Dark of the Moon

had a big tank of money somewhere, that nobody knew about but his son. Like money and interest from the Jerusalem artichoke scam.”
    Stryker started to say something, but she held up a finger. “Suppose Judd Senior starts to fail, first mentally, and then physically, and it looks like he’s about to die. Once he’s dead, any money taken from the account could only be taken by fraud. And the fraud would be pretty visible: the bank says money was taken out on August first, but lo, Judd was dead three weeks before that. Even Junior’s smarter than that.
    “In the meantime, the son goes to his accountants, and they say, ‘It’s really bad. You’ve been gifted right up to the limit, so the whole estate is exposed to taxes. Plus, you’re so far in debt to him that you’re going to owe money to the state and federal government and they are going to foreclose you. You can’t even go bankrupt, because bankruptcy doesn’t wipe out back taxes.’ So what do you do?”
    Virgil shrugged: “It’s your hypothetical.”
    “So the old man is failing mentally, and you’re down there in his business office, and you know about this big tank of money. You know the codes, or you have the checkbooks, that you need to transfer money to the old man’s bank account…and the old man is so far gone mentally, he won’t see it. You couldn’t give it to yourself, because that would either be fraud, or more debt, and it would all be on paper. But if you were willing to forge his signature, if you gave that money to a business that the old man supposedly owned—even if he was too far gone to know that he owned it—and if you had a way to take that money back out of his business, whatever it was, say, for services that were never performed…”
    “You’re saying he was embezzling from his old man.”
    “I’m not saying that. I’m saying that if I’m elected sheriff this fall, I’ll look into it.”
    “Suppose he was pouring money into a corn-ethanol plant?” Virgil said.
    She shook her head: “The government would take the plant, and any profits should show up in tax filings. You have to remember: you have all this paper—checks and banks, purchases and sales. The government won’t believe you, if you say that you lost it.”
    “Suppose the profits coming out of the plant were hidden?”
    “What I’m trying to tell you is, you can’t hide it. Not very well. The feds would do the books,” she said. “They’re good at books.”
    “Suppose the plant was making two products. The above-ground books worked out to the penny. The underground stuff, there were no books at all. You know, like they make a hundred thousand gallons of ethanol, sell ninety thousand, claim they only made ninety thousand, and sold the other ten thousand gallons as over-the-bar vodka, two bucks a quart, underground.”
    “Then, if nobody gave you up, you’d make some money,” she said. “But the distribution network, the low unit value of the product, would hardly make it worth the risk. Somebody would talk, and there you are on tax evasion.”
     
    V IRGIL TOOK S TRYKER outside and asked, “You think she can be seriously trusted? No gossip?”
    “She’s been an accountant here for twenty years, since she got out of school—you couldn’t get one word out of her about how anybody spent a nickel,” Stryker said. “And nobody’ll get a word out of her about what we were talking about. She’s like a Swiss bank.”
    Virgil said, “I got a lot of paper in from St. Paul. Tax records, corporate stuff, stuff I took out of the bank. It really needs an accountant—somebody who can work it overnight.”
    “Ask her,” Stryker said. “You’ll have to pay her—but there’s no question about trusting her.”
    “We can pay her. We need the analysis.”
     
    T HEY WENT BACK to Olafson, and she agreed to do it: “Too many people dead. Of course I’ll do it. I’ll even give you my state rate—overtime, of course, rush job.”
    “And that would be…”
    “Hundred and ten dollars an hour,” she said.
    Sounded like a lot, but then, it was only for eight or ten hours: “It’s a deal. I’ll go get the paper, you type up an agreement and I’ll sign it.”
     
    B ACK OUT ON the sidewalk, Stryker said, “If you’re supposedly developing an ethanol plant, but what you’re really doing is using the plant to buy bulk chemicals to manufacture methamphetamine—I mean, we’re not talking about a coffeepot on a stove somewhere; we’re