Brain Storm by Cat Gilbert (detective books to read .TXT) 📖

into my offshore account,” At Trinity’s glare, he quickly added. “He’s setting up a numbered account, even as we speak, to which we’ll all have access. Once the funds are in the offshore account, he’ll move them into the numbered account after routing the funds through the system several times. With any luck, they’ll be untraceable.”

Get out. You had to love web banking. I looked down at the pad of paper Mac pushed toward me. Looking at the information they had jotted down, between the five of us, we’d have a considerable amount of funds available if everything went as planned. I thought it was a pretty big ‘if’, but Jonas and Mac seemed almost elated with the whole thing. Probably lack of sleep, I decided.

“You’re sure you can trust this guy to do it and keep quiet?” I asked. I may have decided to follow my gut and trust Mac, but trusting his contact was asking a lot of anyone. “All he has to do is send the money to a different account or make a simple phone call, and we’re up the creek.”

Mac hesitated. It wasn’t much, but it was long enough for me to feel my skin flush and the sweat start to break out on my forehead. He was having doubts now?

“He’ll do it,” Mac finally assured us. “He’ll do it, and he’ll keep quiet about it. He owes me.”

He said it slowly and quietly and looking at him, suddenly there was no doubt in my mind. Not that the guy would do as promised, but that Mac would kill him if he crossed us. The knowledge sank in with a shiver down my spine. Jonas might be big and mean, but Mac was the scary one. Not for the first time, I was glad he was on our side.

“What about the gold?” Trinity demanded impatiently.

“Uh?” I sounded like I didn’t have have a brain in my head, but I was still focused on Mac.

“I said, what about the GOLD?” Now she had my attention, along with everyone else’s at the table. She was talking about the gold coins she had in the safety deposit box.

“What about it?” I asked, and watched as her head practically started spinning.

“What about it? I’ll tell you what about it. It’s sitting there in the bank vault waiting for us to get it and I’m not about to let it stay there. There has got to be a way to get it out.”

I doubted seriously that there was. We would be lucky if we managed to pull off moving funds into the offshore account. Waltzing into a bank where they were bound to be looking for us was suicide. I didn’t want to be the one to tell her that, though. She had that tone in her voice that said she wasn’t backing down.

The guys choose that moment to go check on the transfer, made their excuses and all but ran from the room. Had I said they were mean? Scary? Yellow-bellied cowards was more like it. Jerks. I might have expected it from them, but when Mama D got up and excused herself from the table, I was flabbergasted. I had expected her to try to talk some sense into her granddaughter and instead she had hightailed it out of there right behind the guys. That she had left, told me one very important thing. The guys might be avoiding confrontation, but Mama D was backing Trinity on this, and I was left standing out there all alone.

“Trinity, you know there’s no way we can get to your gold. They’ll be watching for it,” I started in, attempting to try reason first. It might work. She was a lawyer after all.

“I’m going to get it,” she informed me. “If I have to, I’ll take Jonas with me, but I’m going.”

Was she serious? The fact that she had even thought Jonas would agree to let her go, much less go with her to help, told me how desperate she was. For the life of me, I couldn’t understand the sudden turnabout. She’d seen the amount of funds we were moving around. We didn’t need the gold.

“Taylor,” she said, gripping my arm. “We don’t know what’s going to happen. We may need that money later. Then it will be too late to come back and get it.”

She had a point, but I still couldn’t see any way to do what she wanted. Just the idea of her going in with Jonas was ludicrous. At 6’5” Jonas was easy to spot in a crowd. Add in his looks and his swaggering air of confidence and Jonas couldn’t enter a room without being the center of attention.

Trinity didn’t realize it, but she was practically a carbon copy, right down to that crusader attitude they both had. I guess if I really thought about it, we all had that attitude. Fighting for the right. Truth, justice, and the American way. Now, we were all criminals. On the run. Which brought me right back to my main concern. No way could those two get in and out of a bank without being noticed. Big time. I was all for leaving the gold behind. It was a small loss to keep from exposing anyone to danger, but that was just my opinion, and it wasn’t my gold. Obviously, Trinity felt different.

“Why is this so important to you? Is getting this gold worth risking your life over? Jonas’ life?”

“It’s not like that, Taylor. It’s not even my gold.” She paused and bit her lip. “It’s Kevin’s.”

I shook my head, confused. Her brother was dead, and she was saying the gold belonged to him? Kevin had been killed in a drive-by shooting a few months before Keith’s death. He had stood up as best man at our wedding. I liked Kevin. He was a great guy, but he had never struck me as the type to even have a portfolio, much less to have diversified into the gold market. Why he had it was a big question. A bigger one was why she’d kept quiet about it all this time. Warning bells sounding in my ears, I asked the question, even though I was dreading the answer.

“Exactly how much gold are we talking here, Trinity?”

She looked around like she expected someone to be spying on us and then leaned over to whisper in my ear.

“Half a million.”

I couldn’t possibly have heard that right. Did she say half a million? Half a million what? Coins? Dollars? Ounces? Did it even matter? Kevin had worked in a garage. There was no way he had a half a million of any of the above. Not legally. My stomach rolled at the thought that this had something to do with his murder. What was Trinity thinking? She had to know this was trouble, the minute she found it.

“Trinity, what have you done?” I hissed at her.

“I found it. After. You know.” She was back to looking around like she expected hoodlums to pop out of the cabinets any minute. If I had any doubt that Trinity knew the gold was trouble, she’d put it to rest. “You know how it was. Gram was out of her mind with grief when Kevin got killed, and whoever did it, got away with it.” Her voice was breaking at the painful reminder of what they had gone through, and tears threatened to spill as she blinked them back. “I found the gold in his locker at the gym weeks later. They called to ask me to come clean it out, and I found it in his gym bag. I knew it was wrong to keep it, but I couldn’t bring myself to turn it in.”

I couldn’t believe it. All this time, she’d kept evidence from the police. If she’d turned it in, it might have led them to the killers. Instead, she put it in a safe deposit box.

“What on earth possessed you to keep it? That’s evidence Trinity!”

She flinched like I had hit her and I suppose, in a way I had. What she’d done was just as illegal as whatever it was that Kevin had done to get the money in the first place.

“You don’t know that. We don’t know that it had anything to do with Kevin’s death. That was Kevin’s money. I wasn’t going to give it to the police. They would have just put it in evidence, and it would have disappeared into someone’s pocket.” She was crying now, and I had a hard time understanding the words as she tried to explain. “Kevin was killed, right in our front yard. You remember, Taylor, I know you do. They killed him and the police never found who did it. They never even tried. They didn’t care.”

“Trinity, you know that’s not true. Jonas worked round the clock. They all did. I did. It might have helped if we had known the whole story.”

“I told you I didn’t find it for weeks. Taylor, that gold is the only thing we have left of Kevin. I can’t leave it behind. I won’t.”

What a bunch of hooey. She had a lot of things that had belonged to Kevin. It was a lame excuse, and she had to know it. Even worse, was that she actually expected me to buy into it. For Pete's sake, she was a lawyer. A good one. She ought to be able to concoct something better than that load of malarky. Then again, none of us were exactly on our game. Jonas was law enforcement and had broken more laws in the past 24 hours than I cared to count. I’d gone from calm and collected to borderline basket case, and I didn’t even want to think about the turn around Mama D had gone through.

As irritated as I was at what she’d done and that she’d kept it from me, the fact remained that I knew Trinity pretty well. She wasn’t a criminal, and she wasn’t stupid, although you couldn’t tell it from the conversation we were having now. Trinity had kept quiet about the gold. Trinity, the warrior for justice. If there had been a chance that the gold would have led us to Kevin’s killer, she would have turned it over in the blink of an eye. The fact was, she hadn’t, and there was only one reason I could think of that would cause her to do what she did.

“Mama D knows about the