House Odds E-Book

Mike Lawson

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Washington, D.C., fixer Joe DeMarco has been asked to handle a lot of difficult situations over the years for his boss, congressman John Mahoney. But nothing has ever been quite so politically sensitive, or has hit so close to home, as the task Mahoney hands DeMarco in House Odds. Mahoney's daughter has been arrested and charged with insider trading. An engineer with a high-flying technology firm, she allegedly placed a half-million dollar bet on one of the firm's clients. DeMarco's job is to clear her name and keep his boss clean. But how did she get her hands on so much money to invest in the first place? Before long, DeMarco uncovers far more about the case than meets the eye, and the risk to Mahoney is more than just a little political embarrassment.

Leseprobe

House Odds

Also by Mike Lawson

The Inside Ring

The Second Perimeter

House Rules

House Secrets

House Justice

House Divided

House Blood

House Odds

A Joe DeMarco Thriller

Mike Lawson

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright © 2013 by Mike Lawson

This E-book edition published in Great Britain in 2018 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

E-book ISBN: 978-1-61185-927-0

Grove Press Ormond House 26-27 Boswell Street London WC1N 3JZ

www.groveatlantic.com

This book is dedicated to my nephews: Dan Smaldore, an officer in the Arlington County Police Department, and Nick Marshall, U.S. Army. Thank you both for your service.

House Odds

1

“There’s something off here,” McGruder said as he stared at the monitor, one fat finger tapping the scroll-down key.

Pat McGruder was sixty-four years old, five foot seven, two hundred and sixty pounds, and he had emphysema—and he was scaring the hell out of Greg. He was actually scaring Ted, too, but unlike Greg, Ted wasn’t letting it show. Ted sat there sipping his latte, pretending to read Fortune, while McGruder studied the spreadsheets. But Greg—the dumb shit—he was fidgeting, wringing his hands, swallowing like he had a golf ball lodged in his throat.

McGruder continued to look at the monitor, wheezing, his thick lips pursed in disapproval. He was sitting in Ted’s chair, at Ted’s desk, using Ted’s computer, while Greg and Ted sat on the couch in front of the desk like two wayward kids called to the principal’s office.

“There’s something off here,” McGruder muttered again.

“Jesus Christ, Pat!” Ted said, tossing the magazine to the floor, acting pissed. “There’s nothing off. We’re down maybe two percent and . . .”

“Two point one,” Greg said.

Ted shot Greg a shut-the-hell-up look.

“. . . and the books show you exactly where, and we’ve told you exactly why. We’re not trying to hide a damn thing. The economy being the way it is, every casino on the boardwalk lost money this quarter, and profits fluctuate in a business like this.”

McGruder didn’t answer. He continued to tap the keyboard and squint at the monitor. Finally, he stopped tapping and looked at Ted.

“Don’t tell me how things fluctuate, sonny. And I heard what you told me and I can see the numbers. But something’s off.”

“Pat, can you believe I’d ever try to skim on Al? Come on! Not only is the man like a father to me but . . .”

“Ted, you remember a guy named Pauly Carlucci?” McGruder said.

“Yeah, out in Vegas,” Ted said, like he could give a shit.

“That’s right,” McGruder said. “Out in Vegas. And what do they call Pauly now, Ted?”

Ted didn’t answer. He just stared at McGruder, letting him know that he wasn’t intimidated.

“They call him Pauly No-Thumbs, don’t they, Ted?”

Ted just stared.

“Yep, Pauly No-Thumbs. And you know why they call him that?”

Ted still didn’t answer, but McGruder pretended he had.

“That’s right,” McGruder said. “They call him that because Al hacked off his thumbs. And Pauly just tried to screw Al out of a lousy two grand. Can you imagine what he’d do to a guy who really ripped him off?”

“I’ve had enough of this,” Ted said.

“You’ve had enough?”

“Yeah. I’m sick of you sittin’ there, you fat fuck, implying that I’m stealing from Al because you think something’s off, but you don’t know what.”

“You better watch your mouth,” McGruder said.

“To hell with you,” Ted said.

McGruder stood up with some effort. He looked at Ted for a moment, then nodded. “Okay,” he said.

Ted didn’t know what that meant.

McGruder waddled away from the desk, over to the coatrack, and shrugged into a suit coat that had to be a size seventy short.

“I’m gonna be back in a couple days,” McGruder said. “Look things over again, talk to a few of your people, check out some of these losses you claim you had. I’m coming back because it ain’t all about numbers, sonny. It’s about my nose.” McGruder tapped the end of his broad snout as he said this, then pointed at Greg. “And it’s about the way he’s sweating and how you’re acting so fuckin’ cool you’re practically whistling.”

Ted shook his head like he couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

McGruder opened the door to leave, but then he turned back and said, “Oh, I forgot those copies I made.”

Greg leapt to his feet and practically ran to the printer. He reached out to pick up the copies, and when he did, McGruder said, “No, Greg, don’t pick ’em up like that. Pick ’em up without using your thumb.”

* * *

“We’re dead,” Greg said. “Absolutely dead. And did you have to talk to him like that?”

Ted didn’t say anything. He stood with his back to Greg, looking out a window. His office was on the twenty-ninth floor and there was nothing but ocean as far as he could see, not one boat on the water. He’d never found the Atlantic Ocean, at least this part of it, all that picturesque. The Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the waters off ­Hawaii—those cobalt-blue and turquoise seas—now, they were lovely. But here, the water was most often a dirty gray-green—and that was on the nice days.

“Ted, are you listening to me?” Greg said. “The guy knows something’s wrong. He’s going to tell Al.”

Ted Allen was the CEO of Indigo Gaming, which meant he ran the Atlantic Palace Casino in Atlantic City. Greg Porter was his head accountant, but called himself the CFO. Whatever. Ted turned away from the window and looked at Greg.

He and Greg had attended UNLV—the University of Nevada, Las Vegas—and they were both thirty-three years old, six feet tall, and tended to dress casually for work: sport jackets over polo shirts, tailored slacks, loafers. But that’s where the similarities ended.

Greg’s dark hair was beginning to thin and a ring of fat bulged unattractively around his waist. And lately he had stopped wearing his contacts—something about allergies—and had taken to glasses with tortoiseshell frames. Greg thought the glasses made him look intellectual; Ted thought they made him look like the number-crunching wimp that he was.

Ted worked out every day, had broad shoulders, muscular arms, and a washboard stomach. He had a full head of reddish-blond hair, wide-set blue-green eyes, full lips, and a nose that had been worth every penny he’d paid the surgeon. A woman once said that he looked like those Hitler Youth models who pose for Abercrombie & Fitch. He’d never been sure, though, if she’d meant that as a compliment.

“Greg, sit down,” Ted said. “And calm down.”

“Calm down! I’m telling you, McGruder . . .”

“Have you ever considered that this whole thing could be turned into an opportunity?”

“An opportunity! An oppor—”

“Greg!” Ted snapped. “Quit repeating everything I say. Now, sit down and listen to me. I have an idea.”

As Ted spoke, he glanced over at the diplomas on one wall, at his double degrees in business and hotel management. He was proud of those framed pieces of paper. His mother had been a bare-breasted dancer at the Flamingo in Vegas until her tits began to sag, and back in those days she’d also hooked a bit when money was tight. Now she tended bar at the MGM Grand and applied her makeup so heavy she looked like a clown. Good ol’ Mom. But she had introduced him to Al, and Al had paid for his education.

That Al now owned him, body and soul, was the price he had to pay.

“I dunno,” Greg said. “It might work, but it’s risky. I think we should tell Al what we did—what that bitch did—and what you have in mind. I mean it’s a good idea but we should come clean first, get everything out in the open. Al will listen to you, Ted. He loves you. He won’t do something crazy.”

Ted shook his head slowly, not because of what Greg had said, but because of what Greg had become. In college, Greg was the guy you went to if you needed to buy a term paper or the answer key to an exam. He could get you pot, a fake ID so you could drink and, if your girlfriend got knocked up, he knew a lady who could take care of that, too. Back then Greg had balls, which was why he and Ted had become friends, and why Ted had later hired him to keep the casino’s books. But not anymore; these days there were mustard seeds bigger than Greg’s balls.

Thank God he was a good accountant, though. Or at least a better one than McGruder.

“Greg, we didn’t just lose the money,” Ted said. “It’s the way we lost it. Then we cooked the books. No, Greg, I’m not telling Al. I’m going to get the money back and I’m going to get the project financed. I’m going to turn this whole fucking mess to our advantage.”

He was going to make lemonade out of lemons, as his dippy mother always said.

But Greg just sat there, head down, looking like he’d just been told that he had colon cancer. Then he reached out to pick up a bottle of springwater. It took Ted a second to figure out what he was doing: he was trying to pick up the bottle without using his thumb. Christ.

“Greg, go find Gus and tell him to come up here,” Ted said. “I need to give McGruder something else to think about until I can put everything in place.”

2

When DeMarco’s cell phone rang, the dental hygienist was jabbing at a tooth with something sharp and painful. He made a noise that sounded like “Waaa” to get her to stop, checked the caller ID, and told the pretty sadist he had to take the call.

“He needs to see you immediately,” Mavis said.

“I’m at the dentist’s. I can probably be there in . . .”

“Joe, I don’t care if they just yanked every tooth out of your head and you’re bleeding to death from the holes in your gums. Get back here. Now!”

Mavis glared at him when he arrived, which was unusual because he knew that she had a soft spot for him in that small, hard organ the Boston Irish call a heart. He assumed she was displeased because he hadn’t been able to instantly teleport himself from Alexandria to the Capitol, and half an hour had elapsed since her phone call. She shooed him toward Mahoney’s office with a brisk, “Hurry up, hurry up.” He wondered what the hell was going on.

He entered the room expecting that the big man behind the desk would complain because he, too, had to wait—but he didn’t, and this surprised DeMarco. Mahoney was the type who demanded instant gratification, and he whined loud and long when it wasn’t forthcoming.

Mahoney gestured with his blunt chin at a young black woman sitting in one of the two visitors’ chairs in front of his massive desk. “This is Kay Kiser,” he said.

Kiser was wearing a navy-blue suit, a white blouse, and flat-heeled black shoes. DeMarco could tell, even though she was seated, that she was tall. He was five eleven and Kiser was at least that tall, maybe taller. And she looked athletic: good shoulders; flat stomach; shapely, muscular legs. With her height, he wondered if she’d played basketball in college, or maybe volleyball. She was also pretty—and probably even prettier when she smiled—but right now she wasn’t smiling. The expression on her face was beyond serious; it was downright grim.

“Ms. Kiser,” Mahoney continued, “this is Joe DeMarco. He’s a guy who helps me out every once in a while.”

Kiser’s only reaction to DeMarco’s less-than-enlightening job description was to study his face as if she wanted to be sure she could pick him out of a lineup. What she saw was a broad-shouldered, muscular man with a full head of dark hair, blue eyes, a prominent nose, and a big square dimpled chin. DeMarco was a handsome man with a hard-looking face, although he never thought of himself as a hard guy.

“Ms. Kiser works for the SEC,” Mahoney said.

Aw shit, boss! What have you done now?

John Fitzpatrick Mahoney had a broad chest, a wide butt, and a substantial gut. His hair was white and full, his features large and handsome, his eyes blue and watery, the whites perpetually veined with red. John Mahoney had the eyes of a committed drinker.

Mahoney was a Democrat and the minority leader in the House of Representatives. He’d represented a district in Boston for decades and had been the Speaker of the House for years, but lost the top job when the Republicans took control a couple of years ago. He was not an easy man to live with even when things were going his way; he’d become even harder to live with since he’d lost the Speaker’s gavel. His life these days was devoted to putting his party back in power.

DeMarco had worked for Mahoney for a long time and he knew that his employer skated close to the edge in almost everything he did, but DeMarco had never thought him greedy enough—or stupid enough—to do something that would come to the attention of the SEC.

Rising from his chair, Mahoney said to Kiser, “I gotta go—I gotta go vote on something—but I want you to tell DeMarco everything you told me.”

“Sir, I don’t have time to . . .”

“Yeah, you do,” Mahoney said.

There was usually a life-is-but-a-game twinkle in Mahoney’s eyes—particularly in the company of an attractive woman—but not today. And his message to Kiser was clear: no matter what Mahoney may have done, he was still one of the most powerful politicians in the country and she was just a bureaucrat at the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“I’ll talk to you later,” Mahoney said to DeMarco. “And Ms. Kiser,” Mahoney said, his hand on the doorknob.

“Yes?” Kiser said. DeMarco thought the woman’s eyes looked like pieces of polished flint—a rock used to start fires and make arrowheads.

“Thanks for doing this thing this way,” Mahoney said. “I appreciate it,” he added, surprising both Kiser and DeMarco.

* * *

“We’re arresting the congressman’s daughter, Molly, for insider trading,” Kiser said.

“What!” DeMarco said. Now he understood why Mahoney had been so solemn. But Molly? No way.

“My boss sent me here as a courtesy to Mr. Mahoney to inform him of his daughter’s situation,” Kiser said. “Also, as a courtesy to the congressman, we’re giving Ms. Mahoney until seven p.m. to turn herself in and be placed under arrest.”

Every time Kiser said “courtesy” she spit the word out as if it were something nasty stuck to the tip of her tongue. She clearly resented the preferential treatment Molly Mahoney was receiving and DeMarco could tell if Kiser had had her way, two big federal agents would have marched into Molly’s office, slapped handcuffs on her, and hauled her away in full view of her co-workers—just the way they would have handled some coke-snorting young trader on Wall Street.

Kay Kiser wanted to crucify Molly Mahoney on a high hill.

“What makes you think Molly did anything illegal?” DeMarco said.

“I don’t think. I know. Ms. Mahoney works for Reston Technologies in Rockville, Maryland, and she recently purchased ten thousand shares of Hubbard Power stock for fifty-two dollars per share. She . . .”

DeMarco did the math in his head. “She bought half a million dollars worth of stock?”

“Yes. Reston Tech is a research company that works with major manufacturers to improve their products. One of the companies they work with is Hubbard Power and they build batteries used in submarines.”

“Submarines?”

Kiser ignored DeMarco’s confusion. “Reston came up with a design to reduce the weight and size of submarine batteries by thirty percent. This was a major scientific breakthrough in battery design, and the U.S. Navy is going to spend millions on these new batteries.”

“Why?” DeMarco asked.

Kiser kept talking as if DeMarco hadn’t asked the question. “Ms. Mahoney worked on the submarine battery project and she bought stock in Hubbard Power a month before the company’s shareholders were informed of the breakthrough. And when the company announced the new design, the stock price rose to seventy-eight dollars a share and Molly Mahoney made a profit of approximately a quarter million dollars.” Kiser’s lips curved upward in a small, humorless smile. “As soon as she sold her shares, her original investment and her profits were seized by the government.”

“I still don’t get it,” DeMarco said. “So what if she bought some stock in this other company?”

Kiser looked at him like he was an idiot. “That’s what insider trading is, Mr. DeMarco. When a person has information not available to other shareholders, and this person uses the information to make a profit or avoid a loss, it’s called insider trading.”

“Maybe she didn’t know that what she was doing was illegal.”

“She knew. Reston’s corporate policies specifically prohibit their employees from buying stock in companies they’re working with—to prevent insider trading. In an amateurish attempt to avoid discovery, Ms. Mahoney set up a new e-mail address, a new bank account, and established trading accounts with five different online brokers. Then, over a two-week period, she bought Hubbard stock in increments, buying ten or twenty thousand dollars’ worth of stock at a time. She apparently thought that by using multiple brokers and buying the stock in small batches, her half-million-dollar purchase wouldn’t be noticed. She sold her shares through these same online accounts and the cash was electronically deposited into her new bank account. In other words, no paperwork, no links to her old e-mail addresses and old bank accounts, no personal checks and, obviously, no visits to the brokers’ offices.”

“Then how do you know she even bought the stock?”

“Because the brokerage and bank accounts are in her name, with her Social Security number.”

“So maybe somebody stole her identity or rigged her computer in some way, and whoever did this set up these accounts.”

“It wasn’t her computer,” Kiser said. “Again, in an attempt to deceive, Ms. Mahoney used a computer at an Internet café.”

“Well, hell,” DeMarco said. “Then anybody could have done this.”

Kiser shook her head as if she felt sorry for DeMarco. “I would suggest,” she said, “that her lawyers adopt a different defense strategy.”

“Look, there are millions of stock transactions every day . . .”

“Really,” Kiser said.

“. . . so how’d you happen to spot Molly’s trades out of all those other transactions?”

“Because that’s what the SEC does, DeMarco. That’s our job. That’s my job.”

In other words, Big Brother is always watching. Or in this case, Mean Big Sister.

“But where in the hell would Molly get half a million dollars?” ­DeMarco asked. “She’s not rich, not that rich.”

“I don’t know,” Kiser said, and she looked momentarily less confident —but she recovered quickly. “And I don’t care. Half a million was deposited into this new checking account she established, and she used the money to buy the stock.”

“But who deposited the money?”

“Her partners.”

“What partners?”

Kiser ignored the question; she was good at ignoring his questions. “And it would be in her best interest to name those partners immediately. It could reduce her sentence.”

So Kiser thought Molly had partners but didn’t know who they were. “Are you promising her immunity if she cooperates with you?” DeMarco asked.

“The U.S. Attorney will not give her immunity. I’ll make sure that never happens. The best she can expect is a reduced sentence.”

DeMarco decided that Kay Kiser was more likely to set her own head on fire than show Molly any leniency.

“Has anyone talked to Molly yet?”

“Her father called her while we were waiting for you to get here. And her lawyers have been notified.”

Kiser uncrossed her long legs and rose from her chair. DeMarco rose with her. She was taller than him, by at least two inches.

“I’m leaving now,” she said, brooking no argument. Her boss may have forced her to kiss Mahoney’s ass, but DeMarco wasn’t Mahoney. Then Kay Kiser marched through the door without a “goodbye,” her back as straight and rigid as a steel rod.

Javert, DeMarco thought as he watched her go.

He’d seen Les Miserables in New York a few years ago, and that’s who Kiser reminded him of: Javert, the French cop who hounded poor Jean Valjean to the ends of the earth for stealing a loaf of bread.

God help Molly Mahoney.

3

“The driver’s name is Gleason,” Gus said. “The good news is Donatelli doesn’t like him and only uses him when one of his regular long-haul guys is doing something else. He used to work at a government shipyard up there in Kittery, but he’s retired now and he pisses away his money on booze and lotto tickets. He lives in a fuckin’ shack and most the time, unless Donatelli has work for him, the only thing he eats is fish and crab, and it don’t matter to him what fish are legal.”

Ted was jogging on a treadmill in the casino’s fitness center wearing only shorts and running shoes. A short, white towel was wrapped about his neck. His body glistened with sweat and he knew he looked good; he’d just seen a lady giving him the eye. If she had been closer to twenty than forty, he might have invited her to sit with him in the jacuzzi when he finished his workout. Half the women he slept with he met in the gym.

He glanced down at the heart-rate monitor, to make sure his pulse was staying above one thirty, then looked at Gus and said, “Get to the point.”

Ted was convinced the term “knuckle-dragger” had been coined with Gus Amato in mind. He was about forty and he wasn’t very tall—only about five foot nine—but he had a broad chest, massive shoulders, and long, powerful arms connected to huge, hairy hands. His nose was broad and his dark hair was curly—so curly that Ted suspected he was the direct descendant of some Moorish invader who’d screwed a Sicilian a few centuries ago. He was wearing gray slacks and an orange golf shirt, which Ted didn’t mind, but on his feet were white alligator-skin cowboy boots, and dangling from his left ear was a gold hoop the size of a man’s wedding ring. The boots and the earring were something he’d just started wearing, and Ted thought they looked absurd.

“Last week,” Gus said, “Gleason got a brand-new pickup—well, almost brand-new, only twenty thousand miles on it—and he bought a new motor for his fishing boat.”

“Where’d he get the money? From Donatelli?”

“No, that’s the beauty of it. Donatelli would be totally surprised that all of a sudden this loser is driving a new rig.”

“So where did it come from?” Ted noticed his pulse was rising, but he didn’t think it was because he was running. It was rising because Gus, as usual, was annoying the shit out of him.

Gus laughed. “Two years ago, this useless dick filed a disability claim against the shipyard where he used to work, saying the job had destroyed his hearing. And the government, for whatever fuckin’ reason, decided to settle with him. They sent him a check for thirty-eight thousand dollars two weeks ago.”

Now, that made Ted smile. “Anything else?”

“Yeah. He has a granddaughter and Gleason takes the little girl fishing with him when he’s not drunk and she’s not in school.”

“Perfect,” Ted said.

As Ted had told Greg, he needed something to distract McGruder momentarily, and he needed something to convince him that the casino’s books hadn’t been doctored the way McGruder thought they had. Ted didn’t need a lot of time, just a few days, maybe a week at the outside.

And the good Lord, it seemed, had chosen to drop this poor slob, Gleason, right into his lap.

* * *

Mahoney sat, his chair tilted back, his big feet up on his desk. His tie was undone, his suit jacket off, and he held a tumbler of bourbon in his thick right paw. As he talked to DeMarco he looked out at the National Mall, at the protest in progress.

The protesters were as close to the Capitol as the U.S. Capitol Police would allow them to get, but too far away for DeMarco to read the signs they were holding aloft. It seemed to him that there was always someone on the Mall protesting, that hardly a day went by when some group didn’t exercise its constitutional right to assemble and complain.

“If it was Maggie, I might believe it,” Mahoney was saying. “Even Mitzy, but if Mitzy did something like this, she’d be doing it to save the redwoods or the whales or some fuckin’ thing. But not Molly. Molly . . . She’s mymouse,Joe. She’d never do anything like this.”

Mahoney had three daughters: Maggie, Meredith—who went by the nickname Mitzy—and Molly. Maggie, the oldest, was a gorgeous redhead. She was tough, smart, and ambitious—and as tricky as her father if the occasion required it. She was currently an assistant district attorney in Boston, and Mahoney hoped that she’d run for his seat if he ever decided to retire. He and Maggie fought like cats and dogs whenever they were together, but she was clearly Mahoney’s favorite.

Mitzy, the youngest, was a free spirit who refused to be shackled by convention or tradition. She dropped out of college her sophomore year, and since then had hopped from one risky, adventurous job to another. She’d been an avalanche maker on the ski slopes of Colorado; a diver on the Barrier Reef filming white sharks in feeding frenzies; and was the only female member of a team that climbed Annapurna II at a record-setting pace. The last DeMarco had heard she was in the Amazon jungle trying to prevent the extinction of some bird whose sole purpose for living was to shit the seeds of some exotic tree.

Molly was the middle daughter. She was pretty, but not head-­spinning, knockout pretty like her sister Maggie. And unlike Mitzy and Maggie, she was quiet. When all three girls were in the same room with Mahoney and his wife, Molly would sit there, a small smile on her face, just listening as her parents and her sisters talked and argued. She couldn’t compete with Maggie’s stories of crime and politics, and no one could match Mitzy’s tales of nearly being killed by sea creatures and hostile climates. It was easy to see why Mahoney called Molly his mouse.

“Why’d she go to work for Reston Tech?” DeMarco asked. He knew Molly had some kind of engineering degree, chemical engineering he thought, but that’s all he knew about her profession.

“She likes that they do cutting-edge design work,” Mahoney said. “That sorta stuff turns her crank. And the outfit she works for is close to D.C., which she also likes, and they pay pretty well.”

“Well enough for her to have half a million dollars to invest?”

Mahoney shook his head. “She makes about a ninety grand a year, and her mother told me that she was saving up to make a down payment on a house, but no way has she saved up half a million. She’s only twenty-six and she’s only been with Reston four years.” Mahoney sighed. “This thing’s making Mary Pat nuts. She wants to blow up the whole fuckin’ government, starting with the SEC. I’m not gonna get a minute’s peace until this is settled. Oh, and she wants to see you.”

“Sure,” DeMarco said. Mary Pat was Mahoney’s faithful, long-­suffering wife. She had endured her husband’s countless affairs, his drinking, his selfish nature. She had raised his children, managed his household, and stayed by his side through political thick and thin. DeMarco would walk barefoot on broken glass carrying a Hummer on his back for Mary Pat Mahoney.

“She probably wants to give you a kick in the ass, make sure you’re doing everything you can,” Mahoney said.

DeMarco doubted that. Mary Pat wasn’t the ass-kicking type. On second thought, maybe she was when it came to her children.

“I need to talk to somebody over at the SEC,” DeMarco said. “Somebody other than Kay Kiser.”

“Yeah, ain’t she a pip,” Mahoney muttered.

“And I need to talk to Molly.”

“She’s a basket case right now, but I’ll call her and tell her you’re coming over.”

“Is she staying at your place?”

“No. Her mother told her she should, but she doesn’t want to. Maybe when the press starts camping out on her doorstep she’ll move in with us.”

“What are her other lawyers doing?”

Mahoney’s lips twitched at the word “other.” DeMarco had a law degree, had even passed the Virginia bar, but he’d never practiced law. Instead he’d gone to work for John Mahoney—and then did things for the man that he couldn’t put down on a résumé. Nonetheless, DeMarco thought of himself as a lawyer and it always pissed him off that Mahoney didn’t.

“What they’re doing right now,” Mahoney said, “aside from charging me six hundred bucks an hour, is chucking big paper rocks at the SEC to slow this whole thing down. And if the case goes to trial, they’ll tie Kiser into knots. But it shouldn’t ever get to trial, because Molly didn’t do it.”

He didn’t bother to add: and it’s your damn job to prove it.

Mahoney brooded for a moment, finished his drink, and set the glass down hard on his desk. “Someone’s framed my daughter, goddamnit. And when I find the son of a bitch . . .”

“I don’t think she was framed,” DeMarco said.

“What! Are you saying . . .”

“Boss, you don’t frame someone with half a million bucks.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m saying that if somebody wanted to frame Molly, I don’t think they would have thrown away half a million to set the hook. Maybe a few grand, but not half a million. I think there’s one of two things going on here. One, somebody’s using Molly for cover or . . .”

“For cover?”

“Yeah. Somebody—maybe somebody in her company—was trying to make a killing in the market just like Kiser thinks, but they did it using Molly’s identity so if anything went wrong she’d get the blame.”

Mahoney nodded. “And two?”

“Two is somebody’s out to get you. To get you, somebody might be willing to write off five hundred grand.”

Mahoney was silent for a moment; it hadn’t occurred to him that he might be the target. “Maybe you’re right,” he finally said. “So you need to get your ass out there and find out what’s going on. You pull out all the stops on this one, Joe. You do whatever you gotta do. You understand?”

What Mahoney meant was that if DeMarco had to break a few laws, Mahoney wouldn’t care. DeMarco also knew that if he got caught breaking those laws that Mahoney wouldn’t care about that either.

DeMarco looked out at the protesters again. Their signs were waving back and forth in unison like they were singingMichael Row the Boat Ashoreor some similar Kumbaya-ish chant. Maybe, DeMarco thought, he’d stop working for Mahoney and set himself up as a protest facilitator. All these folks would have to do was step off the bus and there he’d be with permits and face paint and signs emblazoned with clever, rhyming slogans. For a little extra, he’d provide straw-stuffed dummies to hang in effigy—and all the dummies would resemble Mahoney.

* * *

Gus Amato drove from Atlantic City to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, where Gleason lived. He didn’t like to fly—crammed into a seat built for pencil necks and twelve-year-olds, surrounded by people always coughing and sneezing—and he really didn’t like to travel unarmed.

Gleason’s place was even worse than he’d expected: a seven-­hundred-square-foot shack that hadn’t seen paint in twenty years, the front lawn a tangled field of dandelions and weeds, and crap just strewn everywhere: beer bottles, an old toilet, a kid’s bike missing a wheel, a rust-covered barbecue tipped over on its side. The only thing that wasn’t broken or rusting was a four-door Ford 250 parked in front of the house. On a trailer attached to the Ford was an old fourteen-foot Boston Whaler, and locked to the transom of the boat was a big, shiny Mercury outboard.

The man who came to the door was in his sixties. The little hair he had was thin and gray, and he had an enormous, bloated belly and the bloodshot eyes of a major boozehound. He was wearing a white wife-beater undershirt that showed off flabby arms and blue jeans stained in several places with rust-colored spots that Gus suspected were dried fish blood. He was six-two, which made him five inches taller than Gus, but the last thing Gus was worried about was this guy’s size.

“What do you want?” he said when he saw Gus. He didn’t say this rudely; more like he was just surprised that anyone would be visiting him.

“You Tom Gleason?” Gus said.

“Yeah. But if you’re selling something . . .”

Gus hit him in the gut and felt his fist sink into four inches of fat. Gleason collapsed in the doorway, retching. “Just wanted to be sure,” Gus said.

Gus dragged Gleason with one hand across the floor and propped him up against a sofa that was a weird green color, like the color of pea soup. As Gleason sat there trying to catch his breath, Gus looked around the house. Jesus, how could anyone live like this? He could practically hear the roaches scuttling over the food-encrusted dishes in the sink.

“You able to hear me okay?” Gus asked. He said this because he’d just noticed that Gleason was wearing a hearing aid in each ear; maybe he really did deserve that settlement money he got from the government.

Gleason nodded, still not able to talk.

“Okay. A couple weeks ago, you were supposed to deliver a truckload of fish to Atlantic City that Marco Donatelli’s guys ripped off from Legal Seafoods.”

“I did,” Gleason said.

Gus wagged a finger. “No, no, listen to me. You gotta get your story straight. Like I was saying, you were supposed to deliver this fish but it never made it. You told the casino buyer that the refrigeration system on the truck crapped out and he was dumb enough to believe you. But then, shit, next thing we know, you got a new Ford sittin’ outside your house and new motor for your boat.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Gleason said. “I delivered the fish.”

Gus put a hand gently on Gleason’s shoulder. “Tom, I don’t want to have to hit you again. Now, you got a fat little granddaughter. She takes the bus home from school every day, and it drops her off two blocks from your daughter’s place. So what I’m sayin’ is, that if you don’t get this story straight, a couple of Colombian guys—and these guys are fuckin’ animals, Tom—they’re gonna pick her up and . . . Well, I don’t have to tell you, do I? You’ve heard what those people do, sell little girls to perverts, put ’em in porno flicks. I mean, it just makes me sick. So I’m gonna start over, to make sure you understand.”

* * *

DeMarco rapped on the doorframe of an office containing a scarred wooden desk, a high-backed black leather chair behind the desk, four gray metal file cabinets, and two wooden visitors’ chairs. Paper was stacked on every flat surface in the room, including the tops of the file cabinets, the floor, and both visitors’ chairs. Next to the phone was a pile of pink telephone message slips, and there were at least thirty slips in the pile.

Sitting behind the desk was Perry Wallace—a triple-chinned fat man with small, cunning eyes. His hair was shaved close on the sides but left thick on top, making it appear as if someone had glued a muskrat’s hide to his big, round skull. He was as attractive as roadkill. But he was probably the smartest person DeMarco knew and he was definitely the hardest working.

Perry Wallace was John Mahoney’s chief of staff.

Making laws requires work, lots of work, and Mahoney was not a hardworking man. Perry Wallace was the one who did the work. While Mahoney gave speeches and posed with Cub Scouts and veterans, Perry managed Mahoney’s staff and his reelection campaigns. He read every word in the Bible-size bills making their way through the House, did the research to sniff out the bullshit buried in thebills, and did the math to see how much everything would cost. Andnot only did he toil until the wee hours on Mahoney’s behalf, he kneweverything. He knew the law and how the federal budget was tallied; he knew the operating rules for Congress, which are harder to interpret than the Dead Sea Scrolls. Most important, he knew every Democratic politician in America and how he or she could be used to advance Mahoney’s agenda, whatever that agenda might be.

Wallace’s reaction to DeMarco’s theory—that somebody was using Molly’s legal problems to harm Mahoney—was: “I don’t see it. So she’s convicted of a crime. Big deal. Everybody has kids, and sometimes their kids do stupid things. Mahoney’s numbers wouldn’t dip two points if she went to jail. And if they showed Mary Pat crying while they carted Molly off to jail, his numbers would probably rise two points.”

By Mahoney’s “numbers,” Wallace meant Mahoney’s standing in the polls, polls that Wallace conducted on every major decision Mahoney made to see how popular or unpopular it might be.

“Okay,” DeMarco said, “but what if somebody came to Mahoney and said, ‘I have evidence that will get Molly off, but I’ll only give it to her lawyers if you’ll push the Democrats my way on a particular issue?’ Don’t you think Mahoney might change his vote to keep his daughter out of jail?”

“Maybe,” Wallace said.

“Maybe!” DeMarco echoed. “Definitely. He’d never let his daughter go to jail for a crime she didn’t commit.”

Or for a crime she did commit.

“Okay, so maybe he wouldn’t. So what?” Wallace said.

“So is there some bill out there that’s going to make somebody tons of money, so much money that using half a million bucks to frame Molly for a crime would be worth it?”

Wallace laughed. “DeMarco, there’s always some bill out there that’s going to make somebody a lot of money—or cost somebody a lot of money. You really oughta pay some attention to what those guys do in that big room downstairs every day.”

“Yeah, but can you think of something specific?”

“I can think of twenty specific things. The number of bills that involve big bucks is large, but more importantly, the number of people behind those bills is almost infinite. It could be any CEO in America; any millionaire who wants to be a billionaire; any one of a thousand special interest groups.”

“Come on, Perry, help me out here. Who’s rich enough and hates Mahoney enough to do something like this? Who hates him so much that they’d use his daughter to get to him?”

“Who hates him so much that . . .” Perry Wallace’s small eyes suddenly grew wide and a look of shock spread across his broad face.

“My God, Joe, I think I know who it is!”

“You do?”

“Yeah. But it’s not a single person. It’s a large group, a gang actually.”

“A gang? What gang? What are they called?”

“They’re called Republicans, you moron.”

* * *

“Pat, it’s Ted Allen.”

“What do you want?” McGruder said, his voice all tight.

“I want to apologize for the way I spoke to you the other day when you came to the casino. I know you were just doing your job.”

McGruder didn’t respond—he just sat there wheezing into the phone. How long, Ted wondered, could a guy in his condition possibly live? “Anyway,” Ted said, “that’s not the main reason I called. You remember when you were here, Greg telling you how we lost money on a load of fish?”

“Yeah, almost fifty grand,” McGruder said.

“That’s right. Marco Donatelli ripped off a truckload of fish, most of it lobster and crab, and we bought it from him. We’ve dealt with him lots of times, and we’ve never had a problem in the past, but this time the truck’s refrigeration system went out between here and Maine and we lost the shipment. Donatelli gave us back our money, of course, but I had to pay retail for fish to stock the restaurants that week. So, like we told you the other day, it affected the bottom line by almost fifty K.”

“Why are you telling me this again, Ted? Are you changing your story now?”

“I’m telling you because I just found out that the driver Donatelli used bought himself a new truck. It looks like this clown lied about the fish spoiling and then sold the load to someone else and kept the money. I’m just letting you know because I’m gonna have Gus take care of the guy.”

Once again all Ted heard was McGruder breathing into the phone, sounding like those steam irons they use in Chinese laundries. Finally, he said, “I want Delray to go with Gus.”

“Aw, that’s okay. Gus is already up in Portsmouth and he doesn’t need any help with this guy.”

“I wasn’t asking you, Ted. I was telling you. Delray’s going with your boy.”

Ted was smiling when he hung up the phone.

4

“Kay Kiser is possessed,” Sawyer said.

Randy Sawyer worked for the SEC and DeMarco knew that for him to talk about an ongoing investigation, particularly one this politically charged, meant that Mahoney had either called in a huge favor or had leaned on someone very hard. Or maybe not. Maybe Sawyer had volunteered to help because he was one of those ambitious civil servants who wanted to go from anonymous bureaucrat to presidential appointee. This was Washington: motives were ­endless—and almost always self-serving.

Sawyer told DeMarco that he was a deputy commissioner in the enforcement division at the SEC, which meant he outranked Kay Kiser. He was a short, chubby-cheeked guy in his forties with a promi­nent overbite and nervous brown eyes—eyes that kept darting about to see if anybody was paying any attention to him and DeMarco. With his buckteeth, he reminded DeMarco of a paranoid squirrel.

They were at Arlington National Cemetery, walking between two of the seemingly endless rows of white markers. They were there because Sawyer took the metro from D.C. to his home in Falls Church, Virginia, and he’d told DeMarco to meet him at the cemetery metro stop. He said he didn’t want to meet in the District—like he was an instantly recognizable celebrity instead of a government pencil pusher.

So they walked between the graves. PFC Harlan Johnson 1899–1918; Corporal Elgin Montgomery 1948–1971; Sergeant Marlon O’Malley 1924–1944. O’Malley, DeMarco noticed, had died on June 6, 1944. A D-day casualty? The headstone didn’t say. The headstone just said that O’Malley had lived only twenty years. DeMarco had always thought the cemetery was beautiful and poignant—and a vast, stark reminder of the cost of freedom.

“What do you mean, she’s possessed?” DeMarco asked.

“I mean she works about eighteen hours a day. She’s not married and, as near as anyone can tell, doesn’t have a social life. Or a sex life. All she does is work. It’s like she wants to hang every white collar criminal on the planet before she dies. Molly Mahoney is in big trouble if Kiser has her in her sights. She’s smart, she’s tough, she never quits, and she’s hardly ever wrong. In fact, I can’t remember her ever being wrong.”

Great. It sounded like Molly had pissed off Supergirl.

“What made her investigate Molly in the first place?” DeMarco said. “I don’t buy that she just happened to spot Molly buying ten thousand shares of stock out of the trillion shares being traded every day.”

“She wasn’t investigating Molly. What she was doing was watching Reston Technologies. We—the SEC—have been watching them for years, before Kay Kiser was even hired.”

“Why?”

“Because there have been three previous insider trading scams involving Reston—three that we know of—and one goes back to twenty years ago and we never caught the people involved.”

“Really!” DeMarco said. This was good news. “What were the other cases?”

“First of all, do you understand what Reston Tech does?”

“Not really. All I know is that Molly’s an engineer who works for Reston, and Reston worked with another company called Hubbard to design some super battery the Navy likes. I didn’t even know submarines used batteries. I thought they were nuclear powered.”

“They are nuclear powered, but they use the ship’s battery when they have to shut the reactor down. And reducing the size is a big deal. When you think of a battery, you’re probably thinking of the twelve volt battery you got in your car. Well, a submarine battery contains over a hundred cells all wired together and each cell weighs over a thousand pounds, and the battery takes up a big compartment in the sub. And on any boat, size and weight are at a premium and if you can reduce the size of the battery you can cram more stuff into the sub: weapons, slick gadgets, whatever. So the Navy is willing to pay a shitload to gain the extra space.”

“I get it,” DeMarco said.

Sawyer bent over and straightened a little flag that was next to one of the headstones, and DeMarco noticed the name on the grave was Murphy, his mother’s maiden name. He doubted he was related to the guy, who’d died during the Korean War, but he found the coincidence spooky.

“And the batteries are just the latest thing that Reston’s done,” Sawyer said. “Reston Tech was started by a genius named Byron Reston. He was an inventor, kind of a latter-day Thomas Edison, and he’s got about a thousand patents on stuff he designed. What he’d do is find some manufacturing company that needed a major improvement in whatever they were making, and he’d come up with the improvement and then he’d partner with the company and share in the profits. The guy was a wizard. He’s dead now but the company is run by his son and they still do what Byron Reston used to do but on a larger scale, and they hire the best eggheads they can find.

“Anyway, twenty years ago Reston Tech partnered with a company that made some kind of gizmo for water treatment systems. This was huge because every big city in the country has a water treatment plant and whatever this gizmo was, a filter or some fuckin’ thing, was going to make the process a whole lot cheaper, and the company that came up with it a whole lot richer. Well, two months before the company goes public with this new product, an investor buys a million bucks’ worth of their stock, when the stock’s at an all time low. In fact, it looked like the company was going bankrupt and nobody was buying their stock. Anyway, when the company announced they had a product they could sell to every water district in the country, the stock shot through the roof and the investor made almost five million bucks—and the whole thing just smacked of insider trading. I mean, why would a guy buy so much stock in this failing company unless he knew they were on the edge of a major breakthrough? But in the end, we could never prove anyone was guilty of insider trading and the investor walked away with his five million.”

Sawyer stopped and straightened another little flag at another grave, and DeMarco wondered if he had some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

“Six years go by, and this time Reston is working with a company that makes body armor and they come up with a compound that would make the armor lighter but with just as much stopping power as the armor being used at the time. But, just like with the water treatment gizmo, three months before the armor company goes public with a product they can sell to the Pentagon by the boatload, somebody buys a ton of stock, the stock price skyrockets, and the investor makes almost twelve million. But this time we can’t even figure out who the investor is.”

“What do you mean you couldn’t figure out who it was?”

“Just what I said. Whoever did this set up a dummy investment company composed of half a dozen people who didn’t exist. The company filed all the right papers with all the right agencies and the people in the company all had Social Security numbers and tax IDs and everything else. On paper, everything looked legit—except the people didn’t exist.”

“You couldn’t follow the money trail?”

“Sure, we could follow it. We followed it from one offshore bank to another to another until it finally disappeared into thin air. Remember, this was fourteen years ago, DeMarco, and it may surprise you to learn that banks in places like Belarus and Nigeria don’t follow the same record-keeping practices we have over here, particularly if you tip the banker.”

“Earlier, you said he. Do you know the investor’s a he?”

“No. It could be a she or a they. But the thing is, we now knew the insider had to be at Reston Tech. I mean, when it happened with the water treatment gizmo it could have been somebody at either the water treatment place or at Reston. But when it happened a second time, and with a different company, we knew there had to be a bad guy at Reston.”

“But you don’t have any idea who he is?”

“Not a clue—and believe me, Kiser’s dug hard for him. Anyway, five years ago it happened again. This time it was for a company who was designing an electric motor you connect to the wheels of a jet.”

“What?” DeMarco said.

“You know when an airplane is sitting at the gate and they use that little truck to push the plane back? And after the jet is on the runway, it taxis for twenty minutes, using up a bunch of fuel. Well, this electric motor, which operates off a rechargeable battery, hooks up to the airplane’s wheels and you can use it to move the plane and taxi. You not only save on fuel, but you can also fire all the guys who drive the little trucks that push the planes around. The thing never got approved by the FAA, but just the idea of it was enough to drive the stock up.”

“So what happened?” DeMarco asked.

“What happened is the same thing that happened with the body armor. Right before the company announces their super-duper new electric airplane motor, somebody buys a ton of their stock and makes a mint. This time the investor was a European hedge fund and, once again, the hedge fund was just an empty shell and because it was set up in Liechtenstein or Switzerland or wherever the hell it was, it was even harder for us to figure out who was involved.”

“So what I’m telling you is, Reston Tech is a perfect company for insider trading. At any one time, Reston is working with thirty or forty different industries on new technologies and if you can figure out what the next big thing is going to be, the place is a gold mine. And this has happened three times in the past that we’re aware of.