I groaned as I looked at my half-drunk cup of coffee. I had a strange feeling I wasn't going to be able to finish it. “If he's alive, yes.”
“I'll play devil's advocate here,” Clarke stated. “If it isn't Brett, and he's really dead, who else could it be?”
“His father is in jail, right?” Lany asked.
“He is,” I replied. “I had Jerry check.”
Lany squinted at me. “And Eben Juarez is still in jail, right?”
I didn't have an answer for that.
“I believe so, but it might be a good idea to have Lyn or Jerry double check.” The man was supposed to be doing life. If he wasn't, I damn well wanted to know why.
“I'm just trying to give us a list of suspects,” Lany stated, which was a huge win. It meant his brain had woken up. I just didn't like the direction it was headed in.
“This could be someone totally new, Lany,” Clarke said. “It doesn't have to be any of the morons we've dealt with in the past.”
“No, I know that. This just feels… Personal isn't the right word, but maybe familiar?” Lany’s hand waved a little in the air as he talked. “I know that doesn’t make sense because we’ve never been in a situation like this, but it still feels familiar to me.”
“I say go with your gut until we find evidence to say otherwise,” Lyn stated. “If you say this feels familiar, then it feels familiar. Let’s figure out why.”
“I’d love to,” Lany said as he dropped his head onto the table. “None if this makes sense if these guys are still in jail.”
The clacking of keyboard keys immediately filled the dining room. “I’m checking now, Lany.”
“I also want you to look into all the guards that were around Juarez,” I told Lyn. “See if any of them have suddenly inherited a large sum of money or something.”
“The money might not have gone directly to them,” Lany added. “See if their kids’ tuition was suddenly paid or anonymous payments made to medical bills, stuff like that. There are a lot of ways to launder money.”
“That might take a little time,” Lyn stated.
“Joe can help when he gets here.” I knew Lyn was better at this computer stuff, but Joe could hold his own, or he wouldn’t have been picked for my SWAT team.
I walked over to stand behind Lany, looping my arms around his waist. “What are you thinking?” He was staring at the storyboard kind of hard.
“This is going to sound really cliché, but we need to follow the money,” Lany stated. “Both the money that I was transferring for the DEA and the money that might have gone to the prison guards. It might take a bit to get through the different routes, but I really think following the money will lead us to whoever is behind all of this.”
“Okay, so we follow the money.” Made sense to me. If we figured out who was funding all of this, we could narrow down the suspect pool.
“Okay, the good news is that Juarez and Carbonados are still in prison,” Lyn said after a while.
“And the bad news?” I asked, even if I really didn’t want to know.
“The bad news is that it looks like a couple of the guards have questionable finances.”
Figures.
“I’ll need to look into it a little bit more before I can positively say they are on the take,” Lyn continued, “but I know what a prison guard makes, and it’s not what these guys have in their bank accounts.”
I squinted at the man. “They seriously put dirty money in their bank accounts?”
How stupid was that?
“Unless they got this money somewhere else,” Lyn replied, “then yes.”
Idiots.
I swear criminals were getting stupider every single day.
