Page 135 of Into the Fire

The mission had begun with a thumb drive. Looked like it would end with one, too.

Evan jogged out to the truck, checked up and down the street, then retrieved his laptop. Back inside, he fired up the computer and plugged in the thumb drive.

He sat at the deco letter desk in the corner, Max hovering at his shoulder.

A profusion of spreadsheets invaded the screen.

The figures on these dwarfed the numbers they’d seen in Grant’s files.

Evan scanned the documents. Wires, dates, withdrawals, bank statements, multiple sets of doctored books, meeting minutes, shell-corp formation papers, LLC articles of organization and operating agreements.

And this time: names of the players at the top.

As Evan google-searched the names, Max made a dry noise in his throat.

Bedrosov and everyone who’d come before were nothing compared to this.

A city councilman. The city treasurer and the finance director. The economic-development director and a leading city-admin officer. The public-works director and the comptroller. An assistant officer in charge at LAPD’s Criminal Investigation Division. An LLC manager by the name of Stella Hardwick.

All stakeholders in a fund with the impressively forgettable name of the Los Angeles City Reserve Fund. Its balance, held in Bedrosov’s captured bank in Singapore, was two hundred and twelve million.

Evan read until the throbbing in his head grew almost unbearable, then leaned back in the chair and pressed his fingers to his eyes. He thought of the potholed city streets, the film of pollution wrapped around downtown, the ragged metropolitan facilities crumbling where they stood, desperate for cash allocations that never seemed to come.

A perennial shortfall.

City budgets had checks and balances to safeguard against embezzlement by segregating duties across a variety of departments. But it seemed Stella Hardwick had found a way around those safeguards.

“Looks like all the big players were in on it,” Max said.

“You don’t need all the players.” Evan pointed at a scanned PDF of the signature page of the LLC’s operating agreement. “Just one in each division.”

The scheme required a perfectly placed set of men able to verify a fake spending cut. To corroborate a supposed budget shortfall. To create fictitious invoices. To nudge investigations into the circular file.

A dozen men, with Stella Hardwick at the helm, had victimized an entire city.

At the end of the trail, there wasn’t a face but a committee. Not a head to the monster or even nine heads but a mini-bureaucracy. The more legitimate the veneer, the less anyone would question what lay beneath.

By plugging into Bedrosov’s existing criminal enterprises, Stella and her men had established an infrastructure beneath them to wash the money they skimmed off the city’s $9.2-billion budget. After routing their embezzled cash through his bank, Bedrosov fed it out through multiple franchises beneath him, like Petro’s. The money was cleaned and delivered in nonreportable, nonsourceable chunks to the men’s—and Stella’s—respective accounts. Bedrosov had kept the principals sealed off completely, insulated from the process. Which explained why Joey had been unable to pierce the veil of his enterprise.

Stella and her men had used the authority of their offices to cover up their corruption.

They had used dirty cops to further their abuses of power.

They had used contract killers, crime bosses, and psychopathic businessmen to neutralize their opponents.

And in the process they had gotten help from a very surprising source.

The awareness sat heavily in Evan. How awful for him and Max to have come all this way only to realize that the truth had been right there the whole time, right beneath their noses.

He waited a moment for the flush of the revelation to subside and then refocused. He returned to the laptop, studying the meeting minutes. They were aggressively specific, listing attendees and detailing procedures and the precise order of events. An ironclad assurance against an associate’s developing a sudden fit of conscience. If anyone went down, they’d all go down.

“God,” Max said. “Grant barely scratched the surface. I mean, he was still deciphering code names way at the bottom of the scheme.”

Chagrin washed through Evan, prickling his skin. He’d assumed that Max had put it together as well.

“Max,” he said, “Grant wasn’t investigating this case for the cops. He was cooking the books for Stella Hardwick.”

He could feel the heat of Max at his back, searching the screen. Could practically sense the wheels turning in his head, searching for traction.