“Still playing a lot of golf?” Jesse said after he had sat down and the waitress had taken their orders for iced tea, Sandy’s with lemonade.
“Only when it’s light out,” Sandy said.
When they’d set up the lunch, Jesse had explained to Sandy that his sudden interest in crypto and Bitcoin and NFTs was because of what he’d discovered on Charlie’s laptop, and could think of no better person to ask.
“You blowing smoke up my ass?” Sandy said.
“Totally.”
“Never hoits,” Sandy said.
He ate some of a breadstick. “Sounds like you don’t have much to go on, other than websites and supposition. Like blue smoke and mirrors.”
“And scam calls making Charlie as angry as I’d ever seen him.”
“You obviously believe the two might be connected.”
“I wouldn’t necessarily bet on that yet,” Jesse said. “My old man always told me never to bet the way you’re rooting.”
“Happens to me all the time on the golf course,” Sandy said.
“Charlie was looking into crypto, something I would have bet he’d previously had zero interest in,” Jesse said. “And I know he was trying to track those calls. It’s not a great leap to think that whatever he found out poked a bear. And then had somebody go after his grandson after Charlie was gone.”
“You think it’s the same person?”
“You’re an analytics guy,” Jesse said. “What do you think?”
“I agree with you,” Sandy said. “I think maybe a nice old man somehow got sideways with bad men.”
“Tell me about crypto.”
“Invisible money that’s real, if you can wrap your mind around a concept like that,” Sandy said. “But it’s like crack to bad guys, to the point where they probably wish they’d invented it themselves. Put it this way: If you’ve stolen something of value, converting it to crypto not only keeps your profit safe, it makes it undetectable to the government.”
Jesse told Sandy Lipton that all he really knew about it came from the brief crash course Nicholas Farrell had given him.
“Sounds to me,” Jesse said, “as if crypto and all that other shit is a way for bad guys to launder money without going through the process to do it the old-fashioned way.”
Sandy gave Jesse a crisp two-fingered salute.
“Well done, soldier,” he said. He grinned. “I’m assuming you don’t want my tutorial to include digital wallets and the cloud and blockchains.”
“Not unless you want me to arrest you,” Jesse said.
Their club sandwiches arrived. When the waitress had walked away Sandy said, “The first crooks to embrace crypto were your basic drug dealers and porn dudes. People who really were used to being old-school money launderers, no matter how young they were. Move the money around, leave no tracks or fingerprints, everybody was living scummily ever after.”
“Sounds like the Wild West.”
“Before the sheriff showed up in town.”
“Meaning the government.”
“Realizing it still needs to build a better mousetrap for the rats,” Sandy said. “Listen to me: Crypto isn’t going away, even if the bubble seems to have burst for now. There’s still a war going on between good guys and bad guys over there on the dark side, with the good guys hoping the bad guys stay greedy, keep looking for creative ways to make the value of their ill-gotten gains go up while they wait for a market adjustment they know will come. Because trust me on this: Anybody who thinks that crypto ain’t gonna rise from the ashes again is bananas.”
He grinned again. “You following this?”
“Somewhat,” Jesse said.
“Bottom line?” Sandy said. “There’s a shitload of profit to be made if you can manage not to get caught. All you need is a computer and a low moral compass.”
“Could we be talking about enough money to kill over?” Jesse said.
“Everybody’s got a different price, Chief. Except you, pretty sure.”
Sandy Lipton talked more about crypto then, marveling at how it had gone from the dark web to television commercials with big stars doing them.
Finally the waitress brought Sandy the check, telling him there was no rush.
“You got a final piece of advice for me?” Jesse asked him.
“Yeah,” Sandy Lipton said. “Follow the funny money.”
Thirty-Five
Jesse went back to his office after lunch, spent the rest of the afternoon researching crypto and people that various governments around the world were starting to catch, trying to get a sense of how the ones who had been caught had messed up.
And could not shake the feeling that he was out of his depth here.
He rarely felt that way when working a case, even when he was in the place he sometimes thought of as the deep, dark forest. It was because the subject, or at least a part of it, was money. Jesse had never cared about money, even when he was married to Jenn. Maybe there had been a time in his life, before he’d ruined his shoulder that day in Albuquerque, when he thought about being rich as a ballplayer, and famous. But then that was gone. And he was a cop. Cops didn’t make much money, in L.A. or here. Or anywhere. The job wasn’t about that. The job was about the J-O-B. He had some money in the bank. Jenn, at least until she had quit television — or television had quit her — had always had money of her own, and had asked for nothing when they got divorced and before she had finally become rich by marrying a rich guy.
Her shit, Jesse liked to tell himself, had finally come in.
Jesse knew the basics. How much he made, what his annual bump in salary was going to be, what he had in his savings account, what his pension would look like someday, if he ever made it that far. He’d made some money on the old man’s house when he’d died, and invested it in some long-term bond funds that the late Abby Taylor, the lawyer with whom he’d once been in love, had suggested. The returns were steady enough that Jesse rarely checked them these days.
He knew enough about hedge funds from Sandy Lipton, and because Sunny had gotten herself involved in a case about a dead hedge-fund guy who had nearly walked away with Spike’s restaurant in Boston during the first siege of COVID. But even that subject was above what Jesse considered his pay grade. And was fine with that.
Only now along came crypto.
And Charlie’s interest in it.
Who’s the rooster in the henhouse? Jesse asked himself, for maybe the fiftieth time since he and Nicholas had read Charlie’s text.
He was after a murderer here, that made him feel as if he were on solid ground. Whoever it was, and whatever Charlie had found out about him, Jesse knew this:
He was smarter.
He’d never believed the old line about jails housing only dumb guys. Some very smart guys had ended up getting themselves locked up. But even the smart ones finally slipped up, somewhere along the way.
This guy would slip up. It was what Jesse kept telling himself. Whoever did it to Charlie was the one who was out of his depth.
Because I’m the one after him.
Neither Molly nor Suit was around when he decided to leave for home. He thought about calling Nellie and asking her if she wanted to order dinner in at her place, but decided he would just go home instead, order in there. He did, from Sushi Moto, let Delivery Dudes do their thing, ate General Tao’s chicken, extra-crispy, and fried rice, and some dumplings.
He thought about calling his son, Cole, in London for a month after falling hard for an English actress he’d met in L.A. They hadn’t spoken in a couple of weeks. But it was late there. He’d call him when all the craziness ended. If it ever did.