“Have at it,” Neo said.
I took the chair in front of the computer and flipped it on. The cursor glowed green, but there was no password protection and I shook my head in disbelief as I moved the mouse.
Neo and Rock were busy with the binders, clearly taking advantage of the opportunity to nose around in the Rooks’ affairs.
Family beyond blood, my ass.
I looked at the system directory to get a feel for the folders, how they were set up and arranged, how the naming systemworked. It wasn’t my forte, mostly because it as boring as fuck, but I forced myself to be methodical, opening each folder, scrolling quickly through its contents, looking for something that might point to the money that was distributed to the Rooks from Aventine’s administrative funds.
“Tell me how it works,” I said, pushing another folder aside and opening a new one. “The money that comes into the school and goes out to the frats.”
Neo closed the binder in his hand and came to lean on the table. “The university gets money from all kinds of places, some of which I won’t go into. But you can probably guess how it works: donations from prominent alumni and corporations, state and federal grants, private benefactors, shit like that.”
“But it doesn’t all stay with in the university coffers,” Jagger said.
“They just want to account for it,” Rock said, his head still bowed to one of the binders. “Or take credit for it.”
“What happens after they account for it?” I asked.
It was easy to follow the conversation while I searched the computer, mostly because I hadn’t found a single thing pointing to the money that had been transferred from Kensington Trust to Aventine and then to the Rooks.
“They distribute it,” Neo said. “The stuff that isn’t earmarked for administrative use anyway.”
“What’s the money for?” Jagger asked
Neo frowned, like the question insulted him. “Could be any number of things, but imagine an international corporation wants to grease the wheels of the Russian oligarchs.Ifthat were something that ever happened, said international cooperation might find it more discreet to funnel large sums of money through an organization with ties to said Russian oligarchs.”
“Like a fraternity where their kids go to school,” Jagger said.
“If something like that ever happened,” Rock said, “it would be one way to get money into the hands of powerful people without drawing the attention of authorities.”
“Or the IRS,” Neo said drily.
I was only half paying attention now.
Because I’d found something.
“When was that Kensington Trust transfer made to Aventine again?” I asked Jagger.
He gave me the date listed on the bank records Cassie had found in her parents things, and I scrolled through the bank records I’d found in cryptically-named folder.
They started twenty years earlier — I had no idea where the more current records were kept, hopefully on a computer system that didn’t date back to the Paleolithic era — and it took me a while to get to the year Cassie’s parents died.
“What was the total?” I asked, my eyes glued to the screen.
“$586,999,” Jagger said.
He didn’t even have to look at his phone. The guy was a fucking savant when it came to numbers.
“Fuck me,” I said when I saw the number appear in a list of transactions a month after the money from Kensington had been wired to Aventine.
Jagger pushed off the table to look over my shoulder at the computer.
“There it is,” he said. “There it fucking is.”
I don’t know why I was surprised — the Kings had found the transaction in Aventine’s master records — but seeing it in the Rooks’ system made it all real.
The total was right there: $586,999.00 transferred from Aventine to the Rooks.
