paper with the other hand.
`And the rest of the answer is in here,’ she said.
Finlay and I joined her on the bench. Studied the file she’d been reading. It was a surveillance report. Gray had hidden out under the highway, cloverleaf and watched the truck traffic in and out of the warehouses. Thirty-two separate days. The results were carefully listed, in three parts. On the first eleven occasions, he’d seen one truck a day incoming from the south, arriving early in the morning. He’d seen outgoing trucks all day long, heading north and west. He’d listed the outgoing trucks by destination, according to their licence plates. He must have been using field glasses. The list of destinations was all over the place. A complete spread, from California all the way up and over to Massachusetts. Those first eleven days, he’d logged eleven incoming trucks and sixty-seven outgoing. An average of one truck a day coming in, six going out, small
trucks, maybe a ton of cargo in a week.
The first section of Gray’s log covered the first calendar year. The second section covered the second calendar year. He’d hid out on nine separate occasions. He’d seen fifty-three outgoing trucks, the same six a day as before, with a similar list of destinations. But the log of incoming trucks was different. In the first half of the year, one truck a day was coming in, like normal. But in the second half of the year, the deliveries picked up. They built up to two trucks a day incoming.
The final twelve days of his surveillance were different again. They were all from the final five months of his life. Between last fall and February, he was still logging about six trucks a day going out to the same wide spread of destinations. But there were no incoming trucks listed at all. None at all. From last fall, stuff was being moved out, but it wasn’t coming in.
`So?’ Finlay asked Roscoe.
She sat back and smiled. She had it all figured.
`It’s obvious, right?’ she said. `They’re bringing counterfeit money into the country. It’s printed in Venezuela, some place Kliner set up alongside his new chemical place there. It comes in by boat and they’re hauling it up from Florida to the warehouse in Margrave. Then they’re trucking it north and west, up to the big cities, LA, Chicago, Detroit, New York, Boston. They’re feeding it into the cash flows in the big cities. It’s an international counterfeit money distribution network. It’s obvious, Finlay.’
`Is it?’ he said.
`Of course it is,’ she said again. `Think of Sherman Stoller. He drove up and down to Florida to meet the boat coming in from the sea, at
Jacksonville Beach. He was on his way out there to meet the boat when he got picked up for speeding on the bridge, right? That’s why he was so agitated. That’s why he got the fancy lawyer out so fast, right?’
Finlay nodded.
`It all fits,’ she said. `Think of a map of the States. The money is printed in South America, comes here by sea. Lands in Florida. Flows up the southeast, and then sort of branches out from Margrave. Flows on out to LA in the west, up to Chicago in the middle, New York and Boston in the east. Separate branches, right? It looks like a candelabra or a menorah. You know what a menorah is?’
`Sure,’ Finlay said. `It’s that candlestick Jewish people use.’
`Right,’ she said. `That’s how it looks on a map. Florida to Margrave is the stem. Then the individual arms lead out and up to the big cities, LA across to Chicago across to Boston. It’s an import network, Finlay.’
She was giving him plenty of help. Her hands were tracing menorah shapes in the air. The geography sounded OK to me. It made sense. An import flow, rolling north in trucks, up from Florida. It would need to use that knot of highways around Atlanta to branch itself out and head for the big cities in the north and west. The menorah idea was good. The left-hand arm of the candlestick would have to be bent out horizontally, to reach LA. Like somebody had dropped the thing and somebody else had accidentally stepped on it. But the idea made sense. Almost certainly Margrave itself was the pivot. Almost certainly that warehouse was the actual distribution centre. The