“You want it more, or some do. I did.”
“Yeah. On the surface, he looks like an average guy, but that’s surface. The other’s single, came from blue-collar, hard-scrabble, studied. Got a good ride on scholarships.”
Again she gestured, zeroing in on Parzarri.
“He?
?s made money with his money, which you ought to be able to do when you know money, I guess. He’s not swimming in it like a money pond, but he’s solid. Scholarship kid, going to good schools, really good schools and coming home to a tough neighborhood in Jersey. You see how the other half lives, and that can be rough. You’re the one who’s there because you’re smart, not because you’ve got money. You don’t have the nice clothes, you take the bus instead of driving the car Daddy bought you. It can piss you off.”
“So you’ll make sure you’ll eventually be the one with money, with the nice clothes and the fancy car?”
“Maybe. They look clean, but . . .” She tapped her computer. “There’s something there.”
“But no pressure.”
She laughed, shook her head. “You’ll find it. But meanwhile, I need some input. You’re the expert.”
“On greed and avarice?”
“On how the greedy and avaricious work. If there’s something in there, and there damn well has to be, would the accountant in charge of the account know, or am I just assuming and suspicious?”
“You’re suspicious, but yes, almost certainly the accountant in charge would know. There’s some wiggle room there if the person—if it isn’t indeed the accountant skimming, cooking or finagling on his own—who’s finessed the numbers managed to do so without having it show. A thorough audit’s bound to turn over some of those rocks.”
“So the person doing the audit would know, or find what’s under them.”
“In a firm like Brewer? You could count on it.”
“Would the financial guy—the money managers, brokers, whatever term you use for WIN—would he know?”
“Again, there’s that wiggle room, particularly if the client and the accountant worked it together. But to make more? To keep it smooth, and actually simpler? You’d want the money manager in the pocket as well.”
“At least three people,” she considered. “Simpler maybe, but it gets sticky. The more people who know, the easier for something to slip.”
“Didn’t it?” he returned. “Someone’s dead.”
“Yeah.” She looked back toward the board. “Someone is.”
“It’s business,” he continued. “As you said about the murder itself. Not personal, just business. Cheating, stealing, shifting funds, kickbacks, payoffs, burying profits—whatever it might be—it’s business. To do business, and do it well, to do it profitably, you need advisers, managers, workers. And, to keep it smooth, again simple, you’d want those people to have a foot in each door—the legal business, and the criminal.”
“Yeah, okay, that’s how I was leaning. I thought about Oberon, how she ran her department, all those cops—and used her handpicked to run her dirty cop sideline. You need some in each camp, to keep the legit business going, and to use that legit business for the dirty one.”
She considered it as she finished her coffee. “And if it runs like that, if that’s a good comparison, the money guy, the accountant, they’re not in charge—they’re tools. The one in charge,” she tapped her computer again, “is in there.”
“But no pressure,” Roarke repeated.
“You eat pressure for breakfast, ace.”
“Some days a man just wants a full Irish.”
“Me? I get that every day.” She rose, walked back to the board. “He—or she—or them. Not up here yet. Not yet. But the tools are. I just need to figure out which ones up here do the cooking.”
She went back to her auxiliary, and back to work.
• • •
He saw the moment she started to flag, how she rubbed at her eyes, scrubbed at her hair, as if it would keep her awake and alert.
He thought he could manage another hour or so. It was all so bloody interesting, how others set up their businesses, their books, their investments. He’d find what she needed, nothing else would do the way she’d put her faith in him. Challenged him, of course, very purposefully, he knew. Put his ego and his competitive spirit on the line.