CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
“Look, for the thousandth time, I didn’t attack Shep.”
It was late Tuesday night, and Veronica watched Tanner’s interrogation unfold through a one-way mirror. Lamb hadn’t wanted her there—he’d been ready to throw her in the lockup for obstruction, never mind that she hand delivered the perp in question. She’d had to call Petra Landros and remind her that $600,000 was still missing—$600,000 that had been raised in part by Neptune’s Chamber of Commerce. “Do you think Lamb’s capable of tracking it down?” Veronica had asked.
Within twenty minutes a hulking, concrete-faced deputy was showing her where she could hang her coat. She assumed Petra had put in a call to Lamb to remind him that his campaign funds and endorsements were on the line. Well, whatever works. She just wanted to hear what Tanner Scott had to say for himself.
Tanner Scott sat across from Lamb, his forearms flat on the table. Next to him, Cliff McCormack jotted notes onto a legal pad.
“Fine, yes, we were working together.” Tanner’s flat Midwestern drawl was a shade higher than usual. He was nervous. “I mean, I was working for him. This whole thing was his idea. I’ve been out of the game for a long time, living clean and legitimate. But then along come Shep …”
“That’s Duane Shepherd? The victim?”
“Yeah. He tracked me down in Tucson. I hadn’t seen him in eight years. We used to be partners.”
At this point Cliff leaned over and whispered something to Tanner, but he shook his head.
“No, look, I’ll come clean to anything I’m actually responsible for. But I swear to God, I wasn’t anywhere near that hotel tonight. I didn’t have anything to do with that maraca.”
He pronounced “maraca” with a short “a” on the second syllable, like “rack.”
“We used to hustle a little bit, back before I stopped drinking. I got busted nine years ago and served my time. It scared me straight. I got sober, I settled down. By the time I got out of prison, Shep had landed himself in. After that we lost touch. I didn’t see him again until last week.”
Veronica had already been on and off the phone with Mac for most the night—enough so that she could piece together the parts that Tanner wasn’t telling. She already knew about Tanner’s check fraud. Shepherd, on the other hand, had a meatier rap sheet. He’d served six months in the nineties for selling forged athletic memorabilia in Sacramento, including a football supposedly signed by “the Juice” himself in the aftermath of the O. J. Simpson trial. A few years after that he was in trouble again, this time for passing off altered lottery tickets in Denver. The last sentence, the one that had come down while Tanner was serving his time, was for identity theft and credit card fraud, a five-year stint in federal prison for maxing out dozens of accounts he’d established with stolen Social Security numbers.
The men had never been implicated in the same set of crimes, but she was willing to bet they’d worked together on and off for a long, long time. Mac had dug deep and found complaints in Reno, Fresno, and Phoenix—cases where victims had come forward claiming fraud but where nothing could be proven. Six women who claimed they’d been recruited by a “modeling firm” that had required them to pay money up front for their portfolios, only to find the firm vanished when they went back; a few socialites who claimed to have met “Denzel Washington’s charming brother” and loaned him vast amounts of money. An older couple who’d purchased a houseboat from a “little skinny guy with blue eyes,” only to find that the deed was forged. Veronica knew the statistics on swindling—most people never came forward, too ashamed of having been taken in, too ashamed of a situation where their own greed or lust or hunger had been laid bare. For every one complaint, it was worth assuming there were a half dozen other victims who’d stayed hidden in the shadows.
“He had an idea for how to make some money. I told him no, I was out. But the thing about Shep is, he can be very persuasive.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “He forced me into it.”
“How’d he force you into it?” Lamb’s voice was dripping skepticism, his left eyebrow arched over a baby-blue eye. “Did he threaten you with violence?”
“Shep has stuff on me from way back. Enough to get me put away. I mean, nothing violent,” he said quickly. “Some scams we ran back in the day that are still technically, uh, unsolved. He threatened to turn me in. I never meant to hurt anyone. I swear.”
“You believe him?”
Veronica looked up. Norris Clayton had sidled up next to her, holding two cups of coffee. He handed one to Veronica.
“About being blackmailed by Shepherd? I’ll give it a fifty-fifty. It’s possible—but Tanner’s an established liar, and Shepherd isn’t exactly in a position to argue.”
“Oh, you didn’t hear?” Norris grinned humorlessly. “Shepherd disappeared from his hospital bed about an hour ago. No one’s sure how he managed it—but he’s vapor.”
Veronica turned to stare at him, but she didn’t have time to speak. Lamb was still grilling Tanner Scott. She shook her head and turned back to the window.
“Okay, okay. So what was Mr. Shepherd’s plan? Walk me through it like I’m stupid,” Lamb said.
Norris snorted softly, and Veronica’s esteem for the man rose dramatically.
“Well, he’d seen how much money was flooding into that Hayley Dewalt website. I mean, by noon on the first day it hit a hundred thousand. It was unbelievable. So he thought it’d be pretty easy to get in on that. All Aurora had to do was make sure to be seen at the same party the first girl went missing from, and then hole up for a few weeks while the money rolled in. Then we’d do the ransom drop, and a few days later she could stagger into a gas station, dirty and a little worse for wear. Shep would get the money out of town, and we’d meet up later and split it.”
Lamb was staring at him now with unmasked skepticism. “Wait, wait. You’re saying your sixteen-year-old daughter was in on this?”
Tanner hesitated, then nodded.
The sheriff leaned back in his seat, arms crossed over his chest. “Look, we have this other kid—Adrian Marks—saying she ran off with some guy. I gotta tell you, that’s more plausible to me than the idea of a teenaged girl staying holed up during spring break.”
“How many teen girls you know, Sheriff?”
Lamb didn’t crack a smile. Tanner sighed.
“Well, that’s how the whole thing fell apart. Damn girl told that friend of hers she was running off with a boy so he wouldn’t worry about her when she went missing. She was trying to be kind, I guess, but it was an amateur mistake.” Tanner erupted in a hoarse laugh. “I thought I taught her better.”