She worked them on, so consumed by what she was doing, that she was unaware of
anyone around her or the tow truck that was slowly rolling up to haul the Lincoln to the
police department for processing. West had not worked crime scenes in years, but she
had been good at it once. She was meticulous, tireless, and intuitive, and right now she
was getting a weird feeling as she looked at the clutter left by the killer. She lifted a US
Air ticket by a corner, opening it on the car seat, touching as little of it as possible as her
misgivings grew.
Mauney had flown to Charlotte from Asheville today, arriving at Charlotte-Douglas
International Airport at five-thirty p. m. The return, for tomorrow afternoon, was not
back to Asheville, but to Miami, and from there Mauney was flying to Grand Cayman, in
the West Indies. West carefully flipped through more tickets, her heart picking up,
adrenalin coursing. He was scheduled to fly out of Grand Cayman on Wednesday, and
stop over in Miami for six hours. Then he would return to Charlotte, and, finally, to
Asheville. There were more disturbing signs that were likely unrelated to Maundy’s
murder, but pointed to other crime possibly surrounding his life.
This was always the bitter irony in such cases, she couldn’t help but think. Death ratted
on people who were closet drug abusers, drunks, or having affairs with one and/or the
other sex, or those who liked to whip or be whipped, or to string themselves up by
pulleys and nooses and masturbate. Human creativity was endless, and West had seen it
all. She had gotten out a ballpoint pen and was using it to turn pages of other paperwork.
Though her forte was not cash and equivalents,
treasury and agency securities, derivatives, investment banking, commercial and
corporate banking, West knew enough to get a sense of what Mauney might have been
intending on his travels.
In the first place, he had an alias, Jack Morgan, whose picture IDs on passport and
driver’s license showed Mauney’s face. There were a total of eight credit cards and two
checkbooks in the names of Mauney and Morgan. Both men seemed to have a keen
interest in real estate, specifically a number of hotels along Miami Beach. It appeared to
West that Mauney was prepared to invest some one hundred million dollars in these old
pastel dumps. Why? Who the hell went to Miami Beach these days? West flipped
through more paperwork, perspiring in the humid heat. Why was Mauney planning to
drop by Grand Cayman, the money-laundering capital of the world?
“My God,” West muttered, realizing that Grand Cayman was three syllables.
She stood up, staring at the bright skyline, at the mighty US Bank Corporate Center rising
above all, its red light slowly blinking a warning to helicopters and low flying planes.
She stared at this symbol of economic achievement, of greatness and hard work on the
part of many, and she got angry. West, like a lot of citizens, had checking and savings
accounts at US Bank She had financed her Ford through it.
Tellers were always pleasant and hard-working. They went home at the end of the day
and did their best to make ends meet like most folks.
Then some carpetbagger comes along and decides to cheat, steal, hoodwink, make out
like a bandit, and give an innocent business and its people a bad name. West turned her
attention to Hammer and motioned to her.
“Take a look,” West said quietly to her chief.
Hammer squatted by the open car door and examined documents without touching them.
She had been making investments and saving money most of her life. She knew creative
banking when she saw it, and was shocked at first, then disgusted as truth began to
whisper. As best she could tell, and of course none of it could be proven at this precise
moment, it appeared Blair Mauney III was behind hundreds of millions of dollars loaned
to Domin ion Tobacco that seemed to be linked to a real-estate development group called
Southman Corporation, in Grand Cayman. Associated with this were multiple bank
account numbers not linked by identification numbers. Several of the same Miami