Andrija house, and then confronted him on the playground. I finished with a description of my surveillance of Tanja and her brother and Tanja’s visit to her parents.

“Why did you let him go?” Yates asked.

I leveled my gaze at him and took a deep breath. “I started shaking so bad that I ended up on the ground. He got away before I could do anything about it.”

“You could have called it in. We’d have shut down Quindaro and the rest of the city. Probably caught him. By now, he could be anywhere.”

“The minute you pick Colby up, my daughter dies. They’ll assume he cashed in his insurance policy, which makes Wendy a liability instead of an asset.”

“Suppose the Andrija family is the aggrieved party. How’s it any different if we pick them up?” Yates asked.

“First one to get arrested makes the best deal. The Andrijas can give you anyone upstream of them plus Colby and they can give me Wendy. That gets them the best deal.”

Yates furrowed his eyebrows in a quick spasm in the same instant the corners of his mouth turned down. His micro expression was only a?icker but it was enough to pass judgment. He’d wait until this was all over to tell me I was through, but he’d made the decision. For now, he treated my explanation as if it was the most reasonable thing he’d heard all day, moving on with his next question.

“How does this all tie together?” he asked.

“Thomas Rice, Javy Ordonez, Marcellus Pearson, and Bodie Grant were all dealers. I think they had the same supplier. It could be the Andrijas or someone higher up the food chain. Troy was right, after all. There was a leak on my squad. It was Colby. He gave them information about our investigation which was worth as much as the drugs, maybe more.”

“Being right doesn’t make me feel any better,” Troy said.

“Everything worked fine until Jill Rice turned her husband in,” I said.

“Why didn’t Rice burn the rest of them to save his ass?” Troy asked.

“Rice was a businessman. His wife said he was good at it. He figured he’d take the time and have something to come back to. He and Colby made a deal to run some of the money through the purchase of Rice’s car and house. Colby told me that’s what he did with the money he stole. I’ll bet if you push Jill Rice hard enough, you’ll find out she was holding onto her husband’s money for when he got out.”

“She divorced him,” Troy said.

“Paperwork, ” I said. “Kept us from pushing. Rice was willing to keep his mouth shut and ride it out. Marcellus wouldn’t have done that. Our warrant for the surveillance camera was about to run out. We would have had to shut him down and that would have been it. Colby was supposed to kill Marcellus but Latrell got there first. Then they had to clean up the rest of the loose ends, starting with Thomas Rice.”

“The warden still can’t prove it wasn’t suicide,” Troy said.

“And Grisnik’s sources inside Leavenworth still say someone with a badge put a hit on Rice. Colby is the only one who fits that description who would have benefited from Rice’s death.”

“If Colby had Rice taken out, you figure him for the Ordonez hit, too?” Troy asked.

“Hard not to.” I explained my theory about how Colby could have followed Latrell, found Latrell’s gun, and later used it to kill Javy. “You find Bodie yet?” I asked. Troy shook his head.

“That’s some serious corporate reorganization,” Yates said. “Take out the people making you all the money. You would have to replace them with new people who are loyal to you and who can control their territories.”

It was an expensive way to do business. But it proved my point about the importance of kicking these things around, talking out loud until the holes in the theories were either patched up or grew too big. I got up and paced in the center of the rectangle, studying the whiteboards, stopping when I came to the list of witnesses.

“There’s another possibility,” I said, as one thread suddenly tied together with another.

“What’s that?” Yates asked.

“Retirement. Once things started to unravel, maybe they decided it wasn’t worth the risk anymore. Time to take the money and run.”

“So who are we talking about?” Troy asked.

I rose from my chair and walked to the whiteboard and drew a circle around Tanja and Nick Andrija’s names.

“Them?” Yates asked.

“Yeah,” I said. Then I wrote their parents’ names on the board, Petar and Maja, and underlined the first two letters of each. Together they spelled PEMA.

“Them.”