“So you’re saying, catch him on the murder charge,” Sean said.
“Exactly.”
“Which is the one thing I can’t do,” Max said, “because I’m not a cop.”
“This might be the time for the FBI to bring the scenario to SAPD and see what they think.”
“We’ll talk to Lucy,” Sean said. “She may have a witness to the Albright murders. Not an eyewitness, but Lucy and her people are tracking him down now.”
Max didn’t like Ryan’s analysis, though it made sense. “Harrison Monroe doesn’t get his hands dirty,” she said. “He’s a short, quiet, mild-mannered, impeccably dressed financial planner who looks the part. I don’t see him standing in front of a woman and stabbing her. I don’t see him pulling the trigger from a moving car and killing a potential witness. He’s ordering the murders, but he’s not committing them.”
“If someone comes clean we can get him on first-degree murder even if he didn’t pull the trigger. This is really a RICO case, Max, and I’ve been part of them, but it’s usually a large team of agents working multiple angles to take down as many people in a criminal organization as possible through a lot of tedious paperwork, analysis, investigation, and collecting evidence. Being a cop is not all glamour and recovering priceless artwork, sweetheart.”
“Which is why I’m not a cop,” she countered.
“You do your fair share of the unglamorous grunt work. Want to talk to Eve? She’s clamoring to say hi.”
“Am not,” Eve said from the background.
“Of course I want to talk to her.”
Sean said, “Thanks, Ryan, I’m going to call Lucy and see what’s keeping her.”
Sean stepped into the next room as Eve popped up in the Skype window next to Ryan. “When are you coming back?” she asked.
“I wish I was on a plane now,” Max said, and meant it. “This might be one of the few cases I can’t solve.”
“Stay then,” Eve said. “I don’t want you to regret not finishing it just because of me.”
“That is certainly not the reason,” Max said. “Ryan can explain all the nitty-gritty to you, but it sounds like my skills aren’t sufficient.”
“They are more than sufficient,” Ryan said. “It’s the time involved. A case like this you can’t cut corners.”
That was true, Max thought. If Ryan and Eve weren’t in her life, she’d rent a condo here in San Antonio and stay as long as necessary to finish the case. She’d done it in the past.
But now she didn’t care. Well, she cared, but not enough to uproot her life and miss out on so much time with the people she loved.
“It’ll be a couple more days,” Max said, “maybe a week. If I know Lucy is taking the case, I can walk away.”
“You must trust her.”
“I don’t trust many people to do as good a job as me, but Lucy is one of them,” Max said.
Eve said, “Maybe Ryan and I can come out there this weekend if you can’t leave.”
“If I can’t leave, that means I’m working.”
“You can have dinner with us, right? And you can’t work every minute of the day. And besides, Ryan misses you a lot.”
“Shh,” Ryan said in a stage whisper. “That’s between you and me, kid.”
Eve smiled. She had been through a rough patch in April and had had to adjust to a whole new life after learning that the people she loved and trusted the most had lied to her.
Max knew how she felt. The difference was that Eve’s uncle had lied to her for the right reasons, to protect her and give her a safe life. Max’s mother had lied to her for her own selfish reasons.
But Eve had accepted her new life, embraced it, and looked at the past as a learning tool. A lot like Max would have done, and she was proud of her.
“If I can’t leave on Friday, I would love to see you both in person. I have a suite, so there’s plenty of room.”
“It’s a date,” Ryan said. “I need to feed this kid, and you have no food. Let me know what Agent Kincaid says and if you need to talk, I’m here.”
* * *
Though Max often irritated Lucy in how she approached an investigation by jumping in without looking, Lucy was always impressed with how she organized her information. Lucy was very visual, so viewing Max’s timeline and all the relevant data clearly listed helped her see the whole case. Though she was exhausted and just wanted to go home and sleep, Lucy was glad she’d come by the hotel.
In the forty-eight hours that Max had been in town, she had done a lot.
“What is HFM?” she asked. She was both upset and angry that Sean and Max had been followed this afternoon after Max’s meeting with Harrison Monroe, but she understood why they hadn’t called the police. There had been no crime, and proving to the authorities that someone was tailing you was virtually impossible. “On paper it looks legit.”
“It may be legit,” Max said. “At least on the surface. He buys a lot of property, holds it for a year, and sells it—all through HFM. But it’s impossible to tell—without a federal warrant—where his original money came from. Sean doesn’t think we have enough to turn over to your people. Neither does Ryan.”
“You don’t,” Lucy said. “On the surface there is nothing illegal about any of this. You drew a pretty picture connecting Victoria’s murder to the discovery of the Albrights’ bones, but that’s not even enough. Stan’s comment about Monroe being a straw buyer—even if we could get the judge to let you testify to his statement—means nothing. He didn’t flat out say he didn’t know Monroe, he just didn’t make it sound like he did.”
Lucy looked at the list of names that had been running around in her head ever since Max laid out her theories last night. Six friends from college … involved allegedly in an illegal gambling operation years ago … what were they doing now? Had their crimes caught up with them? Could these murders be revenge … for someone they hurt more than two decades ago?
“You’re thinking,” Sean said.
“It’s … nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.”
“If we assume they had committed crimes together in college, maybe one of their past acts caught up with them.”
“That’s a long time to wait for revenge,” Max said.
“And almost impossible to follow up on,” Lucy said. “Unless there was a complaint filed.”
“That, I can find out,” Sean said. “I’ll dig around and see if anyone filed a complaint in college about any of these people. It won’t take much time—a few calls to the right people.”
“Revenge is a solid motive,” Lucy said, “but I keep coming back to Denise’s family being murdered. It’s … overkill. Unless the kids saw something, but Tori got Becky out of volleyball practice Friday and that tells me that they were either planning on running or … or what if Glen was taking the kids out of town for safety because Denise was planning on going to the authorities about whatever she knew?”