This Doesn't Happen in the Movies (11 page)

“Yeah, that’s probably true.”  Cal paused and I heard papers rattling in the background.  I could picture him trying to find the dozens of scraps of paper that he typically took notes on.  “How much do you know about money laundering and that sort of thing?”

“Only what I see in the movies,” I chuckled.  “Are the X Women into money laundering as well as murder?”

“Sort of,” Cal answered.  “Here’s the two-dollar version of what they do.  With that much money being passed around, and not for legitimate business affairs, the group has to have a way of accessing it without anyone interfering.  That’s where the Cayman Islands come in.”

“I’m with you so far.”

“The money is deposited in a bank in the Caymans.  Now you need a legitimate business in order to make this all work.  So you buy a corporation in the Caymans or somewhere in Europe.  There are probably others, too.  Anyway, you can buy a corporation cheap; I found a number of ways of doing this.  Once your corporation is set up, you borrow money against that corporation, set up a legitimate business, and make your deposits as profit from the business.  Money launderers do this all the time.  Maybe they buy a restaurant or something, and at the end of each month, they deposit money from their drug deals or whatever with the real profits.  Now you can use the money from illegitimate sources, and no one’s the wiser.”

“But that can be tracked, can’t it?”

“Sometimes, but once the feds figure out what the criminals are doing, the criminals change the way they do things.”

“Always one step ahead.”

“Exactly.  And if you put enough layers around yourself, it makes it that much harder to get caught.  Think of it like an onion.  If the real source of the money is at the center of the onion, and you have numerous businesses and banks involved, each one a layer around the center, you have to peel a lot of onion skin before you get to the truth.”

“So how are the X Women involved in money laundering?” I asked.

“Well, I suspect it’s not like you think of money laundering, like the Mafia, but they do use the same type of system so no one knows about them.”  I heard more paper rattling.  “I traced that account number Amanda gave you to a bank in the Cayman Islands.  She deposited five hundred thousand dollars to an account back in December.  The name on the account is ‘Ultionis Femina’.” 

“That sounds like Latin or something.”

“It is, Reed.”

“They weren’t even trying to fool anyone with that name,” I said.  “Can you imagine naming your daughter that?”

 Cal chuckled.  “No, especially when you learn the meaning.  I looked it up.  It roughly translates into ‘avenging woman’.  The address the woman provided was 3241 Five Book Way.”

“Hang on, let me write that down.”  I sat up and grabbed a pad and pen I keep handy on the nightstand.  Cal repeated the address, spelling the street name for me.  “Funny name,” Cal said.  “I found a number of Book Avenues, and Book Ways, but not Five Book.  I didn’t find that street listing anywhere, not that that’s a surprise.”  I studied it while he talked.

“I’ll bet it means something,” I yawned, still trying to wake up.

“Yep.”  Cal never talks in a know-it-all tone, but when he knows it all, you just know that he knows.  “You already figured this out,” I said.

“Yep.”

“Okay, let me think here.  I’m not at my peak before the sun rises.”  Cal didn’t respond.  I had a sudden flash.  “Did you look that up in a Bible?”

Cal snorted.  “Good idea.”

“What’s the fifth book in the Bible?  Not Genesis.  Numbers?”

“Keep guessing.”

 I scratched my chin.  “Deuteronomy?  Is that the fifth book in the Bible?”

“Very good, Holmes.”  I rolled over on my side, and felt around under the bed to find the Bible my mother had given me.  I blew the dust off of it and coughed.

“It hasn’t seen much use, huh?” Cal asked.

“No, to my mother’s chagrin,” I said.  “Let’s see.”  I cradled the phone with my shoulder and turned to Deuteronomy, chapter 32, verse 41.  “
When I sharpen my flashing sword and my hand grasps it in judgment, I will take vengeance on my adversaries and repay those who hate me.
”

“These women are creative, if nothing else.”

“And scary.  They’re not leaving much to the imagination.”

“I wouldn’t want to run into them in a dark alley,” Cal said.

“Since you rarely leave your house, I don’t think that’s a problem.”

“Yeah, right.  Anyway, I searched for anything on ‘Ultionis Femina’, but didn’t find anything on her, either here or in the Cayman Islands.  Not that I expected to, but you never know.  And you know how simple it is to create fake names, identities, the whole works.  So I continued with the money trail instead.  Amanda’s funds were rewired that afternoon to an account in Lucerne, Switzerland.  The money was withdrawn from that account a day later.  The name on that account is Wilma O. Trace.”

“Wilma O. Trace?”  I pondered that for a second as I wrote it down.  Then it made perfect sense.  “Oh, I get it.  Without a trace.”

“They are cute, aren’t they?”  Cal chuckled again.  “Same thing with that name.  Nothing.  And the money trail disappeared, too.  It’s all that layering going on.  They essentially vanish.”

“Without a trace.”  I pulled the covers up over me, getting more comfortable.  “This is a well-connected group,” I said.  “It still takes a bit of rope-pulling and power in order to set all this up.  It takes a good bit to put together fake I.D.’s, credit cards, Social Security numbers, and who knows what else for a bunch of people.”

“I spent quite a while searching for the X Women,” Cal continued.  “Once I got past the porn sites, I contacted a number of sources,” his polite way of saying computer hackers, “but it was a dead end.”

“Too bad,” I said.

“No, I really mean a dead end,” Cal repeated.  “I’ve never seen a bunch of geeks get so frightened all of a sudden.  And these guys break the law all the time, so it’s not like this should’ve scared them.  But it did.  I finally got one of the guys, Scatter D, to talk with me a little bit in one of the chat rooms, and he said he’s heard a few things here and there, but he wasn’t saying much.  He did say that people who talk end up dead.  Reed, this organization of yours does not mess around.  They remind me of the Mafia.”

“It’s not my group,” I said.  “Please, I want nothing to do with them, especially if they’re like the Mafia.  Hey, I didn’t tell you what happened to me last night on my way home.”  I proceeded to relate my adventure with the SUV.

“You should get out, now.”

“I wish I could.”  I heard Cal let out a huge sigh.

“I’ll be careful, Mom.”

“Your mother would say the same thing,” Cal said.

“I know.”

“I’ll keep looking.  Go back to bed.”

I tried, but I couldn’t get what Cal had said off my mind.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

There was no way I was falling back asleep.  I was wide awake after my conversation with Cal, and this new information was running a race in my head.  I pulled on a pair of sweats and plodded barefoot into the bathroom.  I splashed cold water on my face, and carefully took the butterfly bandages off the cut on my temple.  It seemed to be healing well, so I cleaned the wound but didn’t bother to reapply bandages.  I’d have a small scar, but nothing more.  I smiled at myself in the mirror and sauntered into the kitchen where I fixed coffee.  The aroma of the gourmet beans filled the kitchen, and I took a steaming cup into my home office.

I don’t indulge in many things, but my office is one of them.  It’s a cozy room with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves on one wall where I keep most of my prized possessions.  I have a DVD case full of my favorite detective movies, along with a collection of Alfred Hitchcock classics.  The bookshelves are packed with a ton of books, mostly murder mysteries, and a collection of rare first edition detective novels.

I set the coffee down and started up my computer, and began an Internet search on “Janet Delacroix”.  Maggie had given me little information about the football player she claimed to have helped eliminate, but I had her daughter’s name.  That would be my starting point.

I typed in ‘female student murdered’ and received a list of more than fourteen thousand matches.  I needed to narrow the search, so I typed in the name Janet Delacroix.  This brought the list to a measly five websites.  I quickly scanned the  highlighted search words, and the associated web link, and determined that, except for the last one, none fit my criteria.  The last one took me to a website for the National Library of Medicine, with Janet listed as an employee in the research department.  If it was the same Janet, Maggie’s daughter, she lived in the Washington, D.C. area.  That didn’t help me in finding out about her murdered friend, but contacting her might be a possibility, if I wanted to follow that trail.  I thought about my Internet search.  I’d gone too broad, then too narrow, now could I find something in the middle?

 I took out ‘Janet Delacroix’, kept the words ‘female student murdered’ and added ‘college’.  Still over seven thousand.  I added ‘football star’.  This narrowed the search to a thousand.  I checked a number of the websites, but none had anything to do with a girl murdered by a college football star.  I mulled over how to narrow the search even further while I sipped my coffee.  I scrolled through another page and was about to start a new search when one website caught my eye.  It was an archived article from the Miami Herald about a university student murdered near the school campus, and how that had an influence on campus safety at some Florida college campuses.  The article wasn’t specific to the murder, and didn’t mention the school or the student.  I added the words ‘Florida’ and changed ‘college’ to ‘university’.  Now I had a little over a hundred.

Not only was the list more manageable, I was hitting a number of archived articles about the murder of a university student.  Unfortunately the websites were for newspapers that wanted a fee to check the articles, or I could request a hard copy that would be sent in the mail.  I didn’t have time for that, so I kept scrolling down the screen, clicking on each website and scanning the web page.  After the first ten or so, I began to doubt my research methods.  By twenty, I began to devise ways to get Maggie to divulge the information. 
Tell me or I’ll force you to wear polyester
.

On twenty-eight, I hit gold.

“Murder of popular teenager has police puzzled,” read the teaser line under the website address.  I clicked on the link.  The logo for
The Gainesville Sun
appeared on the top of the page, with “archives” in bold letters underneath.  Six articles were listed on the page, and I didn’t have to pay to check the articles.  I held my breath as I clicked on the first link and opened the article.

Two sentences into the article I knew this was the one.  The article was about a nineteen-year-old woman named Elaine Richards, found murdered on November 1, 2006.  Her semi-nude body had been discovered near Lake Alice, close to the University of Florida.  She had extensive bruising around her neck, and rape was suspected.  The police were not releasing further details until after an autopsy could be performed.

The next article had even more information.  The night before the discovery of her body, Elaine and her boyfriend, Derek Jones, star linebacker for the University of Florida Gators, spent the evening together.  When I read the name, a vague memory popped into my mind.  I’m not a big fan of college football, but I seemed to remember something about the incident because the announcers for one of the Bowl games mentioned how Derek’s potential pro football career had been in jeopardy because of the murder and his possible culpability in it.

The couple had gone out to dinner on Halloween night at a posh restaurant near the university.  The waiter and maitre’d both remembered Derek eating there with a pretty girl, but could offer little else about them.  Elaine’s roommate and best friend, who wanted to remain anonymous, hadn’t expected her friend to come home at the end of the evening, and hadn’t worried until Elaine didn’t show up for a ten a.m. class they shared.  Elaine’s roommate still hadn’t told anyone of Elaine’s disappearance when the nightly news reported finding the body of a woman on the shore of Lake Alice, near the university’s nature preserve.  Elaine’s roommate had a gut feeling and went to the police.  She identified the body.

Poor kid, I thought of Janet Delacroix.  Barely an adult and being thrust into a situation like that.  The rest of the story centered on the lack of clues in the investigation, and how the police had initially suspected Derek Jones, but dismissed him after his roommate and another friend provided an alibi for him.

I read the other articles, each shorter than the last.  Cause of death was asphyxiation caused by being choked, most likely with a belt.  She had been raped, and due to bruises on her back, wrists, legs and face, beating and possible torture were also suspected.  The police lamented the lack of clues and leads, and the campus population was on edge.  The last, tiny article said that Elaine’s funeral was being held out-of-state, and that the police still had no leads or suspects.

Now that I had a name, I searched on “Elaine Richards” and “Derek Jones”, and came up with some more articles that didn’t divulge much more than what I already knew.  One victory was the mention of the detective in charge of the investigation, George Romero from the Gainesville Police Department.

I spent a few minutes finding the number for the police department in Gainesville, Florida.  It was a few minutes after eight, Denver time.  As I dialed the number for the Gainesville PD I hoped that George was both still employed with the department and available.

A woman with a slow drawl informed me that George Romero had retired.  Maybe that was a good thing – a retired cop might be more likely to talk to me about an old case.  After thanking her and hanging up, I searched phone directories in the area and found a couple of George Romeros.  Now I just had to hope one of them was the former detective.