‘Ready?’ Luis asked, as they both jumped out of the truck and collected their equipment from the back.
‘As I’ll ever be,’ Randy replied, breathing out through his mask.
The driving part usually took them around five minutes to complete, but the manual sweeping, depending on what sort of grime they encountered along the way, could take them anywhere between fifteen and twenty-five minutes per hundred-yard section. Once that was done, the process repeated itself for the next hundred yards, until they got to the 6th Street Viaduct, which they did at around 10:30 p.m.
‘Do you want to take a break now?’ Luis asked, using his sleeve to mop the sweat from his forehead. ‘Or when we make it back to the 7th Street Bridge?’
‘I’m all right,’ Randy replied. ‘I can wait until we get back, if you want.’
‘Let’s do that then,’ Luis agreed.
They both got back into the truck, moved it one lane to theright, closer to the gutter, and began their first of two return journeys back from the 6th Street Viaduct to the 7th Street Bridge, but they never finished the job.
It was Luis who spotted it first, just a couple of minutes past midnight, during their last hundred-yard manual sweeping job before they got to the bridge. When they were just about seventy yards away from it, as he swept another rake full of dirty water toward the side gutter, his wandering stare moved up to meet the bridge. He didn’t see it at first, but as his gaze was coming back to his rake, he spotted something – a silhouette, it seemed – just by the second lamppost up on the bridge. The only one out of four that was faulty.
As his eyes clocked the silhouette, Luis did a double-take before pausing.
‘What the fuck?’ he said, squinting, trying to sharpen his focus.
‘What the fuck what?’ Randy asked, looking in the same general direction as Luis, but failing to spot anything.
‘Up there.’ Luis raised his right arm to indicate. ‘On the bridge. By the second lamppost from the right. The one that’s busted.’
It took Randy a second, but he finally spotted it too, his neck craning forward. ‘Is that someone up there?’
‘I think it is, yeah,’ Luis replied before he realized what was just about to happen. His eyes widened as he let go of his rake. ‘Jesus Christ, I think the dude’s gonna jump.’
Randy’s mouth dropped open. Luis was right. The man on the bridge looked like he was about to leap to his death.
‘HEY!’ Luis yelled at the top of his voice, waving his arms in the air frantically. ‘HEY… STOP!’
The man didn’t look back at him. His head stayed low, with his chin almost touching his chest, and as Luis began a mad sprint in the direction of the bridge, the man simply stepped off its edge.
Luis was still too far away to make it there in time.
Horrified, all he could do was watch the man’s body slicethrough the air, gaining speed as it did, before splattering itself against the concrete channel down below. Even from a distance, as the body hit the ground hard, Luis could hear a sickening cracking noise, as the man’s bones fractured on impact – some rupturing through muscle and skin to protrude out of his arms, legs and shoulders. His head also hit the ground with tremendous momentum, the collision hard enough to shatter his cranium, making it cave in and deforming his whole face out of shape.
Luis didn’t stop running until he got to the bridge… his breathing labored, his body shaking, tears already welling up in his eyes.
‘What the fuck?’ he called out, desperately bringing both hands to his head. His gaze moved to the mangled body on the ground and the pool of blood that was slowly forming around it. ‘Jesus Christ, man!’
Randy, on the other hand, stood exactly where he was, about seventy yards away. His eyes were still squinting, trying hard to sharpen their focus and see through the darkness, but he wasn’t looking at the man on the ground or at a freaked-out Luis Toledo. No, Randy’s eyes were still squinting at the bridge… because what he actually saw, couldn’t really be possible… could it?
Fourteen
Hunter and Garcia were right – Shaun Daniels’s murder couldn’t have been about money.
Eleven days after they visited O’Hearn’s Bar and Grill, they finally received a report from Financial Forensics. An expert forensics accountant had spent days digging through Shaun Daniels’s personal and business accounts. The accountant had checked everything on record and followed every electronic and paper trail that Shaun had left behind. There was nothing there – no large deposits or withdrawals, no steady money drip, no offshore accounts, no investment bouncing, no obscure transactions… nothing. On the contrary, Shaun and his limited company – Daniels Plumbing Ltd – were barely managing to keep afloat. In fact, in the past twelve months, he’d been in the red with his personal account more times than a traffic light, surviving mainly on bank overdrafts and small credit card loans.
The forensics accountant had also looked into Shaun’s credit card accounts. He had three of them – two personal ones and one registered to his limited company. They weren’t maxed out but, just like his bank accounts, all three credit cards were in the red. It seemed that most of the time, Shaun Daniels got by through mainly paying only the interest that he was being charged every month. Every now and then, he was able to pay a little more, making a small dent into his debt, but soon enough he wouldoverspend on one thing or another and that debt would either grow, or be right back to where it was before.
When Financial Forensics examined Daniels Plumbing Ltd’s invoice books, they did find a few discrepancies, but nothing that truly worried anyone. The discrepancies came in the form of inflated invoices for small jobs, just like Garcia had suggested, but definitely not on the same scale. Every once in a while, Shaun Daniels would overcharge a client by as much as $450, depending on the job – hardly a money-laundering operation. Shaun would then create two invoices – an inflated one for the client and a ‘real’ one that he would bundle together with several other invoices and file as a single accumulated bill with the IRS.
According to the forensics accountant, that was the most used trick by small businesses. As long as they kept the overcharge under $500 and bundled them into an accumulated bill, detection was practically impossible. They’d have to be properly audited to fall into the IRS net and the IRS simply wouldn’t waste time and resources going after such small fish.
All in all, the conclusion of the forensics accountant was that Shaun Daniels wasn’t exactly a crook. He didn’t really swindle the system. He simply did what he had to do to get by… the American way.
Fifteen