Dead Watch

up a development company. The vice president and his friends own about seventy-five percent of it and Sam has the rest. The key thing, though, is the financing. The Landers family had no money—but Sam managed to get financing for his Padre Island apartments from . . .”
    “A Bahamas bank,” Jake said.
    “Yes. He builds the apartments—they are quite nice, I understand—repays his loans, and walks away with a nice profit. A very nice profit. The profit is nice because the Bahamas money is buried in the construction. For the money he supposedly puts into them, the apartments should sell for $450,000. But, because he’s not actually repaying the loans, he’s building $550,000 apartments. Nothing else can compare. And they’re snapped up by retirees who can see the deal they’re getting, but which is invisible on paper. He pays his taxes—no state income tax in Texas, remember—and the money is back in the United States, all legal and tax-paid.”
    “But they lose forty percent to the feds.”
    “Not really. They actually made some profit on the construction. They came out of it with probably five to six million. And then, with a perfectly good development company, and with some experience and a track record, they started doing real projects. They’ve been making money ever since. The vice president is probably worth fifteen million. Maybe twenty.”
    “How did your husband know about all the different parts of the deal?”
    “He watched the whole thing get set up. There’s a man named Carson, Ron’s boss, he told Ron to keep his nose out of it. That stuff goes on in any big state project. But Ron knew there’d be trouble sooner or later, and he didn’t want to be the one who went to jail, so he made copies of everything. On the sly. Carson’s still one of the big shots at ITEM. He held Sam Landers’s hand through the first couple of apartment projects. And he kept books, on the computer, you know, and Ron made copies. Those are the DVDs.”
    They spent an hour sitting on the front-room couch, looking at paper, loading the DVDs into Jake’s notebook, going through the notes, the records, the bank documents, the real estate titles, and tax documents. Altogether, the package was as devastating as advertised. If true.
    “If true,” Jake said.
    “Well, Al Green said that the thing is, everything here has a public record behind it. Records that the Landerses can’t dodge,” Levine said. “It’s all visible, but nobody could ever tie it together without inside knowledge.”
    Jake looked at his watch. “I gotta get you out of here.”
    Now she was nervous again. “What’s going to happen?”
    “I think, because of what happened in Madison, that you should take a trip,” Jake said. “Do you have any place that you can go? A friend’s, or a sister’s, that’s away from here? Somebody who doesn’t have the same name?”
    “I have a sister in Waukesha.”
    “Would she put you up for a few days?”
    “I’m sure she would,” Levine said.
    “Then you should go. Right now—I’ll wait until you’re ready. Leave me a phone number and I’ll get back to you. I’ve got to talk to some people back in Washington.”
    “The president?’
    “I don’t actually talk to the president that much,” Jake said. “But I’ll talk to some people and see what can be done. If you’ve been straight with us.”
    “I’ve been straight,” Levine said. “I knew it was going to cause trouble, but . . . after they took Ron’s pension away, I have no money. I mean, we had some in Fidelity, but it’s mostly gone now. I need to get a job. I can’t work at Wal-Mart, that’s the only thing I can get here, there aren’t any jobs. I might have to sell my house . . .”
    Tears were running down her cheeks; Jake wanted to pat her on the shoulder, but he didn’t know quite how to do it. “Let me get you out of here, and get this package to Washington. We’ll figure something out. This is gonna work for you, one way or another.”

    She took forever to get dressed and pack: more than an hour, by Jake’s watch. Jake suggested that she call her sister from outside the house.
    “You think I’m bugged?”
    “I don’t want to take any chances with anything,” Jake said.
    When she was ready, she got her dog, a nervous gray whippet, and Jake helped wedge it into a carrying case and carried it down to the tuck-under garage and put it on the front seat of her car.
    He carried three more suitcases