Read LAUNDRY MAN (A Jack Shepherd crime thriller) for Free Online

while—mostly by running hard, shuffling papers fast, and doubling up his losses—but when the magnitude of the debacle became so large that he couldn’t hide it any longer, the entire mess collapsed in a heap. That was when Wilkins disappeared without a trace. He left his house to drive to the bank one morning and stepped right off into the twilight zone.
    Two weeks later, Barry Gale—or someone—was found at the bottom of the swimming pool at the guest house. His suicide was quickly attributed to the working relationship between Gale and Wilkins. There was even some speculation that Barry Gale could have been the real mastermind behind the whole currency futures scam and that he might have been using the less experienced Wilkins as a front man; but with one man dead and the other missing, following up the speculation would have been difficult.
    In the end, apparently no one even bothered to try.

SEVEN
    WHEN NATA FINISHED reading the story, she looked at Darcy. “Maybe this guy Gale really
is
still around,” she said.
    “Then who was the stiff in the pool?” Darcy asked.
    No one said anything since the answer was pretty obvious. If Barry Gale was still alive, Wilkins was the prime candidate for the Esther Williams role. Moreover, that opened the possibility that Barry might have had something to do with arranging the casting.
    “You think this guy might be indexed somewhere with EDGAR?” Darcy asked Nata.
    “Who’s—” I started to ask.
    “Never mind,” Darcy interrupted, and obediently I fell silent.
    Nata typed briefly and then slid her hand over a trackball sitting next to the keyboard. As she rolled the cursor around one of the screens and clicked here and there, both she and Darcy leaned in closer. After a moment I saw them exchange a look and then Darcy leaned over Nata’s shoulder and typed a few keystrokes. After that they both watched the other screen in silence.
    “That’s pretty amazing,” Nata finally said, more to herself than to Darcy or me.
    She clicked the left mouse button on the trackball twice, looked at the screen for a long time in silence, and finally rotated her chair until she was facing me.
    “I don’t know what to tell you, Jack.”
    Up until then I thought we had been doing just fine.
    “What do you mean?” I asked.
    “I found the name Barry Gale in a keyword search of EDGAR’s primary data index,” Nata explained. “But when I went to the locations referenced in the search, there was nothing there. All the references came up as invalid entries.”
    “Does that happen a lot?”
    Darcy glanced at Nata for a moment and then shook her head. “Never.”
    “What are you saying?” I asked, looking from one to the other.
    “There are a couple of possibilities, I guess,” Nata took over again. “Three, really. Mistakes in data paths can occur. Maybe this is just the result of a simple input error.”
    “But you don’t think so.” I was sure, at least, of that much. Nata’s face made it plain. “What else?” I asked.
    “The references may have been there once, then deleted for some reason and the index entries were overlooked.”
    “I didn’t think database entries were ever deleted, just updated.”
    “Right. Usually they’re not.”
    “So then what’s the third reason?” I asked.
    Nata hesitated, glancing at Darcy, who nodded once.
    “The entries may be encrypted with a unique key that we don’t have,” she said. “That’s never happened before either, but theoretically I suppose it’s possible.”
    “And what would that mean?”
    “There’s generally a turf battle of some kind going on in Washington, Jack. It might just be that one agency has something going and it’s taking particular care to make sure that another agency can’t find out about it. It could be that sort of thing.”
    “Could
be?”
    “Look, Jack, we’re good, but we’re not perfect. Some of the really big hitters can bury stuff so deep we can’t get to it. To tell you the