I offered her the crime lab fax Lester Spinney had used to lure me back to the office and summarized the very advantages I’d been thinking of bypassing just hours earlier. “Traces of cocaine-lots of it. All vacuumed up by the cleaning lady into a factory-fresh bag, as attested to in her sworn affidavit. It’s the third leg of the stool you were asking for to get us legally into Andy Goddard’s-aka Tony Bugs’s-condo. It should give us a rock-solid search warrant on its own merits, which in turn might give us something more than a fingerprint to connect him to Jorja Duval’s murder.”
She read both documents carefully, nodded once, and without having sat down, gathered up her things and headed back out the door. “I’ll go round up a judge. What’s your timing?”
“I don’t want to rush things. I have to coordinate with Snuffy and the Marshals on how we pick Tony up.” I checked my watch. “Is four hours from now okay?”
“I’ll be here.”
Spinney passed her on the threshold and nodded appreciatively after she’d left. “Very cool woman. Wouldn’t like her as a mother, though.”
I didn’t ask him to expand on that. “Where’ve you been?”
He waved a computer printout at me. “Using the copier downstairs, wrapping up on your homework. Wild goose chase, as it turned out. I don’t know what you were hoping to find, but both the pump and ski tower manufacturers came up empty.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning they have contracts with Tucker Peak to work out general specs, all aboveboard. Plans are in place to move full-steam ahead.”
“General specs? The towers aren’t in production right now?” I asked him. I began feeling the same satisfaction I got after locating a long-sought-after puzzle piece and fitting it into place. “I was told they’d be installed by helicopter this spring. They have survey crews out there now. And those pumps are supposed to have been finished and awaiting shipment, pending a new pumphouse.”
He looked at me blank-faced. I smiled in return, the conviction of what I was thinking spreading through my body like a warm glow.
“No,” he said slowly. “They both told me they were just in the early stages.”
“No money’s changed hands?”
“Not beyond a down payment.”
“That’s what they think,” I murmured, trying to counter my growing excitement. “Money’s definitely changed hands, and I bet I know who’s holding it. How was Bettina to work with on this?”
“Fine,” he said. “She did ask me why she couldn’t talk to McNally, but she didn’t seem too surprised when I told her you’d fill her in later. What’s going on?”
“I haven’t figured out the details,” I admitted, “and the evidence may prove me wrong, but I think we’ve stumbled over an embezzlement scheme, with the CEO and CFO working as a team. Did you get someone to pick up Gorenstein?”
“Yeah. They should be here in an hour or so. I thought he’d just pocketed a few rentals on the sly. What’re you talking about?”
“It looks clearer to me now than it did back then,” I explained, “but the first time I thought something was wrong was when the sabotage at Tucker Peak went beyond the usual environmentalist high-profile pranks-maybe even before that… come to think of it, when I wondered why McNally didn’t have Snuffy just throw the protesters off the property. That never made sense to me, even with McNally’s good-guy reputation.”
I rose from my desk and crossed over to where we hung our coats. “Want to take a field trip? I need to talk to Bettina face-to-face.”
“Fine with me, but what about Gorenstein?” he asked, joining me.
“Leave a note downstairs to have him cool his heels till we get back. I don’t mind him staring at a wall for a little while anyhow. If he gets antsy, tell whoever’s holding him to invent a stall tactic-no car to take him back home or something. Meanwhile, you and I can coordinate with Snuffy and the Marshals via cell phone on busting Tony Bugs.”
On our way through the reception area, we told Judy where we were headed and continued on down to my car, noticing that the second half of yesterday’s snowstorm looked about ready to unload-at long last. Once on the road, I resumed my narrative. “Another thing was Win Johnston. He was hired by McNally-I think as a red herring-obvious enough that if Win hadn’t approached me first, we would’ve heard about him somehow anyway. He was supposed to be a smoke screen, just like McNally’s keeping the TPL around.
“Finally,” I continued, “there was Norman Toussaint, twisting in his own guilt, eager to confess his sins even if he wouldn’t snitch on his son’s sugar daddy. He told us he’d done the chairlift and the water main and that TPL had dyed the storage pond, hung the banner, and the other benign stuff. But he had no explanation for the pumphouse burning and admitted someone else did in the generators.”
“Couldn’t that still have been the TPL people?” Spinney asked. “Betts doesn’t seem to have a clue what they’re up to, and he’s one of the bosses.”
I didn’t argue the point. “That’s possible, except for the kid’s medical bills suddenly being paid and the overall timing. I thought it was an interesting coincidence that the pumphouse burned just before the pumps were supposed to go into it. In fact, McNally stood right in front of me and bitched that he’d have to pay storage fees on them until he could rebuild. That was after Bettina had told me her crew had finished building the shed two months ahead of schedule. Now you found out the pumps haven’t even been fabricated-and certainly haven’t been paid for.”
“So, McNally was billing the resort while he was pocketing the money he claimed he was spending,” Lester summarized. “But where’s that put Gorenstein? If he controlled the books and was in cahoots with McNally, how come he only got caught for the condo rental deal?”
“Another smoke screen,” I suggested, liking my hypothesis all the more, now that I was hearing it out loud. “Which is why I want to talk to Linda Bettina. My bet is that the consultants, engineers, feasibility studies, environmental impact statements, and everything else were mostly pure invention, the supposed costs of it all going instead into McNally’s and Gorenstein’s private account. What outsider can keep track of stuff like that? You can spend two hundred grand on a single research project and bury it in the back of a file cabinet. People do it legitimately all the time.”
I held up my hand to stop him from repeating his question. “I know, I know-the condo shuffle. That’s where I think they did their best work. Time was running out on their plan, see? Instead of milking this operation for the entire winter, like they’d hoped, the schedule had to be moved up because of the intensity of the TPL protests, and just maybe because we appeared out of the woodwork looking to solve Snuffy’s burglaries-plus, Bettina screwed them up by being too efficient, forcing them to burn the pumphouse. But the plan was still in place, and I think it called for Gorenstein to be fired for some minor infraction and allowed to vanish, explaining why Win was hired to find out about the condos. After that supposed ‘embarrassment,’ McNally was probably going to come up with his own excuse-maybe a better job offer or a bogus heart attack (meaning we better check the legitimacy of that heart condition)-and join his buddy in some banking haven where they’ve been sending the loot from the start.”
“So, there’re three sets of books,” Spinney said, nodding at the logic of it. “One for public consumption, seemingly legit but hiding the condo deal; one fake backup set showing the condo rip-off, for Win Johnston to discover and get Gorenstein fired; and a third, truly accurate one that only McNally and Gorenstein knew about.”
“Right,” I agreed. “And which we’ll probably never find.”
The pager on my belt went off. I pulled it loose and looked at the number on the display. I was about to tell Lester it was probably Judy telling us that Gorenstein had arrived under escort, when Spinney’s pager ignited also.