St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

hard drive, and you never heard me say that.”
    “You’re scary.”
    “Actually, a half-smart twelve-year-old could have hacked into the ranch computer. What’s interesting is that at least one other charity fed ‘contributions’ into this same account. Minus three percent, of course.”
    “Three percent?”
    “Transaction fee,” Dan said dryly. “Once the amounts get into the high eight figures, the fee goes down. By the time you get to a billion, the transaction fee is usually one percent or even less.”
    She did the math and stared at him. “That’s ten million dollars just to move money electronically from one place to the next,” she said. “A little steep, don’t you think?”
    “Not if you have a dirty billion and get a clean nine hundred and ninety million back. Clean money that you’re happy to pay taxes on and invest in legitimate enterprises because otherwise you’d have to hide all of it—in cash. At any given moment, there are trillions of black dollars zipping around the world, and every e-transaction takes a little bite of the overall pie.”
    “My head hurts.”
    “So think about what Pete Moore had on the Senator and/or the governor that would be worth eighteen thou a month to keep quiet.”
    “The governor, too?”
    “According to the records, Josh had—and exercised—power of attorney for the Senator for the past four years. Unless the governor just let Pete do everything on the ranch bookkeeping, the governor had to know that about two hundred thousand bucks a year was going to questionable charities, so questionable that the Senator didn’t even try to deduct them from his income tax payments.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “You want to see the tax returns?” Dan asked, his fingers poised over the keyboard.
    “No. I don’t even want to know you have them.”
    “Have what?”
    “Ha ha.” She twisted hair around her index finger. “So we’re back where we started. Something that affected both father and son.”
    “At least we have a good reason for someone to kill Pete and Melissa. Blackmailers aren’t real popular with their victims.”
    “But why kill the Moores now?” Carly asked. “Why not years ago, after Josh got the power of attorney? He must have known about the blackmail, or at least guessed that something was rotten in Denmark.”
    “Having power of attorney isn’t the same as exercising it. He could have had a live-and-let-live attitude toward the Senator’s expenses. It was, after all, the old man’s money,” Dan said. “Did you have any luck eliminating potential bastards who could have swapped places with the real Josh in Vietnam?”
    “It sounds so bizarre when you say it right out. You only have to look at Josh to know he’s the Senator’s son.”
    “Yeah, but which son?”
    “Too bad Melissa’s dead. I’d ask her,” Carly muttered.
    “That reminds me,” Dan said.
    “What?”
    “Somehow a file full of Melissa’s family mementos found its way onto my hard drive.”
    “I can’t hear a word you’re saying. Print it out.”
    Smiling, Dan set up the printer, checked the paper, and went to work. As the computer spit out the first paper, Carly grabbed it and went to work.
    “Both sides,” Dan said.
    “What?”
    “I’m printing them the way I found them. A lot of the stuff had material on the back.”
    Carly nodded and went back to reading while the printer spit out paper at frightening speed.
    Dan set up the last part of the file and turned to her. “What do you have?” he asked.
    “A letter. The handwriting is…I’m getting used to it, okay?”
    “What’s the date?”
    “November. Nineteen eighty-five.” She flipped the paper over and saw the signature. “Betty Schaffer.”
    He connected the genealogical dots in his mind. “Susan Mullins’s daughter by her husband, Doug Smith. Betty would have been closing in on forty when she wrote that. Wait, isn’t that the year she killed herself?”
    Carly didn’t answer. She was concentrating on making sense of the jumbled, irregular handwriting.
    Dan went to Carly’s computer, searched old news files, and found the brief death notice in the obits. Betty Schaffer, née Smith, daughter of Susan Smith, née Mullins, had died on Christmas Eve, 1985. Recently divorced by husband. Reading between the lines, Betty had faced the family holiday with a load of booze, pills, and self-pity. Either she miscalculated the doses or she wanted out of her life. Whatever, she died.