Into the Fire(106)
“Looks like all the big players were in on it,” Max said.
“You don’t need all the players.” Evan pointed at a scanned PDF of the signature page of the LLC’s operating agreement. “Just one in each division.”
The scheme required a perfectly placed set of men able to verify a fake spending cut. To corroborate a supposed budget shortfall. To create fictitious invoices. To nudge investigations into the circular file.
A dozen men, with Stella Hardwick at the helm, had victimized an entire city.
At the end of the trail, there wasn’t a face but a committee. Not a head to the monster or even nine heads but a mini-bureaucracy. The more legitimate the veneer, the less anyone would question what lay beneath.
By plugging into Bedrosov’s existing criminal enterprises, Stella and her men had established an infrastructure beneath them to wash the money they skimmed off the city’s $9.2-billion budget. After routing their embezzled cash through his bank, Bedrosov fed it out through multiple franchises beneath him, like Petro’s. The money was cleaned and delivered in nonreportable, nonsourceable chunks to the men’s—and Stella’s—respective accounts. Bedrosov had kept the principals sealed off completely, insulated from the process. Which explained why Joey had been unable to pierce the veil of his enterprise.
Stella and her men had used the authority of their offices to cover up their corruption.
They had used dirty cops to further their abuses of power.
They had used contract killers, crime bosses, and psychopathic businessmen to neutralize their opponents.
And in the process they had gotten help from a very surprising source.
The awareness sat heavily in Evan. How awful for him and Max to have come all this way only to realize that the truth had been right there the whole time, right beneath their noses.
He waited a moment for the flush of the revelation to subside and then refocused. He returned to the laptop, studying the meeting minutes. They were aggressively specific, listing attendees and detailing procedures and the precise order of events. An ironclad assurance against an associate’s developing a sudden fit of conscience. If anyone went down, they’d all go down.
“God,” Max said. “Grant barely scratched the surface. I mean, he was still deciphering code names way at the bottom of the scheme.”
Chagrin washed through Evan, prickling his skin. He’d assumed that Max had put it together as well.
“Max,” he said, “Grant wasn’t investigating this case for the cops. He was cooking the books for Stella Hardwick.”
He could feel the heat of Max at his back, searching the screen. Could practically sense the wheels turning in his head, searching for traction.
“Wait,” Max said. “No.”
Evan’s head ached from the prolonged focus, so he reminded himself to speak clearly and with the same kindness he’d want to be shown if he were in Max’s shoes. “There were two sets of spreadsheets on the thumb drive Grant gave you,” he said. “We assumed he was working to unearth the real transactions. But he was actually the one burying them.”
Just before Evan had killed him, Bedrosov had referred to Max as Grant Merriweather’s cousin. In hindsight it seemed telling; Bedrosov knew Grant well enough to make him the point of reference. Grant had been hired into the operation to clean the books. Right away he must have sensed he was in over his head. Given the power players behind the scheme, he’d have figured he needed insurance for when he finished the job. He needed to be able to threaten mutually assured destruction to anyone thinking of taking him out.
So two months ago, shortly after he started the job for Stella Hardwick’s band of brothers, Grant had pulled some preliminary spreadsheets onto a thumb drive to be delivered into the hands of a Los Angeles Times reporter in the event of his death. Lorraine Lennox was an expert in L.A.’s crime networks. Evan recalled scanning over one of her articles that had made insinuations about a secret cabal of unidentified city leaders. Lennox had been sniffing around the bigger story, which was likely why Grant had chosen her once he realized he’d gotten himself in too deep. And why Stella’s hit men had wiped her off the board as soon as Grant fled with the damning thumb drive and they feared they might lose control of the narrative.
“Why would you say that?” Max’s voice was hoarse now, the truth dawning.
“What Grant gave you was only his rough work at the beginning of the job. Pieced-together files, partially encoded, even hidden. In case it fell into the wrong hands, he couldn’t trust you with something that had the explosive details—the names of the higher-ups—spelled out overtly.” Evan pointed at the screen. “But these books are dated fifteen days after the first set—right before Bedrosov got arrested. And they’re complete. Every last payment that’s been moved out of the city budget to the Singapore bank, laundered, and delivered to the principals has been codified by legitimate bookkeeping. That requires the skill level of a superb accountant.”
“Maybe they hired someone else,” Max said. “You don’t know that it was Grant. How could you know that?”
“Because,” Evan said, “Grant gave this thumb drive to Bedrosov.”
Evan slid the thumb drive out of the laptop and tilted it to the light. He hadn’t checked yet, but his gut told him it would be there.
Etched onto the metal plug of the USB connector was a nifty little logo, the right downstroke of the M merged with the rising slant of the A.