Dixie Browning - Social Graces

No one was talking. Bonnard because he was dead, Will because he was clueless, his lawyer because if the jerk had ever passed a bar, it wasn’t a bar that served drinks. The guy was a lush.

Mac had tried his own brand of logic on the case, running down the short list of suspects. The Chief Financial Officer, Sam Hutchinson, had apparently been cleared. Currently on an extended leave of absence to be with his terminally ill wife, he’d been the logical suspect. His computers, his files—everything that bore his fingerprints, had been impounded. He’d come through it all clean. Will liked the guy. Only hours before he’d died, Bonnard himself had vouched for him.

As for Bonnard, late founder and CEO of Bonnard Financial Consultants, not even death had offered protection. Once the flock of outside auditors dug in, both he and Will had been swept up in the dragnet.

It was shortly after that that Mac had moved his base of operations from an apartment in Mystic, near the aquarium, to Will’s Greenwich home. He was currently living in the small apartment over the garage, finishing up a few tasks from his last commissioned dive.

BFC was a small regional firm, nothing like some of the big outfits that had hit the reef over the past few years. Not that the impact on the victims was any less devastating, as BFC had specialized in handling retirement funds for a number of small area businesses.

To give him credit, back when the economy had taken a dive a few years ago, Bonnard had borrowed heavily against his fancy house and pumped the funds back into the company, a fact that had quickly come to light. It didn’t exactly fit the profile of a high-level embezzler to Mac’s way of thinking, unless at the same time he’d been shoring up the business with one hand to allay suspicions, he’d been bleeding off profits with the other. Slick trick, if you could pull it off.

Bonnard’s only heir was a daughter. The feds had run her through the washer just as a precaution, but so far as anyone knew she had never been involved in any way with her father’s business. Will was convinced she wasn’t a player.

Will’s wife, Macy, wasn’t so generous, but then, Macy was inclined to be jealous of any attractive woman, especially one who’d been born with the proverbial silver spoon. Even Mac had to wonder if the investigators had gone easy on the daughter because of her looks and her social position. He wasn’t sure how big a part sympathy played in such a case, but the fact that her father had died on his daughter’s thirtieth birthday might have had an effect. The press had made it a big deal. He remembered seeing that same pale, stricken face—flawless cheekbones, haunted gray eyes—replayed over and over on every recount during the week immediately after Bonnard’s arrest—an arrest that had been followed almost immediately by his death.

Ironic to think that Bonnard might have got clean away if it hadn’t been for a junior accountant who had mistakenly mailed out 1099s for a tax-free municipal fund to a number of clients and been forced to do amended forms. Evidently the matter had landed on the desk of a snarky IRS agent. One question had led to another; an outside auditor had been called in, and the whole house of cards had come crashing down. Bonnard had gone to his dubious reward, leaving his junior partner to take the fall.

That’s when the scavenger hunt had shifted into high gear, drawing in the FBI, the Financial Crimes Unit, the state auditor’s department and the IRS, not to mention a bunch of media types with Woodward and Bernstein complexes. But with all that manpower, they were no closer after nearly three months to locating the missing money, much less tracing it back to its source.

Which damn well wasn’t Will Jordan.

Mac’s single bag was packed, the Land Cruiser’s tank topped off. He was ready to head south the minute Shirley, his hacker friend, gave the word. Not that hacking was even needed in this case, as public records were open to everyone who knew, geographically speaking, where to look. But when he needed information in a hurry, it helped to know someone who could make a computer sit up and sing the “Star Spangled Banner.”

Valerie Bonnard’s only asset of record at this moment was a modest trust fund that wouldn’t kick in for another five years, and a small property she’d inherited in a place called Buxton, on North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Mac was generally familiar with the area—what marine archeologist wasn’t familiar with the notorious Graveyard of the Atlantic? There was even a new museum by that name on the island. From what he’d been able to find on the Internet, most of the island that hadn’t been taken over by Park Service or National Wildlife had been developed over the past few decades.

Ms. Bonnard, using a dummy corporation, could have been investing steadily in some high-dollar real estate down there. Shirley hadn’t been able to tie her to anything specific, but it would have been a smart move on the part of La Bonnard, especially considering the erratic stock market. Whether or not she’d socked away the missing funds in investment-grade real estate, it was as good a place to start as any.

One of the perks of being a freelance marine archeologist was large chunks of unregulated time. Unlike Will’s, Mac’s lifestyle was both portable and low maintenance, although Will’s was probably about to change even more drastically in the near future. Mac had a feeling that once this nightmare was over, his stepbrother might have lost more than a junior partnership, an upscale house and a few club memberships. Macy was looking restless now that the publicity had died down. She just might walk, which would be no great loss in Mac’s estimation.

The drive took two days, allowing for frequent breaks, in his fourteen-year-old, rebuilt Land Cruiser. Mac spent the first night in the Norfolk region. Late in the afternoon of the second day, having spent a few hours in one of the area’s maritime museums, he pulled into a motel in Buxton and booked a room, intending to spend the first half hour flexing various muscles under a hot shower.

At age thirty-seven he was beginning to realize that stick shifts were hell on left knees. A friend had warned him, but he wasn’t about to trade in his customized vehicle, with the locked compartments designed specifically to hold his diving gear and the ergonomic seats that helped minimize fatigue. It might take him a bit longer to bounce back after a long drive, but normally he looked on the bounce-back time as a chance to catch up on his reading. He’d even tossed in a few books at the last minute, in case he had any down time. Not that he planned to hang around any longer than it took to uncover a lead that would shift the focus off Will.

If Mac had a weakness—actually, he admitted to several—it was books. Aside from diving gear, books were his favorite indulgence. Mostly history. The stuff fascinated him, always had. But reading could wait until he’d pinned the Bonnard woman down and got the information he needed.

A fleeting image of him pinning La Bonnard down on a big, soft bed drifted across his field of vision. He blinked it away before it could take root.

The desk clerk was young and inclined to be chatty. It took Mac all of two minutes to get the location of the residence of the late Achsah Dozier, as this wasn’t the kind of place where street addresses did much good.

“I didn’t really know her, I’ve only been here a few years,” the young woman said. She’d looked him over and touched her hair when he’d walked into the lobby, but evidently decided on closer examination that he wasn’t that interesting.

Not altogether surprising. He still had all his hair and teeth, and he’d been asked more than once if he worked out at a gym. He didn’t. The type of work he did tended to develop the legs and upper body while it pared down the waist and hips. On the other hand, his face had once been compared to a rock-slide.