Page 84 of Mastermind

I put a slice on a napkin and hand it to him. “It sounded like you went a little crazy.”

“After a fashion. What I was trying to do was to find her pattern. Sometimes I can tell how to find a serial killer by looking at their history of crimes and finding tells. With Joe Vik it was how he buried them. This allowed me to go back to his earliest murders, when he wasn’t as careful. With Covel, for decades she was so good at covering her tracks, I couldn’t trace her back to when she made mistakes. She also knew all the weaknesses in hospital systems and nurses’ lifestyles. She could assume identities and keep moving, burying her past. Although I didn’t quite understand it at the time, I had to catch her by becoming a victim. I had to fall into the same kind of situation that her next mark would. In this case, she was murdering homeless people in a city she hadn’t been to before.” Theo takes a small bite of the pepperoni pizza. “I forgot how much flavor there is.”

“So, there was a method to your madness,” I reply.

“Yes. The method was madness. Coming out of it was hard. I lost a dear friend who’d been my mentor while I was away. I also made some bad choices, hurting people around me,” he says somberly. “I don’t know how you manage it.”

“Does it look like I’m managing things?” I ask.

“I don’t think you were living off scraps in trash cans.”

“No. But I still feel alone. I’m closer to my family than before and . . . other people. But the circumstances have changed. I keep moving forward because I don’t know how to stop. If I look like I’m holding it together, it’s because I’ve been faking it for so long, I don’t know how to not pretend. Speaking of faking it . . .” I hold up the printout nearest me. “Weir is up to something. But I don’t get it. I found a name associated with all the investment portfolio statements. It’s Joshua Scanlon. Scanlon is his wife’s maiden name.”

“Interesting,” says Theo. “That’s not a very good alias.”

I finish doing the internet search I’d started. “Oh. This is interesting. Joshua Scanlon is her brother.”

“So Weir is helping him manage his investment portfolio?” asks Theo.

“It would appear so, but according to this, Joshua died eight years ago in a motorcycle accident when he was twenty-two. Three years before Weir married his wife,” I reply.

“Clever way to hide his assets,” says Theo. “Do you think his wife knows?”

“I was tempted to call her until I saw this.” I hand Theo the printout of the envelope he resurrected.

“This is addressed to Scanlon, but at a PO box,” Theo replies.

“Yep. A box that’s on the route between his house and the detention center. The odd part is that Weir’s portfolio seems pretty unbalanced.” I hand Theo a printout with the stock holdings.

“Interesting. I’ve never heard of any of them. It looks like they’re pretty volatile, too,” he replies.

“You think that Heywood might have told him to buy those stocks because he was going to try to influence the market?”

“You know Heywood better than I do. That seems almost beneath his skills. If a company like one of these has a suspicious increase or decrease in value and the SEC is curious, they start looking at who holds large stakes. That would lead to a dead man and more questions. You have anyone you trust at the FBI who knows more about this?”

“Hmm. Maybe Mandy Umbra. I worked with her years ago when I was chasing crooks through bookkeeping. I think I trust her. Also, I want to tread carefully, given Weir’s wife’s condition.”

“Condition?” asks Theo.

I hand him the printouts that show the pharmacy receipts for her medication. “Cytarabine and dexamethasone. Leukemia?” asks Theo.

I nod. I didn’t have to look them up to know what they were used to treat. “From the dosage, it looks like she’s on the recovering side. If I’m reading that right.”

“I don’t know enough to know,” Theo says in one of his rare admission-of-ignorance moments.

At least he has them.

“Let me make a couple calls and see if Umbra can meet with us so we can make more sense out of this before telling Gerald what we’ve been up to.”

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

DIVERSIFICATION

Mandy Umbra is already waiting for us at a diner that’s a thirty-minute drive from FBI headquarters, where she works. She gets out of the booth and wraps her arms around me. I don’t know if this is the Peruvian or the Italian side of her, but whenever we meet outside the office, she treats me like a long-lost sister—emphasis on the lost part.

She looks Theo up and down. “Wow. It’s really him. I don’t know if I should congratulate him or have him arrested.”

“I’d prefer the former,” says Theo. “But even then, I don’t do well with praise.”