They might hide behind different company names, but they were the same people.

The detective was still talking. “Target neighborhoods got leveled and then completely abandoned. Neighborhoods like Hough were overrun with displaced families. Rents went through the roof, while the whole place went to hell. When it came time to redevelop all that land the city had bought, none of the real estate developers were interested. And the real crime of it was that they were the ones that lobbied the feds for the whole plan and the grant money in the first place.”

The detective chuckled. “Jesus, I sound like Max talking about this stuff.”

“So what happened?” Nothing he was saying was calming her nerves.

“When the feds seized Halloran’s assets, they found over three hundred thousand dollars in gold brick in a safe deposit box he had rented from the First Bank of Cleveland. He was going to cooperate too. The way I heard it, he was about to roll over on half the board of directors, but he found another way out. He committed suicide. At least that’s what the coroner called it.”

Iris remembered walking into Mr. Halloran’s ransacked office on the top floor of the building. Someone had torn the place apart.

“People started dropping like flies. Old Man Mercer was killed in a car crash. We kept running into dead ends. By the time CPD got a bench warrant to raid the bank, we found out it had been sold. All assets transferred to Columbus Trust in the middle of the night. They were an out-of-town company with no use for the building at 1010 Euclid. It was shuttered and locked up by morning. The building sold at auction a few weeks later. It stopped us cold.”

“I don’t understand. Why did that matter?”

“The feds were more interested in keeping the bank from failing during the sale than completing the investigation.”

The detective noticed the confused expression on Iris’s face and tried to explain. “The FDIC insurance on the deposits was over three billion dollars. If a scandal broke during the sale, there could have been a run on the bank. Everyone hears the bank is being sold, people get nervous, and they run to withdraw their money—Great Depression stuff. I tried to work through the red tape for weeks, but I was taken off the case. They said I could no longer be impartial, due to my personal connection to the bank.”

“Your sister,” Iris whispered, and looked back at the picture of Max taped to the dashboard. She was somehow mixed up in all of it back then just like Iris was now. “I saw a note she wrote. It was in a book I found.”

He lifted his downcast eyes. “What?”

“She’d written this note to Beatrice Baker.” Iris dug the shorthand manual out of her bag and handed it to the detective. “I found these strange notes in Beatrice’s personnel file, and then I saw your sister’s name in this book. I guess I thought if I could decipher the notes, I might find a clue to where Max went . . .” Iris didn’t complete her thought that she’d hoped the detective would show her leniency in return.

“Did you find anything?” he asked, eyebrows raised.

“Not anything I could make sense of. Just a bunch of odd notes from the Bible and a few names.”

The detective gazed at the photograph of his sister and smoothed the tape with his fingertip. “I think she was having an affair with Bill Thompson.”

The name struck a nerve. “You don’t mean . . . ?”

“The body you found.” He nodded. “I haven’t told anyone that. According to Max, he was involved in some small-time theft. He was raiding unclaimed deposit boxes, and she got tangled up in it somehow. I couldn’t help her. I couldn’t help Beatrice either. I just hope she managed to leave town.”

“You knew Beatrice?” Iris’s eyes grew wide.

“The last time I saw Beatrice, she was in over her head with all of this. She was just a kid.”

She reached down and began searching her bag. “Beatrice called a secretary named Suzanne right before the bank closed. She asked her about a safe deposit box that was in her name. I found the key to the box in Suzanne’s desk and tracked her down.”

The detective did a double take. “What?”

“It’s a long story.” She sat up when she finally managed to fish the key out her bag. “But this number 547 shows up all over the notes. I think it means something.”

“Beatrice called some woman about a deposit box?” He frowned as if remembering an ancient conversation.

He eyed the key in Iris’s hand. She gave it to him. He didn’t examine it; he just kept looking expectantly at Iris. She squirmed a moment, unsure what he wanted. He finally glanced down to the pile of keys in her lap and back to her face with his eyebrows raised. She nodded awkwardly and handed over all of the bank keys.

He sighed. “It will take me months to get a warrant. I doubt they’ll even give me one.”

Seeing the keys in the detective’s hands instead of her own did nothing to calm her nerves. Iris had finally come clean and confessed, but someone was still following her. Someone thought she knew something. People had disappeared. People had died. A lonely brown suitcase was still filled with clothes and hiding in the building. She felt as though she were right there with it. A tear fell down her cheek.

“Why would Mr. Wheeler and all of those people still care about the bank? Why are they following me?” she pleaded.

“You know what was so unusual about the gold we found in Teddy Halloran’s safe deposit box?”

Iris shook her head.

“We only found three hundred thousand bucks. The public records I’ve researched over the years suggest that, when you adjust for inflation, over fifty million public dollars had been grossly mismanaged between 1960 and 1978, when the bank closed.”

“So?”

“We were closing in fast on the case when Teddy offed himself. The feds were involved, and people were starting to get anxious. I think the other members of the board pulled the trigger on the sale to lock up the records and holdings under the FDIC veil, but maybe they messed up. Maybe they didn’t have enough time to pull the money out.”

“What are you saying? That the money is still in the bank somewhere?”

CHAPTER 69

Iris shook her head in disbelief. How could $50 million just go missing? That kind of money doesn’t just get lost in the couch cushions. She hadn’t seen any sign of bags of cash lying around, and she’d been snooping. Then it hit her. The vault.

“They lost the keys!” Iris laughed nervously. It was something she would do. “The safe deposit boxes are still full with all of that money, and they lost the fucking keys!”

“Or someone hid them.”

She stopped laughing. Keys to $50 million in stolen money had been sitting in her purse. She sucked in a breath. She was a dead woman.

“But it makes no sense,” she said, on the verge of hysterics. “Why would they need the keys? They could just drill the boxes, or blow them up for that matter.”

“I’m not sure. You’re going to have to stick with me until we figure this thing out.” He squeezed her hand. “I’m not going to let you disappear too, okay? I’m going to forget where these keys came from as long as you give me your full cooperation, got it?”

Iris was going to be sick.

“Following police protocol for the past twenty years has gotten me nowhere. It may have even cost Max her life. I’m not going to let it happen again.”

With that, he climbed out of the car.

Iris sat frozen in her seat until she heard a tap on her window. The detective motioned for her to get out. They were in an alley somewhere downtown. Terminal Tower loomed above them.

“Where are we going?”

“You’re going to show me this vault,” he said, searching around the alley until he found what he was looking for. “I did some checking on those steam tunnels you mentioned. One of them dead-ends right here.”