CHAPTER

55

DEVINE FINISHED EXPLAINING EVERYTHING TO Montgomery and then clicked off.

The pattern was now established. Transactions flowed into Area 51 with green, and those same transactions stopped with red. And someone on the 6:20 train was receiving those signals and then doing what needed to be done, namely either putting on the brakes or punching the gas based on the color of a freaking bikini.

And Stamos’s murder had made the signal go to red this last time, and led to Area 51 shutting down. But whoever was driving all that money to Cowl and Comely must not like it when those shutdowns happened. It was like a blood vessel with an obstruction, or a rain-swollen dam; at some point the thing was going to burst. Thus, Cowl had to keep opening the valve back up, even if it caused personal peril for him.

Cowl was no doubt afraid, and he had good reason to be. With two murders, the police would dig deep. But there were problems with that theory, too. If they went in there and saw all those silent servers and blank-faced computers, it could easily be explained as being related to Cowl’s business, and how could the cops prove otherwise? And without that there would be no warrant issued to search the cloud connected to all that data, particularly not with the legal firepower Cowl had on retainer. Hell, they probably wouldn’t have enough probable cause to search anywhere in the building, because Stamos hadn’t been killed there.

It occurred to Devine that he was struggling because he didn’t know enough about his opponent, Brad Cowl.

Now he had a specific search he was going to employ with a slightly different spin.

He typed it into his phone: Bradley Cowl negative stories.

He found that there were more than a few, but they all had the same theme. Big, bad billionaire who only cared about himself. Again, what a shock, Devine thought. Like he built what he had by being a nice guy.

But after a great deal of searching, he found one article that took a different theme. It was by a financial journalist whom Devine had never heard of, but Elaine Nestor had once been a respected reporter and had contributed pieces to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and Mother Jones. She had also been a commentator on numerous business shows. Then she had simply vanished from the radar nearly two years ago. And the story Devine had just pulled up, written by Nestor around that time, must have pissed Cowl off immensely. And maybe that was the reason Nestor no longer had a career.

Nestor was basically arguing that something was very shady in the land of Cowl. Every other name partner of a major Wall Street investment firm was well documented and vetted, even those long dead. Not so Anne Comely, argued Nestor, which was the same thing Devine had previously thought. While others in the financial field waved this off as trivial and unimportant, Nestor said that Comely was a red flag because no one could find out anything about her. And in the financial world, that sort of deception might have been reflected in other areas of the firm’s business, Nestor had concluded.

In the matter of Brad Cowl personally, the lady had been even more pointed.

Nestor maintained, based on anonymous sources, that Cowl’s elite academic status at college had been bought and paid for. That he was not nearly the amazing businessman he claimed to be. That he had, in fact, inherited large sums of money from both his grandfather and father but had squandered it on partying and lousy investment decisions. Nestor went on to write that the entire foundation of Cowl and Comely could very well be rotten to the core. She had even called for an SEC investigation.

Devine read some related articles and could now understand what had happened to Nestor. The “anonymous” sources had come forward and claimed they hadn’t said what she had written about them. That she had offered them money and other types of bribes. Cowl’s grandfather was dead and his father was in ill health, but in a prepared statement Cowl Sr. said that his son had gotten nothing from him, and that Brad Cowl had earned every penny of what he had.

Cowl’s university had roundly rejected the allegation that anyone could have purchased high academic status, although the president, the provost, and other key figures there at the time Cowl had attended refused to comment.

And on top of all that, Cowl and Comely had been enormously successful for two decades. Inept but slick-mouthed grifters rarely seemed to really pull that off. Although Nestor had countered that almost all the investors who had given their money to the likes of Bernie Madoff and others of his ilk would beg to differ.

Cowl had sued Nestor and buried her under legal bills, another article said.

It’s the same threat he made to me.

The publication she had written the piece for rolled over under threats from Cowl’s lawyers and had hung Nestor out to dry. The matter had been quietly settled on terms that were never disclosed. Devine was surprised that her article was still even available online, but he’d had to dig really deep to find it. Once something was on the internet, it was really difficult to purge it from every platform.

Nestor’s last known address, at least that Devine could find, was in rural Connecticut.

He searched to see if she was still there. It seemed that she was. There was no phone number or email, and she had no social media presence. He wondered if that was part of the settlement.

He texted Montgomery and asked her if she was up for a motorcycle trip to Connecticut the next morning.

Hell yes, was her response. I can meet you in Westchester, at the train station.

* * *

After another grueling day of work and suspicious looks from his fellow Burners, Devine took the train back to Mount Kisco.

As he walked home from the station, a black sedan pulled up.

“Get in,” said the driver.

Devine got in and found himself sitting next to Campbell.

“The chatter we’ve been relying on died out completely,” said the retired general.

Tags: David Baldacci Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net