Chapter 20: Closing the Accounts

Cosimo's POV

The service corridor behind the Seaport ballroom smelled like bleach and hot butter.

I stood in it at six o'clock with a tablet in one hand, and a waiter went by with a tray of champagne flutes without looking at my face.

Doors opened at seven.

I had Benton Collier's last two accounts open on the screen and an hour to close them.

The green ledger had made it easy.

Benton kept two accounts for running, one in Nassau and one in Lisbon.

Both held money he had drawn out of the fund's first sales and the Wharf's operating accounts.

Eight million, give or take.

He had never learned that a man who runs has to be less careful with the password than he is with the money.

I typed the first account's number, and the second.

My banker had already done the paper.

All I needed was the code.

I hit send on the first, and a bar crawled across the tablet.

Then the second.

The second took longer, because Benton had a security question, and the answer was the name of the dog Lydia had had as a child.

I sat on an upturned crate and looked at that for a minute.

He had asked her once, on some slow Sunday, and she had told him, and he'd kept it.

I typed the dog's name.

The bar finished.

Two accounts, closed, eight million dollars frozen and routed to a court-supervised escrow in Lydia's name.

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