“All right, so if that’s what she’s doing, it should be easy enough to find out. All we have to do is find out who bought the properties. We might not even need to dig any deeper than the six Reid gave us.”

  “There might be more than one buyer,” Olin said. “But, yes, we should see the same name pop up several times.”

  Connor rolled his chair back from his desk. There was no longer a need to be close to his keyboard. If they were going to get anything else right now, it was going to come from Dylan. After all, she was the queen of internet research—both public and on the dark web. “I think you might need to switch gears. See if you can find out who bought the properties.”

  “I heard,” Dylan said, typing furiously on her keyboard. “I should have something for you soon.”

  While they waited, Olin returned to his desk, where he turned his attention to his phone, and Connor’s mind drifted back to the note that had been taped to his front door.

  Hickory. Dickory. Dock.

  “Got it!” Dylan exclaimed. “All six properties were bought by a man named Franz Ludwig.”

  Olin tossed his phone onto his desk and frowned thoughtfully.

  “We have a common buyer,” Connor said.

  “I suppose we can check the first item off our money laundering list,” Dylan said.

  Olin shot her a look. “Sounds like you’re rooting for Alissa to be guilty.”

  “I just want the case to be interesting.”

  Connor had not heard this last exchange. Since he had observed they had a common buyer, he had been thinking about the way the scheme would work. Laundering money through a bar made perfect sense, but there seemed to be a missing piece when it came to real estate. “If the purpose is to clean the money, wouldn’t the buyer eventually have to get the money back? After all, if he has this outgoing expense, he has to have money coming in to cover it.”

  “He could be independently wealthy,” Dylan said.

  “But the money still wouldn’t line up. Right, Olin?”

  “Well, the third party—the renovator, we are assuming—would contract the buyer for another service, and out the money would go, thus completing the circle.”

  There was a knock on the door that led to the waiting room and Lucy poked her head in. “What did you think?”

  “We’re taking the case,” Connor said.

  She smiled. “I thought you would. I had a feeling that was right up your alley.” Then she hesitated, one hand on the doorknob, neither in nor out of the room. She looked to Connor like there was something else she wanted to say.

  “Yes?”

  “I know I haven’t been here long, but my son is taking a field trip today to the aquarium. I was hoping to knock off around two o’clock so I could meet him when he gets home. I know he’s going to want to tell me all about it.”

  “By all means,” Connor said. “You should be with your son whenever you need to.”

  Lucy smiled again, offered up a quick, “Thank you,” and closed the door.

  Connor turned back to Olin and Dylan. “All right, if Olin is correct and this is our buyer, then we need to figure out who the third person involved is if we are going to complete the loop.”

  “We can probably get that by taking a closer look at Franz,” Dylan said. “He and Alissa must have some history together.”

  Connor nodded. “Let’s do it. It would probably be a good idea to know a little more about him than just a name, anyway.”

  CHAPTER 8

  The school bus dropped the children off in front of the Georgia Aquarium. Jerry had seen pictures of it online. Because of that, he thought he knew what to expect. He was wrong. The massive facade, shaped to resemble the bow of a ship at the entrance, was even more impressive than he was prepared for it to be. And impressive as it was, it still paled when compared with the inside.

  Jerry and Marcus were about as close as they could be to the middle of the pack without taking out a tape measure and counting the inches from one end to the other.

  With chaperones both leading and following the students, they made their way through a glass tunnel where fish swam all around them. Well, not quite all around, Marcus observed. There were none swimming underneath their feet.

  “Not unless they’re swimming under the carpet,” he added with a wheezy laugh.

  “Close enough,” Jerry responded.

  Then a whale shark swam past overhead and, along with most of their classmates, they both let out small gasps. It was awe and surprise all rolled up in one.

  “Looks like you got to see your shark,” Marcus said.

  When Jerry said he was looking forward to seeing the sharks, he was thinking about the shark tank they had not yet reached. This, though, was pretty cool, too.

  Neither of the boys noticed the man in the Braves baseball cap who was meandering along with the crowd of students. Sometimes he pulled ahead of the group and sometimes he fell behind, but he was always lingering somewhere nearby. If they had, they might have realized he was alone, which was unusual for a place like this, or that whenever he was within Jerry’s line of sight, he turned his head away as if he did not want the boy to see his face.

  After the children finished touring the exhibits, Ms. Grindon announced they would take lunch in the aquarium’s cafeteria before seeing the dolphin show. Jerry selected a personal-sized pepperoni pizza from underneath a heat lamp and a carton of milk from the refrigerator near the register. Then he met Marcus at a table, where the two of them excitedly discussed the exhibits they had seen.

  Eddie was, for the moment, a distant memory.

  Or at least he was until Jerry took his tray over to the trash can, where his nemesis seemed to be waiting for him. Jerry did his best to pretend Eddie wasn’t there.

  But Eddie, carrying a pudding cup with a plastic spoon sticking out of the top, wasn’t having it. “Hey, you think what you did this morning was funny?”

  Jerry glanced at him, dumped the remnants of his meal in the trashcan, and placed the tray on the receptacle above it.

  “Did you hear me?”

  Jerry could tell he was not going to be able to put an end to this discussion by simply ignoring Eddie. The bully would no doubt follow Jerry back to his seat, getting increasingly agitated with every step, where he would then train his ire not just on Jerry, but on Marcus as well. Best to deal with this now.

  Jerry turned toward Eddie. “Can’t you find somebody else to pick on?”

  Eddie smiled. “Why should I find somebody else when I already have you?”

  Of course, Eddie had other students he picked on. That was hardly the point either of them was trying to make, though.

  Jerry rolled his eyes. He decided he wasn’t going to let this kid ruin a perfectly good field trip. He was going back to his seat, and if Eddie did try to follow him, he would just tell the closest chaperone. Although a second confrontation with a teacher would annoy Eddie, it probably wouldn’t make any vengeance he dealt out later worse.

  But he didn’t even manage to turn ninety degrees before Eddie scooped a glob of pudding out of his cup with his fingers and smeared it across Jerry’s shirt.

  Jerry was mortified. He did not know how to respond. And Eddie, who was already laughing, seemed even more amused by the expression on Jerry’s face.

  “Think twice before embarrassing me again,” Eddie said, and then walked away.

  Jerry hurried to the bathroom. He needed to get this pudding off his shirt before anyone saw him.

  When he did, the man who had been discreetly accompanying the children around the aquarium stood up from a nearby table and followed him.

  Marcus pulled his cell phone out of his pocket when Jerry got up to take his tray to the trash. He wasn’t searching for anything in particular. Looking at his phone—pulling up one social media account or another—was something he reflexively did when he was alone.

  He lost all interest in it, though, when he saw Eddie smear pudding across Jerry’s shirt and Jerry slip away to the bathroom. If Jerry had a cell phone, too, Marcus would have called to check on him. However, Jerry had said his mother insisted he was too young for such a device, so calling him was not an option.

  That left him in the predicament of deciding whether he should follow his friend into the bathroom or stay where he was. As someone prone to overanalyzing every decision he made, that was not an easy choice for Marcus, and he remained where he was, weighing his options, long enough for Jerry not only to enter the bathroom but to exit it, also. Only, Marcus noticed, he did not exit it alone. He was with a man—the same one, Marcus now realized, he had seen go into the bathroom after Jerry.

  The two of them headed toward the stairs. Although the man was holding Jerry’s hand, he was not forcibly taking the boy with him. Nonetheless, the whole thing struck Marcus as strange. Even after getting pudding on his shirt, why would Jerry suddenly leave the aquarium? And if he was going to leave the aquarium, wouldn’t he tell somebody first?

  Marcus decided Ms. Grindon must know what was going on and decided to go ask. At the very least, he probably needed to be partnered up with someone else.

  Ms. Grindon, however, began to panic. She did not know why Jerry was leaving. She did not even know he was leaving. “What did you say?” she asked Marcus, hoping against all reason she had misunderstood him.

  “Jerry left. I was just wondering if you knew why.”

  “He left by himself?”

  “He was with a man.”

  Ms. Grindon stood up. “Which way did he go?”

  Marcus pointed toward the stairs.

  “Stay here,” she told him and hurried away.

  Once she reached the bottom of the stairs, she looked left then right, scanning the crowd of visitors for any sign of Jerry. There were a lot of families, which meant kids were everywhere—many of them boys about Jerry’s height. Since she didn’t remember what he was wearing, it would be impossible for her to tell if any of them were Jerry unless she sought out each child so she could look at him straight on.

  She gave up on that idea and turned toward the exit. If somebody had decided to kidnap him—because that was the only reason she could see for what had happened—they would not continue touring the aquarium together. The kidnapper would want to get out of there as fast as possible.

  Jerry was not among the children she encountered between the stairs and the exit, and the security guard by the door could not say for certain whether he had seen the boy.

  “Maybe if you have a picture,” he said.

  But she didn’t. Why would she? So she spent no more time on that conversation.

  She rushed out the doors, heart pounding. Since she had entered the aquarium that morning, the clouds had burned off and the temperature had warmed to a perfect seventy-two degrees. It was as nice a day as any she could ask for. Not that she noticed.

  She spun around, overwhelmed and looking at each of the children she could see. Unlike inside the aquarium, where potential Jerrys were everywhere, here there were none.

  Ms. Grindon pulled out her cell phone and placed two calls. The first was to the police. The second was to Jerry’s mom.

  CHAPTER 9

  Connor, Olin, and Dylan had spent the better part of the morning digging into Franz Ludwig’s life. When they were done, they knew almost as much about him as they did about each other.

  Franz had been born in Berlin to Karl Ludwig and his wife, Christa. He had no major health issues, had never been married, and—at nearly fifty—posted pictures on social media with the frequency of a teenager.

  He had plenty to post about, too. Karl had made a fortune as a shipping magnate and, as such, Franz, being their only child, was independently wealthy.

  He spent his fortune on lavish vacations, a private jet, a yacht that was big enough to sleep twenty, and more property than any one person could ever use. All indications were he didn’t care how much things cost. He wanted what he wanted, and he paid whatever it took to get it.

  Which, of course, lent credence to the possibility that the property sales were legitimate.

  Add to that the fact that his list of friends on Facebook and Twitter showed no connection to anyone in the real estate industry, let alone someone shady enough to write out fake invoices to Alissa for work that hadn’t been done, and Connor was just about ready to tell Reid everything was on the up-and-up.

  “You know,” Olin said at lunch, “there is another possibility.”

  The three of them were sitting in a booth at Sue’s Diner. The restaurant featured a lot of chrome and neon, and this booth, like most, offered an uninspired view of the road. Still, they ate there often. At four blocks from the office, it was close enough to walk to and had enough variety on the menu to appeal to all of them.

  Olin put his burger down. His gaze shifted between Connor and Dylan, who were on the bench opposite him. “We assumed Alissa was laundering money for somebody else. However, if she was the one who needed to launder money, there wouldn’t have to be a third party involved. She would just need someone to buy the property at an inflated value. And if they didn’t want to keep it, then they could just sell it back to her for less money.”

  “It would still have to be cash,” Dylan clarified.

  “Absolutely. They couldn’t get wrapped up in the complications of a loan for that to work.”

  “So, in that scenario, Franz could still fit the bill,” Connor said, realizing the outcome of the case was not a foregone conclusion.

  Olin nodded.

  There was no need for any of them to suggest they check the buy and sell history of the properties he was involved in when they got back to the office. Since the exchange of property from seller to buyer and back had been an integral part of the scheme as Olin had first proposed it, that had already been their plan. Sure, in this scenario, Franz might not have sold all the properties back to Alissa—for this version of the scheme to work, he only had to pay an inflated price on paper—but it was likely he would have sold some of them back, no matter how many homes he wanted to own.

  They paid the bill and stood to leave. They were barely two steps from the booth when Connor’s phone rang. He pulled his cell out of the pocket of his jeans and checked the Caller ID. It was Lucy McBeal.

  “What’s up?” he said when he answered, as the trio continued heading for the door.

  “It’s my son,” she replied. Lucy sounded like she was on the move, maybe even running. She also sounded alarmed.

  Connor could feel his own heart rate picking up in response. He had a terrible feeling he knew what she was about to say next, and he was right.

  “He’s missing. He left with somebody from the aquarium. Nobody knows who. I’m on my way there now. Can you guys meet me there?”

  Connor heard a car door open and close in the background and figured Lucy must have been heading to the parking lot when she called. Then he passed through the front door of the diner and reflexively came to a stop. He grabbed Olin’s arm to get his attention, who in turn got Dylan’s, and he gestured for them to wait.

  “We’re at Sue’s Diner,” he told Lucy. “Why don’t you come by and pick us up on your way? We’ll all go together.”

  Lucy stumbled through a series of incomprehensible thoughts. “I . . . I need to. . . Well . . .” She was running on fear, that much was clear, and not thinking straight because of it. Connor was reluctant to tell her she shouldn’t be driving like that. He hoped he wouldn’t need to. But if she refused to pick them up, he would say whatever was necessary to convince her. Since the diner was on her way, it not only made sense from a logistical perspective, but he also did not want Jerry’s mom, high on emotion, causing an accident that left Jerry without a mother no matter how the situation turned out.

  “Okay,” she finally said, perhaps reaching the same conclusion.

  “We’ll be on the street in front. Pull up to the curb and we’ll hop in.” Connor slid the phone back into his pocket, then filled Dylan and Olin in on what had happened.

  Dylan jerked open the driver’s-side door when Lucy pulled up to the curb. “Move over.”

  Between the three of them, she was the right choice to take the wheel. Olin did not handle pressure well, so he probably wouldn’t have driven much better than Lucy, and Connor, even as good as he was, was not as good at it as Dylan. She could handle a car with the grace of a race car driver, speeding fearlessly through lights and able to leverage the way one car was moving relative to another to swerve between them with even the narrowest of wiggle room.

  Which was exactly what she did now.

  Sitting in the backseat with Connor, Olin held tight to the grab handle. Although by now he certainly knew she could control the car no matter how dangerous her driving might appear to be, he still couldn’t help telling her to “Stop!” and “Be careful!”

  The reason Connor knew this was that she and Olin had been in a similar situation once before, rushing across town in hopes of beating a pair of detectives to a hotel. According to the story he’d been told, Olin had shouted similar commands at her then. This time, though, instead of keeping quiet, she said, “Shut it, all right? I’ve got this.” Then she sped between two cars seconds before one of them merged into her lane, closing off the opening she had just leveraged.

  Lucy, who seemed largely oblivious to Dylan’s driving, worked through the numbers in her phone, hoping one contact or another might know something about the man Jerry had left with. Her voice trembled and cracked, but so far, she had not started crying.

 

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