Page 86 of The Suit

“JESUS!” I shook out my hands, trying to air the scalding away.

Cody calmly returned to his desk while I ran to the kitchenette and grabbed a wad of paper towels to mop both myself and the spot where I’d been standing. I left the paper on the floor to do its thing and moved to the desks where Cody had already brought up the screens and filled them with copies of accounting paperwork. The last one had CLOSED written across it in large red letters.

“What am I looking at?”

He pointed to the screen on the right. “That’s the shell corporation account for White, Inc. You can see it was closed down on Friday night, and ownership of the boat was transferred over to this account number.” He walked over to the screen and pointed up at a long line of numbers.

“Right, so track that and see where it is now.”

“That’s the thing, the numbers don’t lead anywhere.”

“What does that mean?”

“They’re bogus; they’re fake numbers.”

“How is that possible?”

He typed something out on his keyboard and the screen in the bottom left changed, zooming into the paperwork. “See the last four digits in the account?”

I nodded.

“Any offshore trust or bank, anywhere housing money, has to have an identifier for regulatory purposes, to keep it official, for all the above-board banking. It’s bullshit really, because for ninety percent of people using an offshore trust, it’s to bypass regulations, to be as unofficial as possible.”

“Right.”

“But if you know what you’re looking for, the last four digits will usually isolate the account to its geographical location.”

“Okay.”

“This account number doesn’t exist; these last four digits don’t mean anything. I’m still tracking it through every possible database I can find, but I’m not holding out much hope for it coming up. That paperwork is fake. The Dainty Lady has been lost at sea.”

He grinned, even though I could tell he was pissed that he’d lost it. The problem with being genius-level smart was that you rarely failed when intelligence was the game, and Cody was a poor loser. With valid reason.

“What about the cars and the painting?” Though really, I only cared about the cars.

“Gone too.”

My stomach sank, the remnants of last night’s sake and my morning coffee were doing nothing to quell the feeling of doom which was swirling around.

“What about the numbers that matched the letters? You said they all spelled Dainty Lady, but had been moved up a few spots?”

“The program’s looking, but nothing’s been tripped yet.”

I sat in my chair and leaned back, my hands raking through my hair until I was yanking on the ends.

“Christ. How the fuck has this happened? Like, how the actual fuck?” I was mumbling to myself but then turned to Cody. “Is this normal? Do assets get moved around like this so abruptly?”

“It’s hard to say. Though for this company to be covering its tracks so well I’d have to hazard a guess it’s pretty well versed in hiding money. I’m surprised it’s not already being monitored by the Feds.” He paused as he thought, “might ask around actually,”

“You don’t reckon this isn’t coincidence, just bad fucking luck?”

He turned and looked at me. “No, I didn’t say that.”

“Then what are you saying?”

“I’m saying I don’t believe in coincidence. No one shuts a bank account on a Friday night.”

“They knew we were onto them?”

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