Glassman set it up. We just got friendly.”
“Friendly…?”
“Not that kind of friendly, Steve. We just had a cup of coffee. Bumped into each other once or twice. Started talking. You know how it is; sometimes you just find a person you can open up to. Stuff comes out.”
“Pretty gal.” Chrisafoulis’s mustache twitched, amused. “Look…” He reached across to the passenger seat and unfastened his case. He lifted out a large white envelope. “Fitz finds this out, I’m gonna have you barred from the office Christmas party, you understand?” He grinned. “I know how tough it is to find someone you can open up to.”
“Got it.” Hauck smiled and met his eyes. “Thanks.”
“We blew up the shots.” Steve lifted out a series of eight-by-ten photos. “He snapped them off from the upstairs window overlooking the drive.”
The first was a shot of the backs of two men, wearing masks and what seemed to be dark work uniforms, one carrying a black trash bag, heading away from the house. The second shot showed them climbing into a black SUV at the end of what Hauck recalled was the Glassmans’ long driveway. “A Ford Bronco,” Steve said. “Too bad the plates were obscured. Would have made things easy. Amazing what these little buggers will do, huh?”
Hauck flipped the photos and the last ones were tight blowups of the first. Magnified around fifty times. The two men hurrying off. The first just had the side of one of their faces; he had taken off his mask. White. Thirties. Looking away from the camera. Not much there.
The last one did have something distinguishing. It was a close-up of the perp’s neck. He was white as well. A knot of hair, braided up like in a small ponytail, peeking out from under the mask.
And something on the back of his neck.
“We thought it was a birthmark or something,” Chrisafoulis said, seeing Hauck pause. “But the lab was able to enhance it. Turned out to be a tattoo.”
“Like a dragon’s tail?” Hauck asked, squinting.
“Or the tip of an arrow. Hard to tell. You know the only reason I’d even show you these is what you did for me. This stays between us, right? You got your own job now. You left. This one’s mine.”
Hauck handed him back the photos. “Not much of a getaway bag for all that loot, you think?”
Chrisafoulis looked at him. Steve might have been new to the rank and all the crap it brought with it, but he’d been a detective in the city for fifteen years, knew his work as well as anyone and exactly where Hauck was heading. “Okay, there was something I might not have mentioned…Upstairs. By the wife and daughter. We did find something unusual, now that I think of it.”
“What?”
“You know how the drawers were all rifled through, stuff thrown about? But right on the dresser we found a jewelry case. Rings, bracelets. Some pretty juicy stuff left in it.”
Hauck winked. “They must’ve been in quite a rush.”
“Yeah.” The head of detectives nodded. “Quite a rush.”
Hauck tapped on the edge of the window and stood up. “Thanks. Pretty resourceful kid, that boy, wouldn’t you say?”
“Yeah, very.” The head of detectives bore in on him as he turned the ignition and put the car in gear. “I feel a little strange saying this, Ty, but try not to do anything that might tick you off if you still had this job.”
Within days, the first responses on Thibault began to arrive.
A search of his criminal history came up empty, both in the States and with Interpol. His photograph hadn’t matched any that caused alarm. An asset check showed no liens or judgments against him. His personal bills were paid in full and on time.
Thursday, Hauck was at his desk with a coffee, going over an immigration search on the guy who had perpetrated a mortgage fraud, when Richard Snell from London called back. “I’ve got an update on that subject you had me looking into.”
“Thibault,” Hauck confirmed. He grabbed a pen. He had never met Snell, but the Brit was ex-Goldman, ex-Kroll, and had a reputation in the firm as a top-notch manager. “Go ahead.”
“First, as you suggested, I checked his name against the alumni roll of the LSE. There is no record of anyone named Dieter Thibault having been at either, which I know is to no one’s surprise. There was a Simone Thibault, who received a degree in 1979. You’re certain you have the correct school?”
“I’m only going on what I was told,” Hauck replied. It only confirmed what Merrill Simons had already said.
“You also stated you did a criminal and Interpol check,” Snell continued on. “No reason to be redundant then. I did a quick search into the two investment companies you supplied. Christiana Capital Partners and Trois Croix. Both companies are basically investment shells. For a network of individual funds that are hard to track. They’ve been mentioned a couple of times in the business press here as among the bidders trying to buy up various real estate and Internet properties. Combined, they do list assets under management as over one hundred million euros. No one really has a sense of where the cash originates from. You mentioned some kind of connection to the Belgian royal family…”
“Supposedly there are photos of them in his New York office.”
“Haven’t been able to confirm that one yet. These families tend to go on and on, of course. More minor royals running around Europe than the rest of us. But no one I’ve run Thibault’s name by has ever heard of him in those circles, Ty. I’ll keep at it. But I did raise some peculiar issues though…”
“Fire away.”
“Thibault’s own CV lists stints at various banks. The KronenBank in Lichtenstein is one. It’s a bank that has been under some scrutiny in the past, coinciding with the time Thibault was there. It’s known as a loose place for people who would like to transfer assets quietly and without detection. They set up instruments known as stiftungs; heard of them?”
“Remind me.”
“Stiftungs are, in effect, trusts,” the Brit explained, “protected from most outside scrutiny, perfectly legal, but where the identity of the benefiting recipient can be a bit murky, shall we say. By intention. These assets can then move about from bank to bank across the globe, not so easy to trace.”
Hauck had had some experience with money transferred through these vehicles into offshore accounts in the race to locate Charles Friedman in the Grand Central bombing case. Very difficult to trace without a subpoena from Interpol, which was almost impossible to get.
“KronenBank is a small, restricted private bank,” Snell went on. “Thibault was listed as a Vermogensverwalter, the equivalent of an investment manager. The bank was also in the news some years back for something they call ‘doubling up.’ Taking commissions from both the client and the
