The 6:20 Man

Chapter 56

The next morning Devine called in sick and then met Montgomery at the train station. She was wearing jeans and a long-sleeved shirt and black ankle boots. He passed her his spare helmet, she climbed on, and they set off for Connecticut.

When they arrived at the address, they saw that Elaine Nestor’s cottage was small but quaint, with gray cedar shake siding, white trim, and beds filled with colorful summer flowers. Hers was the only house on the macadam rural road.

When they knocked on the door a woman answered. She was in her late forties with graying hair cut short on the sides with one long bang in the front and black-rimmed glasses on a chain around her neck. She looked more like a caricature of a librarian than a hard-charging financial journalist digging up dirt on the wealthy and powerful. But her features were alert and her eyes bright and probing.

“Elaine Nestor?”

“Yes. Who are you?” she said. He saw a phone in one hand and a wooden mallet in the other. But when she saw Montgomery standing next to him, she relaxed just a bit.

“My name is Travis Devine. This is my friend, Michelle. I work at Cowl and Co—”

That got the door slammed right in his face.

Should’ve seen that coming, idiot.

He glanced at Montgomery, whose expression said pretty much the same thing.

He called out, “I read your article on Brad Cowl. The one that got your career torpedoed. I just wanted to tell you that you were right.”

The door slowly opened, but Nestor’s look remained suspicious. “Why are you here? What do you want?”

“Have you read about the murders?”

“Of course I have. And what do you mean I was right?”

Devine had prepared what he was about to say on the ride up. “I think Cowl is running the biggest money-laundering scheme in the history of the world. And would you like your career back?”

Nestor stared at him for an uncomfortably long moment.

“Would you both like some coffee?” she said brightly.

Three cups of coffee later Nestor was still shaking her head. “ ‘Area 51’? Really?”

“Really,” said Devine. “As crazy as it sounds.”

“It doesn’t sound crazy. People will do anything to make money. But you took a huge risk doing what you did.”

He looked at Montgomery, who was fingering her coffee cup and looking pensively out the window into the rear garden. “I had incentive enough,” Devine said.

Nestor said, “You asked me about Brad Cowl, and I told you what I thought. He’s a slick operator and can talk a good game, but if he knows the difference between an LBO and HBO, I’ll run naked down the street. And he did inherit a lot of money and he blew it on coke and women, and shady investment types who took him to the cleaners, and I have the receipts to prove it. He’s a front man, plain and simple, and I wrote all about that in my article. And then I got my ass handed to me and basically run out of town on a rail. It’s just history repeating itself. Anyone who had the temerity to question Bernie Madoff’s guaranteed returns got the same treatment for decades.”

“Nobody wanted to pop the illusion,” interjected Montgomery. “It’s the Emperor’s New Clothes syndrome.”

Nestor eyed her. “Nobody likes to admit they were suckered. It’s easier on the psyche to keep living the lie.”

“But not easier on the wallet,” said Devine. “It has to come to a head. Although Cowl is not running a Ponzi scheme. I think what he’s doing is actually a lot worse. It goes right to this country’s national security interests.”

Nestor nodded. “I’m sure you read about the Panama Papers and, more recently, the Pandora Papers. It’s no secret to those in the industry that rich people from all over the world have been stashing trillions in opaque trusts that run from generation to generation, in perpetuity, and they don’t pay a dime of tax on any of it, ever. A lot of it is illegal money from cartels, terrorist organizations, deposed dictators who have emptied treasuries, ransomware players. Creditors can’t touch it, and the people whose money it really is can never recover it.”

“I read that South Dakota is sitting on over six hundred billion dollars of that trust money,” said Devine. “It creates a few hundred jobs in the state, but it sucked the lifeblood out of the places where that money originated. And Wyoming has something called the ‘Cowboy Cocktail’ that has even more privacy layers.”

Nestor nodded. “You can be the trust’s grantor and the beneficiary, and the people running the trust have no clue who the real owners are. They just see account numbers. You’ve got do-nothing descendants who haven’t worked a day in their lives and they have their own jets courtesy of these tax-robbing schemes.”

Devine added, “And you have some high-and-mighty politicians screaming about working-class joes pulling three jobs getting a few hundred extra bucks a month in government benefits, because they think it’ll make them lazy.”

Nestor said, “From the scale you mentioned, I could imagine it being Russian oligarchs and Saudi princes, dictators who have raided national treasuries, crime syndicates, drug cartels, your run-of-the-mill billionaires with criminal sides to their businesses, or legit ones who just want to offload money to avoid taxes and acquire more wealth surreptitiously and then pass it down from generation to generation without the taxman getting a dime.”

Devine said, “But there’s more to it than that. This money is not sitting in stock and bond portfolios. From what I saw, they’re buying huge chunks of this country with it.”

Nestor shook her head. “Can you imagine if the Taliban or Iran or North Korea or Russia were getting cash flow from investments in this country to fund their terrorist activities? Kim Jong-un a landlord in New York? An Iranian ayatollah owning hog farms in Kansas? Or Putin having oil fields in Texas? That would be the scandal of the century.”

“How do you think this all started?” asked Devine. “I know that Cowl left the country over two decades ago and was gone for a while.”

“He had burned through all his inheritance by then, and he had some personal scandals he was dealing with. Over twenty years ago, when I’d only been an investigative journalist for a few years, I traced a meeting that Cowl had with some shady people in the Seychelles, but then the trail went cold. Then he dropped off the radar for about a year or so. He might have been in Asia or eastern Europe, at least those were my best guesses. Next, the man waltzes back into New York, buys and rehabs that skyscraper, starts his investment group, hires all sorts of pricey talent, suddenly has a client list that the biggest players on Wall Street would covet, and boom, he’s the talk of the town. He wasn’t even twenty-five years old.”

“And no one really questioned that?” said Montgomery. “That seems crazy.”

Nestor said, “The money folks will forgive a lot if the cash keeps rolling in. Same goes for the government. Cowl’s operations bring millions to the city and state in taxes. He employs lots of people, and they also pay taxes and spend money there. He greases the palms of politicians he needs to. He gives liberally to charities. Always good for a funny one-liner or an ‘expert’ diatribe on a business show. Lives life fast and hard but backs up the talk with results, and he can afford an army of lawyers. Who’s going after a guy like that? Hell, I’m living proof of that.” Nestor looked at Montgomery. “Now, this signaling technique using a bikini is intriguing, and unique.”

“Not the words I would use for it,” said Montgomery, looking embarrassed.

“I actually thought it was cumbersome,” interjected Devine. “It just seems like sending an email would be a lot more efficient.”

“I think I can shed some light on that,” said Nestor. “About twelve years ago Cowl came really, really close to being indicted by the Justice Department and the State of New York for some financial shenanigans. I mean huge fines, delicensing, and possible prison time. They got on to him by electronic eavesdropping. Phone, computer, associates’ electronics. He used his money and influence and a fleet of high-priced attorneys and calling in chits from political pals to get out of the jam, but—”

“—but it would make the man paranoid about relying on those types of communications again,” interjected Devine. “He actually mentioned to me something along the lines of what you just said. He told me for the important stuff, he always went analog.”

“And let me tell you something else. Anne Comely? I spent years trying to track her down. She doesn’t exist. I’m sure of it.”

“I watched an old interview where Cowl said she might just represent an idea or something like that,” said Devine.

“Well, maybe now we have our answer: It represents a criminal enterprise.” She eyed Devine over her coffee cup. “So, what will you do now?”

“Keep following the money. And anything we do find goes right to you for your exclusive. I want to make sure you come out of this with your career and good reputation back.”

“I appreciate that very much, Mr. Devine. But what about the murders? Do you think these two women found out what was going on and that’s why they were killed?”

“Ewes knew about the Locust Group. Stamos was her lover and was also sleeping with Cowl. He might have let something slip over pillow talk, and Ewes and later Stamos followed up on it. And they were both murdered, maybe as a result.”

“Financial crimes are one thing, killing people is totally something else.”

“I don’t think Cowl is calling the shots here, not really. I’ve run into some goons who decided my time on earth was up. Luckily, they were wrong. But it was strongly intimated that Cowl is not running this show.”

“If Brad Cowl is involved with the sorts of people it looks like he is, this will become even more dangerous,” said Nestor.

“I’m actually sort of counting on it,” said Devine.