Brown said, “I took the account apart. The notation on the account said that it was designed to hold monthly receipts from software sales, and that the money would be dispersed at the end of each month to Bois Brule’s creditors, with some of it going to a tax holding fund and other amounts going to investment accounts. There’s nothing unusual about any of that, except the amount flowing through the account. Some months as much as thirty million dollars would go through it.”
“Holy shit,” O’Brien said. “I need to get my guys over here.”
“What else?” Lucas asked.
“A couple of things,” Brown said. “First, it doesn’t look to us, after we took a really close look, like any money was dispersed to creditors. All of it went to stock or bond mutual funds. The second thing is, while the money was always dispersed at the end of the month, with a few small exceptions, this month, and only this month, the money was moved almost as soon as it came in. There’s an additional problem here: when I tried to find out where it went, I couldn’t. When I try, I get a system error. The people down in Systems don’t know what’s going on, either. We can’t find out where the money went. Somehow, the wire numbers have been sequestered.”
“What are the bond funds that it usually went to?” O’Brien asked.
Brown picked up a yellow legal pad and rattled off a bunch of techie-sounding names. “I’m having my secretary type up a full list, with account numbers and so on. That would be the place for your guys to start,” he said, and passed the paper over to O’Brien.
“How much did they get?” Lucas asked.
“Twenty-two million,” Bone said. “Something else: the last withdrawals were the day before the murders. At first, I was thinking, well, they knew about them. But then I thought, maybe, maybe, what happened was that they heard about the murders on the morning news and bailed out. Didn’t come back for the rest.”
Shaffer said, “Huh,” and Rivera said, “Is it possible that your Pruess was involved in this money movement, and now is running?”
Bone spread his hands: “He had no direct access to the account. He was a salesman, not a manager. It’s more likely that, God help us…”
“What?” Shaffer asked.
“That the people who killed the Brookses knew about him, and have taken him away,” Bone said.
Shaffer said, “They’ve taken him away because…”
“Because they think he was involved in stealing that money,” Bone said. “He wasn’t, but because he sold the account, or he and Mrs. Brooks sold the account, they thought he was. They may not know the difference between the salesman and the account manager. But if they’ve got Pruess, they probably know now.”
Lucas looked at Brown: “You got a wife and kids?”
Brown’s Adam’s apple bobbed and he said, “Yeah.”
“Get them out of town. Take them to a resort somewhere. Jim will pay your expenses,” Lucas said.
“Absolutely,” Bone said. “Find a nice place.”
“You don’t think they can find us?” Brown asked. His voice was shaky.
“No. These guys are a bunch of hoodlums, not the FBI,” Lucas said. “Not even the FBI could find you, if you’re careful. Find a place where you can get back here in a hurry if you need to. A few hours…”
“If it’s all right to fly…” Brown looked at Bone.
Bone said, “Marty, you can go anywhere in the country. Go to a resort near a big airport with direct flights back. We’ll pick up every nickel.”
Brown nodded, looked at the paper in front of him. “I will.”
O’Brien looked at Lucas, then Shaffer, and said, “You know what’s strange? We can’t find any sign of this over at Sunnie. They must have separate books out in a cloud somewhere. They use their system to take the money in, and kick it back out.”
“We’ve got ICE looking at it,” Lucas said. “If it’s there, she’ll find it.”
O’Brien asked Brown, “Doesn’t somebody have to direct the dispersal of the funds? Don’t you deal with somebody from Bois Brule? I mean, who was that?”
Brown looked into a file folder, a bunch of paper torn from yellow legal pads. “A person named Sandor Gutierrez, who apparently has been in to the bank only once, to set up the account, through Pruess,” he said. He was sweating, Lucas thought. “Since then, he’s operated on the basis of encrypted instructions sent via the Internet, along with a code word as verification. This was all very routine.”
“And profitable, for you,” Shaffer said.
Bone jumped in: “Of course-we’ve made several tens of thousands of dollars on the account every year. We’ve made about as much on the account as we drop around the cash register every day.”
“You’re saying that the money was no big deal,” O’Brien offered.
“It wasn’t a big deal. Not for us. It’s chicken feed,” Bone said. “The fact is, we were used. We’ll cooperate with any law enforcement agency that wants in. We will press charges against anyone involved, and we will cover any loss claims.”
The attorney nodded, and added, “We don’t expect to see any of this in the media. We won’t, will we?”
“Not from us,” Shaffer said.
“I’d like to see a loss claim,” Rivera said, picking up on Bone’s comment. “A loss claim would be very interesting-but I can promise, this is one claim you won’t see.”
Shaffer asked Brown, “Wasn’t this all very unusual? Didn’t you flag…?”
Brown was shaking his head. “Looking at it the way we did-the way we do-it was simply a successful business, processing bills. Pruess was supposed to have vetted him, and after that, it ran on autopilot. Bois Brule would accept credit charges, would run them through us, money would come in, and at the end of the month, they’d move their money out.”
“And it’s not nearly the biggest account we do that for,” Bone said. “Best Buy runs more money through here in a day than Bois Brule did in a month.”
The long-haired man, who’d been introduced as Ron Vaughn, held up a finger. Everybody looked at him, and he said, “We’re tearing the system down now. Like Mr. Bone said, Pruess sold the account, but he had no access to it. As far as we know, anyway. They may have trusted him with the dispersal codes, of course, which would explain just about everything-”
“Everything except why they didn’t snatch him
Lucas: “We don’t know the details. We just don’t know. Maybe they called Pruess to ask what the hell was going on, and he convinced them it had to be the Brookses. Maybe the Brookses passed it back to him … we just don’t know, and there’s no real way to find out.”
“And if you were handling the money, and you knew that the Brookses had been slaughtered, maybe you’d just run,” O’Brien said. “Maybe Pruess is on his way to Italy.”
“No. Not Italy, anyway,” said Bone. “When we had his partner look for him, he called back to say that Pruess’s wallet and car keys were in his bedside table, along with a money clip. I asked his partner to look, and Pruess had two hundred in the clip, and four hundred in the wallet. He didn’t take his cash card, either, his debit card, and he has sixteen thousand in his account. He also said that Pruess’s passport was there. So not Italy.”
“Is sixteen thousand a lot, for a vice president?” Shaffer asked.
Bone shook his head. “No, I wouldn’t think so. He had an account that allowed you to move money around online, and most of it was in a cash investment account, the rest in what was a bill-paying account. It looked okay … at least, superficially.”
“Let me go back to this guy,” Lucas said, pointing at Vaughn, the systems manager. “Were you about to say that whatever happened, it had to go through your computer system?”
“Yes. And Pruess didn’t have that kind of access-the access needed to move that money directly.”
“Who did?”
Vaughn chewed his upper lip for a moment, like men do when they’ve just shaved off a mustache, then said, “About a dozen people in Systems. In my department. There’s a vice president named Tiger Mann, I don’t know his real first name…. He and his assistant could do it, but their access is also very limited, and they’d leave tracks. Everything is designed to make sure that people leave tracks. We haven’t had time to look, but if it was either of
