Jennifer Sturman - The Key

“That was probably Mr. and Mrs. Ditweiler. He has a touch of rheumatism in his knee, and she just had her hip replaced a few months ago,” I explained. “She makes gingerbread men for the building Christmas party every year. They’re really good.”

The dial resumed its path, creeping along to five, six and seven. Then it stopped again at eight.

“The mysterious stranger is big on building suspense, isn’t he?” said Hilary.

“It’s part of the whole mysterious thing,” Emma told her.

“How much of their lives do you think New Yorkers waste waiting for elevators?” asked Peter.

“Less than Californians waste sitting in cars,” I said.

The dial started moving again, this time advancing steadily onward from eight to twelve and then directly to fourteen.

“The poor kids,” said Jane. “They have no reason to think that thirteen even exists.”

The doors finally slid open, and the mysterious stranger stepped out, black eye and all.

“Hi!” cried Hilary. “I’m Hilary. Who are you?”

He looked from one face to another. I guessed he wasn’t expecting to find such a crowd waiting for him. I cleared my throat and gave a little wave, and his gaze landed on me.

“Ms. Benjamin?”

“Why don’t we skip right to first names?” I suggested. After all, we’d been spending a lot of quality time together of late.

“I’m Special Agent Lattimer. Ben Lattimer.”

It was nice finally to have a real name for the guy-“Mysterious Dark-Haired Stranger in the Suede Jacket” had been more than a little cumbersome. But Ben didn’t look anything like a special agent. He wasn’t wearing a dark suit, white shirt, narrow tie, and sunglasses. Instead, he had on a pair of faded Levi’s, a striped button-down, and, of course, his suede jacket.

“When you say Special Agent, what exactly are you a special agent of? Could we see some identification?” Peter asked, placing his hand on my shoulder. Only if you knew him as well as I did would you have picked up on the note of tension in his voice. He’d been both embarrassed and annoyed that a complete stranger had been in on the Andrew Marcus tackle with me. He’d also been less than appreciative when I pointed out that his Iron City consumption the previous evening might have slowed his reflexes.

Ben reached into his jacket and withdrew one of those leather badge holders you see on TV. He flipped it open. “FBI Financial Fraud Unit.”

“Cool,” said Hilary.

We all took turns studying Ben’s ID before agreeing that it looked authentic and ushering him into the apartment. None of us was sure if it was appropriate to offer food to special agents, but it seemed rude to continue eating without making the offer, and he accepted with an enthusiasm that suggested he hadn’t been recently feasting on pierogies, coffee cake, or Quarter Pounders with Cheese.

“I first got interested when Perry did the Tiger buyout,” he told us between mouthfuls of curry. “Bill Marcus wrote us-the Unit, I mean-a bunch of letters outlining his theory.”

“You pay attention to that sort of thing?” I asked in surprise. I didn’t want to think about how much trouble I could have saved myself, not to mention everyone else in the room, if I’d simply reported my concerns to somebody like Ben in the first place.

“We get a lot of letters from crackpots,” Ben acknowledged. “But you never know when one of those crackpots is going to be blowing the whistle on the next Enron.”

“There seem to be a lot of crackpots in Texas,” said Hilary. Ben looked at her blankly. “You know. Enron. Texas. Crackpots.”

“Anyhow,” continued Ben,“the Marcus letters were actually pretty coherent, at least compared to some of what we see. And the basic chronology and the people involved were exactly as Marcus outlined. Which made me think that maybe he wasn’t your garden-variety crackpot. I started looking for a money trail, and it turned out that all three of the principals-Perry, Gallagher, and Brisbane-had some interesting offshore accounts.”

“Were the accounts in their own names?” said Luisa. “Because I couldn’t find a thing.”

“Far from it. I’d heard that Gallagher was an expert at making money, but he was also an expert at hiding it. They were buried deep, hidden inside a maze of shell companies and private partnerships. It was a real mess, but once I located the accounts, I could begin tracing the flows of cash in and out.”

“And then?” prompted Emma. “What happened then?”

Ben ran a hand through his dark hair. “And then a new case came in, a live one, and I had to put the Tiger investigation on hold. After all, it was only a speculative thing, a routine follow-up on a letter from the crackpot file.”

“But you kept with it anyway, right?” asked Jane, a firm believer in perseverance as a virtue.

“I’d hoped to keep with it in my spare time, but the new case didn’t leave me with any. When it eventually wrapped, I wanted to go back to investigating the Tiger deal, but I was told that another agent had taken up where I left off and concluded there wasn’t anything to it.”

“Seriously?” I said. “Wow, those guys were good. I mean, if trained professionals couldn’t find evidence of anything wrong-”

“Not so fast,” said Ben. “That’s not the whole story. I didn’t think much about it at the time, and before long I was neck-deep in another new case, and then another, and after a while I’d pretty much forgotten about the Tiger deal. Until last week, that is. Which is when I read an article about the Thunderbolt buyout-”

“-which got you wondering,” interrupted Hilary.

“Exactly. So I went to pull the Tiger file. Only-”

“-there was no Tiger file!”

“Hilary,” Luisa said. “Let the man finish his own sentences.”

“She’s right, though, isn’t she? The Tiger file was gone?” I asked.

“It was more than gone. There was no trace that it or even the letters from Bill Marcus had ever existed. Everything had been completely wiped from the system.”

“That sounds like the sort of thing that happens in South American dictatorships, where the government ‘disappears’ people,” said Hilary.

“Thank you for perpetuating tired stereotypes of my homeland,” said Luisa.

“Look,” said Ben,“I don’t know who erased the records, or where the order to do so came from, but remember a United States senator was involved. My initial investigation probably tripped an alarm or two somewhere important.”

“Whatever happened to checks and balances?” asked Jane.

Ben shrugged. “The very fact that the records were gone confirmed for me that I’d been on to something. And the good news is, based on what we saw at today’s shareholders’ meeting, a lot of people suspected what Perry had going with Gallagher and Brisbane. With all of the shareholders present and the media coverage, there’s no way there won’t be a thorough investigation now. Perry and Brisbane may have dodged some very real bullets, but I think their respective careers may be over.”

“But what about Jake Channing’s career? You must have suspected him, too,” Peter asked. “Or why else were you following him?”

“That’s why I’m here,” he said.

“Oh.” I said knowingly. Then I realized I had no idea what he meant. “What do you mean ‘that’s why you’re here’?”

“When I read about the Thunderbolt deal, and after finding the Tiger file gone, I decided it was worth looking into things on my own. I called Winslow, Brown on Monday morning pretending to be from Perry’s office to get the names of the bankers working on the deal with Gallagher. I thought his team would either be in on the entire thing or would make good witnesses. Once I had your names, I did some digging. It didn’t take long to find out that not only had Jake worked at Gallagher’s old firm, he used to date Gallagher’s wife, so I was suspicious of him from the beginning, and even more so once Gallagher was murdered.”