by Tim Kizer
“Where’s the recorder?”
“The study, the cabinet to the right of the desk. Jake, I apologize for what we did to you. I’m very sorry. I made a mistake. But I was never going to hurt you.”
“You told Ryan to cut off my finger.”
“I wasn’t going to let him cut off your finger. I just wanted to scare you, that’s all. And I was never going to kill you, please keep that in mind.”
“Relax, Eric. If you pay us the twenty million you owe us, we’ll let you go. We’re businessmen, not killers.”
“Yes, of course. I’ll pay you the money, just don’t kill me.”
“Jake, I parked my car on the side of the road,” Jeff said. “Let me put it in the garage.”
“Okay.”
Jeff came back ten minutes later.
“What are we going to do with the bodies?” he asked Sam.
The gun his father had used to kill Ryan and Patrick was unregistered, so they didn’t have to extract the bullets from the bodies.
When the police found the bodies, they would interrogate Pruitt and he might tell them about Jeff. This meant that the millionaire had to die. (It was only in the movies that you could massacre a bunch of people while rescuing a captive, and be called a hero. In real life you went to prison for it, unless you were a law enforcement agent.)
Had he touched anything in Pruitt’s Mercedes?
No, he hadn’t.
Had he touched anything in the garage?
No.
The great room?
Just the phone. He’d have to wipe it.
He had left no fingerprints in the guest bedroom he had been held in.
In the dining room only the computers and the table had his fingerprints on them. They should take the computers with them because the police might be able to figure out that they belonged to New Horizons.
They would kill Pruitt after they got their twenty million dollars. How long would it take Pruitt to arrange the payment? If he had twenty million in his bank account, it should take minutes. If he needed to sell some stocks, it might take a few hours.
Would the cops get suspicious when they discovered that Pruitt had wired twenty million to an offshore bank account shortly before his death? They would if it appeared that Pruitt had been murdered.
They would have to make Pruitt’s death look like an accident or suicide.
“Do you have trash bags in this house?” Sam asked Pruitt.
“Yes,” Pruitt said.
Pruitt was going to be the prime suspect in the murder of Ryan and Patrick because they had been killed in his house and because he had no alibi. If the cops found the murder weapon in Pruitt’s pocket, they would surely pin this crime on him. They would have no trouble thinking up the motive.
He thought Ryan and Patrick were screwing his wife, so he shot them dead.
“After we leave, you’ll put the bodies in trash bags and bury them,” Sam said.
“Okay.”
“Do the guys that brought the computers know that you kidnapped me?”
“No.”
“Who else besides you and these two morons knows that you kidnapped me?”
“No one.”
“You can’t tell the police about Peter or me. Do you understand?”
“Yes, I understand.”
“Do you have a computer in this house?”
“Yes. It’s in the study.”
Sam heard Jeff’s stomach rumble angrily.
“Are you hungry, Dad?” he asked.
Jeff smiled. “No. I just ate something that disagrees with me.” Jeff rubbed his belly.
“What was it? Milk and cucumbers?” Sam chuckled.
“I think it’s the sushi I had for lunch.”
Sam pulled out Pruitt’s phone and put it on the table. “I want you to call your wife and tell her you’re on business in Los Angeles. Tell her you’ll be back in a few days.”
“Okay.”
After Pruitt dialed his wife’s number, Sam pressed the Speaker button.
“Hello,” a woman’s voice said.
“Hi, honey,” Pruitt said. “I’m in Los Angeles. I’ll be here for a few days.”
“What are you doing there?”
“I’m working on a deal.”
“Okay.”
“I love you, honey. Goodnight.”
Pruitt hung up.
“I’ll check the house,” Sam said to Jeff.
There were seven rooms on the first floor and six on the second floor. Sam covered every light switch and every doorknob with his handkerchief before touching them. In the study, he found the surveillance recorder and saw that it was switched off. When he finished checking the house, he went into the foyer, opened the front door, letting in the cold night air, which smelled of damp earth, and looked down the concrete driveway. He couldn’t see the road, not because it was dark but because the road was far from the mansion. The sparse trees scattered around the property loomed like black ghosts.
Sam stepped down the porch and walked about seventy feet from the house to get a better view of the surroundings. Crickets’ soothing chirping was the only sound he could hear.
At least a hundred and fifty yards separated Pruitt’s mansion from the house on the left and three hundred yards from the one on the right. There was a thick wall of trees about two hundred yards behind Pruitt’s mansion, which stretched from one side of the lot to the other. Sam was relieved to find that none of the neighbors could have heard the gunshots, at least not without trespassing on Pruitt’s land.
Sam felt fresh and invigorated when he went back inside.
“Now let’s talk about our money,” Sam said to Pruitt. “I want you to wire the twenty million to our account right now.”
Pruitt touched his swollen lower lip and then said, “I don’t have it.”
“You don’t have twenty million?”
“No,” Pruitt said with an apologetic smile.
“You mean you don’t have it in cash?”
Pruitt shook his head. “My net worth is less than twenty million.”
“You were worth three hundred million,” Jeff said. “What happened to that money?”
“My companies have been losing money for the last three years. Also, I’ve made some bad investments.”
Sam frowned. “Sell your stocks.”
“They’re worth only two million dollars.”
“How much cash do you have in the bank?”
“About two hundred grand.”
“How much are your houses worth?” Jeff asked.
“I have about eight million in equity.”
Even at fire-sale prices it would take Pruitt at least two weeks to sell his houses, which was too long.
“Why the fuck did you agree to do this if you didn’t have the money?” Sam yelled.
It was a rhetorical question, and Sam knew the answer. Pruitt had intended to screw them over. The son of a bitch had thought he was dealing with pushovers. Well, the joke was on him.
“I’m sorry.” Pruitt smiled. “I’m very sorry, Jake.”
“Motherfucker.” Jeff hit him in the stomach.
Pruitt grunted and doubled over, wincing.
“How long will it take to sell the stocks?” Sam asked.
“It takes the funds three business days to clear,” Pruitt said.
Three business days? Jesus Christ!
“So if you sell them now, you’ll get the money on Friday?”
“Yes. We can wait here. I won’t cause any trouble, I promise.”
Sam looked at Jeff. His father shrugged.
“Are you expecting anyone to come here?” Sam asked Pruitt.
“No.”
“What about the housekeeper?”
“I suspended the service for three weeks.”
“Your wife—can she show up here?”
“No. I told her my friend was staying at this house. I was going to keep you here for a few weeks.”
“If she shows up, I’ll kill
her. Do you care about your wife?”
“Yes.”
“Good. By the way, did you tell her about the procedure?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Where does your son live?” Jeff asked.
“He lives with me. But he wants to get his own apartment.”
“Let’s go to the study,” Sam said.
In the study, Jeff turned on the computer and told Pruitt to show them his bank accounts.
“How many accounts do you have?” Jeff asked.
“Four.”
“Do you have offshore bank accounts?” Sam asked.
“I have one with a bank in the British Virgin Islands.”
“So you have five bank accounts?”
“No, I have four—three in America and one in the British Virgin Islands.”
When Pruitt logged into his first American bank account, Sam saw that the total account balance was $40,592.66. There was $62,663.69 in Pruitt’s second American bank account. Pruitt had a little over thirty grand in his third American bank account and seventy-two grand in his offshore account. The combined total for all four accounts was over two hundred and five thousand dollars.
“I’d type faster if you took off the handcuffs,” Pruitt said.
“We’re not in a hurry,” Sam said. “Now show us your trading account.”
Pruitt opened the login page of his brokerage website, typed in his username and password, and pressed the Enter button.
The value of Pruitt’s account’s net assets was $2,000,163.53. Looking at the screen, Sam wondered if this was Pruitt’s only trading account.
They could torture Pruitt until he told them about his other trading accounts, but Sam had no desire to do it (mainly because he wanted to be done with this as soon as possible). Two million two hundred thousand dollars was enough; it was a fraction of what he had planned to make, but it was nothing to sneeze at. As they say, best is the enemy of good.
They would find another rich guy with a terminally ill kid by the end of the year, Sam was sure of it.
“Sell them all,” Sam said.
As he entered sell orders for his stocks, Pruitt said, “Are you guys hungry? There’s food in the fridge.”
Sam realized that he hadn’t eaten since noon, and his stomach growled.
When Pruitt finished placing sell orders, Sam pulled out the piece of paper with the name of their bank and their account number, put it on the desk, and said, “I want you to transfer to this account all the money from your bank accounts. You can leave a grand in each account.”
“Okay.” Pruitt nodded.
Chapter 39
1
After Pruitt initiated the money transfers, Sam handcuffed his arms around a leg of the coffee table in the great room. At midnight Sam logged into their account at Cayman Commercial Bank to see if the money had arrived.
The account balance hadn’t changed.
“How long will it take the money to hit our account?” Sam asked Pruitt.
“A couple of days.”
Two days.
Two business days. If Pruitt wired the two million dollars received from the sale of his stocks on Friday, they would get the money on Tuesday.
They should stay here at least until Monday night, just in case.
Sam switched off the computer, then went to the window, opened the drapes, and looked out toward the road.
Had the neighbor’s surveillance cameras caught his father’s car entering Pruitt’s driveway? They might have. Were they powerful enough to read the license plate?
Suppose the police found out Jeff had visited Pruitt in Bartonville. What would he tell them when they asked him about the purpose of that visit?
He would say that he had pitched Pruitt an idea and that he hadn’t seen Ryan and Patrick.
Sam turned around, and his eyes fell on Patrick’s body. They’re going to start stinking soon, he thought.
They had to take the corpses out of the dining room.
Sam put on the dishwashing gloves he had found in the kitchen, and said to Jeff, “Let’s move the bodies to the library.”
“That’s a good idea,” Jeff replied. To Pruitt, he said, “Don’t try anything funny.”
As they carried Ryan’s body, Sam saw that Jeff had a preoccupied look on his face.
“What are you thinking about, Dad?” Sam asked.
They entered the library and laid the body on the floor by the sofa.
“I’m not sure about this,” Jeff said.
“What’s not to be sure about?”
They walked out of the room.
“I don’t think we should take his money.”
“Why?”
“It’s too risky. Let’s just waste this guy and go find someone else.”
“It’s not that risky.”
“The cops are going to know we got the money. They’re going to ask questions.”
They picked up Patrick’s body—Sam grabbed his legs and Jeff his arms—and headed for the library.
“No one’s going to ask any questions, Dad. Besides, he already wired us two hundred grand.”
“I’m talking about the two million. Let’s take it in cash. No wires. Two million will fit in a suitcase.”
“What if he calls for help while he’s in the bank?”
“Good point.” Jeff yawned.
“If the cops start asking questions, we’ll get new bodies.”
“Yeah.” Jeff smiled. “Great idea.”
After wiping off the blood that had dripped onto the floor from the bodies, Sam asked Jeff, “How did you find me?”
Pruitt, who lay on the couch across from them, raised his head from the pillow.
“I put a GPS tracker on this motherfucker’s car last Saturday. You see, I didn’t trust this guy.”
“How long did you wait for me by his house?”
Jeff had given Sam a ride to Pruitt’s place and been supposed to take him home after the meeting.
“An hour.”
Sam volunteered to watch over Pruitt tonight. Before Jeff retired to the bedroom, Sam, wearing the dishwashing gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints, went to the garage and took the keys to the Ford Explorer.
2
The next day Sam loaded all of their computers except one into the trunk of Jeff’s Cadillac.
On Thursday, December 7, Sam logged into their offshore bank account and saw that all the transfers made by Pruitt had cleared. Now they were two hundred grand richer.
The plan had begun to pay off.
Thanks to the ritual, they would become millionaires in just five days.
The ritual had saved him from execution. The ritual was going to make him wealthy.
It was August 2 of last year that his father had first told him about the ritual. The ritual instructions were written on the piece of paper that was glued to a page in the three-hundred-year-old French book on black magic Jeff had bought at an antique book store in New York. At first they were reluctant to test the ritual themselves. They gave the instructions to a man named Douglas Fleming so he would try the ritual and find out if it worked. Unfortunately, Fleming got caught and was sentenced to life imprisonment. They hadn’t heard from him after his arrest, which meant that either Fleming hadn’t swapped bodies with a cellmate or the guy he had switched bodies with hadn’t been released yet.
The first person they had sacrificed was a fifteen-year-old girl named Jennifer. Sam killed her in Toronto on October 29 of last year. She was cute and slim and had nice breasts. His friends Mickey and Frank Garrison were the first people they had tried the ritual on. Mickey and Frank were twenty-two years old and resided in Fort Worth at the time. Sam had chosen them because they were identical twins (he figured switching bodies was not going to affect their lives). He performed the ritual in his house on the night of November 13, after the Garrisons fell asleep. When Mickey woke up the next morning, he had been astonished to discover that he was wearing Frank’s clothes and Frank his and that his cross tattoo ha
d moved from his forearm to Frank’s.
Sam told Jeff that the transfers had cleared, and his father high-fived him.
“Are you going let me go as soon as I wire you the two million?” Pruitt asked.
“No. We’ll let you go when the money hits our account,” Sam said.
“Why?”
“Because we’re afraid you’ll cancel the transfer. You’re not a trustworthy person, Eric.”
3
On Friday, Pruitt received the proceeds from the sale of his stocks. As he typed their bank account number into the wire transfer form, Pruitt said, “How do I know you’re not going to kill me after I wire the money?”
“I told you we’re businessmen, not killers,” Sam said. “We’ll let you go on Tuesday, I give you my word.”
After sending the wire, Pruitt called his wife and told her that he would be back on Tuesday.
The next morning Sam asked Pruitt if he knew any rich people with terminally ill children.
“Yes, I do,” Pruitt said.
“Tell me their names.”
“You want to offer them your services?”
“Yes.”
“I know one guy. His name’s Andrew Broder. He runs a hedge fund. He’s worth three hundred and fifty million. His son has leukemia.”
“What’s the name of his fund?” Sam opened the notepad to a blank page.
“Prism Capital.”
Sam jotted Broder’s name and the name of his fund down on the notepad. “What’s his phone number?”
“It’s in my cellphone.”
Sam took out Pruitt’s phone, pressed the Home button, and said, “What’s the code?”
“Four, nine, three, eight.”
Sam entered the code. He found one Andrew Broder on Pruitt’s contact list. He showed the record to Pruitt and asked, “Is this him?”
“Yes.”
Sam wrote down Broder’s number. “Does he live in Dallas?”
“He lives in Highland Park.”
“If he wants to talk to one of our previous clients, will you talk to him?”
Pruitt hesitated, and then said, “Okay. But don’t tell him I gave you his name.”
“Sure. I can pay you a finder’s fee, if you want.”
“How much?”
“Five percent. Do you want it?”
“Yeah.”
“Do you know any rich people with terminally ill parents?”
