Chapter Six
Each of the three suspects had come into money suddenly, shortly before Armand's shooting. Bank accounts had shown swift increases in deposits or large sums of money had been spent on real estate, equity portfolios, and even a small island.
"Who bought the island?" asked Castle, fascinated with the idea. Ignoring the wheels she could see spinning in his head, Kate pointed to the glowing name of Marco Di'Sabatino, the Mafioso. "I think he's planning on that as a special kind of safe house in case he has to get out of town fast and never come back," she said. "Too bad, but at just about that point in our time line, Di'Sabatino was promoted to a supervisory position over numbers running in lower Manhattan. He would have started collecting a percentage of the millions that flowed through his hands. He'd have enough money to buy five islands, if he wanted. I think we can rule him out."
"And the judge?" asked Castle. Kate sorted through the files until she found the report she was looking for. "He won the lottery."
"No way!" said Castle. "Way!" countered Kate, and pulled up a video file from a news broadcast several decades old. They watched in open mouthed wonder as a reporter interviewed the very same judge and asked him what he planned on doing with his millions."
"I'm going to Disneyland!" laughed the judge. "No, seriously, I'm going to invest the money in rock solid securities and save up for my kids' college educations. You don't get rich being a judge."
"Not what I hear," muttered Castle in frustration, as he flipped the glowing name off the matrix board with a finger. "Who's left?"
"New York Attorney General William Thames," said Kate. "When all this started, he was an ambitious assistant district attorney here in the city with his sights set on being NYC's District Attorney. Soon after, and this is very odd, he began to receive large donations to his DA campaign fund. His opponent claimed he was putting the money into the fund himself, and there was an investigation, but no one could prove anything. He ran a well financed campaign and won. Then, four years ago, he ran for and won the position of New York State Attorney General, the highest ranking law enforcement officer in the State.
"So what's strange about that?" asked Castle.
"There's this odd thing with the deposits."
"What odd thing?"
She looked at the print out of Thames' financial report. "Just before Armand's murder, about four months before, he made a random series of deposits, quite a lot of them, and each for around $9,500 in cash. He claimed they were consultant fees for out of state clients, but there were" – she counted silently – "six of them in this account and another four in this other account. I wonder what that means?" She looked up. "And what are you doing?"
Castle was dancing around the room. He skipped over to her, snatched the sheet of paper from her hand, and swung into a solo rumba. "Oh, you bastard. Oh, you clever, clever bastard. We gotcha now!"
"What?"
Castle pulled a chair up to Kate's bed and sat down. "The big problem with coming into a lot of money suddenly is what to do with it," he explained. "We're talking about lots of money here. Even if most of it was already in numbered Swiss bank accounts, there would still be a large sum of cash left over from the most recent kidnappings. Our Mr. Big has to figure out what to do with it.
"If you suddenly deposit a third of a million dollars into your bank account, the bank has to report it to the IRS, and you have to explain where the money came from. But it looks like Mr. Thames used the traveler's check maneuver."
"How does it work?" asked Kate.
"You buy traveler's checks in large amounts but less than $10,000 at a time. You can buy them in any name for which you have identification, and do this as many times as you want, switching names, switching accounts, and so on. Then you write down the check numbers and burn the checks."
"What?"
"Yeah, burn those babies. Don't leave them lying around for the Feds to find. Then, whenever you need money, you get in touch with the check company, report the serial numbers as lost or stolen, and collect the cash."
"Oh, my god," said Kate. "If he did this a lot of times, we should be able to track down some additional bogus bank accounts by checking for multiple deposits of $9,500."
Castle nodded. "We need to figure out what to do next."
"Yes," said Kate. "We may be able to stop him, but at what cost?"
"I don't know," said Castle. "I don't know how to do this without blowing the cover we created for Captain Montgomery."
"And destroying his legacy to his family and his pension to boot. We have to think of something."
"Time to bring in Jordan Shaw and your team," said Castle.
"Bring them here?"
"Oh, no. I have a much better idea."