House Odds (6 page)

Molly did, but added, “They’re just people like me. They wouldn’t do something like this. And none of them, as far as I know, has any of my personal information.”

“Molly, can you think of anything that will help? Anything. Someone snooping around your office, someone asking for your Social Security number, someone asking where you bank?”

Molly started to say something, but then gave a strangled sob and rose from the table and went over to stand by the kitchen sink with her back to DeMarco. She stood there, hunched over the sink as if she might throw up, then finally straightened but didn’t turn around.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Uh, twelve thirty,” DeMarco said, checking his watch.
What difference did it make what time it was?

“Would you like a drink, Joe?” Molly said.

Ah. She didn’t want to start drinking before noon, like if you drank in the morning you were an alkie but if the sun was past its zenith, you were okay. And she didn’t want to drink alone.

“No, thanks,” DeMarco said. “Nothing for me.”

Molly opened a cupboard above her sink and pulled out a bottle of scotch. Cheap scotch, DeMarco noted. It probably tasted like paint thinner. While Molly was pouring a drink, DeMarco told her what Randy Sawyer had said about three previous insider trading cases at Reston Tech.

“Molly,” he said, “if you can’t think of anyone who would want to frame you, can you think of anyone at your company who might be involved in insider trading? If Sawyer’s right about these previous insider cases, it has to be someone who’s worked there a long time, long before you ever got there. So can you think of somebody who’s richer than you’d expect him to be? You know, spending more than you think he should be able to afford. Or how ’bout somebody who always seems especially curious about what you’re working on.” DeMarco was grasping at straws, and he knew it.

Molly didn’t respond; she was still at the sink, her back to DeMarco. She had slammed down her first drink while he was talking and then immediately poured another shot, this time adding ice to her glass.

“Molly,” he prompted her. “Do you have any ideas?”

She continued to ignore him while looking down at the drab courtyard outside her window. DeMarco had noticed the courtyard when he walked into the building: a small square of grass that was mostly weeds, a dry birdbath, and a couple of bushes with wilted brown leaves. The whole apartment building had the look of a place that ignored minor maintenance—or a place where the tenants couldn’t afford to complain if the maintenance wasn’t done.

Molly turned at last to face DeMarco. Her eyes seemed brighter—a by-product of the alcohol, he assumed.

“They said I might go to jail for three years. I’m going to have a criminal record and lose my job and my dad’s going to be humiliated by the press. I just feel like . . .”

She started sobbing. She cried so hard that she collapsed into a small heap on her kitchen floor. DeMarco walked over to her, pulled her to her feet, and took her into his arms. He patted her back clumsily, like he was burping a baby; she was so thin he could feel her shoulder blades through her shirt. “Molly, it’s going to be okay. We’re going to get you out of this, honey. Trust me.”

She didn’t know a damn thing that would help him and she was too distraught to think straight—but, sure, trust me.

7

Greg Porter walked out of the Public Safety Building on Atlantic Avenue, thinking the meeting with the cops hadn’t gone so well—but the cops were the least of his problems.

This thing that Ted was doing—lying to McGruder, hiding stuff from Al, juggling the numbers . . . He had a bad feeling about it, a really bad feeling. It looked as if Ted’s latest maneuver, however—convincing McGruder that that guy Gleason had ripped off a load of fish—had worked. Or so Ted thought—but Greg was still worried.

The casino kept two sets of books: one they showed to investors and the IRS and one that showed how much money they really made. The second set of books included Al’s cut from the casino, money laundered from some of Al’s other operations, bribes they paid to local cops and politicians. It was an intentionally complicated accounting system and hard to follow even if you were familiar with it. Greg was beginning to think, however, that McGruder hadn’t seen anything specific in the spreadsheets that had made him suspicious. For one thing, they weren’t trying to hide a big loss—only half a million—and Greg had spread the loss out over a lot of things. He couldn’t claim they lost the money because a couple of heavy hitters had lucky streaks at the tables; there were just too many people watching the gambling side of things. Instead, he cooked the books on the operations side. He expensed maintenance they didn’t do, added in losses for property damage that didn’t occur, increased the amount spent to fix a crack in one of the swimming pools, bumped up the cost of consumables that were hard to track. There was no way McGruder could tell if they’d gone through a few dozen more cases of booze than normal.

So he didn’t think it was the numbers; it was McGruder’s goddamn nose. He just
smelled
that something was off, and probably, just like he’d said, it was because of the way he and Ted had been acting. Whatever the case, whether it was something in the spreadsheets or McGruder’s snout, he knew McGruder was going to catch them. He just knew it.

He reached the corner. His car was parked across the street in a thirty-minute loading zone because he hadn’t expected to be with the cops more than fifteen minutes. But then it took an hour to come to an agreement with the bastards, and he could see the ticket fluttering on his windshield. He shook his head. Everything in his life these days was turning to shit.

He started to cross the street but before he could step off the curb, a black Lincoln with tinted windows stopped in front of him, blocking the crosswalk. The passenger side window powered-down—and there was McGruder. Delray was driving.

Oh, Lord Jesus, help me.

“Get your ass in the car,” McGruder said.

Greg’s feet reacted faster than his brain: he ran. He ran right around the nose of the Lincoln, planning to dart across the street and get in his car and . . . And he didn’t know what, but no way was he getting in a car with Delray.

He didn’t see the city bus that killed him, the bus that dragged him fifty-seven yards, its brakes locked, skidding the whole way.

8

DeMarco was at Clyde’s in Georgetown, at the bar, having a vodka martini, admiring the legs of a tall blonde barmaid. He figured he deserved it—both the view and the drink—for toiling diligently on Molly Mahoney’s behalf.

After he saw Molly, he had called her lawyer and told him what he’d learned from Randy Sawyer about the previous insider cases involving Reston Technologies. The lawyer was appropriately grateful. When he asked for DeMarco’s source, DeMarco refused to tell him. He then gave the lawyer the names of the other engineers who had worked with Molly on the submarine battery project. The lawyer, now sounding a bit snarky, informed DeMarco that he already had the names and was already doing background checks on those people.

DeMarco then wasted the rest of the afternoon at the GU law library. He couldn’t remember anything he’d been taught about insider trading in school and thought it might be good to get reacquainted with the subject. After two hours, he hadn’t learned anything that would help Molly and his head ached from trying to understand all the convoluted legal bullshit that seemed to be written in some language other than English. So, when he’d looked at his watch and saw it was four thirty—meaning the cocktail hour, or close enough to it—he’d left the library and ambled over to Clyde’s to reward himself with a martini.

He was just taking the first sip of his drink when his cell phone rang—the phone call distracted him and he inadvertently allowed ice-cold vodka to stream right over his tooth, the one he’d gone to see the dentist about. The tooth was cracked and every time it was exposed to something cold, the top of his head almost came off. Until he could get back to the dentist, he had to tilt his head to the right whenever he drank, which looked pretty stupid when drinking a martini.

“Shit!” he yelled, reacting to the pain and forgetting he was speaking into the phone.

“Joe? It’s Molly.”

“Oh, sorry. I just . . . Never mind. What can I do for you?”

* * *

“It could be a manager named Douglas Campbell,” Molly said.

They were sitting in a small restaurant five blocks from Molly’s apartment, and she was picking at a chicken salad, spending more time moving the food around on her plate than eating. The only calories provided by her dinner came from the white wine she was drinking. She was already on her second glass.

“Why him?” DeMarco asked.

Molly hesitated, as if she was reluctant to tell DeMarco what she knew.

“Molly,” he prodded.

“Doug is Reston’s HR guy. Head of human resources. A couple of years ago, I was standing outside his office, right by the door. I needed to talk to him about a consultant I wanted to hire, but he was on the phone. Anyway, he was using one of those prepaid phone cards to make a call. I could see him looking at the card, reading the PIN number off the card as he dialed. I thought that was odd because he makes long distance calls all over the place, and even if it was for something personal, it wouldn’t have raised any eyebrows. Plus, he’s pretty senior. It’s not like anybody would have questioned one of his calls.”

“What’s the phone card have to do with . . .”

“Whoever he was calling comes on the line and Doug says, all agitated, like he’s upset, ‘It failed the solubility test. You better sell.’”

“I don’t understand. What’s that mean?” DeMarco said.

“At the time, a Reston team was working on a biodegradable plastic bottle. You know how the environmentalists go nuts, saying plastic bottles will be around ten million years from now? Well, the team had come up with a bottle that would essentially dissolve six months after you broke the seal. It would have been a major breakthrough, and the company we were working with would have owned the bottle market for a while. But then, late in the development cycle, they found problems they hadn’t seen in earlier tests and abandoned the project.”

Yeah, DeMarco could just see it: you’re drinking a bottle of pop and suddenly the bottom falls out and you end up with Coke all over your lap. But he didn’t say that. Instead, he said, “Are you saying that Campbell was warning somebody who’d bought stock in the bottle company to get out?”

“I don’t know, but maybe.”

“How long ago was this? What year?”

“Uh, 2010. Maybe the first part of 2011. I just know it was a couple years ago.”

“Do you remember the month?”

“No.”

“You said you went to see Campbell because you wanted to hire a consultant. Can you get the exact date of the phone call by looking at the consultant’s contract?”

“I never hired him. It turned out we didn’t need him.”

“Shit. Well, other than this one phone call, is there anything else that makes you suspect Campbell?”

Molly took her time responding. She was driving DeMarco nuts the way she mulled over every answer.

“You asked about who would have access to my personal information. The HR office has my Social Security number on file, and since my paycheck is direct-deposited, they know where I bank.”

“That’s good, Molly. That helps. Anything else?”

Again she hesitated. What the hell was her problem?

“The other thing you asked was if I could think of anybody who seems to live better than they should be able to afford, and that’s what really made me think of Doug. I mean, he makes a good salary, at least one fifty a year, but his house must be worth a couple million. It’s huge. And he has a beach house and a boat, too. He’s always throwing parties and inviting people from work out to his beach place for barbecues and water skiing and stuff. What I’m saying is, he seems to be a little better off than you’d expect, but maybe not. I don’t know. Oh, and one other thing. He told me once he was planning to retire when he turned fifty, which is pretty young.”

Now, that was enlightening. It was hard to imagine a guy who owned all the things that Campbell owned being able to retire so young.
He ought to be up to his neck in debt, and the
way the markets had been performing the last few years, his 401K should be in the same shape everyone else’s was.

“Is Campbell married?” DeMarco asked.

“Yeah.”

“Is his wife wealthy?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, maybe she has a good job,” DeMarco said.

“I don’t think she works,” Molly said, “but I don’t know for sure.”

“Molly, let me ask you something. Why didn’t you report Campbell when you heard him making this phone call?”

She didn’t answer immediately. She finished the wine in her glass, then looked around for the waitress and signaled that she wanted another. “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess because it didn’t mean anything at the time, not until this happened to me.”

She was lying about something, DeMarco thought, but what? And why would she lie?

9