LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) Read Online Free PDF Page B

calling up the full text of some of the accounts. By the time she had been at it for ten or fifteen minutes, we knew pretty much everything the press had reported about the death of Barry Gale.
    Barry had been at the bank’s North Dallas guesthouse for several weeks while preparing the Texas State directors for their formal meetings with the federal banking examiners. The examiners were awfully curious as to exactly how millions of dollars of the bank’s deposits managed to wander away without anyone noticing, and they were ready to ask the directors a lot of tough questions.
    It was a Thursday afternoon when Barry told everyone he was exhausted and was going to knock off and go to Acapulco for a few days, so no one really wondered very much why they hadn’t heard from him until he failed to turn up for a conference with some Treasury Department people the following Wednesday. Then on Thursday, exactly a week after Barry had last been seen, a maintenance man found the body in a lap pool behind the guesthouse off Preston Road.
    “Your ghost was right on the money,” Nata pointed out. “No useable fingerprints and the corpse’s face was too badly smashed up to get an ID except with dental records.”
    “Was there an autopsy?” Darcy asked Nata. I had apparently been relegated to the roll of a silent observer.
    “If there was,” Nata said consulting her screens again. “there’s nothing about it here.”
    “That manhole cover looks like a pretty big loose end,” Darcy mused. “What do those suckers weigh? They’d have to go at least seventy-five, maybe a hundred pounds, wouldn’t they?”
    Nata nodded absentmindedly, still studying one of the screens.
    “Staggering around with a cast-iron manhole cover, using barbed wire to tie it around your neck, and then leaping into a swimming pool sounds looks to me like a pretty hard way to commit suicide,” Darcy said. “At least, it is if you’re doing the committing entirely on your own.”
    “It sounds like the Russians,” Nata nodded. “Those guys love stuff like that.”
    Darcy bent forward, reading a
Dallas Morning News
story over Nata’s shoulder. It concerned the unexplained disappearance of another director of the Texas State Bank about the same time Barry took the big swim, a guy named Harold Wilkins. The stories about Wilkins were pretty sketchy since Barry Gale’s drowning was so much sexier, but there was enough to work out the gist of what had happened. Darcy pointed to the monitor.
    “Wilkins had been buying currency futures for a year or more before he disappeared. He was running all the positions himself using an account in the name of Westmoreland Oil and Gas, which was apparently a real oil trader in Dallas.”
    “How could he do that?” Nata asked. “Wouldn’t somebody have started asking questions?”
    “Not necessarily,” I offered.
    Darcy and Nata both looked at me as if they had just remembered that I was there.
    “If Westmoreland had been reasonably active in the foreign exchange markets hedging their exposure on future deliveries like most oil traders do, it would have looked normal enough. And I’m sure Wilkins would have been smart enough to route all the dummy accounts to himself. If he was, Westmoreland would never have noticed anything and there would have been nobody else to blow the whistle.”
    Darcy and Nata took that in, glancing at each other, then all three of us went back to reading silently through the rest of the story. As we read, the rest fell into place. Wilkins had been using accounts he had set up in Westmoreland’s name to conduct his trading operations all right. He was buying and selling futures contracts in a half-dozen different currencies for what on the surface appeared to be routine hedging of exposure on crude oil deliveries that provided for payments in Japanese yen and Singapore dollars. When the market turned on Wilkins, however, his losses quickly began to pyramid.
    He kept ahead of them for a