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“The university has access to news databases around the world, and they go back decades. If there was a newspaper article written about it, we might be able to narrow down a whole island to a handful of potential addresses.”
“Are yacht purchases recorded the same way property purchases are?” Flynn asked. “Because we shouldn’t pin all our hopes on that and disregard the other possibilities. And let’s face it, someone who was trying to hide probably wouldn’t splash that much cash on a house.”
“No, you’re right,” Ezra agreed. “It would cause a hell of a lot of speculation if some rich landowner moved in right when the world was going to shit. But a yacht sailing in might just look like a tourist. They could keep moving around too.”
“What could you get for eight mil back then?” I asked.
“Nothing like this,” Ezra said. “But that’d probably work in their favour. We found Zali that quickly because the yacht is so recognizable. Something a lot more toned down would have been cheaper as well as less conspicuous.”
“Would Rosa’s yacht have been capable of making it to Mauritius?” Flynn asked, his words quiet. Wide-eyed, his gaze bounced between Ezra and me. “Her yacht was never found. What if they were killed the weekend they went missing, and their murderers stole the yacht, changed the registration markings, and left the country? Could they have made it there?”
I looked at Ezra, but his face was carefully blank, the kind that only detectives could pull. My gut twisted and nausea washed over me. I’d suspected at the beginning of this project that Rosa Weatherall was guilty of stealing a shitload of cash from her investors, only to commit suicide when the house of cards she’d built was starting to tumble. The results of our research had led me to lean toward an alternative—that Rosa was innocent and someone else in the company had defrauded their clients of the money. The threats against me were real. The liquidator being connected to a crime family was real. The fact that most of the high-level employees were no longer working, many having just disappeared from professional networks altogether after ReimagINC went under, hadn’t been manufactured. But the simplest explanation here was undeniable. Had Rosa faked her death and disappeared? Had she simply sailed on out of the country and moved halfway across the world with padded bank accounts in an international bank known for its discretion and security?
“Could Rosa have sailed it there?” I asked.
“No,” Ry answered from the doorway behind us. “The yacht wasn’t built for long, international open-water trips like that.”
“Oh, hey, Ry,” Flynn greeted him with a smile. “Zee still asleep?”
“Yeah, but she’s in bed. She didn’t want to get sunburnt.” He gestured at our computers. “How’s it going?”
“We’re working on theories. Why do you say it wasn’t built for those trips?” I asked, curious to hear his opinion.
“The fuel tanks weren’t big enough to make that kind of journey. Even if it was broken up and the pilot skirted the Australian, Asian, Middle Eastern, and African coastlines to get there, that length of journey would have been incredibly difficult to pull off. There are a lot of remote areas not set up to receive yachts, so sourcing fuel would have been a problem. It’s not like you can fill a jerry can and pop it in the tank to get you to the next fuel station if you’re in the middle of the ocean or on some deserted beach. You’d need tens of thousands of litres of diesel.”
“Okay, so that’s out,” I conceded. Whoever stole the money would have had enough to pay for fuel, but getting it onto the yacht would have proven prohibitive.
“But someone could definitely have bought a yacht over there with eight mil,” Ezra agreed. “I’ll take a look and see if I can find anything. I’m not sure if I can search the international databases the same way I can for the Aussie ones. I might need something more solid to go off.”
“You guys yell out if I can help, yeah?” Ry gestured upstairs. “I’ll be in my office.”
We went back to our tasks, each of us going quiet as we worked. Database after database turned up nothing, the news records of the tiny island nation off the African coast almost impossible to find. The newspaper archives were there; I just had to find them.
Finally, I stumbled on the right database, immediately getting hits to my search terms. Narrowing it to the three-month period on either side of the date of the transfers, it condensed the results even further, leaving me with only a handful of results. Two were irrelevant—land deals funded by the British in Rwanda and land management grants being issued in Senegal—but the third article had me sitting up straighter.
I blinked in disbelief. The words were right in front of me in black and white. But they seemed too easy. I read the article, then read it again.
“Fuck me, listen to this,” I gushed. Ezra’s and Flynn’s heads snapped up, their undivided attention immediately on me. “‘Foreign Investors in Mauritius Real Estate Boom.
“‘Record high prices have been paid for five secluded luxury estates along the Mauritius coastline, buoying market confidence in land investments in the region in recent months. Local real estate agent, Marie Bundhoo, listed three of the properties sold in the past sixty days.
“‘Our agency prides itself on representing the best of the luxury real estate market in Mauritius.
“‘Despite the uncertain state of the international economy, investors are still flocking to Mauritius.’ There are pictures too.”
I spun my laptop around and showed my guys the grainy images of mansions to rival the ones in Beverley Hills slotted between lush rainforest gardens and pristine beaches.
“I can work with that,” Flynn said with a sense of urgency that had me moving to see what he was up to. “Download that article and send it to me so I can pull it up on Zali’s screen.”
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“A Google Earth satellite search. We know they’re waterfront. We know they’re not in the middle of town and they’re big. How hard can they be to find? It’s an island. Once I narrow it down, I can look it up on Google maps and hopefully find a few addresses.”
“They could be holiday houses too,” I pondered, bringing up a travel website.
“Hide in plain sight,” Ezra agreed. “What better way to get the locals onside than contribute to the local economy. People aren’t likely to look too hard into your past if they’re earning money from you.”
“Exactly.”
