Chapter 13: The Terrified Accountant
The 12th Precinct smelled like burnt coffee and copy toner, the way every precinct in every city did at seven in the morning, and Kate Beckett had decided long ago that the smell was less a nuisance than a promise. The night shift had cleared out, the day shift had staggered in, and somewhere down the hall a fax machine was grinding through something nobody had asked for.
She set a cardboard tray on her desk and slid one cup toward Cho, who was already seated at the spare desk across from hers, his jacket still on, his hair still exactly as neat as it had been the night before. She had no idea when he slept. She was starting to suspect he simply did not.
"There is nothing," she said, dropping into her chair.
"There is a little." Cho pulled a legal pad toward him and turned it so she could read the half page of notes in his compact, unadorned print. "The three women all describe the same van but they all give a different color. Marta says white. Kim says gray. Anya says dark blue. Nobody got a plate. Nobody saw a face for more than a second."
"That is less than nothing. That is three witnesses giving us three different vans."
"That is three witnesses who were each grabbed alone, in three different states, by people who knew exactly when to take them." Cho tore the top page free and folded it in half, a habit he had of filing information by destroying the evidence of his own thinking. "They were not random grabs, Beckett. Somebody chose them. Somebody watched them long enough to know their routines."
"So we find who was watching them."
"Three cities, three jurisdictions, no names." He looked up at her, and his face did not move, but the pause before he spoke was a shade longer than usual. "That is a lot of ground for two people."
It was not quite a complaint. Cho did not complain. But Kate heard the shape of it anyway, the thing he was not saying. He had been in New York for over a month now, eating bad deli sandwiches and sleeping in a hotel that had once been a parking garage, and every single lead had been a dead end with a bow on it. The trail was a hallway with no doors.
She took a sip of coffee and let it scald her tongue. "Gates is pushing me to hand it off. She says if it crosses four states it belongs to somebody above my pay grade."
"It does cross four states."
"Don't help."
"I'm not helping. I'm agreeing." He turned a page. "It crosses four states, and the only thing that keeps it here is a woman in Richard Castle's guest room who can't remember her own name."
Kate was quiet for a moment.
"She remembered something last night," she said finally. "Carbonara and pineapple. That's the whole of it. She remembered a friend's favorite food, and then she cried for ten minutes."
Cho accepted this without expression, but his pen stopped.
"That's more than we had," he said.
"That is not a case, Cho. That is a dinner order."
"It is a start."
She opened her mouth to argue and the phone on her desk rang. She gave it a look of pure unearned resentment and picked it up. "Beckett."
"Detective, there's a man downstairs who wants to talk to you." The desk sergeant sounded like a man who was being personally inconvenienced by his own job. "Says he has information about a... he called it a shipment. He won't give a name, he won't talk to anyone but the detective in charge, and he's shaking like a leaf in a windstorm."
"Where is he now?"
"Sitting in the lobby with his hands in his pockets."
She looked at Cho, who was watching her with interest.
"Give me two minutes," she said, and hung up. Turning to Cho she said, “We may have finally caught a break.”
The interrogation room was windowless and cold, built of cinder block painted the same grey as everything else in the building, and it hummed faintly under the fluorescent lights while the smell of old coffee hung in it like something absorbed into the walls. The man at the table was not what she had expected.
Feldman was maybe fifty, thin to the point of frailty, wearing a brown suit that had been good a decade ago and a tie knotted slightly crooked. He had the narrow shoulders and the soft hands of a man who had spent his working life indoors, at a desk, being trusted with numbers. He was not shaking anymore. That, somehow, was worse. He had the stillness of a man who had already decided something and was waiting for the cost of it.
"Mr. Feldman," Kate said, sitting across from him. Cho took the chair by the door, out of the man's eyeline, which was deliberate, and Feldman's eyes slid to him and away. "You wanted to talk to me."
"I want protection." Feldman's voice was thin and precise, the voice of a man who dealt in exact amounts. "Not the kind you say you'll give me and then lose in paperwork. Real protection. Somewhere with a door that locks."
"That depends on what you're bringing me."
Feldman reached into his jacket. Cho went still, which was how Kate knew he had tensed; she put one hand flat on the table, casual, and Feldman pulled out a folded envelope, not a gun, and laid it in front of her with two fingers as if it might burn him.
"I'm a comptroller," he said. "I work for a firm that manages transport accounts. Ports, mostly. New York, Savannah, Houston, and lately one in Delaware that was never really a port, but the paperwork is flawless if you don't look at it sideways."
"Does this firm have a name?"
"It has four." He said it without a trace of humor. "Four shells, one address, and one man who signs nothing but whose money moves through all of them. I have nine years of transfer authorizations. Invoices, manifests, banking records. I know where the money goes and I know what it pays for."
Kate opened the envelope. Inside was a single page, a printout of a wire transfer, and she read it twice. Two hundred and forty thousand dollars, routed through a Cayman intermediary to a holding company, coded to something labeled as agricultural equipment. She had seen enough of the traffickers' seized records to know the code.
"This is about the warehouse we raided last month," she said.
"Yes." Feldman's hands folded together on the table and pressed until the knuckles went white.
“You sound pretty certain of that.” Kate said, watching Feldman closely. The man looked down at his hands, swallowed hard, and then met Kate’s gaze.
“I am.” He said in a quiet voice.
A realization, cold and terrible, seeped through the interrogation room and Kate noticed that Cho had put the pieces together about as quickly as she did.
“You know.” Her voice was flat, “You know where this money is coming from.”
Feldman had the good sense to look chagrined. “Not one hundred percent, no.” He said quietly, “I knew it was something illegal. The amount of money coming in from the warehouses was suspicious. I was sure it had to be contraband of some kind. My assistant got curious about a month ago, and decided to deliver some paperwork in person instead of through the mail. I saw in the paper that you guys found his body on the docks the same night you found the warehouse.”
Kate looked over at Cho, who sat forward fully focused on the man. She finally had an ID on the body that had dropped when this whole mess started.
Cho spoke for the first time, quietly, from the door. "Who is he?"
“Kurt Marheim.” Feldman said quietly, “Had only been an accountant for a few years. Estranged from his family for some reason or another.”
“Any you were going to just sit on that bit of information,” Kate’s voice was tinged with disgust. “A man you employed, with no one else who would speak up for him, and you just kept quiet.”
Feldman had the good sense to look chagrined, and Cho smoothly stepped in and interrupted what might have turned into a diatribe. “Your assistant was killed over a month ago. Why didn’t you come sooner?”
“I thought, if I kept my head down, it would all blow over. I would be fine. My family would be fine, but two nights ago I got a call from someone higher in the organization. I don’t know who he was, but he knew enough about what happened and about the organization to prove to me he was part of it.” Feldman took a deep breath, obviously to calm himself, before he continued. “He told me that the boss was sending me someone to train as my replacement. That the boss had other work for me.”
“How do you know he doesn’t?” Kate asked.
Feldman gave them both a wry smile. “I am 52 years old, detective. I’m a corporate accountant. It’s what I have always done. I have no other special training or skills that would be useful outside of my profession. It wouldn’t matter if he moved me to a different state to do the same thing, the paperwork would lead back to me. The only way I could work undetected is if my entire identity was changed, and I am under no illusion I am valuable enough to do that for.
"And who is your boss. The one you believe ordered you to train your replacement?"
"The man who signs nothing." Feldman said in nearly a whisper.
“Does he have a name?” Kate demanded.
Feldman's mouth worked. He looked at the table, at the envelope, at Kate, and finally at the blank white wall past her shoulder, like he wanted to make sure nobody was standing behind him.
"I don’t know," he said. "There are layers and layers of people between me and him. All I can do is give you the ledgers. There are three more warehouses I can point to, one of them here in the city. But I don’t have a name to give you." He swallowed. "You should understand what you're being handed, Detective. This man owns things. He owns buildings, he owns people, and he owns at least one person I have personally watched walk into a police station and walk back out without a scratch."
Kate looked at the document in her hands, then at the man across the table, and felt the floor of the case shift under her, the way it did when an investigation stopped being a closed room and started being a city.
"We can protect you," she said. "But I need more than one page and a story."
Feldman nodded slowly, and reached into his jacket again. This time Cho did not move at all, because Cho had already seen what was coming, and what came out was a slim black thumb drive, set down beside the envelope with a click that sounded very loud in the little room.
"Three warehouses," Feldman said. "One of them is in New York. I can tell you which one, and I can tell you who was paid to look the other way." His voice cracked, just slightly, and he pressed on. "Who was being paid as warehouse employees."
At the door, Kate saw Cho's reflection in the dark glass of the observation pane, and for one fraction of a second his expression was not flat at all. Something moved behind it, a quick, hard brightness, and then it was gone and his face was shut again, the way a door shuts.
She should have felt relief. An entire month of nothing, and here, on a Thursday morning, a frightened accountant had walked in off the street and handed her the case.
She did not feel relief. She felt the small cold prickle at the back of her neck that she had learned to trust and never learned to explain, because Kate Beckett had not yet understood that the thing moving behind Cho's expression had nothing to do with the ledgers, and everything to do with a catalyst she knew very little about.
She took the thumb drive.
Feldman was led out through the side door by two uniforms and an evidence tech with gloved hands, and Kate watched through the observation pane until the door swung shut. He walked the way men walked when they had spent two nights deciding whether to live or die, his spine straight, hands loose at his sides, no backward glance. She had seen it before. It never got easier to watch.
"Where are you putting him?" Cho asked.
"Safe house in Queens, the one with the cameras we actually trust. Two uniforms on the door and a third in the lobby until we can get him somewhere better." She turned the thumb drive over in her palm. It was warm from her hand now, a little object that weighed less than a set of keys. "He gets one phone call to his wife. No visitors, no press, and if Gates asks, he came to us voluntarily and we are being nice to him."
"He did come voluntarily."
"Then that part should be easy."
It took Ryan eleven minutes to crack the encryption, which he did with the air of a man being slightly insulted by how easy it was, and by the time Kate came back with a second round of coffee, Cho had arrived, the information processing was well underway.
"Okay," Cho said. "First pass. The man kept organized records. For a crook.”
“Really?” Kate asked. In her experience, most people involved in criminal behaviour usually kept limited and hard to follow paperwork.
"Feldman even has an index page."
Kate set the coffee down and came to the board. Cho had already started transferring the names onto it in his careful block letters, and the shape of the thing was beginning to appear, three columns, three cities, rows of company names beneath each.
"Three warehouses," Ryan said, reading from the laptop. "One in Red Hook, right here in Brooklyn, one outside of Savannah, and one in Wilmington, Delaware. Red Hook is the one he was handling personally. Savannah and Wilmington are run through local managers, but the money comes back to the same place."
"Which is what, exactly?"
"That is the fun part." Ryan clicked, and a new column appeared. "There is no single place. There are six companies, all incorporated in Delaware, which is itself a joke, because three of them list the same registered agent, and that agent's office address is a mailbox in a strip mall."
"Six companies for three warehouses," Kate said.
"Six more," Ryan said. "These are just the ones moving the money. There are transport companies on top of that. Four of them, all with the same DOT number, which is how we should have caught them the first time, except each company files under a different state authority so the number never ends up in the same database twice."
"Same DOT number, four companies, four states?” Kate murmured to no one in particular. “Someone knows exactly which agencies check which fields and which ones don't."
"Agreed," Cho nodded.
Kate looked at the board and felt the room tilt very slightly under her, the particular vertigo of a case jumping scale. A month ago they had been chasing a van with three different colours and a dead man with no name. Now there were warehouses in three states and a filing system designed to survive exactly the kind of investigation she had been running.
"What about payroll?" she asked.
Ryan turned the laptop so she could see. "Here is where it gets ugly. Every warehouse has a staff list. The names are all LLCs, which is normal enough for day labor, but the amounts are not day labor amounts. This page right here is the Red Hook staff. Forty-one names. Twenty-nine of them get paid thirty-eight thousand a year, every year, whether or not the warehouse is operating."
"Retainers," Cho said, pouring himself what Beckett realized had to be his eighth cup of coffee.
"Retainers," Ryan agreed. "He's paying people to be available."
Kate ran her eye down the list. "Any of these names come up in our files?"
"Two." Ryan tapped the screen. "One of them is a guy we interviewed in the first week, a night watchman at the pier, told us he didn't see anything. The other one we never talked to because he's a lieutenant in the 74th precinct."
The room went quiet. Cho set down his coffee and crossed his arms.
"NYPD," Kate said, and it was not a question.
"It doesn't say dirty," Ryan said carefully. "It says paid. Thirty-eight thousand reasons a year to keep a set of eyes on a loading dock."
"It says dirty," Cho said.
"It says paid," Kate said, and she heard her own voice go flat and cold, the way it did when something personal arrived in the middle of a case. "Which means before we touch that name, we go through the bureau, not the department. I am not putting this in front of Internal Affairs on a Thursday morning and watching it leak by Friday."
Kevin had stood up, walked to the board and began to draw out the infrastructure as they knew it. "We have three warehouses, six shells, four transport companies, and a payroll full of ghosts. That's not a ring of traffickers. Rings are small. That's an infrastructure. That's a company."
"That's what Feldman called it," Kate said.
"He's right," Cho said. "But it doesn't change the problem."
Kate looked at him. "Which problem."
"Feldman knows the money." Cho tapped the list. "He knows where it goes and who gets paid. What he does not know is who is above the man above him. He told us himself. He doesn’t have a name, and he has never seen a face.” Cho nodded to the diagram on the board. “This tells us how the thing runs, not who runs it."
"So we work down from the top instead of up from the bottom," Kate said.
"From the middle. These ledgers are the middle." Ryan supplied, only to receive a glowering look from Kate.
"Fine, then we take the middle apart." Kate picked the marker up from the table where Ryan had laid it down and turned back to the board. Red Hook was written in Cho’s block letters in the left-hand column, three lines of addresses under it, and she put a circle around the whole thing, slow and deliberate, so that everyone in the room could see her do it. "Red Hook first. It's ours, it's in the city, and it's the one Feldman was handling personally, so it's the one with the most breadcrumbs on the floor. Thursday night is the night he said the trucks move, which gives us two days to build a warrant and figure out how to put eyes on it without the 74th knowing we're there."
"And the lieutenant?" Ryan asked.
"He doesn't hear a word of this until we're standing in that warehouse." She capped the marker. "After that, I don't much care who he hears it from."