“Well then,” he said, acknowledging the promise in Jack’s voice. “Take some of these with you.”
“I always make too many,” Ruthann said. “If you don’t take them Harold will eat them all.”
She pressed a Tupperware container into my hands at the door and said, “Tell your mama hello, Jack. You’re looking a bit peaky, Jaye. You might get out of the sun and have a rest.”
I just smiled as we walked back out into a humid heat that had turned sticky and clung to the skin.
“Oh, good,” I said. “Feels like rain. Maybe it’ll cool down some.”
“Or boil us,” Jack said.
“Very reassuring,” I said.
We walked back to the funeral home where the Tahoe was parked, and Jack opened the lockbox bolted to the floor behind the driver’s seat and pulled out the evidence bag with the brass key. I climbed into the passenger side while he started the engine, and we were on the road before I had my seat belt fastened.
The Tupperware of Ruthann’s lemon squares sat on the console between us, and the smell of lemon and butter mixed with the leather of the seats and the faint residual scent of Jack’s aftershave that lived permanently in the fabric of this vehicle.
“I’ve put Doug and Margot on Stavros,” Jack said. His eyes stayed on the road, but the set of his jaw told me he’d been carrying this decision for a while and had made his peace with it. “Everything. Business entities, property records, known associates, financial transactions. Anything she can trace through public and semipublic databases, and some that aren’t so public.”
I looked at him. Doug was a genius and Margot could crack systems that governments couldn’t, but neither one of them operated inside the boundaries of what a judge would consider legal evidence gathering. Jack knew that. He’d spent this entire investigation insisting every piece of evidence be clean enough to survive a courtroom. The fact that he was cutting Doug and Margot loose without those guardrails told me exactly how far past professional this had gotten for him.
“None of it will be admissible,” I said.
“It doesn’t need to be. What I need is a map. I need to know what Stavros owns, who he controls, and where his money goes.” He checked his mirrors and passed a pickup doing ten under the limit. “Margot finds the targets. We build the legal case around that to bring them down.”
“Good,” I said.
He glanced at me, and something that might have been relief moved behind his eyes before the road took his attention back. “I still want the case clean. When we put Stavros in front of a jury, I want his lawyer to have nothing to work with. But I’ve got a cop in the hospital and a dead witness on our doorstep, and I can’t afford to wait for the system to move at its own pace while more people get hurt.”
“So Margot maps the network, and then we go to a judge with the legal version of what she finds.”
“That’s the plan. Except I’m not sure which judge.” His hands shifted on the wheel, a restless movement that was unusual for him. “Calloway’s been dragging his feet on every warrant we’ve asked for. Phone records, expanded financials, all of it. Could be he’s slow. Could be he’s overworked.”
“Or it could be he’s on somebody’s payroll.”
“I don’t have proof of that. But I don’t have proof he isn’t, either, and right now that’s enough to make me careful about what I put in front of him.” He turned left at the light and the Towne Square came into view, the forensics tape still fluttering around the section of sidewalk where Cole had gone down that morning. “Once Margot’s data comes in, I’ll know more. If Calloway shows up anywhere in Stavros’s network, even at the edges, I go to a different judge. If he doesn’t, I use him and move fast.”
King George Trust occupied the corner building on the east side of the square, a two-story Tudor with steep gabled rooflines, dark timber framing against cream stucco, and leaded glass windows that caught the late afternoon light and held it in small diamond-shaped panes. The date 1847 was carved into a stone tablet above the arched entrance, and a magnolia tree shaded the front walk, its waxy leaves throwing dappled shadows across the brass plate on the door.
The square was only a block from the funeral home, and Jack pulled the Tahoe into a parking spot with plenty of time before closing.
The inside of the bank smelled the way all old banks smelled, like paper and furniture polish and the brand of institutional air freshener that existed nowhere else on earth. The teller windows were dark wood with brass cages that had been there since Reconstruction, and the carpet was the deep maroon that banks chose because it looked expensive and hid stains. A watercooler hummed in the corner near a rack of pamphlets about savings rates and home equity loans that nobody had touched since they were printed.
Gerald Fisk came out from behind his desk when he saw us through the glass door of his office, which was how Gerald greeted everyone he considered a client worth greeting personally. He was trim and precise, mid-fifties, with thinning brown hair combed carefully across a scalp that was losing the battle, and wire-rimmed glasses that sat on a narrow nose with an exactness that suggested he adjusted them multiple times a day. His tie was knotted in a full Windsor, his shirt was pressed within an inch of its life, and his office was organized with a compulsive neatness that made me want to move something on one of his shelves just to see how long it would take him to notice.
“Jack. J.J.” He shook Jack’s hand and squeezed my arm with warm familiarity. “Lord, what a day. How’s Cole doing? Linda and I have been worried sick since we heard.”
“He’s out of surgery and doing well,” Jack said. “Appreciate you asking.”
“You tell him we’re praying for him.” Gerald gestured us into his office and closed the door behind us with a quiet click. “Now. What can I help you with?”
Jack gave Gerald the warrant and showed him the evidence bag with the brass key. “We’re working a homicide. The victim maintained accounts here, and we have reason to believe this key might belong to a safe deposit box. The warrant covers access.”
Fisk sat down behind his desk and read the warrant from beginning to end. Then he read it again. Then he picked up the evidence bag and examined the brass key through the plastic, turning it over with the careful deliberation of a man who was not going to be rushed by anyone, including the county sheriff.
He opened the shallow drawer to his right and pulled out a small ring with a single key attached to it.
“That’s not one of ours,” he said, holding up the bank’s key beside the one from Dre’s notebook. The difference was obvious even from across the desk. Different size, different cut pattern, different manufacturer’s stamp on the bow.
