mumbles, “Brandon?” Her tone is more questioning than her one word.
“Oh yeah, sorry, I was nodding,” I force out, giving the first excuse that pops into my head.
Izzy giggles before replying, “Thanks, Brandon.”
I exhale sharply when I find the document I’m chasing. The account number corresponds with a wire transfer that occurred almost thirty years ago. It’s the first exact match I’ve found, and it wasn’t anywhere I had considered looking. If it weren’t for Isabelle, I would have never found it.
Happy for her to interrupt my naps anytime she likes, I say down the line, “Anytime, Izzy.”
After bidding her farewell, I dive in for another twenty-plus-hour shift.
“I don’t know whether to be impressed by your gall or disappointed.” When I crack open my apartment door, Phillipa saunters inside. “I figured you’d last a day at most. I hadn’t factored a week into the equation…” Her words stop before she playfully swipes at her nose. “Have you showered since I left?”
I roll my eyes. “Yes… I just lost my deodorant somewhere in this mess.”
By mess, I mean a huge web of conspiracy that stretches from my living room to the attached bathroom of the master suite. Although I’m working this angle for a completely different reason than Alex, he allowed me to work at home the past week with the hope I’d make a breakthrough on the sequence of numbers he handed me the afternoon before Isaac’s arrest. I’m this close. I just have one final hurdle to jump first—hence my extend of the olive branch to Phillipa.
“This is crazy, Brandon,” Phillipa mutters as she takes in the workflow of criminal activity covering every inch of my apartment walls. “Are you sure each wire transfer was for an individual purchase?”
I lift my chin. “It started well over three decades ago. From Christina Smite to Isaac’s down payment last week, each wire transfer has been linked some way to the Popovs. A small pile of unmatched receipts remain, but for the most part, they correspond with sales that never went past the deposit stage.”
Phillipa’s pitch rises as quickly as her hope. “Did you find a match for Melody?”
My teeth grit, but I manage to push out a reply. It’s short and to the point. “No.”
When I pace to the stack of unmatched payments on my coffee table, Phillipa follows me. “The wire transfer identification digits in the Greggs’ file revealed it came from the same bank and branch as the payment Isaac made last week, but the account numbers were different.” I twist to face Phillipa. “Do you remember the massive payout the Petrettis were awarded when Col’s wife was killed during a sting?”
She nods. “How could I forget it? It was the largest payment the state had seen. It certainly changed the way agents handle raids from thereon out.”
I smirk, loving her eagerness even with this case being decades old. “Did you ever wonder where that money went?”
Phillipa shakes her head. “I was only a kid at the time so I didn’t think much of it. Do you know what happened to it?”
Smiling, I hit her with the big stuff. “Most of it was squandered.” Phillipa gags. She’s not surprised nor shocked by my revelation. Col has never been good with money. “But a decent chunk of it was donated to a rival association.”
“Col gave it away?” Her high tone reveals she thinks I’m full of shit. I wish I were.
“If I were to believe the paper trail, he donated to Vladimir’s retirement fund a decade before he had reached retirement age,” I disclose, gloating.
Phillipa looks as surprised as I did when Megan’s bank records had me unlocking the very first match in the mail-order-bride conglomerate Dimitri hypothetically told me about weeks ago. If she hadn’t used the same checking account her father utilized to purchase her mother, I’d still be picking at a massive ball of twine, seeking a thread.
Megan’s mother, just like Isabelle, was sold when she was a child. She was just shy of her eighteenth birthday when Megan’s father purchased her with the compensation payout he was awarded after a workplace injury. Her sale had me wondering why the payment was directed to the Popovs instead of the crew who specialized in those trades during their heydays.
It took several hours of trawling the dark web before I stumbled upon my answer. The Popovs have been running the ultimate pyramid scheme for the past forty-plus years. They find a lucrative product, mark it up by twenty-five percent,