He smiled, but it wasn’t a nice twist of his lips. “Family? I cheated on my wife. Hell, I never even suspected what was going on with my teenage daughter. You tell me, Libby. How terrible would it be if I never made it back?”
“Don’t even talk like that. Your daughter needs you!”
“And you, Libby? What do you need?”
I wanted to tell him I needed us. I wanted to tell him if we could just get home, everything would be all right. But mostly, heaven help me, I saw in my future a lovely orange prescription bottle filled to the top with fresh white pills…
Z had been right. Family was a terrible thing to waste and that’s exactly what we’d done. We’d battled one another, we’d betrayed one another, and in the end, for what?
We’d return home, except instead of finding solace, we’d have to confront the wreckage of our lives.
And still my eyes welled up. I gazed at my husband. A man who’d hurt me. A man I’d lied to in return. And I found myself crying. For the home we used to have. For the marriage I’d thought we’d built together. For the future I’d always hoped to give my daughter.
Justin got off his bunk. He put his arms around me, and though I was stinky and smelly and awful, he tucked me against his chest.
“Shhh,” he murmured. “I’m going to fix this, Libby. Trust me, just trust me. Tomorrow I’ll make everything all right.”
I let my husband hold me. I focused on the reassuring strength of his arms, the sound of his heartbeat. Then I pressed my head into the curve of his shoulder because, once upon a time, I had loved this man so much and I knew, one way or another, I’d never get to feel that way again.
Three P.M. Monday.
Dead family walking.
Chapter 33
TESSA AND WYATT FOUND RUTH CHAN in the baggage claim of Terminal E. The petite CFO sported large sunglasses, a dark tan and a bad case of nerves. When she spotted Wyatt, approaching in his sheriff’s uniform, she visibly flinched.
Then, she squared her shoulders, adjusted her grip on her lone suitcase and marched toward them.
“Any word on Justin or his family?” she asked.
Tessa pegged the woman at late forties, early fifties. Obviously Asian in descent, but something else as well. An exotic woman, beautiful even in simple black yoga pants and a cream-colored wrap top. Though oversize sunglasses covered half her face, it was obvious she’d been crying. Tear tracks stained her cheeks, while a hoarse rasp thickened her voice.
“We have some questions,” Tessa began.
“I don’t want to go to the office,” the CFO stated immediately. “Someplace neutral, that would be best.”
Ruth had yet to eat. They settled on Legal Sea Foods, even though it meant switching terminals, as the restaurant had booths suitable for a private place to talk. Wyatt offered to carry the woman’s suitcase, but Ruth declined, marching resiliently forward, as if keeping moving was the secret to keeping composed.
Fifteen minutes later, they were ensconced in a back booth of the dimly lit restaurant. Ruth had parked her suitcase after removing a slender laptop, which she was now firing to life.
She had yet to speak to them, appearing to be on a mission. For now, Tessa and Wyatt were content to wait. They ordered clam chowder. Ruth ordered grilled salmon and a glass of white wine.
Then, the CFO took a deep breath and finally faced them. She had removed her sunglasses. Up close, she was a wreck. Wan skin, bruised eyes, haggard expression. A woman who’d either had the world’s worst vacation, or was taking the news of her boss’s disappearance very hard.
Ruth spoke first: “Anita said they were taken Friday night.”
“Justin Denbe and his family have been missing since Friday night,” Tessa supplied.
“Any word? Contact? Leads?”
“We have received a ransom demand. Nine million dollars, due tomorrow, three P.M.”
Ruth flinched. “Denbe Construction doesn’t have that kind of money.”
“Justin contacted the life insurance company. He’s invoking the risk-of-imminent-death clause.”
“Of course,” Ruth murmured. “Half the life insurance, plus the kidnapping insurance…that makes sense. Will the company pay it?”
“Not our call.”
“They’ll pay it,” Ruth said, almost as if speaking to herself. “They have to pay it. If something happened to Justin…the public fallout, let alone potential legal liability… They’ll pay it.”
Tessa and Wyatt didn’t say anything, just continued to study her.
“So.” The CFO released a pent-up breath, her shoulders coming down. “This is really a kidnapping-for-ransom case. Justin is an obviously wealthy man. Unfortunately, that made him and his family a target.”
Again, Tessa and Wyatt didn’t say anything, just continued to study her.
“It’s just… When I first heard the news, when Anita called… I thought for sure… I mean.” Ruth took another deep breath, then, when that wasn’t enough, a fortifying sip of wine. “I was so scared something worse had happened. That Justin…that maybe, someone had felt a need to hurt him. And I worried… I worried it was my fault.”
The food arrived. A cup of chowder for Tessa, a bowl of chowder for Wyatt, the salmon for Ruth.
Wyatt dug into his chowder. Ruth attempted her own meal, but when she picked up her knife and fork, her hands were shaking too badly. She returned to her glass of wine.
“Why don’t you start at the beginning,” Tessa suggested. “Tell us everything. If you want to help Justin, that would be best.”
“I wasn’t in the Bahamas on vacation,” Ruth stated. “I was there on business. Justin sent me. Someone has been embezzling money from Denbe Construction. I’ve been following the money trail.”
Tessa got out her phone, set up the record app and they got down to business.
In August, Ruth had noticed a minor billing mistake. Numbers on an invoice had been inverted, and instead of paying the vendor twenty-one thousand dollars, accounts payable had cut a check for twelve. Obviously Denbe Construction owed an additional nine thousand dollars; unfortunately, by the time the mistake was discovered, there wasn’t time to release the additional funds before payment deadline.
Ruth had decided to call, personally apologize for the error and assure the vendor that the appropriate check would be placed immediately in the mail. Except when she called the number, it was disconnected. She had then Googled the company’s name for additional information, only to discover that no such company seemed to exist.
To be sure, she’d followed up on the physical address of the listed company, a street address in New Jersey. Further investigation revealed the street address belonged to a UPS store, while the suite number corresponded to a PO box.
Which had told her enough. The address was fake. The phone number fake. The vendor fake. Denbe Construction was being scammed.
Immediately, Ruth had dug deeper. She’d determined that the vendor, DDA, LLC, had sent a total of sixteen bills over the past three years for a total of nearly four hundred thousand dollars. The contractor was attached to a major senior care facility with a total build cost of seventy-five million. Four hundred thousand dollars, spread out over sixteen payments, was relatively small potatoes. The invoices listed miscellaneous finish materials plus installation costs, nothing out of the ordinary for such a project.
Meaning, at first glance, the invoices were logical enough, and the amounts due small enough, not to attract notice or arouse suspicion. But where had DDA, LLC, come from?
Given the number of ongoing construction projects, not to mention the widespread use of subcontractors, new vendors were regularly added into Denbe’s system. Authorized bills arrived with a code in the memo section that attached them to the appropriate build project; generally Chris Lopez, as head of the build team, or even Justin himself, provided the vendor with the code, a stamp of approval. DDA, LLC’s invoices all had the appropriate bill code in the memo section, meaning there was no rea
son for Ruth or her staff to question the bills.
Now, once a month, Ruth issued a report to both Chris and Justin itemizing all income and expenses associated with the various projects for their review. On the one hand, this should have been an opportunity for one of them to spot the name DDA, LLC, and question it. Then again, the monthly reports often ran half an inch thick, an endless blur of vendor names and subcontractor expenses, starting with checks in the tens of millions of dollars and ending with personal reimbursement requests in the tens of dollars.
Ruth could see where a relatively small check to a relatively minor vendor might get lost in the shuffle. In fact, she was guessing that was the theory behind the crime—rather than defraud a hundred-million-dollar company out of four hundred thousand dollars at once, go after it in drips and drops. Twenty thousand here, fifteen there. While it might sound like a lot of money to some people, for a company of Denbe’s size, those amounts weren’t even rounding errors on most of their projects.
A solid little scam that had slowly but surely been adding up.
Ruth had checked with Denbe Construction’s bank to see if they could tell her anything more about the cleared checks. They could; based on the information stamped on the back, each check had been deposited into an offshore bank account. In the Bahamas.
So the fake vendor billed to a post office box in New Jersey, then deposited Denbe’s checks into an account in the Bahamas. And had been for three years without anyone suspecting a thing.
Four weeks ago, Ruth had waited for Justin to stay late at work. Then, when no one else was around, she’d entered his office and made her case. As she’d expected, he’d been furious, then just plain insulted that someone had dared to steal from him.
Ruth had proposed taking the case straight to the FBI. Offshore accounts were involved, and they would need major investigative guns to demand information from a bank in the Bahamas. Even then, she wasn’t sure what level of cooperation they’d get. Banks were notoriously prickly about releasing a customer’s private information, though rules were finally loosening, thanks to the war on terrorism.
Justin, however, hadn’t wanted to involve the police just yet. Instead, he wanted to bait the perpetrator.
“He asked me to go to the Bahamas. I have the bank account information for DDA, LLC; I got it from our bank. So Friday, I was supposed to walk into the Bahamas bank and close DDA’s account. Take the money and run, I suppose, except it is our money.”
Ruth gazed at them expectantly.
“How can you close out an account that’s not yours?” Tessa asked. “Don’t you have to have signing authority or something?”
“I was going to wing it. Our assumption is that whoever is behind the fraud doesn’t visit in person, right? So just do it. I’m a CFO, I can talk the talk. And Justin wanted the money transferred back to Denbe, which I’m fully authorized to do.”
“He wanted the person who stole from you to know you’d stolen back from them,” Tessa filled in. “Hence the transfer to Denbe.”
“Exactly.”
“Did it work?” Wyatt asked with a frown.
Ruth shook her head. “I was one day too late. The person, the thief, had transferred out all the funds on Thursday. But this is the crazy part: When I told the clerk that the transfer had been a mistake and I wanted to know who’d authorized the transaction, the clerk became very nervous and asked if that meant there was an issue with the other accounts as well. Turns out, whoever set up DDA didn’t have just one account. He or she had fifteen accounts at the bank. For a total of eleven-point-two million dollars.”
“That’s a little bit more than four hundred thousand,” Tessa said blankly.
Ruth had given up on dinner completely. She sat, twisting the stem of her wineglass.
“I called Justin Friday afternoon. I told him the account was closed, that I’d been too late. But I didn’t tell him about the other accounts, the other money. I wasn’t trying to lie or mislead him. It’s just… I already had a suspicion, and in these kinds of situations, you can’t afford to be wrong. I told Justin I needed a couple more days. I’d call him again on Monday.”
“How’d he take it?” Wyatt asked.
Ruth shrugged. “He was frustrated that we’d missed out on reclaiming the money. But…we’d known it was a long shot. And while Justin wasn’t happy that someone had possibly stolen four hundred thousand dollars from his company, that kind of loss, over three years, we could live with it.”
“Except you’re saying the perpetrator had actually accrued eleven-point-two million,” Tessa pressed.
Ruth sighed, dark eyes miserable. “I stayed up all Friday night, all last night. I’ve been poring over contractor lists, project P and Ls, picking out small, random vendors, then Googling them. I’ve found six more that don’t exist. It will take a full forensic audit, easily a good six months of work, but I’m guessing, in the end, all eleven-point-two million came from Denbe Construction. Was stolen from right underneath our noses.”
Tessa’s eyes widened. She could tell Wyatt was equally startled. “Someone scammed eleven million dollars in the past three years? And you’re just now noticing?”
“That’s the thing. The invoices, the fake vendors. The amounts are all so small. In some cases, literally a couple thousand dollars. The kind of payments designed to slip between the cracks.”
“But you said eleven million—”
“Exactly!”
Then, Tessa got it. “You’re not talking about the past three years.”
“No!”
“You’re talking…ten, fifteen?”
“Maybe longer.”
“Twenty?” Now Tessa was definitely caught off guard.
“Predates me,” Ruth said, “so it’s hard to be sure. But some of those years were the company’s biggest. Justin had just taken over, landing three two-hundred-million-dollar builds at once. The amount of billing and invoicing going on, with employees who were overstretched and a computer system that was relatively antiquated. To end up with over eleven million dollars, the embezzler must’ve had at least a couple of big years, and those were the years when you could’ve gotten away with faking very large invoices and no one would be the wiser.”
“Fifteen to twenty years,” Tessa murmured.
“Predates Chris Lopez,” Wyatt said.
“Predates most of us,” Ruth commented. “Except…” She wouldn’t meet their eyes anymore. She picked up her glass, swallowed the last of her wine. Her hand was still trembling, the misery once more etched into her face.
A longtime employee. One who’d have access and authority. Also, by virtue of being one of the only females in a predominantly male business, possibly even a close personal friend of the CFO.
Anita Bennett. Denbe Construction’s current COO and Dale Denbe’s former mistress.
Chapter 34
I DOZED OFF, dreaming of a long hot shower. I stood in my own bathroom, custom glass doors steaming up as I let the hot spray cascade down my naked body. Then, lathering up with my favorite shampoo. Watching thick white suds slide down my arm, chasing away the salt-encrusted itch of my own sweat and grime.
In my dream, I could feel my skin sloughing away, like an exoskeleton to be shed. Prison bars, cinder-block walls, hard concrete floors. I watched their remnants dissolve into a faint gray crumble, then wash down the drain.
If I stopped, looked down the drain, I knew I would see Mick’s face. Radar. Z. They were gone, melted like Dorothy’s Wicked Witch and now spiraling down the bowels of Boston’s sewer system where they belonged.
But I didn’t stop. Didn’t want to look. To seek them out would be to resurrect evil. And this was my dream, my shower. Where the soap smelled liked fresh-picked oranges, and I was no longer in my Back Bay town house, but on a beach in Key West, where I would emerge from the bathroom to find my husband waiting in bed, wearing nothing but cool white sheets tangled around his long, lean body.
Oranges. He would feed me oranges
. The promise of pleasure.
The taste of my pain.
My shower changed. The water disappeared. Pills sprayed out instead. Hundreds, thousands of long, oblong tablets. Hydrocodone. My precious painkillers, returning to me. Complete with orange-colored bottles, of course.
The promise of pleasure.
The taste of my pain.
I fell to my knees on the hard tile, and let the pills bury me.
I JERKED AWAKE, my eyes momentarily blinded by the overhead lights. I blinked, feeling my heart race in my chest. Justin was standing in front of the cell door. I must have made a noise for he was staring at me.
“You okay?” he asked.
Funny question coming from a man whose face looked like a badly beaten side of beef with one eye still completely swollen shut.
“Ashlyn?” I asked.
“Asleep, top bunk.”
I gave him a look, and Justin double-checked. He nodded, confirming Ashlyn was definitely sleeping. Seemed like lately our daughter had become very good at faking it.
I got up, crossed to the stainless steel sink and attempted to get a sip of water.
“Why is the water pressure so lousy?” I asked, if only to break the silence.
“Big building, demanding many miles of pipes to bring the water from there to here. Installing a more efficient system would cost more money, except, for what?” Justin shrugged. “Inmates got nothing better to do than wait.”
He crossed to me, rubbing the back of my neck, like he used to do once upon a time.
“I dreamed of a shower,” I murmured. “A long hot shower with unlimited soap.”
He smiled. “I smell that bad?”
“No worse than me.”
“It’ll be over soon, Libby. This time, tomorrow, you can be showering all you like.”
I wanted to believe him. Could use the reassurance. And yet…
“Shouldn’t you be sleeping?” I asked. “You know, conserving your strength?”