Death, Taxes, and Cheap Sunglasses (A Tara Holloway Novel Book 8) (16 page)

I checked the driver’s license records next. The address on each license matched that on the vehicle registrations. Motley’s photo proved he and Crew Socks were one and the same. Ditto for Vargas and the Latino James Franco. Because I hadn’t gotten a good look at the men in the Avenger, I couldn’t confirm whether the photo of Carlos Uvalde in the driver’s license records matched either of the men. And, of course, I had no idea who the second person in the Avenger might be.

Assuming the information was current, Motley didn’t live here at the complex. But who did, then? Another member of the cartel? A distributor? A dealer?

I ran a quick background check on the men. Vargas had no record. Motley had two convictions for possession of marijuana, but both were in small amounts, enough for personal consumption but not enough to indicate he was dealing in the stuff. Uvalde, on the other hand, had served seven years for dealing heroin and assaulting a police officer. Not exactly a Boy Scout.

I let out a long breath. I supposed I’d done all I could for the moment.

Making an illegal U-turn in the middle of the street, I headed back home.

chapter fourteen

P
inch Hitter

Bzzzz.
My alarm went off much too early the next morning. Having lost three hours’ sleep to my late-night mission, I had to fight the urge to yank the plug out of the wall. Still, though I might be exhausted, I had a job to do. Uncle Sam didn’t pay me to loll about in bed. I only hoped he’d reimburse my gluttonous late-night snack.

On my drive into work, I stopped at a gas station and bought a large Dallas map. When I arrived at the office, I aimed straight for the supply room. My eyes scanned the shelves. Manila folders. Legal pads. Nine-by-twelve mailing envelopes. Boxes of ballpoint pens.

Viola, Lu’s eagle-eyed secretary, stepped into the doorway. “Finding what you need?”

“No.” I pushed aside small boxes of binder clips to search behind them. “I’m looking for thumbtacks. I don’t see any.”

“Thumbtacks?” Viola cocked her head. “I don’t get much call for those. Can’t even remember the last time I ordered any.”

“Darn.”

“What do you need ’em for?”

I held up my map. “I need them to mark points on this map.”

Viola reached out and snagged a package of colorful Post-it strips which read
SIGN HERE
. “Can you make do with these?”

They weren’t at all what I was looking for, but they’d have to do. I took them from her. “Sure. Thanks.”

When I reached my office, Nick’s roses greeted me with their soft, sweet smell and gorgeous blooms. My heart contracted in a painful squeeze as I reached out to finger a petal. El Cuchillo better not hurt the man I loved or there’d be a photo of me on the Internet, licking El Cuchillo’s blood from the bullet I’d put in his brain.
Yeah! Take that, El Cuchillo!
The thought first made me feel tough, then nauseated as the reality of it hit me.
Ew.
I guess I’d settle for a photo of me standing over the thug’s bullet-riddled corpse.

I tossed my purse into my desk drawer and taped the Dallas map to the wall next to my window. Consulting the information in the phishing scam file, I used my cell phone map feature to locate the bank branches where the crook had made the bogus withdrawals. Using the
SIGN HERE
slips, I marked each of them on the map. After applying the last sticker, I stood back to admire my handiwork.
Pretty cool.
I’d always wanted to make an evidence board like they do on those detective shows on TV.

The fact that all of the victims were local and the withdrawals were all made at banks in the Dallas area meant that whoever did this likely lived around here somewhere. Most criminals tended to operate within their comfort zone, where they were familiar with the streets and could make an easy getaway. Besides, with the price of gas being what it was, it wouldn’t be cost-effective for the thief to drive a long distance to make the transactions.

Eddie’s voice came from behind me. “What’re you doing?”

I turned to find him walking into my office, his gaze roaming over my Dallas map. As he stepped up beside me, I pointed to each of the strips and explained myself. “These are the locations where a target in one of my cases made fraudulent withdrawals.”

Eddie snorted. “You’ve been watching too much
Homeland
.”

I stuck my tongue out at him, which he took as his cue to leave. I returned my attention to the map and stepped forward, using another
SIGN HERE
sticker to mark the center of the relevant area. In theory, the center should be the criminal’s residence or workplace. The sticker ended up smack-dab in the middle of the Daniel Cemetery, an old family plot situated just north of Southern Methodist University.

A quick Internet search informed me that the cemetery had been in existence for over 160 years. The cemetery contained the remains of a number of Daniel family members, and even the bodies of former family slaves. Most recently, local real estate tycoon Trammel Crow, who had married into the Daniel family, had been interred there.

I stared at the map. What could I glean from this information? That the person who’d sent the e-mails was a ghost who’d sent the communications from the hereafter? That they were
eeeee
-mails?

After thinking things over, the only information I gleaned was that law enforcement was a very inexact science. I also realized that maybe I was going about the phishing case the wrong way. I’d been trying to collect evidence and clues that could help me move
forward,
when maybe the direction I needed to go was
backward.
Maybe the key to solving this case wasn’t trying to chase after the person who’d made the withdrawals at the bank, but rather to see whether the e-mails could be traced back to their source. I wasn’t sure whether the person who’d made the withdrawals was the same one who’d sent the e-mails, or whether the two (if there were two) were simply working together. But if there was more than one person involved, finding one of them would likely lead me to any others.

File in hand, I did an about-face and headed straight to the office of my fellow special agent Josh Schmidt. I stopped in his doorway and rapped on the frame.

Josh looked up from his computer screen. With his cherubic blond curls, baby-blue eyes, and slight stature, Josh was hardly the most intimidating agent on the IRS payroll. He looked more like a hobbit in search of an all-powerful ring than a federal law enforcement officer tracking down criminals. No matter, though. He hadn’t been hired for his physical prowess. Rather, it was his mental acuity and cybersleuthing skills that had landed him the job as the department’s high-tech specialist. It was precisely those skills that had led me to his office this morning.

After he waved me in, I stepped inside and plopped down in one of this chairs. “I need your help.”

Though Josh and I got along fine now, that had not always been the case. When I first met him, he’d been a sniveling, whiny little weasel, competitive with his coworkers and definitely not a team player. He’d done a 180 once Nick and I had sufficiently stroked his fragile ego and requested his assistance. Of course the fact that he’d since met a woman through an online dating service and finally gotten laid hadn’t hurt, either. Perhaps his earlier demeanor had been the result of pent-up sexual frustration. At any rate, he was our go-to guy anytime we needed help cracking a computer.

“Help?” he asked. “With what?”

I situated my briefcase on my lap, clicked open the latches, and pulled out my file on the phishing case. I held the file out to him. “With this.”

He took the file, set it on his desk, and opened it. He spent a minute or two perusing the contents before looking up at me. “You want me to figure out where these e-mails came from?”

“Exactly.” I explained that none of the victims I’d interviewed had provided any leads, and that my attempts to identify the thief or thieves from the bank surveillance videos had likewise been futile.

“I’ll need the victims’ e-mail account passwords.”

“All of them?”

“Let’s start with four or five. That should be a big enough sample.”

“I’ll give them a call right away,” I said.

Josh closed the file and set it aside. “I’ve got some work on my own cases I need to get out of the way first, but I should be able to take a look at this in the next day or two.”

“Thanks, Josh.”

With that, I headed back to my office. My eyes noted Will Dorsey coming up the hall. “How did last night’s softball game go?” I called.

“We lost,” he said as he approached. “Seventeen to zero, to those pencil-pushing dweebs at the Census Office. It was humiliating.”

I cringed. “Better luck next time.”

He put an arm out to stop me. “I can’t seem to get a direct answer out of Lu. Any idea when Nick’s coming back? We’re getting our asses kicked without him.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Dorsey cocked his head. “He’s out on something big, isn’t he?”

Though I knew Lu trusted her staff, it was standard protocol for information on large, highly sensitive cases to be shared on a need-to-know basis only. If I hadn’t overheard Lu and Christina speaking with Nick in his office, I might not even know what Nick was involved in.

“Yes,” was all I said.

Dorsey nodded, knowing I couldn’t share more. “Whatever he’s working on,” he said, “I hope he wraps it up soon. Otherwise, the Tax Maniacs are going to become the laughingstock of the federal government softball circuit.”

“That would be a damn shame.”

“Wouldn’t it, though?” He cocked his head. “Hey, we’re short one player tonight. Hana Kim backed out. Said she’s got a hot date. Any chance you could fill in?”

“Sure,” I said. Why not? It’s not like I had a hot date. Heck, I didn’t even have a friend to hang with tonight. The game could be just the thing I needed to take my mind off El Cuchillo and his sharp, shiny blade.

We set off in opposite directions again. I returned to my office, took a seat, and called several of the victims in the phishing case. I had to leave a voice mail for Jessica, who was probably in the middle of another facial, but was lucky enough to catch Roy Larabee, Freddie Babcock, and a couple of the other victims. I sent their passwords to Josh via e-mail, and fished another file from my stack.

chapter fifteen

U
nnatural Disaster

The case in this file, like the case involving the Unic and Paradise Park, involved nonprofit fraud. In this instance, the culprit was a “Facecrook,” a criminal who ran his scam through the popular social networking site Facebook. The crook had set up a Facebook page very similar to that of the American Red Cross with the obvious intent of misleading potential donors. The copycat page purported to be for the U.S. Red Cross, an organization that didn’t actually exist. Just as the legitimate Red Cross collected donations to fund disaster relief efforts, this phony organization purported to be collecting for the same cause.

An observant auditor who’d been performing a routine review of a well-to-do couple found a charitable contribution deduction for $2,500 to the U.S. Red Cross. The wife had made the donation after visiting a friend’s Facebook page and seeing the heartbreaking post and photo of a little girl allegedly orphaned after her parents perished in a tsunami. The taxpayers had been none too happy when they’d learned their funds had not gone to a legitimate charity but had instead lined the pockets of a con artist. They’d attempted to get a refund from their credit card company. Unfortunately, too much time had passed since they’d made the donation. Having their tax deduction denied had added insult to injury, and led them to demand that the federal government do something to hunt down the greedy and heartless person behind the scam. Thus, that task became mine.

After visiting my brothers’ pages to check out the latest photos of my nieces and nephews—
adorable as always
—I pulled up the Facebook page for the U.S. Red Cross. I hoped something on the page might provide me with clues about who was operating the scam. When the auditor had become aware of the fraudulent charity, she had immediately contacted Criminal Investigations. Lu had contacted the victims and asked them not to notify Facebook until her department had had a chance to look into the matter. After all, if the page was taken down, the criminal could easily disappear into cyberspace, never to be found. But with the page still active, I might be able to use it to track down the perpetrator. Once he or she was in my clutches, I’d inform Facebook of the scam so they could shut down the page.

I perused the screen for information that might lead me to the wrongdoers. Images on the page included heartrending photographs of families with young children left homeless, their meager belongings in their hands, their faces and futures bleak. Huts with thatched roofs half gone leaned at precarious angles, damaged beyond repair by severe wind gusts. Broken and bare palm trees, their leaves carried off in a gale, lined a debris-strewn beach. The text noted that the photographs were taken after the recent devastating typhoon in Andorra. So sad. My heart went out to these poor folks.

Wait.

A typhoon?

In Andorra?

I stunk at geography and knew diddly-squat about meteorology, but wasn’t Andorra somewhere in Europe? And typhoons didn’t strike Europe, did they?

Viola wandered into my office to deliver a memo reminding us to submit our summer vacation requests ASAP since days off had to be allocated to ensure that at least a skeleton crew remained in the office at all times. She eyed me over her bifocals. “If you want some time off for your friend’s wedding, you need to get your request in right away.”

“Thanks for the reminder.” I’d planned on taking off a day or two the week prior to Alicia’s wedding to help her deal with last-minute details.

“Hey, Vi,” I asked as she turned to leave. “Do you know anything about Andorra?”

“Andorra?” she repeated. “Isn’t that the mean, orange-haired grandma from
Bewitched
?”