Every Kind of Wicked (A Gardiner and Renner Novel Book 6)
Every Kind of Wicked: Chapter 29

The bank gave them a small conference room to use, happy to get them out of the lobby and the public eye. There were probably, Maggie thought, several reasons for examining and processing the contents there instead of back at the station. For one thing, Jack had a warrant for those contents but no warrant to arrest Shanaya, and his statement indicated a right to examine the contents but not necessarily seize them, unless they indicated criminal activity. If Shanaya carried nothing more in the oversized backpack than her birth certificate and a family photo album, then he could let it and her go without further custody or paperwork. Maggie doubted that would prove the case, from the thud the bag produced when Jack dropped it on the conference table. Besides, the homicide unit and the entire department still churned with the agitation of a police officer’s murder, the pervasive disquiet of a large and disturbed organization, so the bank conference room provided a quiet space in which to focus their attention on Shanaya Thomas.

Maggie was officially present to photograph and fingerprint any items of interest, to see if Evan Harding’s prints turned up, but she wondered if she might be moral support. Perhaps having another female in the room—along with the intimidating Jack Renner and the stocky undercover guy who sat near the corner and did nothing but stare coldly—might help the young woman relax and speak more freely. Perhaps she could be a silent “good cop” to Jack’s bad . . . though Maggie didn’t want to dwell on how accurate that title may or may not be when applied to Jack. Besides, Shanaya Thomas didn’t seem to need or want the support, company or sympathetic glances of her own gender or any other. She didn’t so much as glance at Maggie, only occasionally at the undercover officer, and at the bag on the table. The rest of the time she stared at Jack as if trying to bore through his skull with her gaze. She didn’t seem scared. Upset, worried, a touch despairing here and there, but for the most part angry. Really, really angry.

“You have no right to seize my property,” she stated, enunciating every word.

Jack read her the rights printed on the Miranda warning card, even though she wasn’t technically under arrest, then reminded her that she had told them how she spent her days committing fraud. Any reasonable officer of the court would assume that this bag of money had resulted from those fraudulent actions. Surely she didn’t expect to keep the money.

“My employer is fraudulent. He has all the money I obtained for him. That’s got nothing to do with what’s in that bag.”

“That should be easy enough to establish, then,” Jack said. He asked Maggie to proceed.

She took a picture of the unopened bag. Sturdy and new, it had been constructed of black canvas with straps and mesh areas most likely designed to carry pup tents and bedrolls. It had three large outside pockets, two of which were empty. The third was not.

With latex-gloved hands, Maggie carefully—the possibility of needle sticks or potential weapons ever kept in mind—removed the contents. She spread them out and took a picture of the whole group, then the individual items.

There were seven different drivers’ licenses, four for Shanaya, three for Evan. Seven different names, seven different addresses, and three different states. Also copies of fourteen birth certificates, five Social Security cards—some of these matched the birth certificates—and eight miscellaneous identifications such as medical insurance cards, student IDs to colleges in Pennsylvania and Indiana, and a commercial truck driver’s license with Evan Harding’s picture in the name of Chad Kaiser.

Even Jack seemed a bit taken aback by this replace. How did these pieces fit into a puzzle that would show who murdered three people, and why? “Do you want to explain these to us?”

Shanaya Thomas, or whatever her real name might be, answered with a defiant stare and without a single word.

Maggie unzipped the center section. Photograph, spread the opening wider, photograph again.

The stacks of money inside shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but seeing a four-foot-by-two-foot bag nearly full with tidy bundles of currency—well, that one usually saw only on television.

Jack said, “I assume all this stuff had been in a safe deposit box? Which you opened with the key your boyfriend kept taped to his ankle?”

One eyebrow twitched when he said this, as if she had been wondering what Evan Harding had done with that key, but she said nothing.

“The safe deposit box you just vacated? We spoke to the bank manager. He confirmed that you were the owner of the box, along with Evan—”

“Exactly. It’s my property.”

“—and today you had decided to close it, along with the account you two had here together. He couldn’t give me any details, of course, but he could tell me that you were a valued customer.” He indicated the stack of money. “I didn’t know they made deposit boxes that big.”

Maggie, meanwhile, had begun stacking the bundles into piles of five, photographing as she went. There seemed no need to categorize the bundles—all of them had fifty-dollar bills in bundles of fifty. A brown-edged band let her know a bundle contained one-hundred bills so that her little stacks of five totaled $25,000 each.

Jack pointed at the stacks accumulating on the table, Maggie pulling ever more from the backpack as if they were loaves and fishes.

“This is why you killed him,” he said to Shanaya Thomas.

For a second, pure shock wiped the sullenness off her face. “What? I didn’t kill him! How can you say that?”

“Who else, then? No other person appeared to ask us for this safe deposit key. No one else had a motive.”

“I didn’t have a reason to—”

“This isn’t a reason? He taped the key to his ankle to hide it from you, but both your names were on the account. Now that he’s dead, the whole shebang is yours and yours alone.”

She said, “He kept the key on him because he was always afraid that someone would burglarize our room and replace it. Student housing, security’s pretty basic and there’s always kids around—I know it was stupid, paranoid, but that’s how he was. He kept it anywhere but on a key chain, not even on a chain around his neck, in case the store got robbed or he got mugged by one of their low-life clients when he closed up at night.”

“Look at this from our point of view,” Jack said, calmly but not casually. “Only you and he had access to this money. His body’s barely cold, and you’re heading out the door with—this.”

“We did all this together . . . I didn’t kill him, I needed him. I loved him,” she added.

This last should have been heart-rending, yet it seemed more like an observation absently made. Evan Harding had been her partner first, her lover an off-in-the-distance second.

“Shanaya,” Jack said, “where did this money come from?”

She continued to speak with exaggerated clarity: “It’s our savings. We’ve been saving everything we could for years—you saw where we lived, no car, cheap phones, hardly any clothes. We wanted a nest egg so we could get married and move. We worked hard for that money, and it’s mine, and you have no right to steal it.”

Jack didn’t show even a flicker of anger at this accusation. “It will be inventoried and counted and you will get a receipt for every penny. But we will have to establish where it came from.”

“I told you.”

“You said Evan was your partner. You meant that literally, right?”

She stopped speaking. Maggie continued to stack bundles of bills. The undercover guy in the corner had his chin propped on one hand, its elbow cupped with the other hand, as if waiting for the next twist in a stage play.

Jack said, “He skimmed from Ralph. Then he brought the cash here and deposited it in your account through, what, the night depository? That’s why he wasn’t found on a direct route home, because he came here first. Then what, every so often you withdraw from the account, bring the cash down here, and put it in your box? Transactions under ten thousand don’t have to be reported anywhere, and a simple account withdrawal wouldn’t leave much of a paper trail.”

If he had gotten any of that wrong, she didn’t correct him.

“So here’s the thing, Shanaya. Who did he skim from? Those bogus medical checks? How did he do it without Ralph replaceing out?”

“I don’t know.”

“You just said you were partners.”

“I don’t have to prove anything to you. You have no right—”

He pointed out, with surprising patience: “I’ve been to the check cashing place. I know what Evan made per hour. You, on the other hand, admit that your take-home pay was commission on a first-degree felony.”

“My boss was fraudulent. He got all the money, I didn’t. I only made an hourly wage—”

Maggie had emptied the bag and now tallied the contents, doing the math three times to make sure she got it right. She had thirty-eight stacks of five, nine-hundred and fifty thousand, plus three extra stacks so—

Jack turned to her.

She said, “Nine-hundred and sixty-five thousand dollars.”

He didn’t bat an eye. Neither did Shanaya, but the undercover guy in the corner sat up a little straighter.

“And what was your hourly wage?” Jack asked the girl.

Shanaya seemed to be desperately calculating in her head to come up with some amount that explained how she or Evan or both of them could legally have made nearly a million dollars over the course of a few years.

Maggie, meanwhile, tried out mental arguments for not processing each of the nineteen thousand, three hundred bills, which would be largely pointless—the money had obviously been bundled by the bank employees. She could process the two outer surfaces of the two outer bills and the band of each bundle, only what Shanaya or Evan would touch when moving them from a teller window to a safe deposit box. That made sense.

Shanaya continued to work on an innocent explanation.

Maggie double-checked the oversized backpack. Other than the cash, the main compartment held only a worn metal box with a wire handle and a simple clasp, the kind a social organization might use for petty cash. She pulled it out, holding it carefully by the edges. It had a duck sticker and a piece of masking tape that had once been some sort of label on the top.

“Don’t touch that,” Shanaya said.

Maggie stopped; the woman had not said a word to her while the bills stacked up, so perhaps this box—

“That’s personal. It’s none of your business.”

“Unfortunately, Shanaya,” Jack said, with the most painstaking show of patience that Maggie had ever seen from him, “everything about you is now our business.”

Maggie decided to fingerprint it, now that she’d finally discovered a decent surface for prints. Superglue fuming would be better, but the box had already been jostled around inside a canvas bag and she didn’t think further transport would help matters. But how to use black powder inside the bank’s conference room without creating a mess for the cleaning staff or, heaven forbid, leaving a dark sheen that might rub off on an executive’s expensive suit?

Shanaya said, “You can’t prove anything about that money.”

“Maybe not,” Jack said, “but neither can you.”

“I don’t have to. I’m innocent until proven—”

“Except you’re not. We’ve already established that you’re part of a criminal enterprise aimed at defrauding innocent citizens. You don’t get to benefit from crime. It’s as simple as that.”

Maggie found a roll of paper towels tucked in a single, sparsely populated cabinet in one corner of the room. She spread that over the table and placed the box on top of it, then applied powder with a light brush, keeping her strokes short and concentrated. No sense throwing the fine dust off in every direction or the bankers would be collecting dark smears on their file folders, fingers, and clothes for weeks to come. Shanaya watched this inexorable process with dread.

Maggie found three prints that might be of value for comparison, spread clear tape over the dark lines, then transferred the tape to white glossy cards. They were distinct with strong lines, fresh. Most likely Shanaya had placed them there ten minutes earlier, but nothing could be done about that.

“You have no right to go through my stuff,” the woman continued to argue, aiming this fury at Jack.

“I do, actually. That’s what a warrant means.”

Maggie opened the box, gingerly; she couldn’t help but expect live snakes or a small explosion after that vehement objection. But the box held only loose papers and a few keepsakes: a scratched gold band, a worn gold necklace with a light blue stone, a picture that must have been Shanaya as a toddler with an older couple—her parents?—and a brown and white feather about five inches long. Maggie spread it out and photographed, while feeling the woman’s eyes burn into her scalp.

“That’s just—stuff,” Shanaya said, her voice small and weak.

“I see that.” Maggie tried to sound soothing. She would have liked to assure the woman that she could have it back, but that would be up to detectives and attorneys. These apparent family keepsakes couldn’t be considered relevant evidence. The stack of fake IDs, however . . .

“I’m not a criminal,” Shanaya told Jack. “It’s not my fault my boss is defrauding people. Did you make the staff at Enron give their paychecks back because it turned out to be one big pyramid scheme?”

Maggie detected surprise in the brief tilt of Jack’s eyebrows before he spoke. “That’s a good argument—except you’ve already admitted that you knew it was fraud.”

“I didn’t know—”

“So you really believed that you were an IRS agent, sending deputies out to arrest delinquent taxpayers?”

That stopped her. The “I didn’t know” defense wasn’t going to fly. She tried another. “You can’t prove I did that.”

“We have a witness in custody who is begging to identify you on the stand.”

“He can’t identify a voice. That’s not proof.”

“Maybe. Maybe not. We’ll see what the jury thinks.”

She sat back, appraising him coldly. Blanket denial had gone nowhere. Next approach: “You want your cut? How much is it going to take?”

The undercover guy stirred again, either wondering what his percent might be or wondering if that had been Jack’s goal all along. After all, he didn’t know Jack, who might be the kind of cop who assumed every working stiff could use a little extra folding money.

Maggie knew better. Jack had many faults—to put it gently—but avarice was not one of them.

“No one is taking a cut. As I said, this will be inventoried and you’ll get a receipt. If it cannot be established that these are criminal proceeds, it will be returned to you. If they are criminal proceeds but the original owners cannot be located, part or all of it may be returned to you. I truly cannot say. That depends on what else we discover in this investigation and what the state attorney wants to charge you with, and whether you cooperate.”

She looked up, seeing the glint of a life raft bobbing atop a crashing wave. “Cooperate?”

“You’re a businesswoman,” he said. “Maybe we can make a deal. You’re on the inside of a large criminal enterprise. Maybe, if you help us take them down, if we don’t replace proof that you had a much bigger role in that enterprise than you are letting on—”

“I didn’t.”

“If they did not keep records of who was defrauded and how much of that money went to you—”

She snorted.

“Yeah, I can’t see why they’d helpfully maintain all the evidence that we could use to hang them, either. So if no victims can be identified, then there’s a chance that some or all of this money could be returned to you.”

“Seriously?” She didn’t sound convinced. It didn’t sound very likely to Maggie, either.

He said, “If we can’t prove that the money is stolen, we have to return it to you. But, full disclosure, our goal will be to prove where the money came from.”

“Not much incentive for me, then, is there?”

“That’s up to you,” he said, his tone brisk, matter-of-fact. “Here’s the situation: I’m walking out that door with your almost-a-million dollars. You can run, or you can come with me and try to work out a deal with the state attorney. I have no idea if a deal will be doable. I have no idea whether you will or will not eventually be arrested and serve time in jail. I make no guarantees. I hope I have made that sufficiently clear.”

“Crystal,” the girl snapped.

But she didn’t run.

Maggie had been packing the money back into the oversized backpack. Shanaya Thomas watched every movement, her gaze following the tidy stacks of bills as one by one they disappeared inside the black canvas. Maggie could only guess at the mental calculations she must be making. Take the loss and move on? She was young and healthy and most importantly, not in jail. But she had also spent a long time accumulating this cash. Plus Jack now had all her alternate identities, leaving her no funds to buy a new one. She would truly have to start from a zero sum. A year or three formed only a blink on the timeline at her age, but it probably didn’t feel that way. It probably felt like it had taken forever to accumulate that fortune—and she might never see another.

Shanaya Thomas said, “Okay.”