By a Spider's Thread: A Tess Monaghan Novel by Laura Lippman Page A

trying to say there is. Family Crimes checked it very thoroughly. His wife walked out, taking their kids. No sign of foul play. And until he gets a custody order, which he says he doesn’t want to do, no laws broken.”
    “That’s pretty much how he tells it. But I was curious about the fact that her credit cards have been dormant since she left. Isn’t that suggestive of foul play? How can she be on the run without any money?”
    “Didn’t he tell you?”
    “Tell me what?”
    Another knowing smile. Nancy might be younger than Tess, but she had more experience listening to people’s lies.
    “Mark Rubin kept his wife on a short, tight leash when it came to money. She had credit cards for everything she needed, and an ATM-Visa card, but he didn’t let her have more than a hundred dollars in cash. Plus, he made her account for her cash day by day. Withdrawals, too. At the end of the month, he went over everything again, item by item.”
    “I don’t get it. That would make her more likely to use the credit cards, right?”
    “Not if she doesn’t want him to know where she is. So she figured out a way to get around his system, get enough cash to hit the road.”
    “How?”
    “Oh, she’s shrewd. Rubin withdrew his cash for the week every Monday, and he seldom went to the machine again before the week was out. So she figured she had five days before he would notice that the balances were off. All she had to do was lie to him, not show him the slips at night. Starting the Monday before she left, she went to the ATM every day and withdrew five hundred dollars. That gave her twenty-five hundred.”
    “Decent seed money, but it won’t take you far, not with three kids.”
    “She wasn’t done. She bought some high-end electronics on one of the credit cards, stuff that Rubin can’t find in his house. Probably sold it for twenty cents on the dollar through a friend, or a fence. We figure she got at least another thousand pulling that scam. And then, the day before she left, she deposited a check for twenty-five hundred dollars, to cover what she had taken. I guess she was worried he could come after her for theft, even though it was a joint account.”
    “Where’d she get the check?”
    “It was a personal check signed by Lana Wishnia.”
    “She’s a manicurist. Where does a manicurist get twenty-five hundred bucks to lend?”
    Nancy nodded approvingly. “You are good. Rubin didn’t know about her at all, and he thinks Natalie was just her client, but I think different. Lana told detectives the check was to repay some loans Natalie gave her over the years. My hunch is that Lana Wishnia was the fence, but it’s legal, right? No law against buying electronics and selling them cheap.”
    “Why didn’t Natalie just write herself a big check on the joint account, wipe out the whole thing?”
    Nancy cocked an eyebrow, a trick that Tess had never mastered. “Because the bank had instructions to call Mr. Rubin if Natalie wrote a check for cash for any amount over five hundred dollars.”
    “Did anyone ask Rubin about his, um, strict household bookkeeping?”
    “Absolutely. You see behavior that controlling, and you have to wonder — how else is this guy controlling his wife? Detectives checked 911 logs to see if the Rubin residence was known for calling in domestics. It came up clean, but in that community that’s not unusual.”
    “What do you mean, ‘that community’?” Tess’s tone was sharp, her Irish roots forgotten. She was suddenly 100 percent Weinstein, and the girl on the other side of the table was just another bigoted shiksa. Never mind that Tess herself had basically asked Rubin when he stopped beating his wife. That was different.
    “Look, I was posted to Northwest in the city before I came to the county. I know that the Orthodox like to take care of their problems when possible, whether it’s the elderly or drugs or domestic abuse.”
    “All communities should do as good a job of caring for