Lean Mean Thirteen (Stephanie Plum 13)

Coglin answered the door with a sawed-off shotgun in his. “Now what?” he asked.

“Same ol’ same ol',” I told him.

“I'm not going with you. I can't. I gotta stay here. I'll go as soon as I can.”

I looked down the barrel of the sawed-off. “All right, then,” I said. “Good conversation. Call me when you're ready to, uh, you know.”

I got into the Cayenne and took off for the bonds office.

“If you're looking for Lula, she isn't here,” Connie said when I walked in. “She went home to get dry clothes and never came back. Sounds like you had a busy morning. I hear people are driving from all over the state to breathe Burg air.”

“I swear, I didn't have anything to do with that fire. I wasn't anywhere near that house.”

“Sure,” Connie said. “Did you get Hansen?”

“Yes and no. I came here to use the by-phone number program.”

“Is this for Hansen?”

“No. I'm trying to make sense of the Dickie mess. Joyce is tied up in it. I don't exactly know how or why, but I got some numbers off her phone, and I want to run them down. One of them is for the Smith Barney automated Reserved Client Service Center.”

“That's heavy,” Connie said. “Reserved clients are those with at least ten million in assets. What else do you have on that list?”

I pulled a chair up to Connie s desk and gave her the list. “The three numbers on the sticky page came from a piece of paper in Joyce's desk. The rest came from her phone.”

“Doing some breaking and entering?”

“Only entering. Her door was open. I'd like to get into that account, but it asks for an account number.”

Connie looked at the sticky page. “Joyce isn’t Smart. If she had to write the phone number down, I'm guessing the rest of the information is there too."

“The top number is the phone number. The second number I don't recognize, and the last number is Dickie's social security number.”

“And they were written in this order on her pad?”

“Yep.”

Connie punched the Smith Barney phone number in. The automated voice asked for the account number and Connie gave it the second nine-digit number. The voice asked for the access code and Connie punched in the social security number. Access denied. Connie went through the routine again and gave it just the last four digits of the social security number.

“I'm in,” Connie said. “There's a zero balance. And the last transaction was a forty-milliondollar withdrawal. That was two weeks ago.” Connie hung up and looked at me. “That's a shitload of money. Whose account is this?”

“I don't know.”

“It can't be Joyce's,” Connie said. “She'd be in the Bahamas buying men and goats. The access code is from Dickie's social security number, so the logical assumption would be that it's Dickie's account. But I don't know how Dickie would get that kind of money. That's a lot of bill-able hours.”

No kidding. When Joyce said Dickie was worth money, I wasn't thinking this kind of money. “Maybe he stole it from the guys who snatched him, and they got cranky.”

Connie took the list of numbers I'd lifted from the phone, typed them into her computer, and plugged them into the by-phone number program.

“After we get rid of the dupes, there are sixteen numbers,” Connie said. “I'll run them and print them out for you.”

I watched the information come in. Five calls from the law firm in the last two days. And Joyce got an incoming call at one in the morning from Peter Smullen right after Dickie disappeared.

“Isn't Smullen a partner?” Connie asked.

“Yes. That's kind of weird that he called Joyce at one in the morning.”

“Maybe there's something going on with them.”