The Cartel Lawyer by Dave Daren (ebook reader below 3000 TXT) 📕

the bottom of the page. The biggest donor on the list was the Everson Juvenile Detention Center.

I had found the start of the money trail, and now all I had to do was follow it.

Chapter 13

I sat back on the cushioned bench with my caramel latte in my hand as I stared at the computer screen. I’d just found a super PAC that linked the Everson Juvenile Detention Center with Judge Travis Williams, even if it was a tenuous connection.

The caramel latte I’d bought had cooled in the hour I’d spent researching the judge, but it was still delicious when I took off the lid and swigged down the rest of the caffeinated beverage. The four shots and caramel pushed away the last bits of exhaustion from my day, and I felt ready to tackle the financial equivalent of tangled Christmas lights that hid the judge’s money.

My notepad looked like I was a crazy conspiracy theorist with scratched out notes, scribbles, and arrows that arched around the circled words and pointed to the numbers that spotted the sheet. There was almost no place on the paper that didn’t have some kind of mark, and I knew it was going to take some hard work to make any sense out of what I had found. For that, I needed to eat some actual food.

There was almost no one in the coffee shop by then, and the tables had long since emptied of everyone except for a few lone souls trying to cram for their tests. The barista had pulled a stool behind the counter so he could work on his homework and still attend to anyone who came in.

The clock behind him inched closer to midnight, and I glanced over to the front window where the cafe’s hours were displayed. From where I sat they were backwards, but after I cleaned my glasses and squinted, I could make out the three a.m. close time.

I still had plenty of time before they closed to make sense of what I’d found, but my stomach had begun to cramp as a reminder that I hadn’t eaten dinner. I stood and stretched since I’d been at the computer for over an hour without much movement, and I needed to loosen my muscles before I strolled over to the counter.

“Hey,” the barista said as he looked up at me.

His dark-brown eyes were glazed over as he pulled himself out of his studies, but he swigged some ice water and shook away the cloud in his head so he could focus on me.

“Hey,” I replied with a smile. “Do you guys have anything to eat?”

“Uuuh,” the young college student hopped down from his high chair and looked around. “Let me see what we have left.”

“Sure,” I said as I leaned against the counter to study the other late night customers.

Osvaldo’s goon had abandoned his car in favor of the corner booth opposite of mine. He had a book in his hand, and the cover reminded me of something I’d seen on a mystery novel. I almost laughed when I read the title. It was a biography of Al Capone, and the irony that a cartel goon would read about a famous mobster made me chuckle to myself.

He looked up under my scrutiny, then glanced down to his book and back up with a shrug like he knew what I found so amusing. He took a sip of his coffee and then turned the page as he went back to his book.

“So I’ve got a grilled cheese, a chicken bacon wrap, and a chicken caesar wrap left,” the barista said as he came back over to me.

“How’s the grilled cheese?” I asked as I turned to give him my full attention.

“Meh,” the young man shrugged. “I’d go with one of the wraps.”

“I’ll take the chicken bacon wrap,” I said while I tried to ignore the low grumble that emanated from my stomach.

“It’s a salad wrap,” the barista warned. “So if you’re really hungry, I’d go with both wraps.”

“I’ll start with the chicken bacon and see where I’m at after that,” I said as I pulled out my wallet. “And can I get the largest water you have?”

“Sure,” the college student mumbled as he fought back a yawn. “You want me to put some lemons in that?”

“That’d be awesome,” I responded.

I paid and then brought my makeshift dinner over to my table. The wrap was delicious as the ranch dressing mingled with the crunchy lettuce, the smokey bacon, and the still juicy chicken, and when I stuffed the last bite into my mouth, I didn’t feel too heavy to keep going.

The first page of my notepad was a complete mess, so I tore it off and set it over my laptop’s keyboard while I started the process of transferring the information to a new sheet of paper. I used bullet points and arranged them in a cascading pattern as I delved deeper into each piece of information. Anything that was linked to more than one point, I put an asterisk next to, and by the time I was done, my research was much more manageable.

Once it was all organized, I had almost three pages of information, and a pattern had begun to emerge. The first red flag was that the judge had hidden some of his larger purchases in his wife’s name. The second was the fact that though the super PAC I’d found had given large amounts of money to the judge, I couldn’t prove definitively that the donations that the Everson Juvenile Detention Center made to the super PAC had found their way to the judge’s campaign fun, and it wouldn’t be hard to argue that the magistrate had no idea that the facility had helped to fund him. I also couldn’t find any proof that the judge had used