Wild Justice by Phillip Margolin

What did you think you were doing? Vasquez leaned forward. Let s not play games, Walter. I usually work narcotics. I know all about your arrangement with Javier Moreno. You re a fucking crook who got lucky. You owe one to the criminal justice system, and I m here to collect. Talk to me, now, or I ll bring you in as an accessory to murder. Stoops looked shocked. You can t think . . . Hey, this is bullshit. Vasquez stood up and took out his handcuffs. Walter Stoops, the law requires me to advise you that you have a right to remain silent. Anything you say Stoops held out his hands, palms out. Wait, wait. I wasn t involved in that, he said, pointing toward the photographs. I don t know a thing about these murders. I overreacted, that s all. It was a shock seeing those heads. I m gonna see the goddamn things in my sleep. Stoops wiped his brow again. Go ahead and ask your questions. Vasquez sat down, but he set the handcuffs on the desk where Stoops could see them. Who owns the Milton County property? I can t tell you. Vasquez reached for the cuffs. You don t understand, Stoops said desperately. I don t know who owns it. The guy contacted me by mail. I can t even say it s a guy. It could be a woman. The deal was that I was supposed to find rural property with a house on it. It had to be isolated. There was a whole list of conditions. I would have said no, but . . . Well, to be honest, I was in trouble with the IRS, and I was suspended for a while from practice, so there was hardly any money coming in. And, well, the price was right and there didn t seem to be anything wrong with what the buyer was asking. It was just a real-estate transaction. Where did the corporation come in? That was the buyer s idea. I was supposed to set one up and use it to buy the property. The deal was I would get cashier s checks, money orders and stuff like that to set up the corporation. Then I would send pictures and descriptions of properties I thought would work to a box number. When the client found a place he wanted, the corporation would buy it. It sounded peculiar, but it didn t sound illegal. That was the only transaction I was ever involved with for Northwest Realty. After I bought the land I never heard from the guy again. Does the name Dr. Vincent Cardoni mean anything to you? Just from the morning paper. Would you have any objection to my seeing your file on Northwest Realty? No, not now. Stoops stood up and opened a gray metal filing cabinet that stood in one corner of his office. He handed a file to Vasquez and sat down. Vasquez thumbed through the documents. The only thing that interested him were photocopies of cashier s checks and money orders, all in amounts less than ten thousand dollars, that added up to almost three hundred thousand dollars. The significance of the amount of each money order was obvious to anyone who dealt with drug dealers. Selling dope was easy; using the cash you got for it was the hard part. The Bank Secrecy Act required banks to report cash transactions of $10,000 or more and to keep records of individuals who engaged in such transactions. In order to avoid this problem drug dealers structured their cash transactions in amounts less than $10,000. Can I get a copy of the file? he asked. I can t give you copies of the correspondence, but I can give you everything else. Vasquez could have pressured him for copies of the few letters in the file, but there was nothing in them of use. All of the letters of instruction were unsigned and written on a computer. He settled for the rest of the file. Vasquez sat in the waiting room while Stoops s secretary brought the material down the hall to a copier. He was disappointed. He had counted on Stoops to link Cardoni to the land, but it looked as though Cardoni had covered his tracks. It probably didn t matter. There was overwhelming evidence against the surgeon. There were the items with his prints that had been found in the cabin and the videocassette that had been found in