“Great! Two teething babies. Nothing but paradise.” The men laughed before Rudy excused himself.
Hardy lumbered in. “Hey, Legal Lady, you got a minute?”
Thankfully, no hug since I was standing behind my desk. “Well, I’m just about to get on an important call. What’s up?”
“I’ll make it fast.” Hardy closed the door and lowered his voice. “Remember I told you I was putting out some feelers on Jonathan? Well, I think I found something and it’s not good.”
“Okay.”
“I’m not even sure we can release what I’m about to show you to the police. But I think you need to know.” Hardy walked over to the side of my desk. I pretended not to notice the coffee stains down the front of his shirt. “Please promise me you won’t tell anybody I gave this to you.”
“What is it, Hardy?” I tried not to sound exasperated.
“Remember I told you Mikey and Jonathan had their heads together working on some big confidential deal? Well, I found out what it was.” Hardy slid a folder from under his arm. “I went over to Finance and had a chat with another friend of mine.” He thumbed through the folder. “There’s some sort of a deal with a company called Libertad Excursiones. Here, take a look.” He handed me a spreadsheet.
I gleaned the piece of paper. “Okay, a log of bank accounts.”
“Those are Houghton’s bank accounts. Quite a few of ’em too. Offshore accounts in Bermuda and the Caymans with lots of money. Take a look, fifth line down.”
“Appalachian Bank & Trust . . .” I read the line and reread it again, pulling a finger across the paper to make sure I read it correctly. “There’s almost a quarter billion dollars in this account.”
“It’s a small bank in the middle of Kentucky.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I didn’t get it, either. But here’s the crazy part. My buddy tells me money is regularly wired out of Appalachian Bank & Trust to several other banks in San Diego, California. Take a look at this.” Hardy pulled another sheet from his folder, a listing for wire transfers to various vendors, and, nestled in the middle of them, transfers to several California banks. There were at least two dozen during the month of December. And all of them to an account titled LXL Enterprises.
“Wait. What?! This company was swimming in red ink almost two years ago. Where is Houghton getting this money and why is the company sending it to California banks? What is LXL?”
“Not sure. But offshore accounts? And money flowing like water in and out of a small Kentucky bank in the middle of nowhere? Deposits and transfers, usually a couple hundred thousand at a time, all of them from Houghton. It’s been a long time since I was a cop, but it looks like dirty money. Maybe some sort of money laundering or something? Here’s the thing, the deposits slowed a few months ago, around the time the Libertad deal popped up.”
“Where did you get this from?”
“One of the analysts in Finance. Seems like she’s not enamored with her boss. I promised her I wouldn’t get her involved.”
Someone around this place was always willing to sell out a coworker for some untoward remark or a supervisor for being passed over for a promotion. It didn’t surprise me that Hardy had found a willing benefactor of information in Jonathan’s department.
“Looks like something the police need to know about, but I wasn’t sure if I could turn this stuff over to them,” Hardy said.
“These documents are confidential records of the company. We can’t turn them over without a subpoena. Do you have any other information that backs up your theory? Something Jonathan said or did?”
“Nope. Just this and I’m not supposed to have this, either.”
I whirled my chair around to face my computer. Hardy walked around my desk and stood behind me as I pulled up the search engine and typed in the words Libertad Excursiones. Libertad, part of a conglomerate of companies, was owned by a guy named Juan Bernardo Ortiz. Another quick search of Libertad yielded its parent company as LXL Enterprises, a holding company that included hotels and restaurants in addition to Libertad. I clicked on an image of Ortiz: tanned, muscular, and draped over some Hollywood actress I recognized but whose name I couldn’t recall. I followed the trail of articles about him, most containing pictures of Ortiz on a yacht surrounded by bikini-clad girls or dressed in a tuxedo surrounded by the same type of young women.
“Humph . . . not a bad life, huh?” Hardy said.