Fighting Chance(12)

From the moment he met the man from the FBI, he’d been hooked.

The problem as things now stood was that, although the FBI had hired him because he was an accountant—in those days, the FBI preferred its recruits to be either lawyers or accountants—it hadn’t ever really used his expertise in accountancy.

Part of that was his own damned fault. He’d graduated. He’d been sent off to get enough experience to be certified. He’d trained at Quantico. In no time at all, he was able to see that the really interesting work in the Bureau had to do with bodies.

For a while after that, Gregor kept up his certification and made some effort to keep up with accounting. But it was only for a while. Kidnapping detail had given way to murder investigations on Indian reservations and then to the early days of the Behavioral Sciences Unit. And after that, Elizabeth got sick with breast cancer.

Gregor could not remember a time when he had been sorry that his career went the way it had gone. Until now. Now he was sitting at the Federal Reserve, waiting for an appointment and sifting through computer files. He had been sifting through these files for several weeks, and they still didn’t make even a modicum of sense.

He was rapidly reaching the conclusion that they were not making sense, because they could not be made sense of.

He heard a discreet little cough near the top of his head and looked up to find a middle-aged woman standing over him, looking faintly disapproving. Gregor did not take that seriously. This was a confidential secretary of the old school—not a woman who typed and took dictation, but a woman who manged five or six other secretaries underneath her and knew more about what her boss did than her boss himself. She knew because she was convinced that bosses knew next to nothing, and she was probably right.

“Mr. Carpenter is ready for you now,” she said. “If you’ll just follow me this way.”

Gregor said thank you and got up and followed. It had been many years since he was last inside the Federal Reserve, and he was both surprised and a little depressed to see that it had changed almost not at all.

It wasn’t very far to Mr. Carpenter’s office. It was just off the reception area to the right and barely down the corridor. Whoever Mr. Carpenter was, he was not a force to be reckoned with.

That made Gregor Demarkian decidedly relieved.

The middle-aged woman stopped at a blank wooden door, knocked twice, and opened it.

A young man stood up from behind a solid wood desk and held out his hand. “Mr. Demarkian? I’m Terry Carpenter. The Director has told me a lot about you.”

Gregor could not imagine what the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation had had to tell Terry Carpenter about him. This was not a Director under which Gregor had ever worked. He wasn’t even the second Director after one under which Gregor had worked.

Gregor shook Terry Carpenter’s hand and sat down in one of the seats the man was gesturing to. The office was only big-ish. Gregor wondered what Carpenter spent most of his time doing.

Terry Carpenter sat down behind his desk again. Gregor put his briefcase on the floor.

“I’m not sure I’m actually the person you need to talk to,” Carpenter said. “We looked through the material you sent the Bureau, and we tried to work it out, but you have to understand that these things are very complicated. Worse than complicated.”

“‘Bat shit crazy’ is what Mike Engstrom told me.”

Carpenter flushed slightly. “Yeah,” he said. “I know. And I hate to admit it, but I think it’s actually getting worse.”

“It’s been years,” Gregor pointed out. “The mortgage meltdown was in 2008. And you don’t know anything?”

“Oh, no,” Carpenter said. “We know a lot. We’re just not sure what we know is right, and we’re not sure what else is out there, and as to the problem of titles—well.”

“Well?”

“When you take a mortgage and slice it into a dozen pieces and sell the pieces to a dozen different funds that sell securities based on the pieces to hundreds of different clients, it begins to get to be a problem figuring out who actually owns the property.”

“That’s what your e-mail said,” Gregor poined out.

Carpenter flushed again. “I know. It’s going to be years yet before we get this all straightened out, and we may never get this straightened out. There may be hundreds of properties out there without any clear title at all—”

“You mean people are going to be living in houses and nobody’s going to know who owns them.”

“That’s the thing,” Carpenter said. “Yes.”

“I’m only interested in one property,” Gregor said. “Apartment Four, 1207 Markham Street, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. It’s right around the corner from my house. The man who lives there is named Mikel Dekanian. He immigrated from Armenia fifteen years ago. He’s got a wife named Asha and two children, both boys. The boys are both under ten.”