The Intelligence Unit Series
The Guardian Chapter 8

Judging by the way everyone in the room had just stopped what they were doing in favor of drop-jawed stares, Delia must have said something important. She rewound her question-it had seemed innocuous enough-but then her pulse stuttered as understanding took the bullet train from her brain to her central nervous system. She had stumbled across something way bigger than Peyton getting caught with her hand in the till.

Embezzlement. Money Laundering. Extortion. Bribery, the board in front of her read.

Murder.

Oh, God.

"Delia." Matteo's voice was utterly calm, the polar opposite of her thwacking heartbeat and rushing adrenaline. "Do you know this man?"

He stood to touch the digital image on the large wall-mounted screen, and her brain kicked her mouth into gear.

"Yes. Well, sort of," she corrected, and wow, everyone in the room had just dropped what they'd been doing fast. "I met him on Friday. He was with my boss, Peyton, outside the Plaza."

"You're absolutely sure it was him."

"Yes."

"Your boss, who you think might be embezzling money from your company, has connections with this man," Matteo repeated as if she hadn't just said that very same thing, and oh, here we go again.

"God, Matteo, yes, I'm sure. I was walking back from having lunch with your sister and I ran into them outside the Plaza. He's about six feet tall, and was wearing what looked like an insanely expensive suit and a gigantic ruby pinkie ring. He introduced himself as Nick, but didn't tell me his last name, so I made a joke about it. I called him Beyoncé. It was him, okay? It was this guy. Nicky Bianchi."

And that was when everyone in the room dropped any last shred of pretense and moved over toward them.

"Sorry, Garza, did you say embezzling?" asked the brunette detective, who was also the guest of honor at the baby shower they'd been setting up for, if the blue Mom ribbon pinned to her shirt and her very round belly were anything to go by.

"I'm kinda stuck on the Beyoncé thing," murmured the petite blond who wore her badge and gun with as much ease as her bouncy ponytail. "Oh, come on," she added, as Matteo glared at her. "Don't tell me you wouldn't have paid cash money to see that go down." "Yes, I said embezzling," Matteo replied, all business (shocker). "Delia is the Vice President of Finance for Cromwell A&M. She noticed some discrepancies in a few of their accounts last week, but before she could act, her laptop and a flash drive she'd copied the suspicious files onto were stolen in a personal robbery."

The male detective who had been laughing so freely a minute ago, lifted his dark red brows at her. "And now it's looking like her boss, who might be responsible, has direct ties to Nicky Bianchi?"

Matteo wasn't even done nodding before the really tough-looking detective with tattoos covering both well-muscled arms let out a low whistle.

"Yeah, I'm going to go get Sinclair."

Delia tried to keep up, but finally asked, "Who's Sinclair? And, I'm sorry, I don't mean to be rude, but who are all of you? Just, you know, for reference?"

The blonde smiled. "Jeez, Garza. Way to throw the poor woman into the deep end."

"I didn't know she was going to ID Nicky Bianchi like that. Or call him Beyoncé," Matteo grumbled, but the woman just shook her head.

"Detective Addison Hale." She extended a hand, then came to sit at the desk to Delia's left. "And these are Detectives Isabella Walker and Liam Hollister, and James Capelli, our tech and surveillance guru. Although, you can just go with Capelli, because everyone does."

"I prefer 'subject matter expert," Capelli said, although not unkindly. "Guru has spiritual connotations that are somewhat abstract, and what I do is quite straightforward."

"And yet, it's practically your religion," Detective Hollister pointed out with a grin.

"I can relate to that," Delia said, nervous energy pushing the words from her mouth. "On the one hand, numbers are absolute values. As you said, quite straightforward. But studying them yields so many fascinating theories and possibilities-they're endless, really- it's not difficult to be rather, well, devoted, for lack of a better word. Similar to a religion, in that way. So, perhaps you are a guru, as well as being an expert. I don't suppose they're mutually exclusive, do you?"

Annnnd they were all staring.

But before Delia could backtrack, Capelli sent a pointed look at Matteo and said, "I like her. She makes sense."

"She's a victim and a potential witness. Also, my little sister's best friend," Matteo said, and good Lord, had he always been this grumpy?

"I'm right here, you know," Delia pointed out, which made Detective Walker laugh.

"Now, I like you."

"Sorry to interrupt," came a gravelly voice from behind them, and wow, every last one of them had gotten serious in an instant. "I'm Sergeant Sam Sinclair, and this is Detective Shawn Maxwell," the man belonging to the voice said, gesturing to the inked-up detective before moving to shake her hand. "I understand you're the victim of a personal robbery that may be connected to a larger case we've been investigating?" Personal robbery. Funny how those moments of panic and undiluted fear could be boiled down to such a tidy category.

Delia swallowed past her tightening throat. "Yes, sir."

"Sam is fine," he said, his weathered eyes crinkling around the edges for the briefest of seconds, as if he'd already used his smile quota for the day but was sneaking one in. "Or Sergeant, if you prefer to stand on ceremony. I suppose we should start at the beginning. Why don't you tell me about the day of the robbery?"

"You can take your time," Matteo said quietly.

Heat crept over Delia's cheeks as she remembered how he'd pushed her to call up details she hadn't even realized she'd remembered the other night. Taking a deep breath, she recounted the way she'd stumbled across the financial discrepancies in the accounts, and how Peyton had promised to remedy things. It was the easy part. Although she didn't have an eidetic memory, her capacity to recall numbers in vivid detail was far better than average; plus, she knew those accounts better than she knew her own reflection. Delia described everything in an abundance of detail, realizing that she was likely rambling as if it were an Olympic sport, but at this point, she was too invested to care. The more she laid it out, piece by piece, the clearer it became to her that someone at Cromwell A&M was up to no good. Especially with the way the numbers now added up, right down to the decimal, when they definitely hadn't before.

"Brilliant." The unit's tech expert, James-no, Capelli-shook his head as she finished. "The placement, the layering, the integration, they're all right there-in theory, anyway. But this sounds like an incredibly sophisticated money laundering scheme, and with the amount of cash and assets that move through a company like Cromwell A&M, if Bianchi's behind this, he's found himself a gold mine." "You want to explain how you got there?" Hollister asked, splitting his gaze between Capelli and Delia. "For those of us in the cheap seats." Looking at Delia through his black-framed glasses, Capelli nodded. "May I assume that you've studied forensic accounting?"

"Of course. There's always the risk, however small, that Cromwell A&M could be audited or engaged in litigation." "Excellent. Then everyone here understands how money laundering works," Capelli said.

Delia's eyes widened. "Well, yes, but what's going on in these accounts is very involved." Some of the paths had more than a dozen covert stops, none of them directly traceable, and more than half of their accounts had some sort of discrepancy or another-and those were just the ones she'd discovered.

"The scheme is extremely well done, and I'd have to see the actual route of the transfers to be sure"-Capelli paused-"Not that I am admitting that gaining access to those systems is strictly legal or a thing I have the skillset to do."

"We get it," Matteo said, a touch impatiently, prompting Capelli into a more detailed description of how the numbers Delia had discovered translated to a spin cycle of covert transfers, loans, and investments that were all, very likely, fake.

Matteo listened with care that bordered on intensity. "So, you think Bianchi and Peyton have teamed up to move his dirty money through the financial system via a bunch of offshore accounts and shell corporations, then filter it back to themselves with no one the wiser?"

"That's a very broad description," Delia started, not to mention a devious and highly illegal one. But, God, it explained the discrepancies. Not to mention, Peyton's offer to take care of things. How had Delia been so naïve?

"It still doesn't pass the smell test," Matteo said, and all of the other detectives nodded.

"And it fits Bianchi's M.O.," Detective Walker said. "He replaces a trusted contact within an organization, usually someone with a weakness or a skeleton in their closet. Something he can exploit. Then, he uses that connection to make investments, purchase all sorts of assets-the sky's the limit, really."

Delia's brain spun so fast, she was nearly dizzy trying to keep up. "Peyton doesn't have any weaknesses. She's pretty much the opposite of weaknesses."

"You might be surprised," Sergeant Sinclair said. "But we're getting ahead of ourselves. What happened after you notified Peyton of the discrepancies and she promised to look into things?"

Marshaling her thoughts into order, Delia said, "I went to lunch with my best friend, Camila. We ate at Spice Up Your Life, over on Weston Avenue. It's not far from where I work, so I walked." She told the detectives how she'd run into Peyton and Nick-well, Nicky, she guessed, since that was what he seemed to go by-and how he'd seemed aloof, albeit not impolite. "I thought he must be a CEO or something. I mean, he and Peyton were at the Plaza, and he was expensively dressed." "What else?" Matteo asked, pinning her with a dark gaze that made her stupid, traitorous belly flip beneath her gray palazzo pants.

"Well, after that, I went back to my office-"

"No." Matteo shook his head. "I mean, what else can you remember about Nicky?"

"I told you," Delia said, and really? He was going to do this again? Did he think she was an idiot?

"Think harder," he said, and guess that was a yes. Delia was a millimeter away from telling him that she'd heard him the first time when Detective Hollister cleared his throat, stealing her attention with a charming smile.

"We know this is a lot, Delia, and you've been great so far. But there's no time limit on our conversations and sometimes, even small details that you might think are inconsequential end up being really helpful."

"Really?"

"Oh, yeah," Detective Hale chimed in. "Once, we nailed a guy who had ripped off nine ATM machines because he'd worn a hat his grandmother had knitted for him while he'd done the crimes. He'd pulled the thing down low, to hide his face, but once we put the BOLO out and she saw it..."

"She recognized the hat?" Delia asked in disbelief.

Detective Hale grinned. "Yep! It was enough to get us a warrant. We searched his place and oh, helllllooooooo, all the cash was beneath his mattress and the hat was in his hall closet. He confessed on the spot."

The tension that had set up camp in Delia's shoulders eased by a fraction. She supposed it did make sense that the details all had the potential to matter, even if they seemed small. "Okay. Let me think for a second."

Closing her eyes, she replayed the scene in her head, visualizing the fountains, the way Peyton had been frowning, the dark, angry look on Nicky's face...

"They were arguing," Delia blurted. With everything else, she'd totally forgotten. "When I first saw them, they looked mad at each other. I remember being a little worried, because Peyton never loses her cool. But as soon as they saw me, she was all smiles." "They might've been arguing about you," Matteo said, and Delia's heartbeat sped through her veins.

"What? That's crazy. Nicky didn't even know me at that point."

"No, but Peyton might've told him you'd asked about the discrepancies," Detective Maxwell said.

Another memory sparked, bright and swift in Delia's mind. "Oh! Someone was in my office! I mean, I think. Maybe." Before the thought could recede, she described the way her laptop had been left ajar. "It was just the slightest bit, but I always close the top all the way, out of habit." "Always?" Detective Hollister asked, and Delia bit her lip. She knew that saying order and symmetry calmed her probably wouldn't make sense to anyone in the room, except maybe Capelli, so she improvised.

"Yes. I, um, have a lot of quirks."

A muscle in Matteo's jaw flexed beneath his goatee. "So, someone was probably keeping tabs on you."

"Or her machine, at the very least," Detective Maxwell said.

"And it explains the robbery," Capelli added. "Even if someone went through and altered the accounts to make them look balanced now, the download on Delia's hard drive would show the incriminating data. Bianchi has a reputation for being exceedingly cautious, and if he thinks Delia has seen something she shouldn't have, he's probably covered his tracks. Other than the flash drive itself, that laptop could be the only concrete proof that those accounts have been tampered with. At least, that we can get without a complete forensic investigation of Cromwell's network."

No way. No way. Things like this didn't happen to her. They only happened on Dateline. Or, if things got really dramatic, Law & Order. But come on. "You don't really think someone put, what? Spyware on my laptop, then orchestrated a robbery and knocked me out in order to steal evidence of a money laundering scheme, do you? I mean, it sounds crazy."

"It's less crazy than you might think," Detective Walker said, capping the words with a kind smile. "And you have to admit, it is possible."

Capelli chimed back in. "When you consider all the facts as a whole, the statistical possibility that these occurrences aren't linked is extremely low."

"This is Bianchi," Matteo said, his dark brown eyes sparking with the sort of intensity that Delia had never seen there before, and holy cats, it was hot in here. "It's got his signature all over it. And that means exactly one thing."

"What's that?" Delia asked, her voice wavering.

Matteo made up for it by answering her without hesitation.

"Right now, the key to taking down Remington's biggest organized crime lord is you."