Lost Light

turned it in to the vice president for his signature. From there it went to the insurance company and then to the cops after the heist and eventually to the FBI.”
    “You told me to bring the original to the meeting we were supposed to have this morning,” Rider said. “Why?”
    “You know what forger’s tremor is? It’s something you can see in a signature that has been forged by tracing. He traced his coworker’s signature off the original or real currency report. In the photocopy of the one he turned in I could see hesitation marks. Her signature would have been one smooth, uninterrupted scrawl. But it looks like whoever signed that page never lifted the pen but stopped and started after almost every letter. It’s a tell and I think the original will show it beyond a doubt.”
    “How was that missed?”
    I shrugged.
    “Maybe it wasn’t.”
    “Dorsey and Cross.”
    “I think Dorsey. I don’t know about Cross. Cross helped me with this. In fact, he called me and gave me the jump start on it.”
    Lindell leaned forward. We were getting to the part about Marty Gessler and he wanted to get it right.
    “So Simonson turns in a report with made-up numbers and then his buddies go and rip off the delivery and kill Vaughn in the process. Intentionally.”
    “That’s right.”
    “What about Simonson? He got shot, too. Were they trying to cut him out, too?”
    “No, that wasn’t supposed to happen. Not according to Fazio. At least that was what he was saying to me before he got nailed last night. It sounded like Simonson getting shot was just dumb luck. A ricochet. If Banks comes out of his sleep with his brain intact maybe he can tell you about that. I have a feeling he’ll want to talk. He’ll want to spread the blame around.”
    “Don’t worry, if he comes out of it, we’ll be there. But the early word from the hospital is that that’s a big if.”
    “The thing about that ricochet is that it actually helped them. It gave Simonson a valid out from the bank. No suspicion there. Then he hid the purchase and renovation of the bars behind a settlement from the bank. The truth was he didn’t make enough off the settlement to put in a new beer cooler.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “I just know.”
    “All right, let’s get back to the heist for a minute,” Lindell said. “So other than Simonson taking a slug in the ass, the heist goes off as planned. All the cops -”
    “Not exactly,” Rider said. “Harry was there. He nailed one of the robbers.”
    I nodded.
    “And he apparently died in the van during the getaway. Simonson told me the others took him out on a boat or something and buried him at sea. His name was Cozy. They named one of the bars after him.”
    “Okay,” Lindell said. “But when the dust settles from this thing, all the cops have is Angella Benton dead and a phony list of numbers that nobody knows is phony. Then nine months sail by and lo and behold one of those numbers scores a hit when Marty Gessler puts it into her computer.”
    I nodded. Lindell knew where it was going.
    “Wait a minute,” Rider said. “I’m not tracking this part.”
    Lindell and I took five minutes to fill her in on Marty Gessler’s computer program that tracked currency numbers and what her discovery meant.
    “Got it,” Rider said. “She came up with the first inference that something was wrong. She came up with a hit that didn’t work because the hundred-dollar bill in question was already in evidence lockup. It could not have been taken during the movie set heist.”
    “Exactly,” I said. “One of the numbers Simonson made up just happened to be on a bill already accounted for. The same thing would later happen when they arrested Mousouwa Aziz at the border. One of the hundreds he was carrying matched Simonson’s phony list. That brought Milton and the Homeland Security heavies into it and it was all bullshit. The truth was, there was no connection between the two cases.”
    Which meant I had spent the night in federal lockup for nothing and Milton had been killed while pursuing what amounted to nothing, a wild goose chase. I tried not to think about this and moved on with the story.
    “When Marty Gessler got that hit, she called up Jack Dorsey because his name was on the list when it was circulated to other law enforcement agencies. It went from there.”
    “You’re saying that Dorsey then put two and two together and came up with Simonson,” Lindell said. “Maybe he knew about