Exposed: A Jaded Regret Novel

by L. L. Collins

  “We need Beau,” I said. “He has access to your financial advisor, right? He would know how much money it was and how often?”

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure we should tell him.” April looked back at the computer. “What if, whoever this is, Natalie has been protecting Beau? You know there’s nothing she wouldn’t do for him.”

  She was right. This more than likely had everything to do with her brother and not much to do with her. After all, Natalie hadn’t done anything. “This email was dated five days ago.”

  “The day Natalie collapsed,” April said.

  “So that leaves two days for her to meet this demand. Or we find out what the secret is.”

  “Is there a way to trace this and find out who it’s from?” April leaned back in her chair.

  I picked up my phone. “There is when your brother’s an FBI agent.” I hit Kale’s number and waited.

  “Hey, bro,” he answered.

  “Kale. I need your help.” I quickly summarized what we found and what we needed to find out.

  “Give me the email address. I’ll get right on it. Give me a little bit and I’ll call you back.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  “Hey, Kai? Is Natalie okay?” I’d called my mom when she was admitted and swore her to secrecy. I guessed that didn’t include my siblings.

  “Yes, she’s fine, but we need to figure out who this person is. Natalie doesn’t need to deal with one more life-altering disaster. Whoever this is, they’re threatening her.”

  “I’m on it, little bro. Don’t stress.” The call disconnected.

  “We need to talk to Beau,” I said to April. “I know you don’t want to, but if he can help us with any part of this, we need him.”

  April nodded. “I’m afraid.”

  “Afraid of how he’ll react?”

  “Afraid of what this is all about,” she said. April stood and used shaky hands to smooth her dress down. “I’ll be right back.” I watched as she walked to the other side, where the band was working on some lyrics.

  I moved to the seat she was sitting in and looked at the file where Natalie kept all these emails. The emails had a similar underlying threat to “out” her secret or to “hurt” the one she protected. I could only assume that was Beau, too.

  I wondered who it was and what Natalie was hiding. There was no finding out right now since she was unreachable. On top of that, I wasn’t sure she was in the mental state to deal with this even if we could tell her about it.

  No, we would have to take care of this for Natalie, once and for all.

  “What’s going on?” Beau appeared at the office door. April stepped in behind him, fear still shadowing her eyes.

  “Look at this.” I pushed the chair back so he could read the current email. He scanned the words, his brow furrowing as he comprehended the threat.

  “What the fuck is this?”

  “We don’t know,” April said. “But Natalie has a whole file of them. It seems someone has been blackmailing her for money for years.”

  Beau stood, his back rigid and his jaw set. “How can we find out who’s doing it? Is this about me? Is she protecting me?”

  “My brother’s an FBI agent. He’s checking the email address for me. We don’t understand who this person is, or who Natalie is protecting. The emails are just cryptic enough for it to be confusing. Could you think of anyone who’d want to hurt you or Natalie?”

  He turned dark, stormy eyes to me. “Maybe one of our worthless foster homes? I don’t know what information they may have, though. Everyone knows we were in foster care and that my dad killed himself. That’s all public knowledge.”

  “Hmm, that’s a good lead, though. Records from when you were in foster care shouldn’t be too hard to find, and he can then look and see if the email links to any of them.”

  “Natalie cannot find out about this. She needs to focus on her health, not on whatever fool has been stealing money from her. I can’t fucking believe she did this for years and never asked us for help. Dammit.” He looked over at us, and we both nodded our heads in agreement.

  “We need to call our financial advisor. His name is Alex Williamson.” Beau opened the drawer and lifted a book out. “Here it is.” He picked up the office phone and pounded the numbers.

  “I’m going to get the rest of the band,” April said to me. “They need to know, too.”

  She disappeared around the corner just as Beau got an answer on the line. “Alex Williamson, please. Beau Anderson.”

  I blew out a nervous breath, waiting.

  “Alex, Beau Anderson. I’ve been better, man. My sister’s sick—no, nothing serious, but we just ran across some emails she got from someone over the last few years. Has she been sending money to someone? A lot of money?”

  He listened, and I watched his face morph from nervous to angry. “What do you mean, you can’t tell me? She’s my sister! You manage all of our money!” He listened for a moment. “So this was from her personal account. Can you at least tell me how long it’s been going on?”

  Beau growled in frustration and slammed the phone down on the desk. “Well, that got me nowhere. Natalie paid it out of her personal account, or at least I assume she did since he won’t give me any information at all. So without Natalie’s permission, we can’t find out anything.”

  “Not necessarily. If Kale determines this is someone trying to coerce money from Natalie, he may be able to subpoena her records to try to find this person. Don’t give up hope yet.”

  “What’s going on?” The band appeared behind us, all with identical concern on their faces.

  “Let’s go in here where there’s more room.” Beau and I led them into the other room, where we gave them the information we knew.

  “Fuck,” Johnny said. “This is all Natalie needs right now.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “We shield her from this,” Beau said. “We’ll figure this out. And whoever this person is, if we don’t get to the bottom of it in the next two days and they out her ‘secret’—”

  “We’ll deal with it. Whatever it could be. No one has any ideas?” I looked at Bex, then Mac and April. But I already knew. Natalie never told anyone. That wasn’t her. She dealt with things on her own, so she never had to bother anyone else. She protected them from whatever this was, figuring she could handle it on her own.

  Like she always did.

  “Natalie needs to focus on one thing. Herself. So if anyone talks to her at the end of this week, everything is fine. She has no access to television or internet of any kind while she’s there, so even if something gets leaked to the press, she’ll be safe. We need to make sure it’s long gone by the time she gets out.” I hoped and prayed Kale would be able to find something.

  Right on cue, my cell phone rang, and Kale’s name appeared. “Tell me you have something.”

  “I have a few IP addresses the emails are coming from, but that may be hard to pinpoint. I can trace it to the town just outside where Natalie lives, though, which is good. But I’m either going to have to fly down there or call a buddy who lives in Florida to dig deeper into this. If this is a case of extortion, I can’t do it all myself, anyway.”

  “Kale, I’d rather you come here and deal with as much as you can alone, or maybe get one guy you know you can trust. The second this hits the media…” I didn’t have to finish my thought. He knew what would happen. Anything Jaded Regret was huge news, and with us being just months away from the tour, we didn’t need the negative press. Even more than that, Natalie didn’t need it when she was fragile.

  “I figured as much. Let me see how fast I can get a flight and I’ll keep you updated.”

  “We only have two days,” I reminded him.

  “I know. I’m going to get there, brother. I promise. We’ll figure out what’s going on.”

  “Wait,” Beau said. “What if I respond to this person, pretending to be Natalie? Set up a place to meet instead of wiring the money?”

&n
bsp; “Not sure that’ll work. Whoever this is knows she is a public figure and doesn’t want to be outed. If all of a sudden Natalie wants to meet to deliver the money, it’ll raise flags. We don’t need them to escalate or cause further problems. Just sit tight for me. We have two days. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot, but I can find out a lot of information in that amount of time.”

  “We have the financial advisor Natalie uses to wire the money. Beau called him, but he won’t tell him where he wires it.”

  “Well, he will when I show up with a badge. That’s good. We can get the bank it’s going to and a name. Let me get going so I can get to you. I’ll call you back with details.”

  When the phone disconnected, we all looked at one another, the same look of disbelief on our faces.

  “What do we do now?” April asked, echoing all our thoughts.

  “We wait,” I said. “And we get this figured out for Natalie’s sake.”

  I was never so thankful for my brother’s job as I was right then.

  “We got another email,” I said to my brother. We set up headquarters at Natalie’s house. Kale arrived just hours ago with a buddy of his from New York and immediately they began investigating. They got with a Florida agent they knew, and the three of them made their rounds, starting with tracing the IP addresses of the computer used to email Natalie and continuing with getting the bank information from Alex.

  “What does it say?” Since the countdown was on to meet the deadline, it didn’t surprise me that another reminder would come in.

  “It says, ‘Don’t forget the deadline is coming. Don’t be stupid and fail this time. You wouldn’t want to see what I can do if you don’t follow through. Noon tomorrow. That’s how long you have.’”

  Kale read over my shoulder. “It definitely sounds like someone she knows. The problem is, who? We have our contact at children and family services looking into foster parents, but that’s taking longer since you didn’t live in Florida then. It seems more personal than a foster parent.”

  “Do we have a name yet from the bank?”

  “We do, but it could be an alias. People like this are smart. They get fake documents and open fake accounts. It’s not like this person couldn’t figure out that at some point they could be found using this bank account. So I fully expect it isn’t their real name.”

  “What’s the name? Any significance to their past?”

  “The name’s Jordan Albertson. Could be male or female. I have a background check running on the name, but I doubt I’ll find anything.”

  “So we have nothing.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Kale said. “It just means I have to call in more resources. Plus, we’re going to take a ride to the town and go to the places where the emails have come from.”

  I looked at Beau. “Does that name mean anything to you?”

  “I know the name Jordan. It was our mom’s maiden name. Nina Jordan was her name before it was Anderson.”

  “Does Albertson have any significance in your family?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t remember any.” Beau turned and paced the room, his fists clenched next to him. “Don’t tell me you think this is her. That fucking bitch ruined my life, and now she’s coming after my sister?”

  April hurried up to Beau. “Beau,” she whispered her hands on his face. “Look at me. Stop and look.” Beau immediately responded to her, his forehead resting on hers as he forced air in and out of his lungs.

  Kale watched the exchange, wide-eyed. “We don’t know anything yet,” he said quietly. “But this is good information.” He turned to his friend Ziggy. That wasn’t his name, I guessed, but that was what he called him. “Let’s do a search on Nina Anderson or Jordan and see if we can dig up where she is.” He turned to Beau. “When was the last time you heard from your mother?”

  He looked up at us. “The day she dropped me off at the fucking mental hospital and walked out the door, saying I wasn’t worth shit, and I was a monster.”

  Silence enveloped the room again. “Beau,” April said again.

  “I’m fine,” he said. When she pursed her lips at him, he nodded. “I am. Really.”

  “We got nothing by going to the places where the emails were sent. One was a library and one an internet café. Who knew those even existed anymore? We’re going to get the security tapes, but more than likely we won’t get them before tomorrow, which doesn’t help us in our short timeline. Whoever this is, they’re good at hiding.” Kale blew out a frustrated breath. “But we’re not giving up. We’re going to shift tactics.”

  “And do what?” Beau asked.

  “We’re going to have you respond to the email and pretend to be Natalie. We’re going to tell this person the money will be wired from a different bank, and it may take longer for processing.”

  “To buy us more time?” I asked.

  Kale nodded. “Yes, that, and to catch them. When they respond via email, we’ll have another location and can hopefully get somewhere with it. Also, we’re going to wire the money through a dummy FBI account. It’ll look like the money is there, but it really won’t be. This bank account the money has been transferred into over the last few years has been almost emptied out right after each transfer. So it’s only a matter of time before this person goes to the bank to try to withdraw the money. There will be a statewide alert on the account, so the second they try to get the money, the bank will notify us, and we’ll be there to take them down. They think they’re smart, going to different locations over the years over a tri-county area, but we’re smarter. We’ll have agents on standby to go to any location and take them down with just a moment’s notice.”

  “What happens when this person is apprehended?” Beau asked.

  “They’re arrested. We have all the emails and the bank records from Natalie to this person.”

  “And if it’s my mom?” Beau spat the words like they were poison in his mouth. There had been no records of a Nina Anderson or Nina Jordan for the last ten years. She essentially disappeared without a trace. Which meant more than likely, she didn’t disappear. She was hiding. For what reason, no one knew.

  Kale shrugged. “It doesn’t matter who it is. It’ll be over. The threat of whatever this person wanted to disclose to the public will be eradicated.”

  “Unless she talks from jail.” Beau put his hands through his hair. “I swear if it’s her…”

  “You let us handle it,” Kale said. “We’re going to get whoever this is.”

  “We have to take care of this,” I said. “By the time Natalie gets out, this whole thing needs to be over and done with.”

  “I know,” Kale said. “We’re going to do it, brother. Trust me.”

  “I trust you. Thank you for being here.” Beau echoed my thanks.

  Kale nodded at Beau. “Can you get into the email for me, please?”

  Beau sat at the computer, and we all watched as he got into Natalie’s email. Kale stood behind him, and we all scanned for any new emails, but there weren’t any.

  “May I?” Kale asked. Beau moved to the side, and Kale typed an email back. We all watched as he hit send. “Now we wait.” He looked at Ziggy. “Time to get the team ready.”

  Ziggy nodded. “We’ve got a task force ready on our go.”

  I stood, needing to pace some nervous energy. Beau and I looked at one another, a silent conversation happening between us.

  Together, we would make sure this ended.

  “We’ve got a response.” Kale walked to the computer and brought up the email. Beau and I were immediately on our feet. It had been a long six hours since he sent the email.

  “What does it say?” Beau asked.

  “It says, ‘I don’t care where the money comes from, as long as I get it. You don’t get any extra time, so if it’s not there by noon, I go straight to the nearest news station. I’ll be watching.’”

  “Do we need the extra time?” My stomach was in knots. I couldn’t sit around and wait for this one mor
e second. It took everything in me not to drive to where Natalie was and pull her into my arms.

  The only thing stopping me was that I knew she needed this time without all of us to get better. To do something for herself. So while she was there, we would be here. Slaying the dragon. Securing the castle. Making sure no one touched her again.

  “We don’t need the time,” Kale said. “We’re all set to send the money at 11:59 am. Then, we wait. It could be minutes, hours, or days, but they’ll goof up and go get the money.”

  “What if they don’t?” Beau asked the question I was wondering. “What if the email was enough to spook whoever this is and they call our bluff? What if they transfer the money to some offshore account and disappear?”

  Kale shrugged. “Anything’s possible. But now we have an IP address from where this email was sent, so we’re going to check out the location and hope someone remembers this person or has surveillance video. If they don’t surface at the bank in the next few days, we’ll have to escalate our search. Plus, the track record has been the same over the last several years. They go withdraw the money.”

  I sighed. I didn’t want to ask what the likelihood was of finding this person if we didn’t get them in the next few days because I wasn’t sure I wanted that answer.

  “I miss her.” Kale and I sat on Natalie’s couch, nursing a beer and trying to watch some action movie on television. Instead, he checked his phone obsessively for any update, and I replayed every moment with Natalie in my head, including the memory of holding her lifeless body in my arms.

  Kale smiled at me. Beau and the band went home hours ago with the promise of us calling them the second we knew anything. Ziggy, whose real name I learned was Ryan Ziegler, was asleep in the guest room.

  “It’s so good to see you in love, brother. I wasn’t sure you were ever going to realize you were missing something.”

  “I never cared if I was missing something until I met her,” I said. “How did you know Lilly was the one?”