Ellie Ashe - Miranda Vaughn 02 - Dropping the Dime (18 page)

"Sorry I didn't get back to you earlier. I was working."

I sat up and rubbed my eyes. "No problem. I just needed to show you something I, uh, came across in Kathryn's case."

"Sure. But is tomorrow okay? I'm on my way home, and I'm beat." He sounded tired, and I leaned back against the pillow and smiled.

"Of course," I said, glancing at the clock. It was 2:45 in the morning. No wonder he was tired. "You worked late."

He exhaled, and I could hear frustration coming through. "Yeah. There was break-in at Leonidis's house."

I sat bolt upright in my bed. My stomach flipped over and I could taste the acid rising.

"What?"
This couldn't be happening.

"In Simon's home office," he said. "During some big black-tie event. It's a huge mess."

That was the understatement of the year.

I struggled to draw a breath. I had to tell him. It was me. They were looking for me. The person who broke into Simon's office during the party. Oh my God. I was going to prison. This time for certain. There would be no defense because I did it. I broke in. I was a felon.

The spots appeared in my vision again, and I reminded myself to breathe.

As I gulped down air, I heard Jake's voice as if from a tunnel.

"The guy they arrested isn't talking, but it's almost certainly related to the break-in Friday night at the corporate office."

Wait. What?

"Guy? Who?"

"A guest caught him leaving the office and tackled him, so that makes our job a little easier," Jake said, as the blood flowed back into my head.

"Who is he?"

"Don't know. He lawyered up. Won't even give his name."

"Oh," I exhaled the word. "That's good. I mean, that he was caught."

"Yeah. He may be in the system, and we should have an ID soon from his prints."

Oh, God. The prints. How was I going to explain that my fingerprints were all over Simon Leonidis's home office? His desk? The inside of his filing cabinets? The railing of his balcony?

I might not be the suspect in the burglary, but this wasn't much better. They'd dust the room, and my prints would pop up everywhere.

Well, crap.

"Hey, you should get some sleep," Jake said.

That wasn't likely, but the background noise had disappeared, and I could picture him parked in his driveway, exhausted.

"Yeah, sure," I said.

"I'll call you in the morning," he said. "We'll talk about Kathryn then."

I'd nearly forgotten about Kathryn and the paperwork clearing Simon Leonidis. "Right, good. Have a good night," I said.

I stretched out and pulled the covers up to my chin and tried to go back to sleep, but the adrenaline from my call with Jake wouldn't let me relax. After a half hour of tossing and turning, I gave up and went out to the kitchen. A cup of tea might help me get a few hours of sleep.

While I waited for the water to boil, I gathered the paperwork that I'd reviewed recently for Kathryn's case. On top of the folder was the list of questions I'd never gotten a chance to ask her, but I slipped it inside the folder. It didn't matter any longer. Simon wasn't embezzling or evading taxes.

I sipped my chamomile tea and printed out copies of the photos so I could take them to Jake, and slid them in the folder, too. Then I pulled the pages from the escrow files out again and stared at them. There was something there my mind kept coming back to—the payments to the Bishop Ranch Water District. Each house sold by the Leonidis Development Company included a payment from the escrow account to the water district. The payments were part of a long list of figures that would get sent out by the title company when the transaction closed—fees, taxes, school bond payments, and commissions and payments to various parties. Most of the new homeowners probably never took the time to review the page, just signed at the bottom of the document—another of dozens of pages to sign to finalize a house purchase.

But this one jumped from the list, at least to me. Quinn had been adamant that the Bishop Ranch name was only used by his family. And my cursory research had found no water district that shared a name with the ranch. Yet each time someone bought a house in the Bishop Valley subdivision, a payment of nine hundred and forty dollars was transferred to the water district's account. It was hardly a blip on the financial radar for houses that cost more than three hundred thousand dollars, with many over three-quarters of a million dollars or more.

I started doing the math in my head, then grabbed a pencil and started jotting notes. The development was expecting to sell nearly two thousand homes this year, which added up to just under two million dollars going to the water district. Each year. And the subdivision had been selling homes for a decade. Sure, some years were slower, but even in the years where the housing market was depressed, the district pulled in a cool million a year.

But where was it going?

It was entirely possible there was a really easy and completely legitimate answer.

It was also an ingenious way to shave a little bit off of thousands of transactions each year. It wasn't a huge amount relative to the purchase price, hidden among many similar costs that were passed on to the homebuyer. Once put in place, it would happen automatically, with zero oversight necessary.

It was just before four in the morning so I couldn't call Kathryn to ask. And I didn't have all the paperwork that I needed to do a more thorough analysis of the payments. But I did have some of the files and nothing but time on my hands since it was still dark out.

A couple of hours later, I was driving east, heading to Azalea. A thick ground fog was rising, giving the passing farmland an eerie and quiet feel. By the time I pulled into Jake's driveway, there was a hint of pink starting to color the gray morning sky in the east. His truck was pulled all the way up the driveway, in front of the small, detached garage. I parked behind it, parallel with the kitchen and then looked up to see if Jake was possibly awake already. The kitchen windows were dark, as was the rest of the house.

I grabbed my black leather bag from the passenger seat and walked past piles of construction materials to a brick-lined path that led to the front porch of the Craftsman-style bungalow. In the early morning light, I could see it was a charming little house, and Jake's pride in his work shone through in the details, like the smooth finish of the varnish on the porch railing and the precise placement of the stones on the path.

I paused at the door, my finger hovering over the doorbell. It was early. He wasn't expecting me. Should I be doing this? What if he wasn't alone? What did I really know about him, anyway? We'd had an intense experience together a few months ago, then a long absence. He was fun to kiss, and the other night he acted like he wanted to kiss me more often. He might even be a little jealous of Quinn.

But what if there was someone else in his life?

"Miranda, it's 6:19 in the morning." I jumped a foot off the porch at the sound of Jake's voice on the other side of the door. "Are you going to knock or just stare at the door until I'm awake?"

I gave a nervous laugh. "Just debating whether it was a good idea to wake you."

The door opened, and Jake stood there bleary-eyed and adorably rumpled. He wore a T-shirt and a pair of sweatpants, and his hair stood on end. A good deal of scruff covered his face.

"I'll make coffee," he said, holding the door for me.

Hank greeted me with more enthusiasm, licking my hand and head-butting my leg so hard I nearly fell over. Jake pulled him toward the kitchen and set down a bowl of food to distract him.

"When you said you could wait until morning, I expected some time after daybreak," Jake said. His eyes were bloodshot. I thought about what time we'd gotten off the phone, calculated the few hours he'd slept and felt a little guilty for waking him. "Give me a minute to get presentable. Make yourself comfortable."

He gave me a sleepy grin that made my blood surge then disappeared into one of the bedrooms. When he returned a few minutes later, he was rubbing his face with a hand towel and his hair was damp where he'd clearly splashed water on his face.

"Not that I'm complaining, but what is so important that you're on my doorstep at dawn?" he asked, taking two coffee cups out of the open cupboard.

"I couldn't sleep."

"I had no trouble sleeping," he said, a wistful tone in his voice.

"Sorry. It
is
important, I think," I said, reaching for my briefcase. I pulled out the manila folder with all the documents from my kitchen and withdrew the loan papers.

"Cream in your coffee, right?" he asked.

"Yes, please," I said, as he crossed to the fridge. He prepared both mugs, set one in front of me, and then sat on the other side of the kitchen table.

"This is where the payments were going," I said. "Simon's not paying a made up company. He's paying this Jimmy DeLaurentis. It's an unsecured loan. A bad loan. Terrible terms. But it's completely legal."

Jake sipped the coffee and flipped through the printouts. "Are these photographs?"

Damn, he would hone in on the illegal aspect. "Mmm, do you know who Jimmy DeLaurentis is?"

"Of course," he said, shooting me a curious look. "How did you get these?"

"You know what this means, right? It means that Simon didn't do anything illegal."

Jake turned pages without responding, reaching the last page where the payment schedule was attached.

"Those payments match the transfers from Leonidis," I said.

"Mmmm," he said.

I reached across him and picked up the first pages of the contract. "He's paying an outrageous amount in interest, but the loan was signed in 2008, when banks weren't lending money. This may have been Simon's only shot at getting his company through the housing bust."

I stood and brought the coffee carafe back and topped off our mugs while he struggled to read the somewhat blurry contract terms.

"Why wouldn't he just be upfront about the loan?" Jake asked.

"I don't know. Maybe he didn't want his kids to know how close to collapse the company was during the housing crisis," I said.

Jake frowned and studied the list of payments. "If your client knew about this—"

"She didn't," I said quickly.

"Why was she lying about her relationship with Simon's son?" he asked, his eyebrows furrowing.

"She didn't lie, she just didn't disclose the information," I said.

"That's the same thing. She concealed the information from us," he said.

"For a good reason. She and Alexi are starting their own development company. They're going to compete with Simon. If he found out about them, or about their plans, he would have fired Kathryn. And probably Alexi, too," I said.

Jake rubbed his face and closed his eyes. "Why do you think she's telling the truth now?"

I shrugged. "I saw them together. They're in love."

He exhaled and shook his head. "There's something going on here. I'm not buying this, Miranda."

"But this explains why she thought he was embezzling. It was an honest mistake."

I could feel his doubt, radiating off his tense shoulders.

"What's this?" he asked, pulling some additional pages from under the contract.

"Oh, just my notes, it's nothing," I said.

But his eyes were taking in my scribbles—the sample closing statement where I'd circled the Bishop Ranch Water District entry, the figures where I'd multiplied that amount by the number of homes sold. The very large dollar amount that still befuddled me.

"Wait, is there something going on with the Bishop Ranch?"

"What? No. It's not the Bishop Ranch that's getting paid," I said, in a rush to head Jake off before he turned that sharp and suspicious eye on Quinn, something I suspected he'd be eager to do. "It's nothing. Probably. I just can't figure out what that money is for because I can't find a Bishop Ranch Water District."

"Nearly a thousand bucks goes to the water district from each home buyer?" he asked, sitting up straighter and staring at my notes with an intensity that alarmed me. "And that adds up to almost a couple million dollars a year?"

I nodded, not wanting to say anything more. I didn't know what I was looking at yet.

"What do you mean you can't find the water district?"

"I just did some internet searches," I said. My research was a little more extensive than that, since we had access to other legal databases that would let us do more in-depth searches of public records. Nothing came up with that name.

"You think it doesn't exist." It wasn't a question, but a statement.

"It's too early for me to conclude that," I said. "I need more information."

"You know what I think?"

I shook my head.

"I think your girl is in on this. Think about it, Miranda. Who else could set up these payments to a fake water district and siphon off money from each transaction," he said.

Damn, he was good at his job.

"She and Alexi could be taking his dad for a ride here," he said. "She's in the perfect position to set this up, and Alexi, well, he knows where his dad's spare office key is kept."

My body stiffened. "That's ridiculous. Why would Alexi and Kathryn break into Simon's home? Or into the Leonidis office? They work there and could find what they need at any time."

"Kathryn purposefully misled everyone in this investigation, pointed us at Simon, and all the while, she and Alexi could be stealing money to fund their own company," Jake said.

"That is ridiculous," I said, standing up. My movement startled Hank, who rose from the floor in a clumsy tangle of long legs on slick linoleum. "There wasn't a crime here. That's why I had to see you this morning. I'm calling you off."

"That's not how it works," Jake said, standing and leaning over the small kitchen table. "We follow the evidence, and there's something about Kathryn that makes me think she's covering something up here. I think she's involved in the break-ins."