“If you got caught and went to trial, or if you went to the cops, maybe. Other than that, no.”

She nodded. “Oh.”

“Has Charlie ever mentioned any other way he launders money?”

“No.”

“How about the woman who hired you, was she in their pocket?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Do they own anyone else at the bank now?”

“No.”

“Does anyone else at the bank know what’s going on?”

“No.”

“Is there a paper record that passes between you and the DeLucas?”

“No.”

Maybe the scattershot approach wasn’t going to work so well. Sort of like trying to find intelligence. “How about a record of the bank transfers?”

“Not for the first few times. The first few times, I was scared and I didn’t want there to be a record so I erased it from the computers. Then I got scared to not have a record and I started keeping a file.”

“Okay. That’s something. I’ll need to see it.”

She nodded. “All right. I can print out a transaction record at the bank.”

I said, “Is there anything you can think of that maybe I’m missing?”

“I don’t think so.”

The cat came down the hall and walked across the dining room and into the kitchen. Karen Shipley Nelsen leaned toward me and clenched her hands together. “What about Peter?”

I spread my hands. “I have what we in the trade call an ethical dilemma. I’ve taken Peter’s money to find you, and now I have. I owe him that information.”

She stared at me, still clenching the hands.

“I’ve found people before and kept their secrets, but that won’t work here. Peter wants to find his son and he has unlimited resources with which to do it. If I tell him that I couldn’t find you, he will simply hire someone else and they will find you. You weren’t that hard to find.”

Her jaw tightened. She wasn’t liking it much, but she knew that she didn’t have to like it.

I said, “What does Toby know?”

“He doesn’t know anything about the DeLuca family or how I’m involved with them. I don’t want him to know.”

“What does he know about Peter?”

“He knows that his father’s name is Peter Nelsen, and he knows that his father left us because he didn’t want a family and he didn’t want to be married. We don’t talk about it. He doesn’t know that his father is the guy who makes movies and has articles written about him.”

“You should think about telling him.”

She stood up and went to the window and looked out at her son. The ball was sitting motionless on the drive and Toby was sitting against one of the birches. She said, “Tell me the truth. Do you see any way out of this?”