“OK,” Griff said, thinking that this was a pretty accurate summary of Claire Worthington’s life as he’d imagined it, though he’d have added ‘take trips to the beauty salon’ to Leeza’s list of Claire’s daily activities. “With you so far.”
“Then one day, it all comes crashing down around your perfectly-coiffed blonde head,” Leeza continued. “An SEC investigation that’s been secretly in the works for three years. Criminal, federal charges laid against your husband for an elaborate Ponzi scheme. All the bank accounts frozen, all the assets seized, all five of your houses gone. Every lady-who-lunches that you’re ever air-kissed is running for the hills, and their husbands are backing away just as fast. You’re a social pariah, and you’re on your own and penniless, since your perfect hubby’s been deemed a flight risk and is languishing in some minimum-security country club masquerading as a jail. Right?”
“Right.”
“So what does Claire Worthington do? Quick as a flash – and with very little resistance from her husband, for reasons that I can’t quite figure out – she divorces Wilbur and disappears from the New York scene a year ago, seemingly without a single dollar in settlement. I mean, on the one hand, good for her, because fifty percent of nothing is nothing, and she’s nothing if not a piece of gold-digging arm-candy. Of course she dumped him in record time, and at first, I assumed that she just took off in search of greener pastures.”
“Uh-huh.” Griff nodded. “I figure that’s what she did, too. Went looking for meal ticket number two.”
“In which case, she’d be a wreck here in Denver. Right? Like… just what the actual hell does a woman like that know about making it on her own without a man to pay the bills? About finding and holding down a job? About living the kind of life that 99.9% of people in this city lead, and doing it all for a whole year while looking over her shoulder, terrified of being found out? Nothing, that’s what.”
“No argument from me,” Griff said.
“So… why is she so happy?” Leeza asked. “Why is she wandering the streets looking like she’s the most ecstatic woman to inhabit planet Earth?” She didn’t wait for a response; she went on right ahead and answered. “It’s because her marriage is just fine, really. And because she has one hell of a back-up plan and crash cushion, ones that keeps her safe, and I’m willing to lay every penny that I have that she has full access to some sizeable offshore accounts.”
“Mmm-hmmmm.” Griff sighed. “Go on.”
“Maybe she can’t touch ‘em now, because of the heat and because she isn’t allowed to leave the country, but the feds told me and so I know for a fact that she sold quite a bit of her family jewelry, and so she has a nice chunk of change that she’s living on. She can wait a while to hit the payload. I figure that she’s thinking that, yeah, things are shit right now, but she sees that pot of gold waiting at the end of the dark tunnel – sorry to mix my metaphors, but you get what I’m saying – and so she’s all cool and collected. Just biding her time, and when she thinks things have settled down enough and when she’s cleared to travel, she’ll walk on into the airport and be out of here first-class and in the blink of an eye.”
“Then she can start a new life on some island somewhere with lax extradition laws?” Griff said. “And relaxed banking policies?”
“Yeah, why not?” Leeza shrugged. “I mean, who’s going to stop her? So far, nothing concrete links her to any of her ex-husband’s schemes or scams, and even though she needs to stay in the country until she’s fully and formally cleared, she’s technically and legally an innocent woman. Nobody’s investigating her, not anymore, and even though the SEC knows that there are hidden offshore accounts, and they strongly suspect that she has access to them, nobody can find them. No accounts, no links, no proof… and without any of that, she’s free to wander the streets of Denver and buy t-shirts and be happy as a goddamn clam.”
“I got you,” Griff said. “And I agree – a woman like her should and would be desperate and panicked at losing everything the way that she did.”
“Also?” Leeza said. “If they can’t find the hard proof on her husband, and if his lawyers keep muddying the waters and getting evidence thrown out on technicalities, then he’ll be a free man soon enough. They can just disappear together and start living off the hidden bank accounts. I mean, why not?”
“Yeah,” Dallas said, rejoining the conversation. “I’m with y’all… if Claire Worthington is acting like nothing’s happened, then she’s doing it because – for her – nothing has happened. Nothing’s changed, not really. In her mind, all of this is just a temporary thing, just a tiny blip, and soon enough, she’ll be a stinking-rich woman again, living with the man that she loves enough to help scam people out of their savings. She just needs to hold the course, and if she does, the payoff is huge.”
“OK.” Griff ran his hands through his blond hair. “So… can we see the pictures now?”
Leeza nodded, slid her cell phone across the table to Dallas without a word. Griff leaned over a bit as Dallas started scrolling through the images, and he immediately felt his already considerable anger at and disgust for Claire Worthington grow exponentially.
Yeah, Leeza was right and no arguing about it: the only word to describe the woman was ‘content’. Despite the rushed, slightly-blurred quality of the illicitly-snapped pictures, Claire was clearly relaxed and natural as she dithered between two t-shirts, and happiness actually came off her in waves. It was truly like she didn’t have a care in the world, and it made the rage start to boil in Griff’s stomach.
Fuck, what this woman and her husband – oh, no, excuse me… ex-husband – had done to all those people was unforgivable and reprehensible and indefensible. It was criminal, and even though Griff never permitted himself to cross lines and get all emotional about clients or cases, this one was hitting him hard.
He knew why, of course. The son of a coal miner Dad and seamstress Mom from one of the most impoverished parts of Ohio, Griff knew all about working-class families. He knew just how hard his parents had worked to skimp and save for things for himself and his sister Felicia. He knew just how much they had depended on their pensions and medicaid until the end of their lives. They’d taught him the importance of a real work ethic; the integrity of an honest day’s work.
When he’d enlisted and gone to the Middle East, they hadn’t known much about the place he was going, but they’d been nothing but proud of him. They were salt-of-the-earth folk, in the end, and they may not have had many book-smarts, but they’d been serious and professional about what they did know. Most importantly, they’d been good, decent people. The kind of people who gave to others, just because they had that little bit extra to spare.
Now, what if some fucking Wall-Street tycoon who played with numbers on a laptop all day long had just shown up in his parents’ kitchen one day? Plunked himself down at that battered-up scrubbed wooden table where Griff had eaten thousands of his mother’s home-cooked meals, and promised them massive returns of their meagre and hard-won savings, all for no risk at all? Dazzled them with big words and colorful charts and a slick sale?
Griff knew damn good and well what would have happened: they’d have bought in. Despite his Dad’s life-long mistrust of city boys and rich bankers, he’d have liked Wilbur Worthington just fine, all because the man had come from the dirtiest of dirt-poor backgrounds. Worthington had started with less than nothing, and he’d fought and worked his way up from the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. Ralph Griffin would have respected that gritty and grim climb up and out, and he’d have seen a man who understood poverty intimately, who understood it deep in his bones. A man who had breathed it, and bathed in it, and battled to escape it.
And Ralph would have handed away the contents of his bank account to that man. He’d have told his wife Tilly to do the same, and she’d have listened. And they’d have lost it all.
Their savings. Their pensions. Their house. Their car. Their tiny plot of land.
&
nbsp; Everything.
Griff looked over at Leeza now, knowing that her Dad had lost all of that – and so, so much more. Because Harry Burns had also lost the will to live, and he’d ended his bleak misery with a shot to the head in the bathroom of the house that had been foreclosed on, just one day before he’d picked up that handgun.
Leeza’s father had lost his hope… an as far as Griff was concerned, stealing someone’s hope was about the worst thing that you could do to them. This was the Worthingtons’ real crime, in Griff’s eyes, the one that he was determined to work night and day to make right. Or as right as it was possible to make it. Considering the devastation that these two assholes had left in their wake, Griff couldn’t do nearly as much as he wanted to… but he was going to do what he could.
He was going to make them accountable, but since Wilbur was beyond his reach – in the hands of the federal investigators and prosecutors – Griff knew better than to go after him. No, Griff’s focus was going to be on his partner-in-crime, on the woman who had lived large on the lies, on the woman who was now here in Denver, biding her time and behaving like she had some fucking right to happiness.
Griff was going after Claire – and he was going to make her pay. Any way that he could; as much as he could.
Until he had taken everything from her. Starting with the contents of those hidden bank accounts… and ending with her hope.
“Wow,” Dallas said quietly. “She looks really different, huh?”
“Yeah.” Griff squinted at the pictures. “She went dark and short with the hair, and I bet those glasses ain’t even prescription.”
“Mmm-hmmm.” Dallas flipped through the cell camera roll again. “And she’s way low-key. No jewelry, no flashy clothes or handbags. No makeup even, that I can really see.”
“Quite a change,” Griff said, annoyed that it had all been a change for the better. Leeza had been right to say that Claire looked younger and prettier like this, and for some reason, that pissed Griff off even more.
The least the woman could do was sprout moles and warts and zits all over her face, and get haggard and wrinkled. Griff was a big believer that a person’s outer appearance was a reflection of their inner beauty and kindness, that a person’s nasty inner persona was clearly visible on their faces and bodies. So, by that logic, Claire Worthington should have been one seriously ugly woman. The fact that she wasn’t felt unfair and deeply wrong, and Griff decided to just go right on ahead and take that personally.
Yeah, this one was personal to him, and the sooner he admitted that, the better. Sure, Wilbur had scammed other rich people and large businesses out of their money, but he hadn’t ignored or overlooked the average Joe and Jane at all. People like Leeza’s Dad, people like Griff’s parents – hell, people like Griff – had been in his crosshairs too. And boy, had he taken aim and fired.
Direct hits, man. Way, way too many of them.
“OK, so.” Leeza’s voice trembled slightly, and the men focused their attention back on her. “What do we do now? I mean, what’s the plan?”
Dallas smiled at her. “You don’t do anything, Leeza. You’ve done your part.”
“Oh.” She twisted her fingers together. “And Griff?”
“Griff gets close to Claire,” Dallas said brusquely. “Gets her talking.”
“Yeah, I don’t really get this part,” she said. “Are you really expecting her to just start talking to Griff about her billions stashed away in the Cayman Islands?”
“Nope,” Dallas said. “But I do expect her to be lonely and vulnerable and off-balance. She’s not anywhere near her home turf and she’s way out of her comfort zone, after all. I also expect that if a big, strapping guy starts to give her some flirty attention, she’ll respond, so long as it’s not over-the-top of questionable.”
“Questionable?” Leeza said.
“Right,” Dallas said. “She’s gonna be on the alert for journalists and for people looking to track her down. But if Griff stumbles across her path in a way that’s totally natural and non-threatening, then she’ll have no reason to suspect him.”
“And – what?” Leeza asked, waving her hands around. “Griff talks to her? Gets to know her? Asks her out?”
“Yep, yep, and yep,” Dallas said. “Gets her to relax and lower her guard, carefully gathers intel. Asks lots of questions, catches her in lies, gets her to reveal more than she wants.”
“How?”
“Oh, like talking about dream places to go on vacation,” Dallas said. “Or what she’d do if she won the lottery. Or asking about her childhood, see if any names appear of friends that she’s still in touch with, maybe people that she’d trust into her life now. People we can talk to.”
Leeza stared at Griff. “And… you can do this? You can pretend to be interested in and like a woman who’s done what she’s done? Flirt with her, maybe kiss her? Be like a – a male honeypot? You can act that well?”
“I can.” Griff grinned at her again. “My Oscar’s in the mail, actually.”
Startled, Leeza laughed.
“Listen, don’t worry about me,” Griff said. “I’ve done this kind of thing before, and one of the reasons that Dallas has me going in, and not himself or Solid Security’s second-in-command Mark Hayden, is because I can put on the mask pretty damn easy. Claire Worthington is a job, Leeza, but more than that, she’s a woman who knows where lots of money is, money that she’s planning to live off in luxury soon enough. Money that doesn’t belong to her, and money that she has no right to whatsoever. I’ll pretend to be anything at all, if it means getting her to tell me where that money is… even if she has no idea that she’s doing it.”
“And then?” Leeza asked. “Once you think you know something?”
Griff shrugged. “Dallas will be passing everything on to the SEC, and they’ll be investigating our hunches. As soon as they hit pay dirt – and they will, believe me – Claire will be hauled in for questioning. If she’s smart, she’ll offer up information in exchange for a plea bargain. Probably the account numbers and passwords in exchange for probation and time served.”
“She won’t go to jail?” Leeza said, horrified.
“Doubtful, and if she did, it’d be for a few months at most.” Griff sighed. “Unless the SEC and the feds can actually prove a rock-solid connection between her and the bank accounts before she turns informant, then she’ll just be used as a source, I’m afraid. With our help, they may find that proof, and if they do, she’s toast… but if not, her biggest use is to retrieve the money and return it to the government and the investors.” He studied her closely, his green eyes worried. “Can you live with that?”
“If it means that she’s really alone and humiliated and penniless?” Leeza said, and that hard, dark edge was back in her voice. “Yes. Yes, I can.”
“You sure?” Dallas said, his blue eyes nailed to her brown ones. “She may well walk away penniless and alone, but she’d walk away.”
“I know.” Leeza took a shaky breath. “I’m not saying that I’d like it or that it’d be easy… but she’s in the process of walking away now, isn’t she? I guess for me, it’s a question of what she walks away with, and as who. Does she walk away as a known accomplice and financially destitute and humiliated – or does she walk away a very rich woman who never has to face up to what she was part of? I know what I can live with, and what I can’t.”
The men nodded.
“So.” Leeza gave herself a bit of a shake. “You do your job, Griff, and you do it how you see best. Get inside her head, crawl around in there… then you use it against her. You use it, and you exploit it, and you get some justice for those people who the Worthingtons scammed out of their life savings and homes.” She fell silent, then spoke again. “You get some justice for my Dad.”
“I promise you,” Griff said softly to their client. “If I can help them both be held accountable for what they did, I will… and I ain’t gonna stop until I figure out how to help. I’m in this for the long ha
ul, Leeza, I swear. This matters to me.”
Overwhelmed and moved, Leeza nodded, tears in her eyes. “Thank you.”
“Sure.” Griff gave her a gentle smile. “You doing OK?”
She wiped her eyes with a kleenex, looked embarrassed. “Yes.”
“Alright, then,” Dallas said. “You go on home. We’ll be sending you reports every week on how things are progressing with Claire, let you know how things are going. Any questions, any problems, you call me. We can meet here at the office, and I can explain and go over anything you want or need. Good?”
“Very good.”
“And Griff will make contact at eight o’clock with her at tomorrow morning,” Dallas continued. “Get this ball rolling.”
“Where?” Leeza said, surprised. “I mean, how do even you know where she’ll be at eight o’clock tomorrow morning?”
“Because we’ve done our homework, and we know where she is almost every morning,” Griff said. “I’ll be having my breakfast at a café on Brock Street tomorrow… and I’ll be at my most flirtatious when I meet the former Mrs. Claire Worthington.”
As if to give her a sneak peek of what was to come, he cocked his head to the side and winked at her, all shining blond hair and sparkling green eyes, and Leeza was suddenly blushing in spite of herself. Yeah, if that was directed at her, with all of its intensity and gorgeousness? She’d respond, no damn doubt about it.
As he watched the pink spread over her cheeks, Griff chuckled, a low, sultry sound from deep in his broad chest. Leeza fought down the wild urge to fan her face; that need only got worse when Dallas winked at her too and gave her one of his wide, heart-stopping grins. Yes, the man was married and off the market, but come on… Leeza wasn’t blind and she had a pulse, and Dallas Foreman was sex on denim-clad legs.
Solid Gold (Unseen Enemy Book 8) Page 2
