Rascal (Edgewater Agency Book 2)

by Kyanna Skye

  She took that realization and tried to turn her near-blunder into an advantage. A quick look at the prison’s list of past times revealed that there was something that she was quick to suggest and that Mr. Rizzuto had been quick to take up.

  “Archery?” he’d asked, beaming at her when she suggested that they make use of the prison range. “I never would have thought you for the type.”

  She smirked at him. “Well, I’m not very good, but I’ve always been fascinated by it.” Not a complete lie. Jamie had been fascinated by archery as a child and that fascination had continued into her adulthood, even to the point where she followed it with close attention whenever the Olympics came about.

  There was something interesting about one person, taking a shaft of wood or metal, and letting that shaft – tipped in something that could be very lethal – fly down range at a target that had a center no larger than a silver dollar. There was something to be admired in that, she had always thought. To focus one’s attention – and intention – so diligently on a target just so far off and intending to pin that target with something the diameter only slightly larger than a pencil.

  “It’s a lot like golf,” she said. “Focusing on something small and then using something larger to try and put that small object into a slightly larger target? I think it requires something a little extra.”

  “Indeed,” Mr. Rizzuto said as they signed out a pair of bows and dozen arrows each.

  The archery range wasn’t what she had thought it would be. She had imagined an open-air field with large round circular targets at the end of the range, or perhaps plastic facades of animals to shoot at. But again, she was reminded that this was a prison with its limitations and guards would now allow a convict – even a well-mannered one – to bring obvious weapons onto the grounds where they might be turned against them or other inmates.

  What they got instead was a small range that was but four long narrow cement channels in an indoor room that were illuminated by fluorescent bulbs overhead. At the very least, there were the large circular targets at the end of each lane with their target rings marked with rising values the nearer one drew to the center. Jamie counted them lucky that at the very least they were alone in the small range where they could talk freely.

  It was only a short while before he noticed her watching him, a tad more intently this time and a curious smile graced his features. “Something interests you about my form?” he asked, sending another arrow down the range.

  “No… it’s just,” she bit her lip nervously; “I can’t quite figure you out, Mr. Rizzuto.”

  “And that’s bad?”

  “No, not at all. But I’m usually better at reading people. I just can’t seem to get a lock on the kind of person that you are.”

  He sent another arrow down range. “I’m familiar with that kind of complication. I usually find that when that happens to me, I’m able to discern a few other things if I tally what I already know of a person. Why not start with that?”

  Got him, she thought triumphantly, but outwardly she wore a mask of contemplation that showed the appearance of a woman who knew less than she really did.

  “Well… you’re a well-mannered person; that tells me that you obviously had a proper upbringing. I’m thinking an old family. Old families usually mean old money, even to the point where you likely have wealthy relatives in the old country.”

  Mr. Rizzuto said nothing but sent another arrow down the range. His silence told her that she was on the right track.

  “I looked up Lester & Desoto,” she went on, continuing with her fable. “They’re a high-end law firm. Usually, people who end up working there are the kind of people who know other people. Most people get a job there because of who they know. People who get representation from them get that kind of attention because of how they know them. So I’m thinking that you have connections.”

  Again, Mr. Rizzuto said nothing and continued with his archery practice.

  “You had to have had some kind of ties that landed you a job there. But after talking with you all this time, you strike me as an empirical thinker. You’re obviously smart enough if you took millions of dollars from a high-end firm like Lester & Desoto; that kind of thing isn’t done overnight, it takes a long time, which tells me that you’re patient.”

  Again, he said nothing but continued to shoot his arrows at the target down the range.

  “But most people wouldn’t see anything wrong with stealing from a firm that makes untold amounts of money from people that are rich, guilty, and have something to lose. But you, you turned yourself into the authorities, pleaded no contest, and because you’re not a violent offender you wound up here. That is also interesting to me, because from what I’ve been able to gauge of you, you were smart enough to avoid prison altogether. But you were consumed by your conscience… that’s something that a lot of old families usually aren’t bound by.”

  At this, he froze, not freeing his latest arrow and turned to face her. “You have much contact with these ‘old families’ as you call them, do you?”

  “I’ve met a few,” she admitted. “In most cases, if you can hide it, cover it up, bury it, or buy a way out of it, or get someone else to take the blame for it, that’s the way that those possessed of old money tend to work. That’s not the impression that I get from you.”

  He watched her for a few moments and then turned back to his archery and sent down another arrow, striking a semi-distant target.

  “That’s what adds to the mystery of you, Mr. Rizzuto. When we had steak the other night at the lounge and you spoke of wine, you did so with passion… like someone born to that kind of work and taught to see the beauty in it. Like you are someone taught to relish that kind of work and to appreciate every last ounce of effort that goes into it. I’ve seen people get passionate about many things before now, Mr. Rizzuto. I’ve seen men speak about muscle cars the same way that some men speak about their wives. And I’ve seen women speak about this brand of dress shoe or another with the same enthusiasm that teenage girls talk about whichever celebrity they have a crush on.”

  She allowed that to penetrate his mind and pressed on. “And in all of the time that I’ve been talking with you and you’ve never spoken of anything like you have that wine. Now, I for one do appreciate a good glass of wine and under the right circumstances, but the way you spoke also assigns my confidence to the belief that you come from a line of people who made that their life’s work.

  “But it also assigns mystery as to your origins, Mr. Rizzuto. Now, I don’t doubt that there’d be more than one Rizzuto family on either coast that knows how to make wine, so any one of them could be yours. And unless I flew out to each of them and started asking questions, I don’t think I’d get anywhere and I’m not a believer in wasting my time.”

  “Admirable,” he spoke finally, shooting off another arrow. “Is that all you’ve been able to deduce of me so far, Jamie?”

  She crossed her arms reluctantly. She did know a bit more, but the major details that she had just divulged pretty much eclipsed anything else she could have added to the point of worthlessness. “More or less,” she admitted.

  He laughed. “Then you really don’t know too much about me, do you?”

  She sighed. “No.”

  He shot off his last arrow and for the first time, she noticed that his archery was impressive. Each of his shafts, she noticed, had grouped very near the center of his target. Were this an Olympic event, he would be qualifying for a medal. “Well,” he said, allowing his bow to slide in his hand so that it touched the floor as though he were holding a cane, “I’m sure that we have much more to talk about then, don’t we?”

  Oddly enough, she found that prospect rather appealing.

  With the days passing, they made more and more use out of the many different pass times that the prison offered and Jamie had managed to wrangle a few more details from her client about the whereabouts of Lester & Desoto’s missing money, but each turned out to
be as fruitless as the next. And while she noticed that Mr. Rizzuto was chatty about some things, he was a mom on a lot and she grew more and more doubtful that he would be forthcoming if she were forthright in her questioning.

  And with Mr. Rizzuto’s release drawing ever nearer she felt the pressure of time upon her increasing steadily. And while using each of the facility’s diversions, she had found most useful of them all was the prison’s track. And thanks to her own pastime of jogging, she had been able to use this to good effect.

  Like today.

  “You know, I at times wonder why you enjoy running so much,” he said to her, trying to keep up with her quicker pace. It was only one of their many different outings where she successfully managed to surpass him.

  She smirked. Even the Colorado altitude did nothing to slow her down the way it did some people. She had had a difficult time adjusting at first, but now it seemed positively easy to jog at such a high altitude. “It relaxes me,” she said with a smile. “It helps me think.”

  “So I noticed,” Dominic said, his forehead beaded with sweat. “And now that you bring it up, I’m actually curious about something if you wouldn’t mind sharing?”

  The question had come up so suddenly that she almost tripped and fell. For all of the time that she had been spending with Mr. Rizzuto he hadn’t been one to ask many questions.

  Maybe I’m finally getting to him, she silently hoped. “Sure. What’s on your mind, Mr. Rizzuto?”

  “Have you decided yet how you’re going to help me?”

  She felt a twinge of regret in her heart and a short bout of panic. The first few days here it had been easy to stick to her principals about helping him and being openly honest. But eventually, it had gotten to that point where she could not keep from talking about why she was here. A quick fabrication had been necessary and she had led him to believe the fact that she was here on the behalf of a third party interested in helping him after he was paroled, which wasn’t a complete lie. He had seemed to accept that without question.

  Whether he does or doesn’t is immaterial, she had told herself. He can walk out of here without telling me a thing unless I show him what I’m really after.

  “No, not yet,” she admitted. “My employer says that he wants to get a feel for you first. He wants to know the kind of man that you are before he decides if he’s going to help you.”

  “Well, it’s his money and your time that you’re spending, my dear. So, as you please.”

  “Thank you,” she said with a grin, amazed that her simple lie had had help for so long. Though in the back of her mind that lie felt almost like a child, growing to maturity within the confines of her brain and threatening to burst under the growing pressure of why she was really here. “Uh… where were we?” she asked, trying to switch back to the topic at hand.

  “The trial,” he reminded her.

  “Right, the trial,” she said with a nod. “Who was your attending attorney?” she asked dumbly, knowing already that he had waived his right to an attorney for his initial trial.

  “I didn’t have one,” he replied.

  She turned a faux look of shock to him. “Excuse me?”

  “I waived my right to an attorney for the trial,” he said simply. “I didn’t see the need.”

  She licked her lips, feigning interest. This was old news, of course, thanks to what details had been available in her brief, but he had never spoken of the fact directly. And seeing as how she was making no headway in her usual methods, she’d resorted to trying a more underhanded approach to figuring out what he had done with the money. “You embezzled millions from the firm you worked with and you didn’t think you needed an attorney?”

  “Not in the least of ways. Eventually, I realized that what I was doing was wrong and when I turned myself in–”

  “Hold it!” she said, stopping so suddenly on the track that he almost collided with her. She turned to put her hands out to stop him and she could feel his large muscular chest underneath his tight form-fitting gym clothes. This last bit of information had shocked her completely, never having seen that tidbit anywhere in the files. “You turned yourself in?”

  He nodded, wiping sweat from his brow and looking thankful for the chance to catch his breath. “Yes, I did. As I was just saying, eventually I knew that what I was doing was wrong and when I turned myself in I pleaded no contest to the charges. It was settled within a matter of days and I was sent here.”

  She paused, momentarily forgetting about what he was saying and suddenly realizing that she was closer to him now that she had been since first she had started coming to see him. The nearness of their mutual proximity, she found, was rather enticing. There was even something enchanting about it.

  She floundered with her words for a moment. She had gotten the sense from Dominic that was a very clever man. She’d determined that he’d gone to all of the right schools, his mannerisms certainly held that he was from one of the old families and therefore from older money, and though she had only just skimmed the surface of his professional life she had determined that he should have been clever enough to have avoided prison altogether.

  But that he turned himself in and for reasons of conscience and pleaded guilty, that was a shock to her. “I’m sorry; I don’t quite understand Mr. Rizzuto.”

  He shrugged indifferently. “There’s nothing to understand, really, Jamie. I knew that my actions bore consequences. You recall how I said that I had done as I had for the thrill of it? Well, eventually the thrill wears thin and I also got a firsthand look at how what I was doing was hurting people. Thus, my hasty need to see justice done upon myself in as expedited a form as possible.”

  She stood where she was, her mouth wide, her eyes almost gawking she was sure. “What did you see that turned you around so quick?”

  His eyes fell, almost shamefully. “Men and women… people that I worked with… many of them were being laid off because the firm no longer had the means to pay them. They were people that I knew, Jamie.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

  He sighed, his tone becoming almost mournful. “When I first started my little game, I had thought to myself, ‘This place takes in millions every day… who’s going to miss a little bit here and there? They’ll never even notice that the money is gone.’ That’s what I told myself, but it didn’t take long for me to see that the firm simply began to trim away what they considered to be dead weight in order to keep the profits of a few people up.”

  “Dead weight?” she asked, curious as to his use of metaphor.

  “Some of those people had been dedicated to that office for years, decades even. They had families to feed, insurance to pay, and like that. They were just normal people, trying to make ends meet. And I took that away from them for no reason other than because I had been bored at the time.” He shocked her again by putting his larger more muscular hands over hers and gently squeezing them and the simple gesture, she felt, carried tons of emotion.

  “And the firm just brushed them aside, like crumbs off of a dinner table, not caring where they landed or maybe just hoping that someone else would sweep up the mess later. Who knows? And it was me that made that happen. People didn’t just miss out on buying groceries that week, Jamie, it was worse than that. I robbed some of those people of their pensions; the money that they were saving to send a child to college, the finances needed for a heart operation… who knows what else?”

  He pushed her hands slowly aside and rather than resume running, he began walking and quickly she fell in step beside him, her ears determined not to miss a single word. “So you admitted to your guilt, and then what? Gave the money back?”

  He squeezed his eyes shut so tightly she had thought for a brief moment that perhaps he had something stuck in his eye, but he shook his head. “No… it was too late for that. The money was no longer where it was supposed to be. I couldn’t just give it back, Jamie.”

  “You could have changed that. Something
tells me that you were smart enough to do that and set things right before anyone noticed.”

  “Yes, I could have. But the program that I had written was complex and self-executing. Once it was in, there was no stopping it, not even by me. It would simply run its cycle and eventually it would self-terminate. But even I would never know where the money went once it was done. That was part of the thrill for me, you see.”

  “Wait… what?” she asked, again feeling puzzled. “What do you mean you don’t know where the money went?”

  “Just that,” he explained, “I don’t know. I never cared to have that money to myself; I’m not a greedy man. I just wanted to have the thrill of knowing that it could be done… and annoying my bosses at the time.”

  To Jamie, this sounded like the notion of a lunatic mind. He stole the money, but didn’t care to keep it for himself? To her, that sounded like a Robin Hood complex, but even Mr. Rizzuto had said that he didn’t try to give the money back to those that were less fortunate. He couldn’t, by the sound of it, which invalidated her earlier theory. But still, that he would steal money and then just shoot it into space where he couldn’t track it was most perplexing. That’s like breaking into a jewelry store, loading all the gems into a truck, and then driving the truck all over town and shoveling the goods out the back.

  They walked in silence for a few moments before she looked at her client, watching the way the sun glistened on his hard body, before speaking, “You’re a strange kind of man, Mr. Rizzuto.”

  His look of self-loathing melted a small amount as he smiled at her. “That’s the finest kind there is.”

  In the seclusion of her hotel room, she looked up the records of finance for Lester & Desoto that fit the time frame that Mr. Rizzuto had run his little scheme. She had to give him credit, even the bean counters within the firm, some of the most highly paid financial experts outside of the government, hadn’t seen Mr. Rizzuto’s scheme coming. And no one had known it had happened until it was too late.