The house was still solid. They just needed to change the light bulbs. Caulk the windows. Stop deferring the marriage maintenance. But there wasn’t anything wrong.
So, she spent her birthday weekend at home. She tried not to think of those hours as maintenance and instead to be present not just for Kira and Tony but for Brian too.
Then she went back to the office on Monday and found the break she needed in the Draymond Sullivan investigation.
On a call with “Denny”—Denard Thomas Quincy III, his banker and golf pal—Sullivan’s mask had slipped. Not much, but enough to give her a peek. After the usual NASCAR and Hooters talk, Denny had gotten down to business.
About the sixty-five property, Dray—
Get that new off-ramp, perfect for a hotel.
Yeah huh?
Pick it up cheap, that wetland thing. Everyone worried about permits.
That gonna be a problem?
Not once I talk to Ray-Ray.
How much you think?
Don’t know what you’re talking about, Denny. Sullivan slammed down the phone.
Ray-Ray was—probably—Ralph Waller, the Montgomery County surveyor, another of the good ol’ boys who ran the county.
Denny and Ray-Ray and Dray. The names sounded like a punchline to a joke about a pig roast. But these men were canny enough to have skimmed and stolen for decades. Unless Rebecca was very much mistaken, Quincy III had just suggested Sullivan bribe Waller to remove a wetlands designation so that he could build a hotel, which had led Sullivan to end the call immediately, in case someone like her was listening.
She spent the morning finding out everything she could about the hotel project. After lunch she asked Smith for ten minutes. “Might have something on the Sullivan case.”
“Okay, go.”
But as soon as she finished playing the tape, he shook his head.
“No.”
“Denny literally says, ‘How much.’ ”
“And Sullivan says, ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’ ”
“Because he knows.” She was flummoxed. “If Sullivan didn’t know—honestly didn’t—he would ask. Denny, buddy, what are you talking about? That’s how real conversations go.”
“You forget what they learned you in law school, Rebecca? Doesn’t matter what he knows, it matters what he says, and he denies knowledge clear as day. Forget about it. Chuck would laugh me out of his office.” Chuck was Charles Wave, the US Attorney for the Northern District of Alabama. “Chuck likes to win.”
“This is by far the best thing I’ve heard. If it’s not good enough, we’re never gonna get close.”
“Maybe not.”
“What then?”
“You don’t like this guy.”
“I don’t.” The way he talked about Jenelle shouldn’t matter, but it did. Them cheerleaders. She can do a split on my face anytime she likes.
“Enough to take a chance? Something’s come up that could give us a way in. I normally wouldn’t suggest it to anyone as green as you, but it looks like you can walk and chew gum too. The fact that we’re up here and he’s down there, it could play.”
“Sir? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“In or out, Rebecca?”
There was only one answer to that question.
13
The FBI named its undercover operation against Draymond Sullivan GULFSTREAM. It was a sting, though the bureau preferred not to use that word anymore, to avoid giving defense lawyers the chance to claim agents had entrapped their clients. Rebecca was at its heart.
She played the role of Rachel Townsend. Rachel had grown up in Mystic, Connecticut. She liked to party more than study and quit high school a month into senior year. After two years in New York, she found work as a flight attendant on private jets. The job opened her eyes to the world of the super-rich, and she liked the view. At twenty-four, in Geneva, she quietly married Oleg Fedanov, a sixtysomething Russian billionaire real estate developer. At twenty-eight, she even more quietly divorced him.
Now Rachel was back in the United States, rebooting her life in Alabama, where she knew no one. She had $12.7 million in the bank and a love of real estate she’d picked up from Fedanov, who had built apartment complexes all over Russia. She was street smart and aggressive, happy to cut not just a corner but an entire side if necessary.
Setting the cover took months. The private jet company, Velocity Air, was real and had helped the FBI before. Fedanov was also real, and really lived in Geneva. He owed the bureau a favor or five. He was a millionaire, not a billionaire. But an investigator would need Kremlin-level contacts to know for sure. Swiss marriage and divorce records were secret. The Townsend family would vouch for Rachel, in