Free Vanishing Act by Thomas Perry

boss would have said. Then it occurred to me that the half million could have been only part of it, or it could have all been done to set me up."
    "Did it occur to you to transfer it all back where it belonged?"
    "I told you what I found. I can’t tell what I didn’t find. For one thing, I didn’t find anything like a half million in transfers. They could have been from accounts I never saw, didn’t know about. And if these people could put money in, maybe they could get it out, too. There could be another half million already gone."
    "You were an ex-cop. Why didn’t you go to the police?"
    "Believe me, I thought about it. But being an ex-cop made me more worried. I thought about what had happened in cases like this when I was a cop. You get a guy—a banker or accountant or lawyer—we got lots of lawyers. Some company blows the whistle. There’s an account in his name with half a million in it. What does the D.A. do? He puts him in custody, quick. The judge doesn’t grant bail, because if he’s got one account with that much in it, he might have five more, and finding them takes months. He’s a sure thing for jumping bail. While I was sitting in jail, anything could be happening with those records, and none of it was going to help me."
    "So what did you do?"
    "Here’s where Harry comes in. After all this time he called me."
    "Where?"
    "I don’t know where he was. I was at home."
    "What did he say?"
    "Two things. One was to stay out of jail. He had heard that some guys had been shopping a contract on me inside the prison system."
    "Shopping?"
    "Yeah. It was open. Anybody who got me was going to collect."
    "Is that normal?"
    "It hardly ever happens. It’s too risky. There are so many people who would hear about it who need something to tell the police more than they need money."
    "How did Harry hear about it?"
    "He wouldn’t say. Not in prison, and not in St. Louis. He was calling long-distance from a pay phone, and he kept pumping money into it and I kept hearing cars go by."
    "What did you do?"
    "I thought it through eighty different ways. No matter what I did, I couldn’t imagine a way things could work out that didn’t include my spending a lot of time in a prison waiting for an investigation. Harry said the contract was for a hundred thousand. That meant somebody must have stolen a lot. He might have taken ten million, left a half million lying around to get me arrested, and gotten me killed before my trial."
    "Would that put an end to it?"
    "Sure. He keeps the nine million or so, and everybody figures I took anything that’s missing in the whole company."
    "So it was somebody in the company."
    "It might have been, even somebody in one of the other branches, but I couldn’t be sure. It might have been somebody I arrested when I was a cop. For a long time now, they’ve been giving inmates computer lessons as part of the job-training program. It beats lathes and drill presses for getting a job afterward, and they can’t use them to make a knife. You can learn a lot about computers in a five-to-ten sentence. Or it could be something bigger. If you can steal money by phone, then anybody anywhere could be doing it, and I just happened to be the victim."
    "What did you do?"
    "Any way you looked at it, the minute the computer man got the company’s machines up and running and they took a close look at what was in there, I was going to jail. Within two or three days after that I would have to sleep, and then I would be dead."
    She looked at him closely. "You stole it, didn’t you?"
    "What else could I do?" he asked. "I was an honest man. I didn’t have the kind of money it takes to go on the run."
    She seemed to be staring through his eyes into the back of his head. "Did it occur to you that this might have been what they wanted you to do?"
    "Of course it did," he said. "If they were capable of thinking up the rest of it, they could think of that, too. But if I did nothing, each day the prisons were going to