Read Online The Absolution by Jonathan Holt - Free Book Online Page A

mess of computer equipment. Leads and connectors dangled from pegs that had once held coifs and scapulars, while shelves built for vestments contained a jumble of hard drives.
    â€œIn theory, we’re looking for anyone who might have had a reason to murder the man who owned these,” she told him. “In practice, I want to find out everything about him that I can. His chairman just did a very slick job of distancing his bank from whatever it was he did for them, and I’d like to know why.”
    â€œAny idea where I should start?”
    â€œApparently he worked for both charitable trusts and high-net-worth individuals in need of advice on tax planning, which strikes me as an odd combination.”
    He considered. “Well, I’m no expert, but that sounds like money laundering to me.”
    â€œWhat makes you say that?”
    â€œCharities collect donations in cash. That’s the first stage in cleaning dirty money – having a legitimate explanation for where it came from.”
    â€œCould money laundering also involve casinos?” she asked, remembering the chips.
    He nodded. “You take the cash to a casino, you buy some chips, then after a few bets you go back to the cashier to redeem them. But this time you ask for an electronic transfer instead of cash. It’ll look to anyone following the money trail as if you won it at the tables.”
    â€œAnd the memory sticks?”
    â€œLet’s take a look.” He took one of the USB sticks andplugged it into a reader attached to his computer. “I’m just making an optical image, so I don’t actually disturb the contents,” he explained. “Ah—”
    â€œWhat is it?” She watched his fingers fly over the keys.
    He turned the screen towards her. It contained a row of numbers. “It’s money. Electronic money. Easy to transfer, impossible to trace.”
    â€œHow much?”
    His fingers tapped again. “The exchange rate for bitcoins is pretty volatile at the moment. But at today’s rates, there’s the equivalent of about a quarter of a million euros on this stick alone.”
    Bagnasco, meanwhile, had brought back printouts from the cruise ships’ radar logs and started to identify the boats entering or leaving Venice. The logs showed one boat with no LOCODE: either its transmitter was broken, it was too small to require one, or it had deliberately turned off its equipment in order to avoid identification.
    Two separate records, twelve minutes apart, showed it moving from south to north along the Adriatic shore of the Lido shortly after 3 a.m. Another, thirty minutes earlier, showed what looked like the same boat inside the lagoon, heading south towards the Bocca di Malamocco, the more southerly of the two openings into the Adriatic.
    In other words, Kat thought, it had set off somewhere south of Venice but north of Malamocco.
    She looked again at the map. There were around half a dozen small islands in that area. Most were long since abandoned, the sites of former military garrisons, plague hospitals and leper colonies. One of the very few that was inhabited was La Grazia, the island owned by Count Birino Tignelli.
    It wasn’t enough for a search warrant, not by a long chalk. But at least it meant she now had a legitimate reason for calling on Count Tignelli and asking if he’d seen anything.
    But not today. Today she needed to set up the operations room, assemble a larger team of carabinieri and put out requests to other crime agencies for information. She also needed to arrange for Cassandre’s wife to identify the body at the mortuary. Unlike some officers, Kat had no problem with doing that; in fact, she found it strangely satisfying that even in the midst of such raw emotion she could stay detached and professional. It was one of the things that made her believe she was in the right job, but it nevertheless required some thought on how best to approach