“How much are we talking about?”

“A little over half a million.”

“There you go,” Ethel said. “I found roughly a quarter million under Jonathan’s bed. The rest must have been what they carried running away.”

Jesse looked at Bradshaw. “If the trial’s over, why weren’t the bills destroyed?”

“I don’t have the facts at hand, but if not everyone copped a plea, we might have appeals at play. Or this is only the first stage of an investigation going up the food chain, and there might be more arrests. The evidence is still relevant.” Bradshaw turned to Douglas. “Who ran that investigation?”

“Trevor Norwood. I was reassigned to protection and don’t know if the investigation went further.”

“Well, I’ll look into that,” Bradshaw said. “Did Finch ever talk to any of you about the counterfeiting case?”

No one answered.

Bradshaw slapped his thighs. “All right, any other ideas? Frank, what do you think?”

The homicide detective shrugged. “Counterfeiting and cryptocurrency. I’m really outside my wheelhouse. But it seems to me if we need to force a connection, what if Jonathan learned somehow that the bogus money had gone missing? It doesn’t do anyone any good until you can convert it to real money, whether that’s dollars, pounds, or euros. He takes Parker’s playbook that converted dollars into Bitcoins or whatever and replicates it. Getting word to his suspects as an anonymous buyer that he’s looking to sell. I imagine that can be done.”

“Peer to peer,” Jesse said. “That’s what a personal, private transaction’s called.”

“Cash for coin,” Douglas said. “And those exchanges can go bad. I know at least one case in Oslo, Norway, where a buyer was murdered. But how did Jonathan get the necessary coins?”

“Maybe he didn’t,” Jesse said. “Maybe he created a dummy transaction somehow. Fooled them briefly like the counterfeit money was intended to fool him.”

“I don’t know,” Lisa said. “Was Jonathan that sophisticated a programmer?”

Mancini sighed. “Like I said, I’m out of my wheelhouse here. It was just a thought.”

“Well, Frank,” Ethel said, “I think at this point all theories are welcome. Whatever Jonathan was doing, he wasn’t following standard procedure. I noticed he dropped a Beretta, not his issued Sig Sauer. Cory, was his missing laptop company-issued?”

“No.”

“Frank, did you find a personal phone?”

“No,” the detective admitted.

“So the incriminating money, his computer, and his phone were taken, and someone was so determined to eliminate loose ends that he risked a robbery in broad daylight to retrieve the second gym bag and shut off any links to the Secret Service.”

“What do you think they planned to do with the money?” Frank asked.

Ethel smiled. “Come now, Frank, isn’t it obvious? It was going back in the evidence room with no one the wiser and someone richer by half a million dollars.”