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FORTY-TWO

SPECIAL AGENT FRANCIS BLAIR walks into Becky Crandall’s office at the IRS’s criminal division in Chicago. “Hope I’m not stopping by too late,” he says. “I know you Revenue folks like to call it a day about four.”

“Fuck off, Francis.” She removes her glasses, tucks her hair behind her ears. “Nice scruff, by the way.”

The facial hair — three days’ growth of beard. “I’m undercover. A task force with Customs. Might’ve mentioned to you. A sting op. Cargo theft. Been working it about a year now.”

“Well, don’t you live the exciting life?”

“Yeah, don’t I? Tell me you have something good for me, Beck.”

“You tell me something first,” she says. “Does this have anything to do with Michael Cagnina?”

He takes a seat across from her. “Why do you ask that?”

“Oh-kay.” She leans back in her leather chair. “The runaround. Answer a question with a question. I don’t ‘need to know,’ right? Never mind our history. Never mind I worked that fucking Cagnina case with you back in the day.”

Blair throws up his hands. “Not my call, Becky.”

She pushes a file across the desk to him. “Hemingway’s Pub is owned by DCB Enterprises. His initials, David Christopher Bowers. An offshore corporation.”

“Offshore. Hmph.”

“Yeah, hmph. Not illegal, though. Anyway, you know much about the place? The pub?”

He shrugs. “Not really. Why?”

“It’s done really, really well as a business. Very strong revenues. Very strong. It serves food and sells booze. But it must be really popular with revenues like that.”

“It’s located right off the interstate. I know that much.” Blair opens the file. “So I suppose with a name like that, it probably draws a lot of one-off customers — travelers. Plus the local town regulars. Shit, what do I know about restaurants?”

“Well, I don’t know much, either,” says Becky. “But I do look at a lot of financials. This place is doing better than most.”

Blair looks over the numbers. “Yeah, seems like it. You’re thinking, what, he’s laundering money?”

She shrugs. “It’s an ideal vehicle. Personally, if I were going to launder money, a restaurant would be my first choice. A combo restaurant and bar, actually. Drinks are so easy to fudge. But I can’t tell if there’s laundering just by looking at financials.”

“Got it.”

“You see who’s preparing his tax returns, though?”

“No. Who?”

She sighs. “Down in the corner, dumbass.”

He finds it. “David Bowers is doing his own corporate tax returns?”

“He sure is. Now, that’s not anything necessarily suspicious, either. But if I were laundering money, I wouldn’t just pick a restaurant and bar — I’d also do the tax returns myself.”

“Okay, what else?”

“David Bowers is paying himself at least a half a mil a year. Pretty nice coin for a place like Hemingway Grove.”

“Shit, I’d take that up here in Chicago.”

“Me, too, pal. One year it was as high as seven fifty. He varies it. But never less than five hundred a year. Awfully good pay for a guy running a bar and restaurant. Just sayin’. That’s probably how he was able to build his house with cash.” She looks at Blair. “Did you know that? That he has no mortgage on his new house, paid for it in cash?”

“Yeah, I know that,” says Blair.

Her eyes narrow. “You know that. So you’ve been looking at this guy already.”

He lifts a shoulder. “Need-to-know, Beck.”

She wags a finger at him, getting more comfortable with her thought. “I googled this guy David Bowers. Took me two seconds to find about a thousand videos of him making that dramatic river rescue. Pretty freakin’ heroic stuff.”

“It was, sure.” No sense in being disagreeable on that point.

“Made his face go viral,” says Becky. “I’m thinking maybe some facial recognition technology with the Bureau might have picked something up.”

Blair blinks and tries to keep a straight face.

“Meaning you think you know who this guy is,” she adds. “Not that you’ll tell me.”

“Not that I could, ” he counters. “I mean, even if, hypothetically, you were right.”

She smiles, shakes her head. “And you’re still gonna pretend this isn’t about Michael Cagnina?”

“Beck, I never — I never said one way or the other.”

“For fuck’s sake, Frankie. I’m, like, seven months from retirement. I’m not looking to get in on anything that’s gonna get me whacked. I don’t even carry a service weapon anymore. I got one foot out the door. I’m gonna take a consulting job with a bank and live the good life any day now.” She leans forward. “I won’t tell anyone. Just let me live vicariously through a former partner.”

“Okay, fine, Beck. But tell me first — what makes you ask?”

She chuckles. “You mean besides the fact that you have Cagnina on the brain? That he’s your white whale? Besides that?”

“Yeah, besides that.”

“Okay. Besides that. Because I remember, and so do you, Frankie, that we always thought Cagnina managed to stash away some dough before we closed in on him. Right? Didn’t we always think that? Like, sixteen, seventeen million dollars?”

“Course I remember.”

“So I’ve got nothing exciting to do here in this gig,” says Becky. “And maybe my imagination is getting the better of me. Or maybe it’s just my advanced age. But I’m thinking if Michael Cagnina stowed that money away, about the only way he’d ever be able to spend it is if somebody cleaned it for him first.”

Blair smiles. Becky was always a smart one.

“I fucking knew it.” She slaps her hand down on her desk. “You’ve found Cagnina’s money launderer, haven’t you?”