Passion, Betrayal and Killer Highlights (38 page)

I shook my head. “I have no idea, but it must mean
something
.”

“That’s great, Sophie,” Leah said sarcastically.

“Hey, we just found this. Give me a few minutes to figure out—oh my God, Leah, look!” I pointed to the name of one of the customers.

Leah gasped. “Maria E. Souza! That’s the Portuguese woman from Hotel Gatsby!”

“Wait a minute.” I quickly scrolled back up. “Jan Levine.” I got up and ran to the living room and then came back with the torn piece of paper. “Jan Le—this must be her!”

Leah looked at the paper. “Where did you get this?”

“I found it in the shoe box!” I jumped up and down excitedly. “Check her phone number—see if it starts with the numbers 5178.”

“It says here that her number starts with 4153.” Mary Ann tapped the screen. “It’s not her address, either.”

Leah studied the screen and then gasped. “Oh. My. God. It’s her credit card number.”

“Holy shit.” I slapped my hand over my mouth.

Leah scrolled back down to Maria. “There’s something wrong here. The delivery address for Maria is in San Francisco.”

“There’s another buy-and-return scam that I know about.”

Leah and I turned to Mary Ann.

“Remember when I used to work at Dawson’s? Well, sometimes if a department was really close to making their monthly sales goal the managers would ask the salespeople to buy merchandise and return it when the month was over.”

I looked at the screen again. “All these purchases were made in March, June, October and December, and all the returns were made the following month.”

Leah brought her hand to her cheek. “Every three months.”

I chewed on my thumbnail. “What happens every three months?”

“The seasons change?” Mary Ann offered.

“Business quarters,” Leah said quietly. “Business quarters change every three months.”

My mind flashed back to the conversation we had with Charlie. “That note that Charlie saw Cheryl handing Bob—she was using her position at the Gatsby to help Bob commit identity theft.”

“Why would she do that?” Mary Ann asked.

Leah looked at me and I saw my own comprehension mirrored in her eyes. “They did it to keep stock prices up. Artificially inflating stock prices coupled with identity theft…that’s enough to land someone in prison for quite a while.”

I lunged for the phone and dialed Anatoly’s cell number.

“The subscriber you are trying to reach…”

I hung up, sat back down at the computer and quickly saved the information on the disk onto my hard drive. “Mary Ann, Anatoly should be at the Gatsby. I want you to find him and give him this disk.”

“Okay,” Mary Ann said uncertainly. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to Cheryl’s.” I ejected the disk and gave it to Mary Ann, who took it with some hesitation.

“You’re not going to do anything stupid, are you?”

This seemed like a particularly ironic question coming from Mary Ann. “I’m not going to do anything stupid. Now go!” I pushed her toward the door. She slipped the disk in her purse and took off to carry out her mission.

“So,” Leah said. “You’re going to break into Cheryl’s place?”

“You got it. There’s got to be more evidence of Cheryl’s involvement in all this, and I bet you anything it’s somewhere in her home. All I need is a few minutes to look around.”

“Jack and I are coming with you.”

“Leah, you can’t bring a baby to a break-in.”

“I’m not going to go
in
with you. I’ll just sit in the car and make sure no one walks in while you’re there—like a…a lookout person.”

“I really don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“If you go to jail, I’ll have to leave Jack with Mama. Think about what it would have been like to have been raised by Mama without Dad around to keep her balanced. I refuse to sentence my son to a childhood filled with guilt and gefilte fish!”

I smiled despite myself. “Okay, you can come, but only because I know we won’t be caught.” I squeezed her hand. “It’s the Katz sisters against the world.”

Leah gave me a curt nod. “The world won’t know what hit it.”

CHAPTER 19

“You wanna know if she’s a devil worshiper?” Al laughed bitterly. “That broad’s so evil the devil worships
her!
”

—
Words To Die By

“J
ust when I thought it wasn’t possible to hate Cheryl any more than I already did, she goes off and kills my husband.” Leah glared out the front windshield and ran her fingers through her hair. “I can’t believe she would do this. What would her hero Arnold Schwarzenegger say?”

“We don’t know that she killed Bob.” I paused at a stop sign before hitting the gas again. “It could have been James Sawyer. I
know
he’s at the center of all this.”

“Don’t even get me started on James Sawyer. It was just a few months ago that I had his family over for dinner. I made a soufflé, for God’s sake! And this is the thanks I get?”

I gave her a sidelong glance. “If it’s any consolation, I’m sure everything was set in motion long before the whole soufflé event.”

“Wouldn’t it make more sense for us to go to Chalet? It seems like that’s where the evidence would be, and the police have already searched Cheryl’s place.”

“We’ll never get into Chalet on a Saturday, and even if we did we wouldn’t get into James’s office. Besides, the police didn’t know what to look for when they searched Cheryl’s. We do.”

“I can’t believe she was actually providing Bob and Taylor with the information to steal people’s identity. Surely one or two of these people had a credit report done.”

“Think about it. They were probably opening new accounts under these people’s names and every purchase that was made was credited back within thirty days of the purchase. And I assume Bob, Taylor, or whoever, had the presence of mind to close the accounts right after crediting them. If someone did notice it on a credit report they might have seen it as a computer glitch and decided it wasn’t worth the effort to pursue the problem with the credit bureaus.”

“If I thought there was even the slightest possibility that someone was charging things on accounts with my name on it I would put out the effort to find out who it was and stop them.”

“Okay, let’s say a few people did report it. How would they know who got their credit info? Every time we hand our credit card over to a salesperson we risk being ripped off.”

“How comforting.” Leah turned and looked at Jack in the back seat.

“He’s being really good,” I noted.

“I know. I wonder if he’s feeling all right.”

I pulled onto the sidewalk in front of the garage in Cheryl’s building. “I’m going to give you one last chance to back out of this whole lookout-person deal. Keep in mind that aiding and abetting a break-in is a felony.”

“What are they going to do, throw me in jail with a bunch of other criminals?” she said scornfully. “Been there, done that.”

“Fine, but I don’t think you should wait in the car. Why don’t you pretend to wait at that bus stop across the street. That way if something goes wrong, you and Jack will be able to just stroll away.”

“Fine with me.”

We all got out of the car and Leah pulled the stroller out of the trunk and strapped Jack in.

I looked up at the building. “Cheryl’s apartment is on the first floor. I think if I climb on top of the car I should be able to pull myself up to the fire escape and climb in the window.”

“Really,” Leah said flatly. “Am I mistaken or are you the same person who dropped out of gymnastics after three classes.”

“I was six!”

“Yes, but I don’t remember you signing back up at seven.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“As a matter of fact I do. I’ll climb in the window and open the door for you.”

Before I could say anything she was on top of the car. She reached her arm straight up in the air, but there was still about a foot between her hand and the bottom of the fire escape.

“Leah, you really shouldn’t be doing this.”

She bent her knees and jumped. For a split second I didn’t think she was going to be able to make it, and I wondered how I was going to explain my dented roof to the insurance company. But Leah did grab hold of the bars. Now she was dangling in the air, holding on for dear life.

A young couple who was walking by, stopped to stare. I smiled nervously. “We locked ourselves out,” I explained.

They looked at each other, shrugged and kept walking. That’s what I love about city dwellers. More often than not they’d rather walk away from a potential crime in progress than waste their cellular minutes calling the police.

“Anything I can do to help?” I called up to Leah.

“Climb up on the car and help hoist me up.”

I was impressed. Leah had only achieved her criminal status a short while ago but she had already become pretty competent in the role. I made sure the wheels on Jack’s stroller were locked, climbed up on the Audi and, with a little help and a lot of struggling, got Leah up on the fire escape.

“The window’s unlocked!” she called down excitedly.

“Great.” I climbed back down as Leah crawled inside the apartment. My heart pounded as I waited to see if cops were going to come rushing out of their unmarked cars to haul us all in. But that didn’t happen. Instead the buzzer to unlock the front door sounded and I quickly opened it and wheeled Jack inside. I waited for Leah to come down to the lobby, and when she didn’t, I cursed under my breath. I had been hoping she would just leave the door to Cheryl’s place open, take Jack from me and wheel him across the street. Instead I was going to have to bring Jack right to the scene of the crime, which was not only irresponsible from a parenting perspective but also incredibly inconvenient. I was now going to have to lug him and his stroller up a flight of stairs.

I rubbed my hands against my jeans before undertaking the endeavor, and when I finally got to Cheryl’s door I was out of breath and seriously irritated at Leah. But oddly enough, Jack didn’t seem bothered at all. He was quieter than I had ever seen him. I rearranged him in his stroller and opened Cheryl’s door.

Leah was in the middle of the living room looking incredibly pale. Cheryl was standing at her side.

“Oh God.” I stepped forward. “Cheryl, I know this looks bad but I can explain.”

“No need.” I turned just in time to see James Sawyer closing the door behind me. The polished metal of a small revolver sparkled in his hand.

“Go stand with the other ladies, please.”

I opened my mouth but words failed me.

“Now.”

I mutely walked to Leah’s side, pushing Jack along as I did.

James’s eyes traveled down to Jack and I thought I saw a flicker of regret cross his features.

“That’s Bob’s gun,” Leah whispered. “He was about to use it on Cheryl when I walked in.”

“I would have thought that would please you,” James said. His laugh had a slightly hysterical ring to it. Cheryl choked back a sob.

My hand tightened around the handle of Jack’s stroller. “You don’t want to do this, James. You don’t want to kill a mother in front of her child.”

“Of course I don’t want to do this!” James snapped. “I didn’t want to do any of this! Bob is the one who put me in this position. If he had had the common sense of a gnat none of this would be necessary.” James waved his gun at Leah accusingly. “It was your husband who set all this in motion.”

“What went wrong?” I asked. Jack was whimpering in his seat. I had never heard the child whimper before—maybe he sensed the fear in the room. “Did Bob figure out that identity theft was…you know…immoral and stuff?”

“So you know about that.” James let out a heavy sigh of resignation. “It was a temporary game plan and no one was going to get hurt. Not even the people whose credit information we used. Everything we charged to those accounts was promptly credited back. All Bob had to do was get the credit information on a few of the more affluent guests at the Gatsby and wait for his stock options to start paying off.”

I looked over at Cheryl, but she didn’t seem to care about being exposed as a criminal. She appeared much more concerned with the prospect of her imminent death. For once she had her priorities straight.

“What did Bob do?” Leah’s body was shaking. “Why did you kill him?”

“He got greedy, that’s what he did! He didn’t bide his time like the rest of us. Instead he immediately started spending money like he was Bill Gates and he expected me to support his expensive tastes. He told me that if I didn’t give him money right away he would act as a whistle-blower. He said he would cut some kind of deal and give the DA my head on a platter. He made a floppy disk that illustrated what we were doing and gave me a copy to show me that he meant business. He was too stupid to see that even with the best plea bargain he would still have to deal with felony charges, and he was too callous to care that his sister would be sent to prison along with Taylor and me. What kind of man doesn’t care about his own family?”

“Good question,” Leah muttered.

“You still didn’t have the right to kill him!” Cheryl cried. “You could have let me talk to him or…or you could have just given him his stupid money! You didn’t have to murder my brother!”

“Don’t pretend that you gave a damn about Bob,” James scoffed. “You have never cared about anyone but yourself. When I asked you to get close with Erika and shoot her up with cocaine, you didn’t so much as flinch.”

“But you didn’t tell me she had a heart condition!” Cheryl protested. “You said that we just needed to make her look like a drug addict to ruin her credibility. I didn’t know she was going to die! And then you lied to me again to get me to come back to the city. You told me that you had a way of fixing everything. But really you just wanted the chance to kill me, too!” She turned to Leah. “None of this is my fault!”

“Are you serious?” Leah hissed. “You have been stealing people’s identities in exchange for money! You told a woman you were going to administer her insulin and you shot her up with crack instead! I can’t believe the depths to which you’ve sunk!”