Bran New Death(99)

“I want a lawyer,” Isadore said.

Pish straightened. “All right. I was hoping there was a rational explanation exonerating you and the bank, but I guess I have no further business here.”

“No, wait!” Isadore clutched at his sleeve, her gooseberry-green eyes wide with fear. “Are you really a financial adviser?”

He nodded. I spoke up, as gently as I could, “Miss Openshaw, we aren’t trying to pin anything on you. But there is going to be an investigation into Dinah Hooper’s involvement with this bank, and what we suspect are a number of accounts opened to launder money, using Turner Construction and Turner Wynter, among many, many other shell companies, as vehicles. Dinah Hooper has admitted to me that she killed my uncle and Tom Turner. I believe she masterminded a lot more. Now, if you were to cooperate, I’m pretty sure you can help us find the truth.” I was careful not to promise anything legally, because that was not up to me.

Isadore wept a bit, and again called Dinah names, including what I had thought she said was the “devil’s pawn,” but was apparently “devil’s spawn,” or child of Lucifer. She was convinced of that. She finally calmed enough to tell her story. She came to Autumn Vale about eight years before to live with a cousin (not a brother; she had only claimed the fellow was her brother so no one would think it scandalous that she lived with him) but when he died, leaving her his bungalow and car, she decided to stay. It sounded to me as if she had escaped a hardscrabble life, and finally had what she had always wanted: a home and a couple of jobs, one part-time at the bank, and one part-time doing bookkeeping and secretarial work for Turner Construction. Everything was good for a few years.

But then her past, in the person of Dinah Hooper (not her real name, by the way) showed up. Dinah was a grifter, and had used Isadore before in an illegal enterprise. She was sent to torment her, Isadore said, spawn of Satan that she was. Isadore had escaped her clutches, determined to go straight and stay straight, but Dinah had finally tracked her down and threatened her with exposure if she didn’t go along with a scam. Autumn Vale was the perfect town for what she had in mind, Dinah told Isadore, and her job at the bank made it even more perfect.

All Isadore had to do was first, quit her job at Turner so Dinah could have it. Coincidentally, the former bank teller was retiring about then, so Isadore was promoted to a full-time employee. Then she had to deposit the money Dinah gave her into Rusty’s bank accounts. Isadore did that, but of course the demands escalated until she was opening accounts for Dinah, using a dozen or so different shell company names, and making cash deposits to each account, small enough that the FDA would not be alerted to any impropriety. There is a threshold below which banks are not required to inform government agencies about deposits, and Dinah was careful to keep well below limits. That is called, in the banking industry, “smurfing,” as Pish had explained the night before.

Isadore babbled about a lot of stuff. Dinah had created a ghostly workforce to go along with these different shell companies, which allowed even more accounts to be opened. She was running another kind of scam, too, a version of the so-called 419 or Nigerian swindle, which was why she had the multitude of computers and the knowledge of high-speed Internet in Autumn Vale. I had a feeling we were going to find out a lot more over the next few days.

As sometimes happens, I was right.





Chapter Twenty-six





THE NEXT DAY, observed by Becket, who sat like a statue on the flagstone terrace, I supervised Zeke and Gordy’s continued cleanup of the castle grounds. Binny’s white van roared up into my now-weed-free (thanks to Zeke!) parking area. The baker got out, carrying a box, and striding toward me. Had she come bearing cannoli?

“How are you? How is your dad?”

“He’s going to be awesome, thanks to you. I don’t think I really . . . in the craziness yesterday, I didn’t get what you did for him, you know, and how much I have to thank you for.” Her face, now adorned with a more open, natural expression, was very pretty. Her dark hair tied back, she looked relaxed and almost happy. I hoped she would accept all the changes that were about to come her way.

“Don’t mention it. I’m relieved it all turned out okay. So he was hiding out since he disappeared last year because Dinah told him someone was out to kill him, right?”

“Yeah. That note I got . . . it said to meet him at the hunting cabin on the Turner Construction land—it’s an old cabin back in the woods where he used to take me when I was a kid—but like I said, he never showed.”