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He ate his last fry. They’d survived barely long enough to start cooling.

“BrightBlown is gearing up for the long haul,” he said. “A lot of these cannabis places will fall by the wayside over the next few years—it’s already happening to the underresourced and overambitious—but BrightBlown won’t. The Portland outlet has a wellness center attached, and they’ve acquired the building next door to be a health food store, with further plans to expand the brand. It’s cannabis as part of a lifestyle choice for body and mind. Jerry Garcia must be turning in his grave.”

“That’s a significant outlay. Where’s the money coming from?”

“A client of mine was looking at the building, the one tapped for health food. He got gazumped and didn’t take it well, so he did some digging and came back with a name, even if he had to go through about a hundred layers of obfuscation to find it: Devin Vaughn.”

“Who’s Devin Vaughn?”

“Devin Vaughn is the son of the late Landon Vaughn, previously unknown to me but familiar to multiple branches of law enforcement. I have a copy of the client’s research because it’s a good idea to know who’s trying to tip the scales in your town. Landon was a mid-tier mobster of the old dispensation, which meant he was disciplined and didn’t get high on his own supply. No whores, no extortion, minimal violence. His territory was mainly the mid-Atlantic: DC, the Virginias, parts of Pennsylvania. When he died, his son did two things, one smart and the other not-so-smart. Smart was seeking to go legit as much as possible while using those legitimate businesses to launder proceeds from narcotics, which in turn supported the purchase of more businesses and more narcotics. For that, he needed cash-intensive entities, so we’re talking convenience stores, parking garages, cigarette distributors, laundromats, vending machines, and private ATMs, followed by the acquisition of small restaurants, cheap motels—”

“And cannabis stores, right?”

“And some people claim you aren’t bright,” said Moxie, “although only out of earshot. If the business end is handled correctly, legalized cannabis is a license to print money—and launder it, too.”

That much I already knew, just as I knew the main facilitator of the money laundering was the federal government. Because cannabis remained illegal at the federal level, and the federal government regulated banks and credit unions, financial institutions were reluctant to do business with the cannabis industry. Therefore, the industry had to be open to accepting cash, which meant that paying sizable bills became a problem, leaving cannabis sellers to rely on cashier’s checks. But the upside, if you were crooked, was that you had a whole lot of cash washing around and no record of it beyond what you chose to include in your books. So you could elect to screw the IRS by underdeclaring andpocketing the difference or, if you had dirty money from other sources that you needed to launder, you could overdeclare, accept a hit on the tax, and—presto—you had clean money. In fact, considering the premium charged by criminal launderers, it was cheaper to let Uncle Sam do the job for you.

“According to my client’s report,” Moxie continued, “Devin Vaughn has some shrewd advisors, financial and otherwise, including his father’s former right-hand man, Aldo Bern. Vaughn usually listens to what they say; if he was ever arrogant, he’s reputed to have grown out of it, and he shares his old man’s views on violence. It’s not his style, or not habitually, anyway. He has a finance degree, invests in art and antiquities, and keeps his name out of newspapers and criminal courts. He’s in the process of getting divorced, but not because he fooled around, or not that anyone can tell. Overall, Vaughn is a model of modern wrongdoing.”

“So what’s the not-so-smart aspect of his character?”

“He expanded too fast. To go straight, he needed more money, and to get more money, he had to be more crooked. He’s overextended. Finding out how overextended, and what Vaughn might be doing to address it, was beyond the remit of the client report. But BrightBlown will survive. Either Vaughn will find a way out of this mess or he’ll be forced to dispose of BrightBlown, which will be acquired by another vendor because its business model appears sound. But Vaughn will try to hold on to what he has; otherwise, it will be like a run on a bank. His more colorful debtors will come looking for their money, and they won’t be resorting to bankruptcy proceedings.”

The server returned to remove our plates and bestow another smile on Moxie. I was only surprised that she didn’t write her number in lip liner on his hand.

“Which brings us back to your client, Zetta Nadeau, and her missing boyfriend,” said Moxie, once we’d declined coffee, “because if WyattRiggins was working for BrightBlown, he was working for Devin Vaughn.”

“Then Riggins ups and runs,” I said. “Is it too much of a coincidence that a man who may be under threat happens to be paid by a mid-level criminal?”

“I’d have said so. And unless Riggins was skimming from his employer, which would be ingratitude on a woeful scale, not to mention potentially fatally stupid, it can’t be Vaughn who made him run. The mystery is for you to solve. I expect you to pick up the lunch check in return for all the spadework I’ve just saved you.”

“Can you email me a copy of the client’s report?”

“Sure, but I didn’t leave out anything of note. I’m a lawyer. I know how to summarize. I also know how to give advice, which at this moment would be for you to tell Zetta Nadeau to forget about her boyfriend and find someone else to waste her feelings on, because this money will be hard-earned. Riggins is tied to Vaughn, and Vaughn is a dog being stung by hornets, with a whole other swarm of them on the way. You wade in, and you’re liable to get stung as well.”

I thanked him and paid the check. Moxie’s counsel was valid, but picking up the odd sting was an occupational hazard. If you started getting scared of the pain, it was time to consider retirement. Otherwise, as day followed night, you were guaranteed to get stung more often.

It was sufficiently cool outside for Moxie to pull on his gloves and cover his baldness with a beanie.

“What have you got on your dance card for the rest of the afternoon?” Moxie asked.

“I’m going to visit BrightBlown and see what they might know about Wyatt Riggins.”

“Despite my advice? Why is Zetta Nadeau so important to you?”

“Because I’ve watched her grow as a person, despite all she’s been through,” I said. “If she isn’t important, who is?”

“You remember that stuff I said about Devin Vaughn and his sparing use of violence?”

“Yes?”

“I wouldn’t take that as applying to you,” said Moxie. “After all, why should he be the exception?”

CHAPTERXXVI

Eugene Seeley was in his workshop. The cover of the poetry book was in worse condition than he’d hoped and he could only speculate how long it had been languishing on the shelves of the late Antonio Elizalde. But then, the cover wasn’t his priority. Seeley had some expertise as a restorer but preferred repurposing old volumes, making something new from what was in a parlous, even seemingly unrecoverable, state. He enjoyed rebinding, and adding new capitalization and alternative illustrations while retaining the spirit of the primary text. The clients to whom he sold his books were not interested in acquiring first editions as close to their original state as possible, although some were happy when Seeley was able to oblige. Instead, they admired how he could take a battered, ill-used book, like this collection of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and from it forge a hybrid of the antique and the modern. Purists would object, of course, but Seeley wasn’t selling to purists and labored for his own satisfaction. Books didn’t keep him in bread and wine, but they were a useful disguise for what did. Working on them was also a source of calm and helped him think.

Now, as he picked at the spine of the de la Cruz, he was considering what had been learned from Roland Bilas, who was given up before his death by Antonio Elizalde, just as Elizalde had been named by a man named Manuel Chacon Pocheco, who had, a year earlier, performedelectrical repairs at a property in Zirandaro, Mexico, owned by one Blas Urrea, currently Seeley’s nominal employer. Bilas was the most important link yet established in the chain. Pocheco knew only of Elizalde, and Elizalde knew only of Bilas and some former soldiers, but Bilas knew many names and had surrendered all of them before he died.