Joker in the Pack (Romantic Suspense, Completed, Watty Winner)

Chapter 30

A few minutes later, Nye started the engine again. "When I asked what you thought, I meant about Ronnie and Eleanor rather than the rights and wrongs of the prison system."

"What? Ronnie?" I couldn't think straight. Nye had magic lips.

"Babe, you're so sweet when you get like that."

Nye thought ditzy was cute? That was good news. If he kept kissing me with all that heat and darkness and knee-trembling wizardry, ditzy promised to be a permanent state of affairs.

He squeezed my hand. "Ronnie and Eleanor?" he prompted.

"Oh, yes, of course. Eleanor wasn't a very nice lady, was she? I'm not surprised my mother stopped talking to her."

"You said she was playing poker online when she died. How do you know that?"

"Someone told me. In the pub, I think." I snapped my fingers. "Yes! It was Graham, and he'd been drinking. It was soon after I arrived in Upper Foxford, and I'd just heard Eleanor had died on the couch. That's why I threw it out."

"He said that in the pub? In front of everyone?"

"Yes, on curry night, so the place was packed."

"And right after that, the trouble started?"

I saw where Nye was going with this. "You don't think the two are connected, do you?"

"I don't believe in coincidences. Something set this dude off, and poker can be a dirty game. I need you to give me a list of everyone you can remember being there that night."

"I can try, but there were so many people. Floyd in the grocery store might be able to help. He was the person who introduced me to Graham in the first place."

"I'll get somebody to speak to him, although I bet he'll be even less help than last time if he was pissed."

"He did seem a little tipsy."

"So it'll probably be a waste of time. If Eleanor was playing online poker, what happened to her computer? Did it get stolen?"

"No, both of them are at my friend's house. I couldn't guess the passwords, and she knows a computer guy."

"Both?"

"A laptop and a MacBook. I did wonder why Aunt Ellie had two."

"Money laundering. Did she have two internet connections as well?"

"How did you know?"

"Do you know anything about money laundering?"

"I assume you don't mean accidentally putting a ten-pound note through the washing machine?"

He laughed. "It's the process of taking the proceeds of criminal activity and making it appear as if it was earned legitimately."

"I don't really get it."

"There are three stages. First comes the placement, when the dirty money's introduced into the financial system. Then layering, when it's moved around to disguise the origins. Lastly is integration, where the money's reintroduced to the economy, and it appears to be clean."

"But how can poker do that? And what was the vicar saying about bookies? What if she lost her bets? Wouldn't she just lose all the money?"

"It's easy enough to cycle money through the betting system and lose very little of it. At a betting shop, you can play on the game machines, and over time, the bookie's always going to keep a couple of percent, no more. It's written into their own rules. So if you keep the stakes small and just keep feeding the money in, you'll get most of it back. And better than that, you'll get a receipt saying you won that big wedge of cash in your pocket in a game of chance. It looks legitimate, and it's even tax-free."