The Chemist

And now she was outside of Philly in this cheap hotel room, a heavily perfumed deodorizer warring with the smell of stale cigarette smoke, staring at the neat stacks of paper laid out on the bed.

The subject’s name was Daniel Nebecker Beach.

He was twenty-nine. Fair-skinned, tall, medium build, medium ash-brown hair with longish waves – the length surprised her, for some reason, perhaps because she so often dealt with military men. Hazel eyes. He was born in Alexandria to Alan Geoffrey Beach and Tina Anne Beach née Nebecker. One sibling, Kevin, eighteen months older. His family had lived in Maryland for most of his childhood, except for a brief stretch in Richmond, Virginia, where he had gone to high school for two years. Daniel had attended Towson University and majored in secondary education with a minor in English. The year after graduation, he’d lost both parents in a car accident. The driver that had hit them was killed as well; his blood alcohol concentration had been .21. Five months after the funeral, Daniel’s brother was convicted on drug charges – manufacturing methamphetamine and dealing to minors – and sent to serve a nine-year sentence with the Wisconsin Department of Corrections. Daniel had married a year later, then gotten a divorce two years after that; the ex had remarried almost as soon as the rushed divorce was final, and she’d produced a child with the new husband – a lawyer – six months after the wedding. Not terribly hard to read between the lines on that one. During that same year, the brother died in a prison fight. A very long rough patch.

Daniel currently taught history and English at a high school in what most people would consider the wrong part of DC. He also coached girls’ volleyball and oversaw the student council. He’d won Teacher of the Year – a student-voted award – twice in a row. For the past three years, since the divorce, Daniel had spent his summers working with Habitat for Humanity, first in Hidalgo, Mexico, then in El Minya, Egypt. The third summer, he’d split his time between the two.

No pictures of the deceased parents or brother. There was one of the ex – a formal wedding portrait of the two of them together. She was dark-haired and striking, the focal point of the photograph. He seemed almost like an afterthought behind her, though his wide grin was more genuine than the expression on her carefully arranged features.

Alex would have liked the file to be more filled out, but she knew that, with her detail-oriented nature, she sometimes expected too much of less obsessive analysts.

On the surface, Daniel was totally clean. Decent family (the self-destructive cycle that had led to the brother’s death was easy enough to understand in light of the parents’ crash). The victim in the divorce (not uncommon for the spouse of a crusading teacher to realize that the salary would not support a lavish lifestyle). Favorite of the underprivileged kids. Altruist in his free time.

The file didn’t state what had first caught the government’s attention, but once they’d scratched that surface, the dark came seeping out.

It seemed to have begun in Mexico. They hadn’t been watching him then, so it was only the bank numbers that told the story. The forensic accountants had put together a well-documented history. First, his own bank balance, which had sat at just a couple of hundred dollars after the divorce, was suddenly plus ten grand. And then a few weeks later, another ten. By the end of the summer, it was sixty total. He went back to work in the States, and the sixty grand disappeared. Maybe a down payment for a condo, a fancy car? No, nothing visible, nothing on the record. The next year, while he was in Egypt, there were no sudden increases in his finances. Had it been gambling? An inheritance?

That alone wasn’t enough to catch anyone’s attention without some kind of a tip-off, but she couldn’t locate the catalyst in the file. Even with an explicit tip, someone in the accounting department had to have been putting in overtime or else was very, very bored, because despite the lack of urgency, the financial analyst had hunted down that original sixty thousand dollars like a bloodhound with his nose to the ground. Eventually he found it – in a new bank account in the Caymans. Along with another hundred thousand.

At this point, Daniel’s name was put on a list. Not a CIA or FBI or NSA list – an IRS list. Not even a high-priority list at that. His name wasn’t very near the top; he was just someone to look into.

She wondered for a moment how his brother’s death had affected him. It looked like he had logged some fairly consistent visits to the brother, his only family left. Wife runs out, brother dies. Seemed like a decent recipe for pushing someone deeper into his bad choices.

The money kept growing, and it was in no way consistent with what a drug mule or even a dealer might make. Neither job was so well compensated.

Then the money started to move and became harder to trace, but it added up to about ten million dollars in Daniel Beach’s name bouncing around from the Caribbean to Switzerland to China and back again. Maybe he was a front, with someone using his name to hide assets, but as a general rule, the bad guys didn’t like to put those kinds of funds into the hands of unwitting schoolteachers.

What could he be doing to earn it?

Of course they were watching his associations at this point, and it paid off quickly. Someone named Enrique de la Fuentes showed up in a grainy black-and-white photo taken by the security camera in the parking lot of Daniel Beach’s motel in Mexico City.

She’d been out of the game for a few years, and this name didn’t mean anything to her. Even if she had still been with the department, it probably wouldn’t have been a part of her usual caseload. She had done some occasional work on the cartel problem, but drugs never got the red lights flashing and the sirens screaming the way potential wars and terrorism did.