Chapter 32 Hailey
Hailey
I don’t understand.” Hailey thought if maybe she shook her head long enough, Dennis would change his opinion. “How can you be so sure?”
“It just doesn’t feel like his financial signature.
” He had come into Hailey’s office holding a baseball, and he stood before her tossing it from one hand to the other, which was making her want to kill him.
“Look, I’ve been through all Rainier’s accounts, so I can see if he’s tied to these funds or Sunshine Enterprises in any way at all.
His money’s spread out, some in trusts, some in bonds and crypto, but it’s all legit.
He’s got no unexplained assets; apart from the boat he’s got no money-laundering red flags, and I can literally see exactly how he’s paid for everything. ”
“How can you see?”
Dennis crossed his arms, and the baseball disappeared into his armpit. He pressed his lips into a straight line.
“What about the Bratenahl apartment?” Hailey thought of its rumpled gray bedsheets and stark surfaces and felt nauseous. “Rainier’s got an apartment in Cleveland that I don’t remember seeing in your original report on him.”
“Rented in September. Short term, no deposit, two thousand a month. I’ve seen the lease.”
“Could he be running money through his wife? What about something in Rebekah’s name?”
“That’s what we started out looking for, remember? There is literally nothing on this earth in Rebekah’s name except a yoga studio membership in Pepper Pike. You can be one thousand percent sure of that.”
Hailey could feel sweat on her forehead, on her palms. “What else can we do?”
Dennis’s eyebrows met in the middle as he frowned. “Look, if his money is findable, if he has any contact to it, then I know about it.”
“But again, how? I need to be sure. This goes beyond the firm. This guy . . . I told you before, this man is going after me personally.”
“Have you told any of the board this? Clarke or Straus?”
“No. It’s more complicated than that.” Hailey rubbed her temples for so long she almost forgot Dennis was in her office.
“It’s called Pegasus,” he said finally.
“What is?”
“The program I use. It’s spyware. It moves through phones, computers.
I can see anything on them—his bank accounts, messages, everything.
It’s, umm, not really legal, so . . . just trust me, it does the job.
So, could Rainier have gotten a bunch of cash from nowhere and physically dropped it off in this Liberian account?
I guess so, but the money that you got never touched anything he’s ever touched, and he’s never mentioned Bank Nacional Liberia or Sunshine Enterprises in anything I’ve scanned through.
And he’s never been to Liberia, either.”
“You’re that sure?”
“Yeah. I’m sure.”
“Why doesn’t that make me feel any better?”
“I’m sorry.”
A thought slotted into place in Hailey’s brain. “You can read all of his messages? WhatsApp and texts and everything?”
Dennis set the baseball down on the edge of Hailey’s desk and sank into a chair. “Yeah.”
“Did he . . . did you come across anything at all about me?”
“Some. Not too much. Nothing very flattering.”
“I see.”
Had this kid listened to the voice message she had left for David?
Could he have read, say, a message from David to Rebekah referring to how he’d slept with her lawyer?
Did it even matter now, what some twenty-two-year-old IT geek knew?
Hailey kept her eyes focused on the baseball.
For once she was unsure of the next move.
“You should probably know that he’s thinking of filing an injunction against you.” Dennis picked at the rubber on the bottom of his shoe with extreme focus. “For harassment.”
“I yelled at him,” Hailey said quickly. “I lost my temper.”
“Ah.” If Dennis had heard her voice message, he gave nothing away.
Hailey picked up the baseball; the last time she’d held one in her hand had to be ten years ago. She and her dad used to play catch after dinner in the summer, until she’d left for college.
“Does Rainier have any proof that I yelled at him?”
“He does,” said Dennis, finally reddening. “Sorry.”
It was strange, but Hailey thought of Mack then, of how it must have been for him when the trouble with his student had started. So this is how an entire career goes up in smoke. Mack hadn’t even been guilty, but Hailey was! Suddenly the whole thing felt like one big, terrible joke.
“So this Liberian bank,” she said. “If it isn’t David Rainier sending me this money, if it really isn’t him, then what are the clients like? Shady rich people?”
“Rich offshore corporations,” said Dennis. “No names, just account numbers. The account these payments came from had eight figures attached.”
“Well, that’s good news.” Hailey allowed herself a hint of a smile at Dennis’s response. “I mean, I wouldn’t want to take weird money from some average rich person, would I?”
Dennis reached out and took his ball back. “Listen, like I told you: this is not some nice forgotten relative. You don’t run your cash through a bank like this unless you have to.” He stood up, but Hailey couldn’t quite bring herself to end the meeting.
“So what do I do?”
“You’re asking me?”
“I guess I am. What would you do about this money?”
He took his time, then he said, “Get your bank to wire it back. Tell them it was a mistake, that you just didn’t notice it.
That’s what I’d do.” He nodded goodbye, and then he stopped in the doorway and turned back to Hailey.
“Actually, I probably wouldn’t. I’d probably just keep it and hope no one ever came looking for it . . . But that’s just me.”
* * *
The concrete guy was late. He hadn’t called, and Hailey had left work early to be home for him, having spent the rest of the morning researching Bank Nacional and also “walls cracking new houses.” Now she was down in the playroom studying those cracks up close.
Mabel’s purple My Little Pony was drinking from a magic stream that flowed two inches wide and a lot deeper than it had last week.
The cracks were spreading fast. If she sat here long enough, Hailey might actually be able to see the floor fall apart in front of her.
“No!” Mabel’s shout tore through Hailey’s tender nerve endings. “You know you aren’t allowed to have those!”
Gigi had emerged from the walk-in toy cupboard with a plastic box almost as big as she was. It contained Hailey’s old collection of Polly Pockets.
Hailey sighed. “Gig, you know the pieces are too small. We have to save those until you are a little bigger. Even Mabel doesn’t play with those.”
Gigi studied the tantalizing pastel toys through the clear plastic. “Please, Mommy, can we just see them? Just to look? You’re here now, and you’re never here.”
Gigi knew just the right button, and Hailey caved immediately. “Just until the concrete guy comes, okay? Then we put the Pollys away.”
By the time she’d finished her sentence, Gigi had torn the dusty lid from the box and was opening a blue heart-shaped plastic case to reveal the tiny dollhouse inside—the perfect size for the redheaded Polly, no bigger than a toddler’s thumb, that Mabel held up to inspect.
The redhead had always been Hailey’s favorite Polly doll.
Mabel and Gigi took turns opening each of the small cases: a princess castle, a park with a merry-go-round and a slide, a pet store, a café that still had its tiny milkshakes. The sets had been carefully preserved as new by Pammy Byers and passed to Hailey when Mabel was born.
“Look, the kitchen floor in this one is just like our old floor!” cried Mabel. “ ’Member, we used to do hopscotch on there?”
Gigi stared down at the inch-long checkerboard sticker.
“I don’t remember that at all,” she said, and Hailey was struck for the thousandth time how odd it was that she sounded so much older than her big sister.
But they’d lived in Bratenahl for more than a sixth of Gigi’s life; no wonder she had no memory of the Lakewood house.
They had started lining up the open cases on the carpet to make a city when the concrete guy finally arrived.
He was not at all what Hailey had pictured—he was young and wiry and drove a Lexus SUV instead of a mixer truck.
He was unfazed by Gulliver’s barking and bent down to scratch the dog’s ears.
“I took a quick look outside,” he said to Hailey. “But Simeon said the worst damage is in the basement?”
“I guess so.” That word damage didn’t sit well. “It seems to be spreading.”
“Okay, let’s take a look-see. Do you want shoes off?
” He was dressed in crisp khakis and a bomber jacket, but he did have huge work boots with splashes of paint and crusty concrete on them.
Still, she didn’t feel up to explaining to him why he’d have to leave them outside the door in the cold (Gulliver was already sniffing around them hungrily), and besides, the floor was already permanently trashed, so what did it matter?
“It’s fine.”
“Cool place you got here,” he said as they made their way to the basement. “I like the high ceilings.”
He bid a friendly hello to the girls, but his eyes were already on the cracks in the drywall when Gigi asked him, “Are you the concrete guy?”
“Most people call me Ben,” he said. “But yeah, I pretty much am. Mind if I pull up the carpet?”
They watched as he took photos of the floor and the walls with his phone, and then the girls went back to the Pollys while he worked his way around to the furnace room. The crack along the drain had grown even deeper, and the ones in the walls had splintered and fanned out in new directions.
The guy gestured toward the raw wood door in the corner. “Can I go in there?”
“Sure. It’s my husband’s office. He’s not home right now,” she added, when the guy went to knock. Then as he opened the door, she had a panicked moment: What if Mack had left the Sunshine Enterprise photographs of himself out on his desk?