Chapter Nine
Rey said, “Before, when we got the job and I started looking, the affair popped up pretty quickly. There was nothing in his accounts that seemed off. We talked to the woman; she confirmed and showed pictures and receipts.”
Nat nodded. She had been the contact with Stephanie. Isla motioned for Rey to continue what she already knew he would say.
“But after we dropped off the info, Isla was saying how something didn’t feel right, and when Victor Corrigan showed up, I started wondering too.
Why did a company care if two of their employees were banging?
He wasn’t her superior. And I thought maybe it was because the company is big on image.
An affair when one of them is married with a baby on the way is a bad look, but it still wouldn’t damage the company because that’s personal shit. ”
“Truth,” Nat seconded.
Isla said, “So you looked again.”
Rey nodded gravely. “So I looked again. Deeper this time.”
Isla waited. “And?”
“And this time, there was something. A big something. Like Nat just said—like we all said,” he corrected when Isla was about to protest. “This job was a quick turnaround. Urgent, right? What usually takes us weeks to find and verify and verify again, we found in days. Like it was just waiting for us to find it.”
“A present wrapped in a perfect bow,” Isla added.
Rey pointed at her, a silent bingo. “We found what they wanted us to find. The affair is true. The embezzling . . . I’m not sure, because why wasn’t it there when I initially ran it through my cursory systems?
Why pop up all of a sudden? How’d the media get ahold of info that I, who am way better than Chinese hackers, mind you—no offense, Nat—”
“Wait.” Nat startled. “What?”
“—could not find?” Rey finished, dodging a projectile Nat threw at him. “Hey, watch my shit.”
Isla said, “Because someone planted it.”
Rey pointed. Bingo again.
Nat groaned and leaned over with her knees on her elbows and her forehead dropped into her hands. Her long, dark hair fell over her like a curtain.
“Like someone had the affair ready for us to find. Yeah,” Rey confirmed. “I went back in now that Michelle and her management weren’t up my ass to get this info in.”
Isla asked, “Do you think the firm was in on this?” She hated to think that Michelle would have anything to do with a setup that had led to someone’s death.
Rey shook his head. “Nah. They don’t make the bombs. They just light the match to the fuse. We were the ones who filled it with the components so it could go boom.”
Nat dismissed his extended analogy. “Forget all that analogy shit, Rey. What’s the bottom line?”
He checked himself. “So I find all this evidence of embezzlement, right? Looks like he did the shit. He’s up a creek, okay? But when I looked deeper, the info has inconsistencies.”
Isla prompted, “Like?”
Rey faced one of his keyboards and began typing.
The screen showed one of Leonard’s bank statements that they’d delivered to the PR firm and the Corrigans.
“Well, for one, the bank account Leonard supposedly established and funneled the money into was in his own name. Smart people who are embezzling and setting up accounts wouldn’t use their names and have such an easy path to link them.
That account wasn’t his. It was established by someone else under his name, and the money was just transferred to accounts he owned, not long before we got the case. ”
Nat asked, “How would you know that? If they did it under his name, where’s the proof?”
Rey looked at Nat like she was some poor, unfortunate soul. “For one thing, the IP address of the computer that created the account didn’t originate from either his work or his personal computer.”
“And how would you know that?” Nat asked, making Rey work for it.
“Girl, come on. Who am I and what do I do? Don’t try to play me,” Rey said. When Nat rolled her eyes at him, he returned the act, then continued unfazed. “The IP address originates from Virginia. Leonard hasn’t been to Virginia in years, if ever.”
Virginia. The word struck at Isla like a bad violin cord, plunging her into a basin of anxiety she thought she had long overcome.
“I cross-checked the witnesses too. The woman who had the affair with Leonard, Stephanie? Ghost. As in she no longer exists. At least, not her name, Social, address, phone number, or anything else she gave me. The company ID we found for her was a fake name for a temp employee who was interestingly hired in those same two weeks the fake account was established. She was there just long enough to strike an interest in poor Leonard, get him hemmed up in her love so they could hold it over him.”
Isla said, “So that he’d be the fall guy if the embezzling was ever found out.
” She was boiling. The unease and guilt she’d once felt?
Gone. She was pissed now. This was supposed to be child’s play to a person like Rey.
He found the tech stuff. She planned and set the scenes.
She was the POC with Michelle and their other clients.
Nat was the decoy or the prop, with Isla as backup.
Rey’s tech support was never problematic.
It had always been ironclad and never failed them. Until now.
Rey shook his head regretfully. Then he tried to appeal to the both of them. “But this was really convincing, high-level stuff. Like I said, if we’d had more time to vet and vet again . . . you know we like to rinse and repeat before we give the info up. If we’d had more time.”
“More time?” Isla seethed. “A man is dead, Rey. A family is ruined because of ‘more time.’ That can’t be our excuse.”
Rey shrugged. “It’s all I got. But all my preliminary checks were solid. Nat met with the fake temp receptionist, and she was convincing, right?” He was half standing, leaning over his screens, imploring Nat for a save.
Nat nodded vigorously, twisting her long tendrils of hair in her hand. “If she was acting, she could teach me a few things. I can admit when I’ve been outperformed.” She almost looked like she was impressed by the fake temp receptionist.
The room was getting too hot, and Isla slipped out of the light jacket she’d been wearing. She stood up and paced the floor while Rey and Nat continued discussing how majorly fucked up this was. Isla stopped moving, and their conversation stopped as well. They waited for her to speak.
Isla asked, “What do you think, Nat? You’re the storyteller here.”
“I just perform stories. I don’t make them,” Nat corrected. “But I think he was given the choice of which was the greater evil to him.”
“But he wasn’t embezzling,” Rey said. “What was the blackmail?”
Isla picked up the thread Nat had begun to unravel.
“The greater evil, Rey, is whether he wanted his wife to learn he was unfaithful or for her to think he stole money. He could always say he’d tried to steal the money for their family.
He couldn’t explain screwing around while she was having his baby.
So he agreed to take the heat for the embezzling. But the damage was done.”
Rey finally got it. “He realized Stephanie was a honey trap. He was going to be named as the embezzler anyway. He’d betrayed his wife. He couldn’t face it. In his mind, there was only one way out for him.”