Cut and Run (Lucy Kincaid #16) - Allison Brennan Page 0,93

without looking, Lucy was always impressed with how she organized her information. Lucy was very visual, so viewing Max’s timeline and all the relevant data clearly listed helped her see the whole case. Though she was exhausted and just wanted to go home and sleep, Lucy was glad she’d come by the hotel.

In the forty-eight hours that Max had been in town, she had done a lot.

“What is HFM?” she asked. She was both upset and angry that Sean and Max had been followed this afternoon after Max’s meeting with Harrison Monroe, but she understood why they hadn’t called the police. There had been no crime, and proving to the authorities that someone was tailing you was virtually impossible. “On paper it looks legit.”

“It may be legit,” Max said. “At least on the surface. He buys a lot of property, holds it for a year, and sells it—all through HFM. But it’s impossible to tell—without a federal warrant—where his original money came from. Sean doesn’t think we have enough to turn over to your people. Neither does Ryan.”

“You don’t,” Lucy said. “On the surface there is nothing illegal about any of this. You drew a pretty picture connecting Victoria’s murder to the discovery of the Albrights’ bones, but that’s not even enough. Stan’s comment about Monroe being a straw buyer—even if we could get the judge to let you testify to his statement—means nothing. He didn’t flat out say he didn’t know Monroe, he just didn’t make it sound like he did.”

Lucy looked at the list of names that had been running around in her head ever since Max laid out her theories last night. Six friends from college … involved allegedly in an illegal gambling operation years ago … what were they doing now? Had their crimes caught up with them? Could these murders be revenge … for someone they hurt more than two decades ago?

“You’re thinking,” Sean said.

“It’s … nothing.”

“It’s not nothing.”

“If we assume they had committed crimes together in college, maybe one of their past acts caught up with them.”

“That’s a long time to wait for revenge,” Max said.

“And almost impossible to follow up on,” Lucy said. “Unless there was a complaint filed.”

“That, I can find out,” Sean said. “I’ll dig around and see if anyone filed a complaint in college about any of these people. It won’t take much time—a few calls to the right people.”

“Revenge is a solid motive,” Lucy said, “but I keep coming back to Denise’s family being murdered. It’s … overkill. Unless the kids saw something, but Tori got Becky out of volleyball practice Friday and that tells me that they were either planning on running or … or what if Glen was taking the kids out of town for safety because Denise was planning on going to the authorities about whatever she knew?”

“But they didn’t get out fast enough,” Max said.

“The revenge angle is worth looking at,” Sean said, “but our working theory—and no, we can’t prove it—is that Harrison Monroe created HFM to launder his illegal gambling profits.”

“Which you learned from this Tompkins guy who hasn’t seen Monroe in over twenty years,” Lucy said. “I’m sorry to play the devil’s advocate here, but no judge is going to give us a warrant based on an unproven—and uninvestigated—accusation more than two decades old.”

“That’s your world,” Max said, “not mine. I know there’s a story here. I can expose the illegal gambling, I can report anything I want as long as I can support my claims with evidence. We talked to Ryan shortly before you arrived, just to run a hypothetical situation by him. In a nutshell, land transactions generate a paper trail. But to unravel something like this would take months, if not years, of work, and there’s no probable cause for a warrant. Victoria being dead doesn’t seem to count.”

“Because Monroe isn’t a suspect in her murder,” Lucy said.

“We don’t know that, because Detective Reed doesn’t share.”

“With you,” Lucy reminded her.

Sean said, “Ryan had a good suggestion—to focus on the murders, not the gambling or land transactions. A reverse Al Capone, where technology and forensics will yield more evidence than a white collar investigation in the short run.”

“He’s right,” Lucy agreed, “and I’m more comfortable investigating violent crime over money laundering.”

“We need access to all the reports from Victoria’s murder,” Max said.

Lucy couldn’t help but smile. “We?”

“We’re a team,” Max said. “I share, you share.”

Lucy knew what she meant, but she didn’t like their arrangement. “I will talk to Detective