Unholy Shepherd, Robert Christian [fastest ebook reader TXT] 📗

yeah, that’s right,” said Manny, puzzled. “I didn’t know that you go there. You don’t strike me as much of a churchgoer.”

“I’m not,” she said sharply. “I just met Father Patrick walking down the street one day. He likes to talk.”

“My parents go to Mass every now and then. That seems to be what most people say about him. I don’t know him personally, but I’ve heard good things.”

“He’s okay, I guess.” She tapped the legal pad with the pen. “What else?”

“Oh, right. Well let’s see, we can write down that they worked together on the sale of some county buildings recently.”

“This is already a lot of ways they could be connected,” Maureen sighed, as though writing down a few words had greatly taxed her. “How about a drink?”

“Really? Now?” Manny said, raising his eyebrows. It’s barely been two hours. “Go ahead.” He shook his head.

Maureen popped up and ran into the kitchen. She returned with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. She put one glass in front of him and set about opening up the bottle.

Manny quickly grabbed it from her. “I’ll pour,” he insisted.

Maureen sat herself down on the floor in front of the coffee table with a loud sigh. She held out her own glass and Manny poured two fingers into the bottom before doing the same with his own.

“Kinda chintzy, don’t you think?” she said, frowning at the amount of liquid.

“We got work to do,” Manny replied. “Pace yourself.”

He raised his glass to her, and she clinked her glass with his, though it seemed with no great relish.

“Mm, that’s good stuff,” Manny said before setting down his glass and picking up the pile of Sandra Locke’s financial documents. “Okay let’s see here. Church. School. Business. Most crimes have something to do with money, so let’s start there.”

Manny read through each document carefully, but nothing jumped off the page. Sandra’s checking account balance hadn’t varied by more than a few hundred dollars either way for years. She’d taken out a second mortgage on her home about a decade before, but her job at the county kept her paid well enough to manage. From what he could see on the statement, she wasn’t in any dire financial straits. He was about to give up and move on when he saw a hospital bill on top of the pile.

The bill was for nearly $200,000 and was dated nine years ago. It looked to be a sum total of the hospital expenses for little Evan’s care. There was the prenatal surgery, the NICU stay, and a follow-up surgery to replace the heart shunt. Manny grabbed the remainder of the pile and began to shuffle through it. A different picture started to emerge.

“I don’t think Sandra told me the whole story,” he said.

“How do you mean?” Maureen asked.

“Well, she told me all about her son’s heart surgery, but not about how it just about broke her financially. It seems that her husband’s life insurance policy paid off a hundred grand of the bills. But the insurance company deemed the surgery ‘experimental and high risk’, so they covered very little, leaving almost ninety grand to pay out of pocket. It was six months after this first bill that she took out a second mortgage on her home, I’m guessing to cover the rest. Thing is, now she’s got two mortgages hanging over her. At first, I thought she was doing just fine, that she was making the payments and all. But it says here that the second mortgage was at a premium rate, and she was paying it out of a savings account from a different bank. And thanks to the interest, she ran through her money about nine months ago. She’d been paying off the original mortgage on the house, but that second mortgage had about forty-five thousand still outstanding.

“The bank had started foreclosure proceedings about six months ago. It looked pretty grim for her. But about three months ago, the whole mortgage was paid in full. Both mortgages. That’s just over seventy thousand dollars. She was able to keep the house, and now has the chance to rebuild her savings.”

“What are you thinking?” Maureen asked. She had refilled her whiskey and took a small sip.

“Isn’t it obvious?” he said. “She’s the county treasurer. I’m willing to bet on embezzlement or something like that. She could get away with it, if she had some help.” If she had help. Manny threw down the papers in his hand and picked through the box on the table until he found what he was looking for.

“Papers on the sale of that county building,” he explained to Maureen. “There’s a work order for over one hundred fifty thousand dollars here. It looks like it’s for lighting and drywall work. I don’t know too much about contractor costs, but that seems incredibly high. For example, a five-pound box of drywall nails for one hundred sixty-nine dollars? I just bought a five-pound box at the hardware store last month for a tenth of that. And since when does the hourly labor charge for a crew of this size run into the triple digits? I think there was some money laundering going on here, and I think both Sandra Locke and Tom Lowes were in on it. Now, I scrubbed the Lowes’ financials and didn’t find anything, but he’s a well-connected guy who can easily hide money in his business or in an offshore account or something, but Sandra? Well, it’s pretty obvious she couldn’t. Whatever the case, whatever they were into, it cost both of them their kids.”

Manny jumped up off the couch and pulled out his phone.

“What are you going to do?”

“I promised I’d give Agent Layton a call when I came up with something.”

“Maybe that’s not the best idea in the world.”

“Why?” he asked her, perplexed.

“Oh, never mind,” she said, turning on the television and scrolling through the channels. “It’s just that, if it were me, I wouldn’t want to call in with every