The Bliss Factor (36 page)

“Fine,” she said, “but I’m expecting a progress report before lunch. And if you don’t call me, I’m coming back here to find out why.”

“I thought you trusted me.”

“I do. It’s the bad guys I don’t trust.”

 

 

CONN TOOK KEMP INTO THE WOODS, FEELING LIKE a fool when he tied him to a tree.

“What are we doing out here?” Kemp asked him, clearly grasping at straws since he knew exactly what they were doing out there.

“Just making sure we’re far enough from the activity in the Grove so we won’t attract attention when the yelling starts.”

“Yelling?”

“You said you weren’t going to tell me anything. That means I’ll have to persuade you, and I’m not talking about dinner and drinks.”

“W-what are you going to do?”

Conn bent to his left ankle and removed a knife from the sheath there. It wasn’t a big knife, but then nothing in life was about size, it was about what you did with what you had. He had no intention of actually torturing Kemp. The trick was to look like you were capable of torturing someone. A little crazy didn’t hurt, either.

Testing the edge of the knife on his biceps got both points across. Kemp started to babble, talking about how he’d worked at an auto plant for twenty years before he lost his job, staring, white-faced, at the thin line of blood trickling down Conn’s arm.

“I don’t have any other skills,” Kemp said, stopping to swallow convulsively.

“So you became mob muscle.”

“Mob?”

“Mafia.”

Kemp’s mouth dropped open, and if his eyes widened any farther he’d be able to see behind him without turning his head.

“I take it that’s a surprise to you.”

“Harry never said . . . He kept the identity of the boss a secret.”

“Doesn’t mean you’re completely ignorant.”

“But if I tell you—” His voice dropped to a whisper, his eyes darting around the woods. “—won’t they kill me and cut out my tongue?”

“Maybe you should worry about what I’m going to do to you.”

Kemp’s eyes shifted to Conn’s bloody biceps, but he clammed up anyway.

Conn leaned into his line of vision. “Let me put it this way: I’m going to find out who’s behind this one way or another. You make it harder on me, and when I do find them I’ll make sure they think you fingered them.”

“But I don’t—I only drove the car.”

Not much to work with, but it was all he had. “Tell me where you went.”

“Here mostly.”

Conn cast his eyes to the heavens. “Where else?”

“We followed you. That chick’s house, the one you were with. Mackinac Island.”

Conn paced away, then back, something nagging at the edge of his mind. And then it hit him. “You just said you followed us, but that day at the mall—”

“Oh, that . . . We ran into you coming out of that parking structure.”

“Why were you in the parking structure to begin with?”

“Harry had to pick up a check to pay for the glass in his car. The glass your girlfriend got broken by luring us to that union hall.”

“Did you see what business Harry went into?”

Kemp shook his head. “He had me take him to the top floor and told me to let the car idle by the elevator since it wasn’t running so hot.”

The top floor
. Kemp kept bitching, but Conn had checked out of the conversation, his brain working a mile a minute, culling bits and pieces out of his memory from the past week. Rae wondering how Harry had followed them from the parking structure attached to her firm’s building to the mall. After she’d taken the elevator to the top floor. Her boss asking her where she was, what she was doing, and who she was doing it with, when all he should have been interested in was whether or not her work was getting done. And Harry and company in that same parking structure, Kemp letting the car idle on the top floor? That took it beyond coincidence. Especially when he recalled Annie wondering how the mastermind had found out about their group.

“Shut up,” he snapped at Kemp, pissed at himself because if he’d been in his right mind he’d have made the connection that day. And sure, it might be far-fetched that a CPA was behind the counterfeiting, and he didn’t have anything but coincidence and supposition to go on, but it made too much sense to ignore. He considered calling Mike to run it by him, but he knew Mike would tell him not to break an ankle jumping to conclusions. And he couldn’t take the time because Rae was probably sitting at her desk, in the office of the head counterfeiter.

Hell, finding her sitting at her desk would be a relief. All he had to do was get there.

ANNIE AND NELSON HAD DRIVEN RAE TO HER
house to get her files and change into something work-appropriate. It felt good to be in a skirt and suit jacket again, to be sitting behind her desk. Being able to concentrate would have been a nice bonus, but she was fighting her way through the brain bounce without dwelling on her relationship with Conn. It helped to focus on the bright side, which, surprisingly, wasn’t all that difficult to find.

The past week had been a revelation—not that she wanted to be chased around by homicidal goofballs—but, in a weird way, she’d kind of enjoyed it. Sure, there’d been fear, but there’d been excitement, too, and she could stand a little of that in her life. Rae had no clear idea what that meant, but she could say with certainty that a partnership with P.I.G. wasn’t it. In the meanwhile, though, she had a job to do. Conn might not need her, but her clients did.

She finished putting her files away and got down to work. Having a goal always settled her. Step one was getting her clients’ quarterly taxes done, and then she’d move on to step two. Step two was TBD. To Be Determined. And figuring that out, she decided was going to be half the fun.

Still, when her cell rang, she pounced on it. Flying without a net was still a new, and not entirely comfortable, concept. “Conn?” she said, plugging her other ear because she was having a hard time hearing him.

His voice was muffled, but she thought she heard him yell, “Shut the fuck up,” followed by a few seconds of silence before he came back on the line, loud and clear. “I want you out of there,” he said.

“I can’t. My parents went to the mall to ‘wallow in American consumerism,’ as my dad put it. Mom planned to drag him around all morning, and I promised I’d get one of the assistants to drop me there so I could meet them at the food court for lunch, which isn’t for another hour. Why do you want me to leave now?”

And then she made the leap. “You think one of the partners here is a counterfeiter? Or all of them? Not possible, especially Ibold, since he’s about eighty years old.” But she listened to him repeat what he’d gotten from Kemp, and she felt a chill snake down her spine. It could be Putnam or Greenblatt.

“Did you tell them about your parents?” Conn asked her.

“Not right away, but I wear things made from my father’s cloth . . . blouses, scarves. I couldn’t tell you the specific date, or even what piece of clothing it was, but I remember an assistant asked me once where I shopped, and I told her my father made textiles, using organic dyes. And what the assistants know, the partners know.”

“Right. You have to leave.”

“Because they know about my blouses? That’s not proof.”

“We can worry about proof later. I’m calling your parents—”

“No. It’ll only raise questions if they show up here again. I’ll leave.”

“Promise me,” Conn said.

“I promise I’ll leave,” Rae replied without hesitation. She just didn’t say when.

 

 

IF ONE OF HER BOSSES WAS BEHIND THE COUNTERFEITING, Rae needed to know, and while she was at it, she could collect the evidence Conn would need to prove it. Of course, it also meant she’d gotten her parents into this mess, not the other way around. But she’d deal with that when she had to.

Ibold never came into the office anymore. Putnam had gone to a meeting downtown, and Greenblatt had taken the morning off to handle some personal business. The assistants had scattered as soon as the bosses left the building. She didn’t blame them. They were kept on a pretty tight leash, especially this time of the year; the only break they got besides a half-hour lunch was when the partners were away.

Rae picked up a couple of files, just in case, and went to Putnam’s office, slipping inside without being seen. She locked the door behind her and dropped the files. None of his desk drawers were locked, neither was his file cabinet. She rifled through them, careful not to leave any sign of a disturbance. She found nothing indicating he was involved in a criminal enterprise. The top of his desk was immaculate, but she checked behind his computer screen, on the sides of the hard drive, under his blotter, lifting his keyboard in the process.
Bingo
.

All the computers in the firm were hooked into a central hard drive system, the V drive, the virtual vault where every client’s financial records were kept. Some of those files, the ones for their biggest clients, were password protected. A small square of paper was taped to the underside of Putnam’s keyboard. On it were all his passwords.

Rae jotted them down on one of the file folders she’d brought with her and hurried back to her desk, worried more about speed than anyone seeing her come out of Putnam’s office. She signed out of her user ID and signed in under his, opening the protected files and searching through them as thoroughly as she could with one eye on the clock. She found nothing unusual, no files for clients she didn’t recognize—nothing in those files raised a red flag.

Even Putnam’s personal accounts were clean, as far as she could tell. The balances were impressive, but she could tie his income to the firm’s income with no trouble. She ran through the firm’s books again, and stuck with her first assessment. Profits were down year after year, the firm investment fund had really taken a beating on the stock market, and considering that she knew most of P.I.G.’s business, it was clear that Putnam wasn’t laundering counterfeit money through his legitimate operations. Which made no sense.

She could understand why he didn’t wash all the money through P.I.G.’s accounts. There had to be thousands, and in the current economy—and especially in Michigan, one of the hardest hit states—it would raise IRS eyebrows if their business wasn’t suffering. But some of that counterfeit money should have been funneled through the firm; it was just too damn convenient not to do it.

She sneaked into Morris Greenblatt’s office, but he was more careful with his passwords, so she was stymied there. All the clients’ files were in the vault . . . in the vault. She got to her feet and ran into Mr. Putnam’s office again, retrieved a key from his top desk drawer, and took it to a room next door, also called the vault. Depending on who you talked to, the physical vault was either a small storage room or a big closet. Since all the current work was done on computer, it wasn’t used much anymore except as an archive for the pre-electronic and current printed records they had to keep on hand in case of audit.

Several aisles of storage shelves filled the room, four high, packed with twenty-five years’ worth of boxes. Time was short, but she fought the urge to tear into the first row, asking herself instead where she would’ve put something she wanted to keep hidden but lay her hands on quickly. Not the bottom or top shelves, not the aisle with the most recent records. She eased down the narrow passage along the wall, going all the way to the back and working her way forward.

She didn’t do a box-by-box search, just looked for the unusual. She found it in the third aisle from the back, a box that, unlike all the others, wasn’t dust-covered. She opened it and on top lay an old-fashioned ledger, bound in heavy brown cardboard and filled with green ledger pages. The entries were from 1977, but when she lifted it to put it aside, a little rectangular USB flash drive fell out of the spine. And her heart began to pound.

She ran back to her office and shut the door, dropping the ledger she hadn’t realized she’d brought along on the floor next to her chair, and tossing the drive on her desk like a hot potato. She stared at it for a full minute, and when she could breathe again, when her stomach dropped out of her throat, she plugged the drive into her computer, put her hand on the wireless mouse on its under-the-desktop shelf, and accessed the drive. Up popped a password prompt.

If she’d had to guess between the two active partners, she’d have pegged Putnam for the guilty party over Greenblatt any day, if only because Morris Greenblatt had always been nice to her, and Putnam didn’t have a friendly bone in his body. What surprised her was that none of Putnam’s passwords worked. So she tried them again. And struck out again. She blew out a breath, glancing at the cell phone sitting on her desk—the cell phone with Conn’s number in it. She didn’t figure he was any more of a computer expert than she was, but he had a lot more experience at this espionage stuff. And he’d tell her to get her backside out of there.

Conn was right, but she couldn’t walk away, even with that USB drive in her hand. The authorities would certainly be able to get around the password lock, but as soon as the drive was found missing all other evidence would be destroyed. Rae wanted to make damn sure the guilty party went down, and since her career of choice involved balancing accounts to the penny, and she’d spent many a night doing just that, she put her faith in her own expertise, making absolutely sure she had proof of who was behind the counterfeiting before she walked out the door and lost her last opportunity.

Putnam’s usual passwords weren’t working, and she didn’t have Greenblatt’s. And maybe she didn’t need them. She tried the obvious tie-ins:
counterfeit
,
Renaissance
,
mastermind
, nothing worked. She sat back again, thought of Conn, then put him and everything else out of her mind, her eyes landing on the ledger sitting next to her chair. She stared at it absently, not really seeing it until she ran out of other possibilities. And then it struck her that something didn’t fit.