Cut and Run (Lucy Kincaid #16) - Allison Brennan Page 0,52

they might hurt my grandparents.”

“You don’t know that.”

“If my mom did what they said she did, why did they kill everyone?”

“I don’t know, Ricky.”

“I want to stay.”

“Okay.”

“You’re not going to get in trouble, are you?”

“No.”

“Okay.”

“Let’s make supper.”

“What about the truck?”

“I’m done. Good as new.” He put his arm around Ricky’s shoulder as they got up and walked toward the house. Javier whistled for the dog, who slowly rose and trotted after them.

Ricky felt safe for the first time in three months.

Chapter Thirteen

Stanley Grant would be released at one thirty that afternoon, after he was fitted with an ankle monitor. Marie was staying at the courthouse with him, then Sean would escort the two of them to a hotel room that Max had reserved for Grant.

There was a threat to Grant, but Sean didn’t know how serious it was, or even why.

Max had given Sean a key to her hotel room so he could work from there and have access to all her research. She’d only been in town for twenty-four hours, but already her makeshift office was complete with an up-to-date timeline and sticky notes asking questions.

If Grant embezzled 2.1M why is there no paper trail until after V’s murder?

Where are Grant’s gambling losses? Who and what bets? Need verification.

If Grant didn’t kill V, who and why?

Max must have stopped here after the interview at the courthouse, because she’d put a sticky note with the description of the large Hispanic male with a scar on his hand and added Marie’s car accident in the timeline. But for now, Sean focused on her most recent addition:

Who is Harrison Monroe?—Rogan.

Sean booted up his laptop and logged into the RCK database that he and the former RCK IT manager had created to pool all public databases into a central location. He limited the search fields to Harrison Monroes in Texas. There were eleven. He then narrowed to a hundred-mile radius of San Antonio and came up with three. He could expand out if these came up dry, but it made sense that if Victoria Mills was working with someone—a real buyer or a straw buyer—the individual would be local.

Then he read over the basic background reports that the RCK system generated. Monroe, Harrison A. was in his seventies, a veteran and widower, and lived in a small house near Lackland Air Force Base. Three kids, four grandkids, lived within his means. Sean kept that individual on the list because a terrific scam was to use a real, yet unsuspecting, individual to buy and sell land. The purpose was primarily tax evasion or money laundering, but there were other reasons to use a false identity or a straw buyer.

Harrison P. Monroe, forty-five, owned a nice ten-acre spread in New Braunfels, north of San Antonio, jointly with his wife, Faith Parker Monroe, forty-four. No children. Stockbroker for a major brokerage firm. Not specifically land investments, but they were cousins, so to speak, so Sean kept him on the list as well. His only debt was his house, which he had taken a second mortgage out for renovations, and one car loan, though he had three cars in either his or his wife’s name. Faith was a senior lawyer for a major San Antonio firm, but her specialty wasn’t listed on their website.

Harrison T. Monroe, thirty-five, lived in Austin. He was a red flag—he had substantial debt and was upside down on his mortgage. Also married—to Natalie, thirty-six—with two kids, both preteens. He was a Realtor, specialized in residential properties. His wife didn’t work after she had her first kid, up until two years ago when she renewed her dental hygienist license and started working for a dentist office that specialized in children.

Red flag because of his career—he might have known Victoria Mills as a fellow Realtor, and he had the knowledge to run a land scam. Red flag because of his debt—if he was banking on a get-rich-quick-scheme that didn’t pan out the way he wanted, he might be desperate enough to kill. Harrison T. was at the top of Sean’s list, but he’d check out the other two Harrisons.

Sean knew a bit about land scams from reading the news, and he understood how some of them worked, but straw buyers were usually small scale—buying a property that had been listed too low by an unscrupulous Realtor, then either fixing it up and selling high for a quick profit or renting it out for a steady income. Very hard to prosecute such cases because the