Page 57 of Done Dirty

“Are you saying you can no longer control your computer?” I asked.

“Of course not,” Doug said, but he didn’t look as confident as he sounded.

“We’ll talk about this later,” Jack said.

Oscar could feel the tension in the room and he was running in circles around the conference table.

I sat in one of the plush black conference chairs and Oscar immediately came and lay on top of my feet.

“I want to start with financials,” Jack said, looking at Derby. “Any roadblocks getting into his accounts?”

“No,” he said. “The guy wasn’t a financial genius, hiding offshore accounts or anything. And I didn’t have any trouble once the warrants were executed. I can pull everything up.”

“Let me do it, Lieutenant Derby,” Margot said. “I’m already integrated into your system.”

“Ah.” Derby looked back and forth between the AI woman on-screen and Jack. “Okay.”

“Thank you, darling,” she purred. “I’ll put the data on the projector screen. You really should consider updating this equipment, Jack. The department could do so much better.”

“Well, we operate on a budget,” Jack said. “Unlike Doug apparently.”

“He’s got your standard accounts,” she said, going into business mode. “Personal checking and savings accounts. He’s got a brokerage and retirement accounts. All with healthy balances. He drew a nice salary from the business. Typical corporate setup with employees. Everything on the up and up. He uses the business card for business purchases. Pays his bills on time. He’s living on the high side of his income, but he’s not in danger of debt. He took a couple of trips to conferences in the last year, all expensed to the business. One in Florida and another in Los Angeles. I checked the dates and everything coincides with his travel itinerary.” She paused.

“But?” Jack asked.

“Then he’s got the same setup at another bank,” she said. “Personal and savings accounts. Only cash deposits. Nothing else goes in from any other account or direct deposit. No checks. Then he pushes money into a high yield savings.”

“It’s the Dave Ramsey way,” I said dryly.

“How long has he had the cash accounts?” Jack asked.

“They were opened a little over two years ago.”

“How much has been deposited?” I asked.

“Right at half a million dollars,” she said.

“From forty-one women?” I asked, looking at Jack.

“I guarantee he studies his prey before he chooses them. He knows who is wealthy, who’s most vulnerable, who has the most to lose. There are a lot of women who aren’t like Zoe Brown, who’d have the courage to say no and flip the script on someone like Wade. But it wasn’t even Zoe that challenged him. It was her husband. And Wade isn’t going to go head-to-head with a man like that. He’d get his tail kicked.”

“He had photographs of Zoe Brown,” I said. “He wouldn’t get rid of things like that. It’s his insurance policy.”

“It’d be on the burner phone, along with any communications he shouldn’t be having.”

“His drug sources,” I said.

“That would be consistent with the money that’s going out of the cash account,” Margot said.

“What do you mean?” Jack asked.

“He’s got six large cash withdrawals of fifty thousand dollars about every four months over the last two years.”

“The bank didn’t flag it?” Jack asked.

“They filed a currency transaction report, but the reason listed says personal expenses,” Margot said.

“That’s not super unusual if Wade was on good terms with the bank president,” Jack said.