Edge

said, “But Ryan didn’t say anything about the case being dropped. I just talked to him about it at the Hillside.”
    “He probably didn’t know. His assistant told me he was working out of the office all Thursday and Friday on some administrative thing. There’s somebig meeting next week about revamping accounting procedures in the department.”
    I recalled that Ryan had mentioned an internal assignment of some sort.
    She asked, “So does that cross the Graham case off our primary list?”
    “No. Just the opposite. Nobody ignores forty thousand dollars, unless they’re being forced to.” I ate some more of my sandwich.
    “Dunch or linner,” duBois was saying. “There’s no meal in the afternoon corresponding to brunch.” She wasn’t making a joke.
    I asked, “Your impressions of him, of Graham?”
    DuBois considered. “Upset, evasive.”
    “Somebody’s leveraging him to drop the case?”
    “Possible. They don’t make a lot of money, the Graham family. Without the forty K, his kid’s not going back to Princeton. If that was me, I’d go allout to nail the perp.”
    Some scenarios unfolded in my mind. “Okay, the primary forges the check, buys the gold and launders himself some cash. He spends it on something compromising—donation to a radical mosque, a big coke buy, prostitution, who knows? Maybe fronts that he’s Graham. The money can be traced back. The primary says, Give me access to secure files or sabotage the system you’re working on, or I ruin your life forever and get you arrested. Graham agrees. Only Ryan’s still on the case. The primary hires Henry Loving to find out what he knows.”
    “Plausible,” duBois said.
    “Now the other case. The Ponzi scheme.”
    Her azure eyes, framed by shiny dark hair, now dipped to her notes.
    I’d Googled “Ponzi.” I knew a bit about the scams from the Madoff thing, of course, you couldn’t watch the news without learning something. The theory was that a scam artist would pose as an investment advisor and take people’s money, which he would claim to invest. He’d keep the money for himself but would send out statements reporting that the fund had increased in value. If the early investors wanted to cash out, the thief would pay them off with more recent investment money—a scam that works fine as long as not all the investors want their money at the same time. They were usually discovered when customers got nervous and there was a run on the fund. In the Prisoners’ Dilemma analysis of the depositors: acting with rational irrationality.
    DuBois explained, “Now, the suspect, Clarence Brown—”
    “The mail-order reverend.”
    “Not exactly. I checked his online church and—”
    “Online?” That was a new one.
    “Yep. Mail’s not involved at all. You can download and print out your divinity degree. New Zion Church of the Brethren dot com. Anybody can do it. You could, I could. I wanted to see if it was as much of a scam as it seemed, and I got halfway to being a priest. Well, priestess, I guess. They wanted big money, though, and I logged off.” On her bracelet were cross, Star of David and Islamic crescent charms. A cat with an excessively arched back and a witch’s hat too. DuBois was not easy to define.
    “Go on, Claire.”
    “He’s a fake reverend but that’s not the most interesting part. What I found out is that ‘Clarence Brown’ is an alias. He’s really Ali Pamuk.”
    “He have a record?”
    “Don’t think so. Nothing in the standard databases. But I’ve got some friends looking into his history a little more closely. I’m particularly interested in doing-business-as records. I’ve got to correlate social security number, address, phone records, accounting statements, SEC filings.”
    I’d noted the reference to “friends,” hardly an official U.S. government designation for an investigator. But, however duBois was doing this, it would be by the book. You could break all the rules you wanted in bodyguarding your principals—my job. But the task of finding the primary required us to be cops like any other, marshalling evidence and not giving the defense attorneys any windows through which the bird could escape.
    “Any more details?”
    “Turkish father, mother from Nigeria. Both naturalized. A few years ago he seems to have converted to Christianity, before he became a reverend. But he contributed a lot of money to a mosque in Virginia last year and the year before. Not on any watchlists.