Armed and Fabulous (Lexi Graves Mysteries) (57 page)

Solomon hauled Vincent to his feet.
For a serial killer, h
e looked so pathetic with his shirt untucked, his hair mussed up,
and
a bloody rag wrapped around his hand from where I
shot him. "Will you visit me?" Vincent
asked.

"Are you kidding?"

He looked so perplexed
,
I nearly laughed. "No," he said, his forehead marred with frown lines.
“I’ll write you!”

Solomon hauled Vincent away before he could embarrass himself any further.

I
hear
d
sirens approaching, paramedics I hoped for Maddox
and
me
, and a ride to
the can
for Vincent. Once word got aro
und that he'd attacked a Graves
,
his stay at the
precinct
wouldn't be pretty.
I struggled to care
,
but couldn’t
.

"Let's go to the hospital and get patched up," said M
addox, his arm sliding around my waist
.

"It's a date."

Chapter Eighteen

Garrett
picked
me
up
from the hospit
al after my arm was stitched
closed
. H
e drove me home, very quietly
, eyes forward, fingers gripping the wheel until his knuckles turned white
.
H
e hadn't said a word about Maddox, or Solomon, and I figured he might explode soon.
He
just
hadn’t
decided
on
who
m
to explode
ye
t. I was glad I wasn't playing baseball with him and the guys at their regular weekend game. With
Garrett
's temper simmering just below the surface
,
it had the potential to get brutal. At least
Vincent Marciano’s
arrest
had assuaged some of
his
anger.

“You could have been killed,” he said quietly, after settling me on the couch.

The weight of his comment
lay
heavily on my chest. “I know,” I said simply because there was nothing else to say. “But I’m here.”

“You’
re not indestructible,”
Garrett
pointed out. He took my overnight bag to my bedroom and came back, looking down at me. I leaned against the back of the couch and took a deep breath, waiting for the lecture
about safety, why you should never trust an accountant, and
how to avoid
getting shot at
. Instead
,
he surprised me. “
As soon as your arm is h
ealed, we’re going to the range,
”
he told me.

~

Vincent was arrested for six murders, two attempted murders, assault with a deadly weapon, extortion and fraud, which wasn't
too
bad for a guy who had never even
gotten
a parking ticket.

Two weeks later,
Lily and I were s
itting
in my living room. She had run out first thing
after the verdict
came
in
,
and
bought double-pump mochas with extra whip and sprinkles a
long with
the biggest chocolate croissant
s
she could find. I was in heaven. Plus
,
now the court case was over,
and quickly solved given
my
rock-solid evidence,
I could tell her everything.

"How did that little creep Vincent
get involved
?" she asked.

Vincent
squealed with barely any prompting. Some I
even
overheard as we exited
the safe house
to the waiting paramedics
—
Maddox’s boss
,
Matt Miller nodding to me
as we limped out—
some Maddox fi
lled me in on
more
in the days after;
while
I got
the rest
from the court case.

With
Vincent
behind bars,
we wouldn't see him again.

"As company accountant, he had access to all Green Hand's financial records
.
A
fter Dominic mentioned an irregularity,
Vincent
noticed
other
irregularities in the payouts," I explained. "On investigating, he realized the extent of the fraud, piecing together who was part of it from
week
s of patient watching and waiting. But instead of turning his evidence over to the police
,
for their forensic accountants to comb, Vincent got fat dollar signs in his eyes and decided he wanted his slice of the multi-million fraud pie."

"W
hoa
," said Lily. "I did not think Vincent had it in him."

"It's always the quiet ones," I agreed.

"No, that's not it. It's that people are never what you expect them to be."

"Can't argue with that."

"So...
he didn't just kill Dean straight off?"

"Vincent didn't kill Dean at all.
Dean was killed
by
the Finklesteins.
" I licked the cream from the top of my
mocha
and snuggled against the couch as I told Lily everything.

Vincent's first step was to blackmail Martin Dean
,
but Dean didn't have access to the money. When Vincent threatened to turn Dean in, Dean 'fessed up his connections and bought the tickets to Paris where he intended to flee with Tanya, with or without the cash. He simply couldn't ge
t the money without alerting
Harris, Mathis and Ramos, his
car-crazed
conspirators
,
and he wasn't going to jail for the fraud without a pay
off
awaiting him.

The four
never
trusted each other much from the start
.
T
hey decided it was in
all of
their best interests that none of them could access the cash without the other members present. With more than three million of it already converted to cash, it was the smart thing to do. Not as smart as not committing a crime in the first place, but I didn't like to be picky.

The cash was stored in a
special bank deposit vault in the city.
Each conspirator had something that was needed to access it, and none of them could open the box
without the others
.
Dean and Ron Harris
each
had a key
;
Chris Mathis had the code
for the electronic keypad
;
and Hector Ramos was the signatory
.
H
is thumb print
provided
the extra security
,
which was why Vincent hacked it off
.
It was found in his freezer, between the ice cream and peas.

"And Dean gave his key to Tanya?"

I nodded. "Dean knew he was in big trouble. On one side
,
he had Vincent blackm
ailing him, on the other side w
ere Harris, Mathis and Ramos who wanted to get more money, and then there was
always
the potential that the authorities
would
discover the crime."

This much was guesswork, given that none of the gang could corrobor
ate the truth. We surmised that
faced with the evidence and the threat of the police, Dean stalled for time with Vincent, telling him he could get the money
,
but to be patient.
Vincent knew
who
was in the gang
and
since
the money couldn’t be moved
,
he was okay to wait it out.

Then Dean saw my research
for the Gazette
and
knew that I had put together his connection to the other three members of the gang
. He
panicked, putting in a call to Ramos. "He gave his key
to Tanya to hide as collateral,” I explained
as Lily hung on my every word
. “
If anything happened to him, the others wouldn't be ab
le to access the collated money
. He couldn't pay off Vincent without any ready cash,
and
he knew there was a discoverable connection between the four of them
. All
he wanted
was
out.
He
confided in
Ramos all about the problems he had.
"

Lily frowned.
"So
wh
y did the Finklesteins
kill
Dean
?"

"
In his panic
,
Dean
became the weak link so Ramos put out a hit on him. Ramos' wife is Knuckles Finklestein's wife's cousin
,
so Ramos hired the brothers to take out Dean, get the key
and the report
, thus
reducing
the pot. It would have finished off the fraudulent claims
,
but they could take a cool million each. Importantly, Ramos wanted the evidence between him and the rest of the gang obliterated before pay day."

"Who knew this kind of stuff
went
on in Montgomery
?
Makes you wonder what else is going on under our noses."

I didn't want to think about it. I'd had enough
“f
un
”
for a while.

"When did the police get involved?" asked Lily. "They knew, right?"

"They knew there was fraud
,
but
had no clue
who was involved. Green Hand is huge, they have hundreds of thousands of active policies and pay out thousands every day. It took them months to narrow it down to Dean's department."
Apparently, Dean didn’t
know that
Maddox
was already in the department spying and collecting evidence to implicate the whole gang
,
until the night he died
.
“Without his notebook, they didn’t have any place to start looking for the fraudulent policies.”

"Do you think Dean knew he was going to die?"