“You’d rather be orphaned than deliberately abandoned. If I can understand that, I’m pretty sure God does.”
“I hope so. It feels good to finally admit it to someone. I’m tired of thinking about this all the time and never being able to talk about it.” She wiped her eyes. “I’m so tired of being ashamed of her. I know that’s probably hard to understand.”
“No,” I said. “It’s not hard.”
She looked at me.
I said, “My father is in prison for murdering my mother.”
“Oh, Malcolm.”
“Nobody should have to face a thing like that alone.”
“Do you think…I mean, do you think you could hold me?”
I patted the sofa cushion at my side. “Come on.”
She moved over from the chair, sat down, and leaned against me. I put my arm around her shoulders. I thought about her story. Except for the part about Toledo’s death being an accident, I was pretty sure most of it was true. But I was also pretty sure she had gotten one other thing wrong, and that one thing changed it all.
She took in a deep breath and let it out with a sigh. “There’s more I ought to tell you.”
“Okay.”
“I got a part-time job working as a clerk for an escrow service, and I moved into a cheap one-room apartment in Pico-Union and spent as much time as I could at churches and the library and some of the neighborhood bodegas, telling people I wanted to meet La Alejandra. I volunteered at La Sociedad Guatemalteca Benevolencia a lot, talking to the old folks.
“One day, Congressman Montes held a town-hall meeting there. I was in charge of the accommodations, making sure he had coffee or bottled water, whatever he wanted. Doña Elena came with him. It felt surreal, meeting this movie star my mother kidnapped. She was very friendly and easy to talk to. Well, you’ve met her, so you know. She asked me all kinds of questions, like she really wanted to get to know me, and at the end of the evening, she offered me the job as her personal assistant.
“It seemed like fate. Like I was following in my mother’s footsteps, taking a step closer to her somehow, because of the connection with Doña Elena. I didn’t think very much about it. I just went to work.
“Now I spend my days keeping her appointments straight, making the calls Doña Elena doesn’t want to make, running all kinds of errands, you name it. It’s actually a good job. I’ve met some amazing people. But there’s never any mention of the kidnapping and murder.
“I was starting to think I’d never get anywhere, but then one day my computer died. It was bad timing because we were hosting a fund-raiser the following night, and I had a million details to get organized. There was no time to buy a new computer, so Doña Elena told me to use an old one she had stored in a closet off their garage. I set it up and went to work. It was a little slow but better than nothing. Then I opened an old file on that computer by mistake, and I realized the person who had created the file was Arturo Toledo.
“It turned out to be one of the computers he was using at the time my mother…when he was killed. It had hundreds of his files still on the hard drive. I guess Doña Elena didn’t realize that, or else she didn’t care.
“I had moved to Venice Beach by then, and I had bought my own computer, so I made copies of the files and took them home. Over the next few weeks, I read every word of his old emails in my spare time. I looked at all his photos. He had hundreds of snapshots of everything from vacations to baseball games to pictures of his backyard. Finally I found one little document, a single page with three numbers on it. If I hadn’t studied banking in Spain, I wouldn’t have realized it was a bank code, a password, and an account number.
“It took another five weeks to find the bank. It was in the Cayman Islands. The account was still active, but it had a negative balance. The bank had been levying fees for seven years, but nobody had paid them because, of course, it was Arturo Toledo’s account, and he was dead. And the account had been emptied on the day he died.
I said, “So you hit a dead end.”
“Not really. I was able to hack into the bank’s records and—”
“Wait a minute. You bypassed a bank’s security system?”
“Yes.”
“But how did you do that? I mean, how do you know how?”
“I taught myself a lot about computers while I was in high school, and when I got to college, I kept learning. I’m pretty good at things like that.”
“And at working on performance race cars.”
“That’s true.”
“What else can you do?”
“Well, if your toaster breaks, I can fix it for you. Or a television. Or an air conditioner. Like I told you before, I just have this thing about machines. Sort of an intuitive understanding of how things work. I grew up taking things apart to figure out how they work. Anything mechanical, really. And electrical. Any kind of logical system. Mathematics comes super easy for me. I do calculus equations in my head. I can program in most languages. I know most of what there is to know about electronics. Whatever.”
“So you’re a genius.”
“I kind of am, actually. But only when it comes to machines and things. I don’t understand much about people.”
“Okay. So you’re a genius, and you’re inside the financial records of an offshore bank in the Cayman Islands. What next?”
“Well, I was able to find out where the funds in Arturo Toledo’s account were wired. So I went to that bank, which was in Argentina, and once I hacked that one, I saw the money had been moved again immediately.”
“Moved immediately? You mean seven years ago, on the day Toledo was killed?”
“That’s right. Someone really knew what they were doing. It took me three days to follow the money through six banks before I found it.”
I sat up straight, forcing her to move away a little on the sofa. “Wait a minute. You found Toledo’s money?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How much is there?”
“A little over nine and a half million dollars.”
I whistled.
She said, “It was eleven million originally. There have been regular withdrawals over the years. I like to think my mother has been spending it on the people. You know, being La Alejandra.”
I said, “So, you’re close to finding her.”
“I don’t know for sure. It was a numbered Swiss account. That means there was no name associated with the account, just a number. So I can’t be sure if she’s the one who set it up.”
“Can’t you watch the account and track the withdrawals?”
“No. The account holder moves any funds they want to withdraw into a separate escrow account maintained by the bank. From there I guess it must be wired to them. But the escrow account is on a different server, and the security is too good. I’ve been trying to get into it for the last few weeks, but there’s just no way.”
“Then there’s nothing you can do?”
“Well, I did try one thing, but I kind of wish I hadn’t done it now.”
“What’s that?”
“I took the money.”
“You what?”
“It seemed like the best idea at the time. Just because the account holder chose to move withdrawals into the bank’s escrow account doesn’t mean it has to be done that way. So I set up my own numbered account and moved the money into that.”
I couldn’t sit still. I got up and began to pace. “How careful were you to cover your tracks?”
“Actually, I wanted them to trace it back to me, so I made it pretty easy. I mean, they can’t find the money, but they can tell I’m the one who has it.”
I stared down at her. “You’re using yourself as bait.”
“You could put it that way.”
“That’s what the men wanted at your house. They kept asking you where it was. They want the money.”