Spin

eighteen.

My expertise was in accounting, but really, it was in the movement and flow of money. I looked at ledgers with a broad eye, finding patterns and flow. Like rivers on a map that fell into lakes, disappeared into mountains, and got spit into the ocean, the shifts of money were seen best from far away, with the finer details removed.

Bill and Phyllis, the core of the DA’s financial analysts, were a married couple who had met in the Los Angeles district attorney’s office forty-three years previous. They were detail people, in all their Midwestern glory—she was from Cadillac, Michigan and he was from Collett, Indiana. They reveled in getting it right, in not one shred of a detail falling through their fingers.

Thus, they missed everything.

If they’d understood the first law of fiscal dynamics—that money cannot be gained or lost, only moved—they’d understand that it all went somewhere. It was most important to follow a flow of cash downriver, and let the creeks taper into mysterious blue points. The answer was in the streams’ and the rivers’ undercurrents.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hello, dear,” Phyllis said, gracing me with a brilliant smile. “How are you?”

“Fine.” I put my bag on the table.

Bill sat at the old banker’s desk, tapping on a loud keyboard, his face a few inches too close to the screen. “Got mail from the boss.” His chin pointed at his screen, eyes squinted. “Miss Drazen’s looking at the Giraldi files. That right, Miss Drazen?”

“Theresa. Yes. If you don’t mind?”

“We looked at them already. There’s nothing there. We had the guys from downstairs working with us.”

“Probably,” I said. I didn’t want to step on his toes, or the toes of the hundreds who had pored over the documents. “Just a new set of eyes.”

“Have at it.” He felt abused, if his expression was any indication. He dragged four document boxes from a shelf, one at a time, with the scratch of heavy cardboard sliding on wood.

“Anything digital?” I asked.

“Some,” said Phyllis, opening the boxes. “I’ll get it for you.”

Bill wiped his nose with a cotton handkerchief, fidgeted, and sat. Poor guy. I’d flattened his toes, and it wasn’t even lunchtime. I slid folders out, and with them came a scent. Not the musty odor of dust bunnies and paper residue. It was cologne, spicy and sweet with an undercurrent of pine trees after a rain. I caught a hint of something that I couldn’t identify until I’d unloaded the whole box.

I inhaled again, trying to catch it, but it was gone. Only the dewy forest morning remained.

I hadn’t spent more than an hour with the ledgers before I caught something. Just a few million in property tax payments. Legal payments from legal accounts containing legally obtained money.

One house in particular, in the center of the lots, had been purchased three years earlier with money from an international trust. The rest had been snapped up in the previous six months. It was a lot of property, tight together in the hills of Mount Washington, and it rankled.