“Would you just answer the question? The place is close to the state line.”
“About an hour north of Baton Rouge? Close to the state line?” Annoyed, Moira put her cup down with a little more force than necessary and some of the tea splattered out, drops spraying out onto a stack of new contracts.
Grabbing a tissue, she blotted up the marks and studied it. “Neve, why don’t you call the lawyers? They have better access to that info than I do. Hell, we own property in twenty-eight states, at last count. And in forty-two countries.”
Neve made a disgusted noise. “Why the hell do we need so much property for anyway?”
“Because we own companies. Companies that make things. Companies need to be built on land as they haven’t figured out how to do that Cloud City thing that was so cool in The Empire Strikes Back. Our tech departments are working on it, though, I promise.” Her voice started to fade out near the end and she grimaced, reaching for her tea.
“Smart-ass. And you’re straining your voice again.”
“That’s because I had an unexpected meeting—and I’m arguing with you.” She stuck her tongue out at the phone and felt a little better for it.
“We’re not arguing. Has it been that long since we have that you’ve forgotten what we are like when we argue?” Neve almost sounded amused. “Okay, maybe this will help. The Bittner project?”
Moira paused, then resumed lifting her tea. “The Bittner project?” After taking a long, slow sip, she closed her eyes. Nothing came to mind. Finally, she turned to her open laptop and accessed the database. McKay Enterprises was the head of a huge conglomeration and they had fingers in many, many pies. She couldn’t possibly keep track of all of them.
A few keys strokes had the information coming up on the screen, and it left her frowning. “Okay, I see what you’re asking about. The Bittner project—home and surrounding property purchased. It’s fairly local. I’m surprised I wasn’t made aware of this purchase.” She eyed the date, did some mental math, and suppressed a curse. She knew exactly why she wasn’t more aware. The entire deal had been closed within a six-week period. The six-week period during which a certain somebody with penetrating eyes and a mouth that she could still feel against her own had been injured in the line of duty.
Mentally, she hadn’t been sitting behind a desk and shuffling figures, attending board meetings, and listening to key personnel on new patents or suggestions on new product lines. Mentally, she’d been in a hospital on the other side of the world, holding onto Gideon Marshall’s hand and telling him that if he died, she’d kick his ass.
He’d ended up with a medical discharge and a few months later, he was a cop in Memphis. Six months after that, she was married to Charles Hurst.
If Gideon had come home then …
If he’d come home, what would have happened?
She’d didn’t know, but he hadn’t.
A chance dinner in New York had her bumping into Charles again and when he’d asked her out, she’d all but flung herself into his arms, desperate to forget that fear, desperate to forget Gideon even.
It had been a kick in the face, in the heart for him to actually come home just a year later. But she’d already been married, and when he looked at her, it was with a sad sort of understanding.
They’d been over.
If he’d come home …
Stop, she told herself, forcing herself to focus on the details on the screen.
It wasn’t a typical deal for McKay, although the notes highlighted in the file made sense in a way.
“Okay, so what about this piece of property?” Moira asked.
“I want it.”
The bluntly stated words had Moira sitting up straighter. “Ah … Neve? It’s company property.” She eyed the sum paid for the said property and added, “It cost 1.2 million dollars.”
“It wasn’t supposed to be ours anyway. I want the property. I’ll take the money out of my account and give it to the damn company. I want the deed, Moira.”
“Well, I need more than that,” she said. Her voice made a weird creaky noise halfway through and she swore. “Neve, we’re not discussing this on the phone.”
“Damn it, the owner promised to sell it for two hundred thousand to his neighbor. They had a contract—it was signed and the guy had even put money down. They just hadn’t done anything official because the original owner wasn’t going to move until he … shit, he was old, Moira. Then the old guy up and had a heart attack. His son comes along and says no dice, puts the land up for sale. Then McKay came in, brokered this deal and bought the land, and now this man I’m here with is out fifty thousand and the land he’d been planning to use to expand the dog rescue operation he’s got going.”
At the end of her sister’s rant, Moira was sitting there with her eyes covered and the bad, bad feeling that she was going to have to make some heads roll by the time she was done.
“Are you there?” Neve demanded.
“I’m here.” Her voice made that weird sound warning her that it wasn’t going to last much longer if she wasn’t careful.
“What do we need a house for anyway?”
Good question, Moira thought. The gist of it had been in the notes in the computer, but she wasn’t going into that with Neve out there and her here. “The general idea is to use it for company retreats and team-building exercises.” Since nobody was around, she grabbed a pen from her desk and mimed stabbing herself in the temple. “Have you seen the contract?”
“I’m holding it right now. Most of my experience with contracts is all from my time in modeling, but it looks legit, Moira.” Neve’s voice was shaking. “A company retreat. This guy worked his whole life for this and our company stole it out from under him for a company retreat?”
The pure fury in Neve’s voice was no surprise. Moira suspected she’d be pissed off herself before too long. Feelings, egos, and pride often ended up bruised in business, but the McKay family did business the way they’d always done it—ethically.
If somebody had ended up screwed over in a deal with the company, she was going to raise hell.
“Does it look legit?”
Neve heaved out a sigh. “I just said—”
“You majored in business, Neve. You’ve dealt with contracts before—you just said so. Is it for real?”
“Yes,” Neve said after a moment. “It’s for real. It’s got a notary’s signature on it. I figure somebody could find loopholes if they wanted, but that’s not how we do business.”
“No.” Moira stared out the window in front of her. “It’s not. Who is this guy?”
“His name is Zeke Sanders. I … well, he raises dogs. I wanted to buy one.”
Something in Neve’s tone had Moira’s eyes narrowing, but she was already straining her voice to the limit and she couldn’t deal with this if she ended up voiceless again. “Okay. Give me addresses—no, better idea. If you’ve got enough bars, take pictures of the contract with your phone and shoot them my way. I’ll need details of what all I’m looking for, names, et cetera.”
“We’re going to make this right, Moira.” Neve didn’t wait for an answer. She just hung up.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Moira contacted somebody from legal to handle transfer of the house from the company to Neve, putting the price at something more fitting of what it was probably worth.
She wasn’t certain just why this particular place had gone at over a million—it certainly wasn’t worth it, not from where she was sitting. She’d pulled up the full profile on the transaction and while the property was pretty, the house itself was dated and would have to be overhauled before it could be used as any sort of retreat.
That alone would cost several hundred thousand.
And the house was just sitting there. Nobody was doing anything with it. From what she could tell, it hadn’t been touched in the seven years since they’d acquired it.
“Sanders, why didn’t you try to take us to court or something?” She rubb
ed at her temple. Not that she liked the idea of it, but this was an ugly weight in her gut and she didn’t like knowing some guy had been pretty much robbed of fifty grand.
And she still couldn’t understand why anybody would want to buy this for some so-called retreat. The location was awful.
It was so far away from anything, none of the staff who would likely use it would have found it appealing after the first few hours. Moira might have just been delighted—she didn’t mind roughing it when she could actually get away. But she knew most of her key personnel, and their idea of roughing it was getting coffee they poured themselves … or worse, coffee from a gas station instead of a Starbucks.
Starbucks hadn’t quite penetrated that quiet little spot in Louisiana.
Neither had any store larger than a mom and pop–style grocery store or a Dollar General.
It didn’t make sense.
After she’d compiled all the information she could, she put in a call to Jenny Green—the assistant for one Kevin Towers.
Kevin was the one who’d handled this project.
Kevin had been with McKay for a long time. She would give him the courtesy of trying to explain before she gave him a cardboard box and told him to clear out.
But she really, really wished she had a cardboard box in her office.
“I’m sorry, Ms. McKay … he’s … excuse me one moment, ma’am. Please, Mr. Towers isn’t in. One moment and I’ll take a message—no, I cannot take it now.” The woman came back on the phone and said, “I’m terribly sorry, ma’am. Mr. Towers isn’t in. He left just a short while ago, taking the rest of the day off. He wasn’t feeling well, I don’t think—sir, I will be with you in a moment.”
“Jenny. What seems to be the trouble?” Moira stared at the wall in front of her.
“Nothing I can’t—”
As a male voice rose in the background, Moira pushed a button on her phone. Baxter appeared a moment later. “Baxter, Jenny Green seems to be having some trouble over in her area. Can you send security?”
Jenny’s voice hesitated, then firmed. In the background, the man’s voice grew louder, a decidedly aggressive note to it.
As Baxter’s jaw squared and he nodded, Moira turned her attention back to the woman on the phone. “Jenny, why don’t you pass the phone over to your … guest?”
There was a moment of silence.
“You might want to take it, sir. Perhaps she can connect you with Mr. Towers.”
A brusque, hard voice came on the phone a moment later. “Who the fuck is this?”
“Would you mind looking down at the desk in front of you?” Moira closed her eyes, brought a mental image of Jenny Green to the fore of her mind. Neat woman, tidy. Kept her desk pristine. There was a blotter on her desk, never smudged, never out of place. And the embossed M was hard to miss. “Do you see the blotter … in case you’re wondering, the blotter is the big square pad—square, four sides, you know?”
“Bitch, if you don’t—”
Moira continued to talk, keeping her voice low and steady. She’d learned a long time ago that the way to deal with the sort of men who tried to put her in her place was to just carry on about her business. More often than not, they had questions or just things they wanted to hear themselves say. Early on, there had been several men in the company who’d thought they could pull the penis card. They hadn’t lasted long. Now, though, the asses she dealt were either looking to get money from her or steal business away from her, and their favorite method was laying down the testosterone.
Most of them learned pretty quickly, though. They all wanted something and they’d be quicker to figure out how to get it if they listened to what she was saying.
This idiot was no different.
After a few seconds, he realized she hadn’t shut up and he lapsed into silence. She shifted the call to her Bluetooth seamlessly and started to walk. She thought she’d timed it right.
“So you see the blotter? There’s an M on it. That’s short for McKay. As in McKay Enterprises. That name sound familiar?”
“Seeing as how that’s the damn building I’m in, it should.”
“Good. Then let me introduce myself.” She rounded the corner and pushed through a pair of frosted glass doors—the doors that led from her executive offices to the rest of them.
A big, bulky man with a shaved head stood holding a phone to his ear. Jenny sat at her desk. Two security guards came through the door only seconds after Moira.
“The bitch you’re talking to would be Moira McKay.” She turned off her Bluetooth and waited for him to notice that he could still hear her. “As in … the CEO of McKay Enterprises.”
He turned slowly and stared at her.
She gave him a polite smile. “Now, sir, let me ask … who the fuck are you?”
* * *
Moira rubbed her temple as the head of security updated her.
He’d been the one to take the thug down.
Grizzled and graying, Hank Sheffield didn’t look like much at first, but under that professional veneer, the man was like a rattlesnake. It wasn’t wise to cross him.
“His name, according the city cops, is Landon Hayes. Got a record. A local leg-breaker for a small-time bookie.”
Pressing her fingers to her eyes, she said softly, “Please don’t tell me that Kevin had a gambling problem.”
When Hank said nothing, she looked up at him.
He shrugged. “You asked me not to tell you.” He leaned forward and peered through the window. “They’re loading the big moron now. Stupid as he is, he might not make it through the first night in the joint. What was he thinking, coming in here like that?”
“Well, he does work for a small-time bookie,” Moira said, going for a little levity. “If he was any good, he’d have moved up to the big leagues.”
Hank shot her a grin that made the creases in his face deepen. “Good point, Ms. McKay.”
She rubbed at her neck and fought the urge to slump in her chair. Too many people were manufacturing excuses to come by her office. She wasn’t about to be seen looking like she wanted to collapse.
Of course, Hank was there, but Hank was … different. He was a friend.
He’d come on board a few years before her father died, and he’d been one of the people who’d guided her through when she was fumbling to find her way.
“Maybe that’s why he pulled this shit with the house.”
“Ma’am?”
She looked over at Hank and shook her head. “Nothing. I’ve just got a mess on my hands and Towers was involved. I’ll have to talk to him.” She didn’t know if she wanted to wait until Monday, either.
Especially not if he had some leg-breaker—she shuddered at the image—trying to hunt him down here at his place of employment.
“Why don’t you go on home, Miss Moira?” Hank said, falling back on the name he’d used for her when they first started working together. “You’re not going to fix anything right now.”
She should argue.
She knew she should.
But he was right.
She needed to step back and think, get her head cleared so she could look at all of this with a fresh outlook.
So she nodded. Maybe Hank looked a little surprised and that made her smile.
Impulsively, she moved over and hugged him. “Thank you,” she said. “For always being there.”
The older man was blushing when she pulled away. He awkwardly patted her shoulder and jerked a thumb to the door. “Go on now.”
* * *
The drive back home was too damn long.
Moira could think of only one thing that would make anything about this day remotely salvageable. That would be to just undo it. If she could figure out a way to rewind and just erase it all, that might work.
She didn’t even want a redo, because how could she make any of it turn out any better?
That being the case, she thought maybe the next best solution would be to find a bottle of Macallan dow
n in the basement. On rare occasions, sitting down with a bottle of fine scotch was really just the only answer. It was only for rare occasions, but she didn’t often have a day like this.
If she didn’t have any down in the basement, then damn it, she was going over to Brannon’s to raid his supply. He stockpiled liquor the way a miser hoarded gold.
She’d bring a bottle to Ferry and get good and wasted. It wouldn’t change anything that had happened, but it would buy her some oblivion and when she sat down to think about this again—after her hangover cleared up—she would have a new perspective on everything.
Granted, she didn’t know how a new perspective would help.
The IRS agents were giving her and her family the benefit of the doubt, it seemed, although they did want to come over and take a look at her property, inspect what they had at the family vault and all that jazz. They wouldn’t find anything.
Somebody was trying to cause grief for them on that front, claiming treasure was buried on their land.
Uneasy, she rubbed her throat.
Then there was the weird deal with that house that Neve had told her about.
A house they didn’t need.
One they’d overpaid for and was somehow connected to a man who had a bookie out looking for him. Yeah, this was all kinds of bad news.
She’d tried to call Towers several times on the drive back home with no luck. She would get in touch with him somehow. The man’s job was history. Her executives were expected to uphold a high moral standard, and he’d gotten himself in enough trouble that he had a bookie coming to her company. Jenny could have gotten hurt. Anybody in the building could have gotten hurt.
And it wasn’t even the first time that scumbucket had come around. A few of the others had recognized him. One of the junior execs had even sheepishly admitting to lending Kevin a few thousand dollars to “buy some breathing room.”
As she swung the car up the drive and waited for the gates to open, she told herself to stop thinking. She needed to get inside Ferry, get her some damn scotch and just shut her brain down. Completely.
The late winter sun shone down, the rays hitting the multitude of windows and shattering into a thousand dazzling beams. Normally the sight brought at least a small smile to her face, but not today.
The Right Kind of Trouble Page 14
