“I’m good,” Kat said, descending the stairway. Chuback waited for her. He wiped his hands on his shirt before shaking her hand with a meaty paw. “Everyone calls me Chewie.”
He was thirty, maybe thirty-five, with a bowling-ball gut and thick, pale legs like marble pillars. There was a Bluetooth jammed into his ear. The basement looked like Mike Brady’s office with wood paneling and clown paintings and tall filing cabinets. The desk area was made up of work benches, three of them forming a U, all loaded up with a dizzying variety of screens and computers. There were two huge leather chairs on large white pedestals. The arms of the chairs were covered with colorful buttons.
“You’re Asghar Chuback,” Kat said.
“I prefer being called Chewie.”
“Senior partner at Parsons, Chuback, Mitnick and Bushwell?”
“That’s me.”
Kat glanced around. “And who are Parsons, Mitnick, and Bushwell?”
“Three guys I played basketball with in fifth grade. I just use their names for the masthead. Sounds fancy, though, right?”
“So the entire investment firm . . .”
“Is me, yep. Hold on a second.” He tapped the Bluetooth. “Yeah, right, no, Toby, I wouldn’t sell it yet. Have you seen the commodities in Finland? Trust me on this. Okay, I’m with another client. Let me call you back.”
He tapped the Bluetooth to hang up.
“So,” Kat asked, “was your mom the secretary my partner spoke with?”
“No, that was me too. I have a voice changer on the phone. I can also be Parsons, Mitnick, or Bushwell if a client wants a second opinion.”
“That’s not fraud?”
“I don’t think so, but truth? I make my clients so much money they don’t much care.” Chewie pulled joysticks and gaming consoles off the two large chairs. “Have a seat.”
Kat stepped onto the pedestal and sat. “Why does this chair look familiar to me?”
“They’re Captain Kirk’s chairs from Star Trek. Replicas, sadly. I couldn’t buy the original. You like? Truth? I’m not a Star Trek guy. Battlestar Galactica was so my thing, but these chairs are pretty comfy, right?”
Kat ignored the question. “You recently issued a Suspicious Activities Report on a certain Swiss bank account, is that correct?”
“It is, but why are you here?”
“Pardon?”
“You’re NYPD, right? SARs go to the Financial Crime Enforcement Network. That’s the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Treasury, not the city police department.”
Kat used the armrests, careful not to hit any of the buttons. “The account has come up in a case I’m investigating.”
“In what way?” he asked.
“That’s not something I’m willing to discuss.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.” Chuback rose from his chair and stepped down from the pedestal. “Let me show you out.”
“We aren’t done here, Mr. Chuback.”
“Chewie,” he said. “And yes, I think we are.”
“I could report this whole operation.”
“Go ahead. I’m a licensed financial adviser working in conjunction with an FDIC-insured banking institution behind me. I can call myself whatever I want. I filled out the Suspicious Activity Report because I am law-abiding and had concerns, but I’m not about to betray my clients or their financial confidences blindly.”
“What kind of concerns?”
“I’m sorry, Detective Donovan. I need to know what you’re after here, or I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Kat debated how to play it, but a grown man named Chewie had given her little choice. “I’m investigating another case where someone deposited a large sum of money in a numbered Swiss bank account.”
“And it was the same account I reported?” Chuback asked.
“Yes.”
He sat back down and drummed his fingers over the multicolored Captain Kirk lights. “Hmm.”
“Look, as you pointed out, I’m not with the Department of Treasury. If your client is money laundering or evading taxes, I don’t care.”
“What are you investigating exactly?”
Kat decided to go for it. Maybe it would shock him into some kind of admission. “A missing woman.”
Chuback went slack-jawed. “Are you serious?”
“I am.”
“And you think my client is somehow involved?”
“I don’t have a clue, quite frankly. But that’s what I’m after. I don’t care about financial improprieties. If you’re willing to protect a client who may be involved in some kind of kidnapping—”
“Kidnapping?”
“—or abduction, I don’t know—”
“I’m not, no. Are you serious?”
Kat leaned forward. “Please tell me what you know.”
“This whole thing,” Chuback said. “None of it adds up.” He pointed to the ceiling. “I have security cameras everywhere in this room. They’re recording everything we say. I want your word—and I realize that your power is limited—that you’ll help my client rather than aggressively prosecute him.”
Him. So at least she knew the gender now. She didn’t bother hemming and hawing. The recording would be meaningless in a court of law anyway. “You have it.”
“My client’s name is Gerard Remington.”
She scoured her memory banks, but the name meant nothing to her. “Who is he?”
“A pharmaceutical chemist.”
Still nothing. “So what happened exactly?”
“Mr. Remington instructed me to transfer the bulk of his account to that Swiss bank account. That’s not illegal, by the way.”
Again with the illegal. “So why did you report it?”
“Because the activity could indeed be considered suspicious. Look, Gerard isn’t just a client. He’s also my cousin. His mom and my mom—that’s the lady who showed you in—were sisters. His mom died a long time ago, so we’re pretty much all the family he has. Gerard is a bit, well, he’s on the spectrum, as they say. If he were younger, someone would have categorized him as autistic or having Asperger’s or something like that. He’s a genius in many ways—he’s a helluva scientist—but socially he is inept.” Chuback spread his arms and smiled. “And yes, I realize how strange that sounds coming from a grown man who lives with his mother and sits in Star Trek chairs.”