And since Devine had barely eaten any of his lunch eight hours earlier and no breakfast, he said, “Thank you, sir.”
Food was brought and the men began to eat.
Devine took about five minutes filling Campbell in on what he had found on the fifty-first floor and how Michelle Montgomery had helped him.
“Sounds like she would make a good operative,” said Campbell.
Probably better than me, thought Devine. “There’s bad news, though. The camera feed was working great. But on the train ride in this morning, the whole thing shut down.”
“What?” said Campbell sharply.
“I was checking the phone constantly, to make sure it was all good. And it was until my ride into the city.”
“They must have found the camera.”
“I don’t think so, sir. If they had, why not remove the camera? I can still see inside the place if it ever starts back up.”
“Well, forward what you have to me,” said Campbell.
“It’s a lot of data. It won’t fit in an email.”
Campbell made a call. A minute later a man entered the room. Devine showed him what he had. The man arranged for a secure file transfer onto a laptop and then left.
Campbell said, “I’ll get my people working on it immediately. And, by the way, why have you waited this long to report in?” he added gruffly.
“That was the other thing I’ve yet to tell you.” He went on to inform him about the NYPD detectives meeting him outside the office early that morning to tell him that Jennifer Stamos had been murdered.
“I’ve been preoccupied with that all day,” said Devine. “But there’s something else.” He showed Campbell the untraceable emails he’d received.
Campbell looked at them and said, “If this is the killer, he’s targeting you for some reason. Any ideas on that?”
“No, not really.”
“Do you need us to try and trace them?”
“I have someone working on it who’s making progress.”
“Your hacker friend?”
“No, someone even better.”
“Still, forward them to me and I’ll put my people on it. Another set of eyes never hurts.”
Devine did so.
Campbell said, “We’ll have our forensic accounting people go over the surveillance footage, of course. But you have your MBA. What do you make of it so far?”
“Enormous amounts of money coming in from what looks to be foreign sources, and enormous amounts of money going out. Locust Group is one recipient. They own the Lombard Theater, on Broadway, and Michelle Montgomery’s walk-up in SoHo, and the brownstone on the Upper East Side that Christian Chilton lives in. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. There could be thousands, tens of thousands of properties and assets being purchased.”
“You said foreign. Can you tell the precise sources of the funds coming in?” asked Campbell.
“Numbered accounts, maybe Swiss, maybe Bahamas, maybe Chad. Offshore platforms, the routing is a labyrinth. It’ll take an army of your forensics accountants to unravel it. There were also what looked to be transfers of cryptocurrency of various types. This is definitely a global scenario.”
Campbell tapped his fish with his fork. “So what do you think is going on there? Money laundering?”
“The obvious answer, of course, would be yes. But in the world of modern finance, having an automated system like this in place to buy all sorts of assets and transferring money all over the globe could be completely legit. Speed is one’s friend in this arena, and lots of firms do things similar to this, although not with near the same velocity and scale.”
“Do you really think it’s legit?” asked Campbell.
“Except for two things, I would tell you I’m not sure.”
“What are those two things?”
“Sara Ewes and Jennifer Stamos being murdered. That is obviously not something that typically happens in connection with big investment firms doing these sorts of transactions. So hopefully it will be enough to take them down, right?”
He looked at Campbell; the man didn’t seem overly confident.
“What is it?” asked Devine.
“There’s the matter of proof.”
“What I got—”
“—is inadmissible, Devine. Fruit of the tainted tree.”
“But I’m a civilian.”
“Any competent defense lawyer would argue that you had been effectively deputized by the government, and, indeed, used a piece of specialized surveillance equipment provided by the federal government. We won’t have a legal leg to stand on.”
“I guess not,” conceded Devine.
“But there are perhaps ways to work around that.”
“I sure as hell hope so. What did you learn about Hancock, the imposter in NYPD detective clothing?”
“We can’t confirm this yet, of course, but my sources told me it sounds an awful lot like a chap named Eric Bartlett. He’s a former CIA operative. Left government service about eight years ago. He’s popped up here and there working for some unsavory types. But he was too slippery to catch and hold. He’s previously pulled impersonations like this for different clients.”
“Well, hopefully we can put an end to those impersonations, and to him. Because I don’t want to run into that guy again if I don’t have to.”
When Devine got home later that night, Tapshaw’s light was out, but Speers’s light was on. He knocked on her door.
“Yes?”
“It’s Travis, got a minute?”
She opened the door and eyed him appraisingly. “Jill told me about the mugging and your warnings to her — to all of us. How bad was it?”
“Could have been worse.”
“Only it wasn’t a mugging, was it?” said Speers.
“It was the guy who was pretending to be NYPD, and a pair of thugs. They had guns and knives. That’s how I got this scratch.” He held up his hand.
“Impressive you got away alive, then,” she said coolly.
“More luck than not.”
“I doubt that. The Army taught you well.”
He looked over her shoulder at the stack of books. “How’s the studying coming?”
“It’s coming. Torts are easy. Criminal law is harder.”
“That’s what all the criminals say,” quipped Devine.
“I’ve seen the news. Jennifer Stamos is dead.”
“Yes.”
“Was she the one who came here to visit you the other night?”
“Yes.”
“And you told me she was having an affair with Brad Cowl and you had proof of it.”
“Yes.”
“That does not look good, Travis. For you.”
“I didn’t kill Stamos, Helen. Why would I?”
“You keep lobbing legal softballs at me. Your motive is she decided to call your blackmail bluff and threatened to expose you. So you silenced her. Do you have an alibi?”
“No, but I found out that Cowl got called out at just around the time she died. And now he’s pulled a disappearing act. So either he killed her, or else he found the body, called the police, and went into hiding.”
Speers said, “Maybe he killed her and called the police.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Guilt, or thinking it might help him somehow. People under stress do strange things.”
He looked over her shoulder at the pile of books again. “Well, I’ll let you get back to it.”
As he walked off he had a brand-new problem. And that problem was Helen Speers.
Because those books and study guides hadn’t been touched since the last time he’d seen them. They were all in the exact same position.
She wasn’t studying for the bar. She might not have graduated from law school. Her name might not even be Helen Speers. He had had no reason to check before.
Now he did.