Rebel accepted it gratefully, drank, set the bottle down on the table. He studied the special agent in charge while she pulled out a binder from her briefcase. She looked a bit over fifty. Her short dark hair had a hint of curl and a dash of gray. She wore black pants, a dark green blouse, and a black jacket. This woman might look as mellow as his aunt Lucy, but Rebel imagined she was as tough as the local plumber’s Rottweiler and wouldn’t take crap from anybody.
Jordan said, “As I told Mr. Navarro, I’m here tonight because I got a call from a good friend of mine, Sheriff Ethan Merriweather of Titusville, Virginia. Ethan told me two of your agents came to Rebel Navarro’s house while his family was there having dinner. Sheriff Merriweather assured me Rebel Navarro is being falsely accused and asked me to representhim.” Jordan eyed Gregson a moment, turned to Rebel, and smiled. “Let me say first of all that I am pleased he called because both my wife and I read your books, Mr. Navarro. She thinks your name, Rebel, is romantic.”
Rebel realized Jordan had made this small detour because he’d seen Rebel was tense as a bow. He wanted to relax him. To his surprise, he smiled back. “Romantic? My blasted name got me into more fights than I care to remember when I was a kid.”
The corners of Gregson’s mouth kicked up, just a bit. It changed her face, lit it up, made her seem less formidable. So Jordan had wanted to put her at ease as well. She said, “Before we begin, let me say, Mr. Navarro, you appear to have friends in unexpected places. Special Agent Dillon Savich called me from Washington tonight. He wondered what we’d discovered between his phone call to me yesterday morning and our bringing you in this evening. I assured him critical evidence had just come into our hands, but declined to give him the details.” She paused a beat. “He did say one of our agents appeared to have taken a dislike to you—Special Agent Briggs. If Agent Briggs was out of line, do let me apologize. He can be impassioned and sometimes he does cross the line.” Her voice was very smooth, without a hint of emotion.
Rebel nodded. “I’ll say this for Agent Briggs. He didn’t give up trying to get me to confess. He made me promises, then threats, all the way from Titusville.”
“But they had read you your rights, hadn’t they?”
Rebel nodded. “Another first-time experience. May I, with the approval of Mr. Jordan, simply tell you what’s happened in the past couple of weeks, tell you what I know?”
Gregson looked over at Jordan.
Jordan said, “Agent Gregson, this is what Mr. Navarro would prefer and yes, I agree. You can ask your questions afterward.In turn, I trust we’ll find out why you arrested him so suddenly and dragged him here to the Philadelphia field office on this fine Friday night. Can we agree on that, Agent Gregson?”
She studied Rebel’s face, trying to understand what the catch was, didn’t see one staring her in the face, and slowly nodded. “One of the reasons we arrested him is we believed he might be a flight risk like his brother, but we’ll get to that. All right, we can see how his story goes, but if I wish to, I’ll interrupt him. And we’ll start the recording. Any objections, Mr. Jordan?”
“None.”
“And you, Mr. Navarro?”
“No.”
Gregson recorded the time, the place, and the people present. “First, let me read you your rights again, Mr. Navarro, for the record.”
After she asked him if he understood his rights and he dutifully said yes for the recording, Gregson continued. “Mr. Navarro, please don’t bother to lie to us. It would be a waste of our time and not in your interest, not to mention exhausting.”
Rebel nodded. “I lied my way out of a lot of sticky situations when I was a teenager, Ms. Gregson, but not now. No, not now.”
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Rebel sat forward in his chair, clasped his hands on the table. “In mid-June my brother, his wife, and his son, Tash, came for a visit to Titusville. I quickly learned my brother’s purpose was to ask me to keep his eight-year-old with me for the summer. He and his new wife had planned a honeymoon in Europe, and he thought spending the summer with me would be good for Tash, plus it was his honeymoon. Of course, I agreed. I welcomed the opportunity to get to know my nephew better. Then my brother and his wife flew off to Paris the next day. He called every day and spoke to both me and his son. Then, when the embezzlement news broke, he no longer called. My only communications with him since have been these text messages you’ve doubtless read since I showed them to your agents Wednesday evening.” When Gregson shook her head, Rebel pulled out his cell phone and showed both Jordan and Gregson his brother’s texts and his replies. Rebel waited for them to read the texts, then said, “Which brings us to this evening, when Agents Morales and Briggs came to my door again, only this time they had an arrest warrant for wire fraud and conspiracy. They read me my rights and drove me here to Philadelphia.”
When Rebel stopped talking, Jordan sat back in his chair, crossed his arms over his chest. He said to Gregson in his deep voice, “Obviously something changed between Mr. Navarro’s first interview with your people on Wednesday and tonight.Please tell us why you suddenly issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Navarro and hauled him here.”
Gregson said in a crisp, no-nonsense voice, “Let me say I can see you’re probably an excellent writer, Mr. Navarro. Your accounting of what’s happened was quite believable, complete with your supporting text messages. However, you are not as competent a criminal. Today our forensic accountants uncovered exactly where more than two hundred million dollars in your brother’s investment fund disappeared to. It was wired over time, supposedly as an investment, to a company in the Caymans which existed in little more than name only, and those transfers were made on your brother’s workstation, using his passcodes. This Cayman company was only a conduit. The money was quickly wired out of that account to destinations far harder to trace, including cryptocurrency. It’s not clear how much of it we’ll be able to recover, since as of yet we haven’t been able to locate end-point banks.
“The initial account in the Caymans was opened by a shell company owned by an LLC. This account was opened months ago by you, Mr. Rebel Navarro.”
Rebel stared at her, slowly shook his head. “I know nothing of any shell company or LLC in the Caymans, nothing. I know what a shell company is, in theory, but I don’t know how that works, except what I’ve gleaned from novels or TV. Why do you think I opened this account and set up the LLC?”
“It’s very straightforward. We have your signature on the documents.”
Rebel said slowly, “I don’t see how that’s possible. I’ve never even been to the Caymans, you can check my passport, so how could I have signed anything there?”
“You didn’t need to be there—as you certainly know. You filled out the necessary forms and sent them in by registered mail.”
Jordan held up a hand. “Agent Gregson, let me see if I’vegot this straight. You think the Navarro brothers conspired together to steal over two hundred million dollars from the investment fund?”
“That’s correct, Mr. Jordan. It took our task force some time to get those records subpoenaed from the Cayman banks and from their government registries, but now that we have them, lo and behold, there was Rebel Navarro’s name and signature all over them.”
She opened her file again, pulled out a sheet of paper, and slid it over to Rebel. “Is this your signature, Mr. Navarro?”
Rebel felt outside himself, as if someone else was studying the signature on a page filled with legalese, a page he’d never seen. He looked at the scrawl, admittedly very like his, on the last page of a legal document, and raised his eyes to look at her. “This can’t be my signature. I’ve never seen these documents.” He was pleased he sounded so calm.
Gregson slid a sheet of blank paper over to him. “Would you please sign your name for me right now so we can compare them?”
