Shell Game (6 page)

“Of course they will,” she said, turning again to the street. “But what about the campaign to raise money for the children's hospital? We're donating all our time on that, Alan. Will the new owners live up to our commitment? That's important. There are a lot of sick kids out there who need a good facility. We were making a difference. And all the other charity work we did at G-cubed. What's going to happen to that?”

“Maybe they'll be community minded.”

“I shouldn't have to sell my company. I mean that for a lot more reasons than just the money we took out of G-cubed.”

He rubbed her shoulders and neck, feeling the knots in her muscles. “No, you shouldn't.” What else could he say? G-cubed had gone on the block four days ago and a smaller, almost unknown firm out of Los Angeles had snapped it up in less than forty-eight hours. A few details remained to be ironed out, but the deal was done. Thirteen-five for the company, and after selling expenses, they would net about twelve-eight. That left them two hundred thousand dollars short on the loan to the bank. The house would have to go.

“I talked to the Realtor this morning,” Alan said. “He'll be over tonight to list the house. That okay with you?”

She nodded, almost imperceptibly. “What price does he want to put it on at?”

“One-point-four-five. He feels we will get one-point-four million. That nets us about what we expected. After covering a two hundred thousand shortfall with the bank, we should have about seven hundred thousand left over.”

“Well, that's not enough to buy a place in the city. We'll have to look at San Mateo or one of the other suburbs.”

He continued to rub her neck, the knots diminishing under his touch. “That's not so bad.”

Silence crept through the room, and they both watched a woman walking her dog on the far sidewalk. She chastised him for peeing on a bag of garbage left by the curb and Alan could feel his wife's body shake slightly as she chuckled at the absurdity of it. At that moment, the woman's greatest challenge in life was to get her dog not to pee on someone's garbage. The dog only cared about emptying his bladder on something that smelled good.

“Life should be so simple,” Taylor said quietly, as though reading his mind.

“It will be someday. Just not right now.”

She glanced at her watch and stood up. It was nine-thirty. “I need to go. I asked the staff to be in the boardroom for ten o'clock.”

He kissed her and held her tight for a minute, then let go. She left quietly, locking the door behind her. Her car was parked at the curb, and she turned the alarm off and slipped in behind the steering wheel. The Audi didn't feel as sporty today, but she knew it was just her. The car was simply metal and glass, plastic and wires. It didn't care who drove it. For that matter, she thought, money didn't care who owned it. Right now, Edward Brand owned a whole bunch of her money. She floored the car and felt some of her tension melt away as the high-performance vehicle shot ahead. The tachometer red-lined before she reached for the gear shift. When she finally up-shifted, the car responded and the speedometer crossed over seventy. She eased off the gas and brought her speed down to the legal limit. Somehow, that simple exercise made her feel better.

Taylor reached her office and parked in her assigned spot. Her entire staff was waiting in the boardroom when she arrived. It was five after ten. She took her place at the head of the table and had a quick look about. All eyes were focused on her, waiting. Waiting to know whether they still had jobs.

“The company has been sold,” she said. “But no one in this room will be let go. That was the first condition of the sale. Everyone is still employed.” There was a silent, collective sigh in the room. She could feel it more than hear it. “I've got all the details of the sale, including when it will be effective. I'll get into those in a few minutes, but first, I want you to know that I will not be staying on. In any capacity. This is it for me.”

There were groans of dissention, but she raised her hand and her staff quieted. She was closer to tears than anyone in the room could have imagined. “It was my choice,” she said. “I can't continue to work inside the organization that we, as a team, built from scratch. Not with someone watching over my shoulder.”

The meeting continued for another hour as Taylor detailed what the new owners would like wrapped up before they took over. They were heavily tied to the West Coast but had no presence in San Francisco. With the client base G-cubed had built and the office space and staff already in place, the deal worked perfectly for them. Thirteen-point-five million worked well for Taylor.

She finished her speech and spent another half hour hugging everyone and wishing them the best. She left her personal items in her office. Removing everything was going to be painful, and she would rather do it when there was no staff present. She pulled up in front of the house and parked behind a dark car that she'd seen before. She just couldn't place it. The moment she entered her house, she remembered. Sam Morel's voice carried down the hall to where she was removing her shoes. When she entered the kitchen, she saw Morel and her husband sitting at the table. Alan rose when he saw her.

“How did it go?” he asked.

“They took it okay,” Taylor said. “They're glad no one is getting laid off.” She smiled at Morel and checked her watch. Five to twelve. “Good morning, Detective.”

“Ms. Simons,” he said, rising.

She waved him back into his chair and sat down at the table. “Please call me Taylor.”

“Sam,” he said.

Alan rejoined them at the table. “Sam was just going over the latest news from the FBI and the DA's office.”

“We appreciate you taking the time to keep us up to date,” Taylor said.

Morel nodded, then cleared his throat. “I was telling Alan that the FBI has identified eight centers Brand and his colleagues targeted. The operation in San Francisco was one of the eight.”

“The others were all in major cities?” Taylor asked.

“Yes. New York, Dallas, Denver and the like. Nothing under a million people and all cities with vibrant economies. The sting was the same in each city. They used the NewPro name, told people that they would be revitalizing old products and gave each investor a copy of the false prospectus. From what we can gather so far, they ripped off about two hundred million dollars.”

“So it's not just us,” Alan said. “There are lots of people out there in the same predicament we're in.”

Sam nodded. “I have a list of the victims. Some can easily afford the loss, others were hit very hard. Brand didn't care. He took whatever money he could get his hands on. Hawkins gave me a detailed report on NewPro's accounting. Once they had the corporate accounts set up they established lines of credit with suppliers and pushed most of those dates to September fifteenth. Then they packed up a week before that and skipped out on the payments. Some of their suppliers wouldn't extend the dates that far and all those companies were paid up to date.”

“How much money did they invest in this?” Alan asked. “I mean, setting something like this up isn't cheap.”

“No, it's not. The FBI tally on what Brand's crew paid out is somewhere around eight million dollars. That includes paying their office staff, who had absolutely no idea what was going on and covering up-front costs like the two hundred thousand they paid to G-cubed for your initial setup fees on the advertising campaign. They were well financed. And that's got Hawkins and his guys thinking that maybe these guys have done this before. They're looking in their history databases for similar scams.” Morel brightened for a moment. “There's one thing that might be helpful,” he said. “The FBI office in New York might have something.”

“What?” Taylor asked, sitting forward in her chair.

“Don't know. Hawkins said they had a source that was feeding them information, but he wouldn't elaborate.”

“I'll keep my fingers crossed,” Taylor said. “We need some sort of a break.” Alan grasped her hand.

“We've finished interviewing the staff who were working at NewPro,” he said. “We did it jointly with the FBI, and we've identified two other men beside Edward Brand who were involved. The rest of the staff look to be innocent dupes.”

“Who are the other two?” Alan asked.

“Ben Wright and Roger Tate. Do you know them?”

Alan and Taylor both nodded. “Wright was VP—Western Region Sales, and Tate was the financial guy. Brand introduced him as a Certified Public Accountant.”

“Well, we've accounted for everyone but them. They're ghosts, like Brand. No one living at their addresses, no mail, no trace of either man. We suspect they kept an address just for show, but that all three were living together somewhere else. Where, we have no idea.”

“So the entire office, with the exception of these three guys, all thought NewPro was a legitimate business,” Taylor said.

“It appears that way.” Morel sipped his coffee and continued. “Fraud, or white-collar crime or whatever you want to call it, is out of control. The FBI has an entire division, the White-Collar Crime Investigation Team, set up to monitor fraud and money laundering through the Caribbean. It's not just drug money flowing through the Bahamas and the Caymans and all the other Islands. More and more it's money from fraud that's being deposited into the banks. Since it's not drug money, the bankers are more accommodating on stretching or breaking the rules.”

“Why don't they stop it?” Alan asked. “We've got the Securities and Exchange Commission regulating publicly traded stocks. Why can't something be done to control private corporations?”

Morel shook his head. “Computers changed everything. It used to be that in order to pass a bad check, a fraud artist would have to physically move into an address, search the public records for someone about his or her age who had died, assume the identity by ordering a birth certificate and get a driver's license once the proof of birth arrived in the mail. Then they would go to the bank, open an account and order checks with their address on them. They'd wait for the checks to be printed and mailed out, then they'd go on a spending spree. Now, with computers and the Internet, they simply place an order with a firm that prints checks and have them sent to a P.O. box. Turnaround time is less than a week, and they don't need an address. I don't know if any of you saw the movie
Catch Me If You Can
, with Leonardo DiCaprio, but one of the scams they showed in the movie still works just fine. Say someone wants to write a bunch of bad checks in New York State. They take the checks and modify one number on the routing numbers the banks use to designate the Federal Reserve Bank in that region. By changing two to twelve on the routing number, the checks are sent to Hawaii for processing rather than New York. That buys them another two weeks. When the checks finally start to come back to the bank, they've scammed thousands and thousands of dollars from merchants and the bank and have moved on to the next set of checks they ordered. The losses to the banks are in the hundreds of millions of dollars. That's just checks. There are hundreds of other frauds going on out there every day. We're talking billions of dollars in fraud every year. Yet for some reason, everyone seems to think this is acceptable. It's all Greek to me.”

“How do you catch them?” Alan asked.

Morel shrugged. “Usually we don't. The criminal has to make a mistake to get caught. If they're smart about what they're doing, keep moving and don't get too greedy, they get away with it. In fact, most of the small ones just get written off. It's the big ones, like this, that get the attention.”

“That's not good news,” Taylor said.

Morel finished his coffee and set the mug on the table. “We might have a line on some of the computers they used. And sometimes there is still usable information on the drives. Sometimes. Usually they wipe the drives clean by writing a series of zeroes over the data.”

Taylor nodded. “Kelly told me about that,” she said. Both men looked at her. “Kelly Kramer, he's my computer specialist at G-cubed. Well,
was
my computer specialist. He took some kind of Master's program in some sort of high-technology crime investigation from some college in Arlington.”

“He's working for an advertising firm?” Morel asked. “What's with that?”

“He was involved with some woman, and she wanted to move to San Francisco. When he followed her out here, he needed a job. I was the first one to make him an offer. He's great with computers and CAD, and he loved the job. So he stayed.”

Morel scratched his head thoughtfully. Jamie was an asset when it came to dredging information off a wiped hard drive, but Jamie wasn't always reliable. There were times when he was AWOL. It would be wise to keep Taylor Simons's computer specialist as a backup. “Maybe we could use him,” Sam said. “We're run off our feet just trying to keep up with all the fraud that's happening. We've got a hiring freeze on. It's all about money these days. Anyway, one of my sources has a line on a batch of computers that just came on the resale market. I'm meeting with him later today.”

Alan managed a slight smile. “Well, good luck. Any news these days is good news. It's been over a week since they took off with our money. I don't imagine the trail gets any warmer with time.”

“No. It's not like a murder investigation where time is often crucial, but the longer Brand and his crew have to settle in somewhere, the worse it is for us.”

“If the trail goes cold . . .” Taylor let the sentence die off. She didn't have to finish. The money had disappeared into a black hole, and that hole was closing.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

Alicia Walker glanced over her shoulder. Two men were about eighty feet behind her and matching her pace. She ducked into an alley and sprinted fifty feet to an overflowing Dumpster, crouching low in the shadows. She could feel the pressure of the government-issue Glock pistol against her back. It felt good.