Believe me, sister. I’ve needed him a lot recently.
Henry cleared his throat. “Innocent people shouldn’t run. You shouldn’t.”
For a few seconds, Mattie stood still, her eyes locked on Henry. Holy cow the pressure. If she turned away, game over. She’d break Henry’s heart and then Lucie would have to kill her. Bury her body in a swamp somewhere.
One with a lot of gators.
Finally, she let out a hard breath that sent her ample boobs bouncing. “I don’t know how to fight this,” she said, her voice sailing up an octave. “It’s…a lot.”
Henry moved closer. “Honey, listen to what Lucie found out. Then decide.”
Mattie blinked, eyes shimmering with moisture, and it kicked Lucie straight in the chest.
Ach.
Maybe the gators were overkill.
How many times had Lucie gotten into hijinks that should’ve sent Tim racing to the door? No matter what, he’d stood by her. Loyalty, apparently, ran in the family because Henry, probably confused, angry, and hurt all at once, still found it inside him to call this woman honey.
A good man. Just like his nephew.
Lucie held up a hand. “He’s right. Hear me out. You at least owe me that much.” She smiled. “What with almost getting me kidnapped and all.”
Guilt. As much as she hated to employ it, got the job done.
Mattie snorted. “You’re something else, Lucie. I’ll give you ten minutes. Then I have to go.”
Ha.
They’d see about that.
The deadline came and went. Yet here they were, still parked on Mattie’s sofa while she took in all that Lucie had just shared. The stakeout, the search of Sonny’s room, the boarding pass from his Boston to Palm Beach flight. Lucie kicking the crap out of Sonny and his subsequent admissions, all of it laid out carefully for Mattie to dissect.
When Lucie emptied her brain of all things related to Sonny Peppers, Mattie threw her hands up, smacking them against her skintight jeans. “He expects us to believe he doesn’t know who hired him?”
“As nutty as it sounds, my dad said it’s possible.” Dad would know. Sigh.
“What’s the address of the building he spoke of?”
Lucie checked her phone and read it off.
“Huh.”
Placing one hand on Henry’s knee, more a gesture of familiarity than anything, Mattie levered up from her spot and quick-walked to her suitcases. She’d better not be skipping out. Not without some sort of response other than huh.
But, surprise, surprise, rather than head out the door, she pulled a laptop from her carry-on, bringing it back to the sofa and booting it up.
“At work,” she said, “we’d use Boston’s property assessment website to check the values of listings. The owners are there and if their address is different from the property, it’ll list both.”
Oh, brilliant. Lucie pushed out of her chair and moved behind the sofa to look over Mattie’s shoulder.
Mattie’s fingers flew over the keyboard—she must have aced typing class. A screen popped up welcoming them to the site. Mattie typed the address into the search box and…Voila. A new page popped up with type small enough to convince Lucie a trip to the eye doctor might be in her future. She leaned in and squinted as she scanned.
Property type: commercial. Value: $875,000.
Come on, where are you?
She continued reading and…bingo.
Owner: Paul Landon.
Mattie straightened her shoulders, closed the laptop, and stood. “I have to go.”
Whoa. Hang on. Before Mattie took a step, Lucie ran to the suitcases and held her hands up. Childish? Sure. Did she care?
No.
Dog-tired and short on patience, she couldn’t worry about her maturity level.
“Just hold on,” Lucie said. “It shouldn’t be a shock that Landon owns that building.”
“Oh, it’s not. It confirms that I need to go. Move.”
Nice try, lady. Not happening. “Let’s call Tim. He’ll know what to do. Please. Don’t leave before we muddle through this.”
Without waiting for an answer, Lucie whipped out her phone. “Give me two minutes.”
Phone to her ear, Lucie shifted right, standing directly in Mattie’s path.
“No,” Mattie said. “Move.”
Lucie held up a finger. “It’s ringing. One sec.”
Before the second ring, Tim picked up. “Ugh,” he said, his voice groggy from disturbed sleep. “Why are you calling me from the kitchen?”
“I’m not in the kitchen.”
“I was afraid you’d say that.”
“Hey. Don’t give me a hard time. Henry wanted to see Mattie and he’d been drinking. I couldn’t let your uncle drive while under the influence, could I?”
“Or maybe you both could’ve waited until morning?”
No one would ever accuse Tim of being a romantic, that was for sure. “Listen, Romeo, if you’d let me, I can give you information before Mattie lams it again. And I’m not being dramatic. As we speak, her bags are lined up at the door and she’s ready to blow right through me to get out of here.”
The classic Tim sigh streamed through the phone line. “What have you got, Columbo?”
That was more like it. When Mattie shifted right to circumvent her, Lucie sidestepped. No one was leaving until Tim weighed in. “The building Sonny Peppers said he picked up the money from is owned by Paul Landon.”
“Hunh,” Tim said.
“Is that a good hunh or a bad hunh?” At times, like now, it was hard to tell.
“It’s a non-committal hunh.”
Terrific. Lucie smacked herself on the forehead. Could she get a break here? “What does that even mean?”
On the other end a rustling noise, the unmistakable sound of covers being tossed aside, filled the silence. “It means I’ll be there in ten minutes. Don’t do anything until I get there. And tell Mattie to stay put. I’m tired and cranky. Chasing her down in the middle of the night would piss me off.”
Lucie squeezed her eyes shut, fought the fatigue fogging her brain. “It has to be him who sent Sonny, right?”
“Luce, if this guy is any kind of a decent criminal, which he must be if the Feds have yet to charge him, he won’t pay a hitman by leaving the money at his own damned building.”
Darn it. She smacked herself again. How had she missed that? “You think it’s—”
“—a setup? Yeah. Someone is framing Paul Landon.”
“I had a thought,” Lucie said from her spot on the sofa when Tim strode through Mattie’s door.
He circled around, kissed the top of her head, and dropped next to her. “Can’t wait.”
Oh, ha-ha.
She should wallop him for being a smart mouth, but he looked so adorably rumpled in a wrinkled T-shirt and basketball shorts that she couldn’t do it. The kicker was his hair. He wore it close-cropped, but long enough that after sleeping the velvety red strands mashed down on the right side. That’s what being a side-sleeper got him. He’d attempted to throw some water on his head and fix it, but what she loved about her man was that he didn’t care what he looked like when a crisis loomed. Tim was all about action and getting things done.
Even if his hair wouldn’t cooperate.
In the eight minutes it took him, she’d had a brainstorm and quickly commandeered the laptop. Yes, it was after midnight, but her strung out mind and body had reached that pivotal point when fatigue morphs into twisted mania that’d keep her going for hours.
She tapped the screen. ““You’ll love this, big boy. Wyoming Secretary of State’s website.”
“Okay. I’d planned on calling them in the morning.”
“Well, Detective, why wait when we can—wait for it—download a list of all companies registered in the fine state of Wyoming.” She threw her arms up in triumph.
Tim’s eyebrows hitched. A spark of his tenacious need for the truth lit his green eyes. “Seriously?”
/> “Yep. Mattie showed me a website with Boston property tax assessments. It got me thinking, so I did a search for owners of Wyoming companies. That brought me to this website. It should give us contact information for owners and registered agents.”
He high-fived her and something churned low and deep in her belly. Ninety-eight point five percent of the time, Tim poo-pooed her investigations. Not that he doubted her intellect or skill. He simply hated her putting herself in tenuous situations that might get her hurt. Or worse.
A high-five from Tim? She might as well have won the Nobel Peace Prize.
A few taps later, Lucie watched the download bar crawl.
“Big file,” Tim said.
“Sure is. With any luck, we can sort it by registered agents.”
Tick, tock, tick, tock. Almost downloaded.
Tim craned his neck to look down the short hallway leading to the back of the house. “Where’s Uncle Henry and Mattie?”
“They went to her room to talk. This has devastated him, Tim.”
“My mom will freak.”
Again with his mother? Lucie liked the woman—a lot—but certain boundaries shouldn’t be crossed. “Yeah, well, all due respect, it’s not her life. What if Mattie is innocent? Henry would be turning his back on the woman he loves.”
He did the Tim sigh. Well, too bad. Someone had to think of Henry’s emotional vulnerability in all this.
“Luce, I hear you. But I don’t know what to think.”
“The frustrated mob princess side of me thinks Mattie got the shaft. I could be wrong, but I have a feeling about this one.”
“And if you are?”
She couldn’t go there. Being wrong scared the you-know-what out of her. “I don’t know. But we need to give her a chance.”
Lucie glanced at the screen. Download complete. She clicked the file, watched the wheel spin for an agonizing fifteen seconds until a spreadsheet—a mess of one—popped up.
Tim leaned forward. “The columns are all screwed up. You can’t sort it like that.”
An understatement for sure. Not only were the headers not matching up with the corresponding columns, some of the fields had merged. “Don’t panic.”
“Uh, I’m a Chicago cop, if spreadsheets scared me, I’d be committed by now.”
Always appreciative of Tim’s gallows humor, Lucie snorted. So cute, her man. “We can search the spreadsheet for Helen Craft. If she’s in here, we copy the data to a clean sheet and in the morning start calling the numbers.”
“Good,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
“This is fun, isn’t it?”
“My uncle’s life going down the crapper?”
“Not that. Working together. I like it.”
He flashed the O’Brien smile and locked those lush greens on her. “Me too. I love you, Luce.”
If she wasn’t so tired, he’d totally get lucky after this.
“I love you, Detective.”
She leaned over and planted one on him. Right in Mattie’s living room, just bam. This wasn’t a ho-hum, casual kiss either.
Open mouths and tongues were involved.
She angled her head, giving him and his fabulous tongue better access. Totally getting lucky, later.
His hand came around, settling on her hip. He gave her a squeeze and slowly pulled back. “We’re in the middle of something here and you do this to me? You’re evil.”
“I know.” Bad, Lucie. Bad.
Such a slut. But she’d rocked his world—and maybe specific parts of his anatomy Lucie had grown fond of.
Lucie shook off the buzz left by Tim’s lips and focused on the spreadsheet, cracking her knuckles as she read. “Quit distracting me. We have things to do. Search term: Helen Craft.”
She typed the name in and the cursor went to the first entry for Helen Craft.
“Boom,” Tim said. “Got one.”
“Yep.”
Lucie copied the row into a new spreadsheet and clicked back to the original list. She clicked the search arrow again.
Helen Craft.
“That’s two,” Tim said.
The second was copied into the new spreadsheet and Lucie repeated the exercise. Thirteen times.
When all entries had been exhausted, Lucie slouched against the back of the sofa, the laptop still resting on her legs.
Tim peered back at her. “Different addresses all over the state.” He waggled a finger. “It doesn’t say her company’s name.”
“No. Just Helen Craft.”
Tim sat back, rested his head on the cushion while he stared up at the ceiling. Thinking. “We can’t assume she doesn’t own a management company.”
“Remember that scandal last year. The law firm?”
He looked at her. “The one that helped their clients hide billions in overseas accounts?”
“Yes. Their sole function was to be a registered agent for wealthy people trying to evade taxes. That’s all they did. The entire firm.”
“If Helen Craft was on that level, she’d have more than thirteen companies.”
True. Damn him. Lucie grunted.
Still mulling it over, Tim went back to studying the ceiling. “Let’s break it down. She’s working for someone, say Paul Landon, whose son happens to be the in-house real estate guy for a major US retailer. For shits and giggles, we’ll say it’s That Girl. Daddy—being Paul Landon—connects the developers with his son. Or daddy partners with them. They buy buildings in certain markets.”
Ooh, ooh. Lucie raised her hand. “Certain markets where That Girl has stores.”
Tim smiled and tweaked her nose. “So smart, you are. Daddy is the secret middleman, though. His name can’t be anywhere near this thing due to the whole nepotism conflict. The developers buy buildings and lease space to That Girl for way over market price.”
“Which drives up the selling price for the building. Those lease deals are a pot of gold.”
“It’s not about the That Girl lease. These guys are looking ahead. They put the building on the market and up the selling price. They justify it by telling potential buyers they’ll make a fortune on the That Girl lease. Dang, that’s slick.”
Developers. Middlemen. Market manipulation. All of it swooped through Lucie’s mind, the investment banker in her connecting dots. Oh, wow. She sat up so fast, momentum sent the laptop tipping. Whoopsie. She snatched it before it tumbled to the floor and set it on the table.
Tim set his hand on her back. “What are you thinking?”
Did he have a week? That might not even be enough time for the thoughts raging in her mind. She peered over her shoulder at him. “We need to link Helen Craft with any companies Mattie and her dad did business with. Then see if we can link them back to someone besides Paul Landon.”
Twelve
On a quest to find the printer she’d just sent her spreadsheet to, Lucie summoned Mattie, who led her to the second bedroom that doubled as an office. Like the rest of the house, everything was neat, tidy, and well-styled, but…somehow bare. Too perfect. Nothing about the interior said home. Lived-in. Maybe Lucie and Tim could help Mattie change that.
On the desk in the corner, the printer whirred and spit out two pages.
Mattie scooped them up and read them. “What’s this?”
“The thirteen companies in Wyoming Helen Craft is a registered agent for. Island Management is on there.” Lucie waved her to the living room where Tim and Uncle Henry waited. “I’d like to go through this list with you and see if we can link any of the other companies to you or your father.”
“Why?”
“It’s a long shot, but if we can make a link, maybe we can identify who else was involved in the fraud.”
They entered the living room, where Henry sat on the overstuffed loveseat adjacent to the sofa. “Do you think that’s who might be after Mattie?”
Tim took the list from Mattie and read it over again. “Or at least involved with Paul Landon. Right now, all we have is Sonny Peppers picking
up his payment from Landon’s building. It feels too convenient to me.”
Mattie made a move toward Henry, but paused, obviously rethinking her seating options while she and Tim pretended the level of awkwardness hadn’t just risen to epic heights. Finally, after Lucie contemplated stabbing herself, Mattie turned and sat in the lone side chair anchoring the loveseat and sofa.
“Dad handled most of the That Girl business. But—” she held up a finger, “—I have a report showing all commissions paid to us last year. I handled all reporting for our taxes. It’s in a folder on my computer.”
“Can we look at it?”
“Of course.”
Mattie grabbed the laptop from the coffee table and zipped away on the keyboard. Seconds later, she handed it to Lucie, who sat with Tim on the sofa. Together, they skimmed the spreadsheet.
Lucie circled a finger at the screen where rows and rows of commissions had been listed. “Do you mind if I play with this? I’ll create a copy, so I don’t mess anything up.”
“Go ahead. And thank you.” She glanced at Tim then back to Lucie. “Both of you. Not a lot of people would trust me. You’re amazing people.”
Lucie shrugged. “On a certain level, you and I understand each other. And Tim? He loves his uncle. That’s what people who care do. They support one another.” She smiled at Tim. “It’s one of the many reasons I love him.”
Tim ripped off a smile that let her know the feeling was more than mutual. His green eyes lit with the hunger that came right before the two of them typically shared an orgasm or twelve. Fatigue or not, O’Hottie would get lucky after this. It might be a quickie, but he’d have a smile on that handsome face when she finished with him.
Heat rushed into Lucie’s cheeks. Oooh-eeee. The man riled her up. Tim let out a soft snort. Focus here, Luce. She peeled her gaze away, forcing it back to the laptop, where she copied the file and saved it. A quick sort alphabetized the corporation names. Here we go. “Tim, read me the thirteen company names from the Wyoming list.”
“Sure. First one. Garnett Inc.”
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