by Dana Marton
Bing waited for the man.
“What do you want?” His father passed by him.
“Came to check on Luke.”
The man stopped to shoot back a surly glare. “He’s a good kid.”
Luke was brushing the horse now, his mouth pursed with concentration. Bing watched him for a second before turning to his father again. “I don’t want you to be drinking around here.”
“Hell.” He turned red in the face immediately. “Don’t you think I know that? One bad move and a horse could trample that boy.” He swore at Bing then stomped away.
Luke came up. “Is everything okay? I don’t have to leave, do I? I like it here.”
“Jason’s the boss. He says you’re doing good work.”
The kid’s face lit up. He ran back to the horse. Bing headed back to the office.
He was just reaching Main Street when Mike came on the radio. “Taylor’s not home. He seems to be missing in action. Neighbors haven’t seen him since last night.”
“Thanks. Put an APB out on his vehicle.” Then he called Mayer at the HR department, Taylor’s boss. “I assume you have some kind of computer-backup system?”
“As long as someone’s laptop is connected to the company, everything gets backed up on the server. Then the servers get backed up to the cloud, in case there’s a fire here or some other disaster.”
“I need a copy of every file Tag Taylor worked on in the past two years. I’ll get a warrant, but I wouldn’t mind something sooner.”
“It’s fine with me, but I’ll have to check with upper management. Can I call you back?”
Bing was back at the station by the time that call finally came in and then, shortly after that, a sea of zipped files arrived through a string of e-mails. He set the whole department working on them. “We’re looking for anything that has to do with money.”
He took Jack’s empty chair and used his computer, wanting to be with the others so they could keep a conversation going.
“How about stock options?” Harper asked.
“Definitely.”
“What are stock options, exactly?” Mike wanted to know.
“Above a certain level, every employee gets them,” Bing said as he unzipped the first batch of Taylor’s files. “It’s based on performance, like bonuses. The manager awards a number of shares, the HR department processes it, then finance sets it up. You’re awarded the right to buy shares at a certain price. You wait. If the share price goes up, you exercise your stock options, buy the stock at the price that was granted to you, then turn around and sell them at the current, higher price, cashing the difference.”
“If the price goes down?”
“You get bupkis.”
“How come we don’t get that here?” Mike huffed.
Bing shook his head. “For one, we’re not a company, and we don’t have shares.”
“Oh, right.” He ducked his head, but recovered pretty quickly. “Hey, so a turtle gets mugged by a gang of snails. The cops ask him what happened. The turtle shakes his head. ‘I don’t know. It happened too fast.’”
Chase laughed, Harper rolled his eyes, Bing groaned.
“How could someone scam money from stock options?” Chase asked a minute later from behind his computer screen.
Bing considered some of the scenarios he’d been entertaining. At first he’d thought both Stacy and Kristine had been killed because of their affairs, but he believed Taylor when he said he hadn’t loved Kristine. Bing wasn’t sure the man loved anyone or anything.
At this point, he was pretty sure both women had been killed over money. Neither Stacy nor Kristine had a lot of it, but they had access to it at work.
“What if,” he thought out loud, “the managers awarded a certain number of stocks to their subordinates, but someone at HR upped the numbers before sending it over to finance. Then finance at that point assigned those extra options to someone else.”
He pulled up an online stock trading site in a new window on the computer, typed in Anselm-Gnamm Pharmaceuticals, and scanned the charts that came up. “Stock price tripled over the last three years. They had half a dozen new drugs hitting the market, half of them home runs.”
“So if someone got their hands on enough stock options at a discounted price….”
Chase gave a low whistle. “They could have made millions.”
“Stacy worked in HR.” Bing stated the obvious. He could taste it now, the missing pieces were revealing themselves, the picture slowly coming together.
“They could have pressured her into it or blackmailed her with something. But why kill her if she was making them money?”
“Maybe she was going to come clean to me. She seemed strange that last week. Stressed. Nervous. I was too busy with work to dig into what was bothering her.” He’d kept busy at work because he was afraid her unhappiness came from their marriage, that she would want to talk, want changes, and he wasn’t sure what he could do, what he wanted to do. They’d loved each other once. They’d gotten married in a rush—her dream—and then things hadn’t worked. And, like a man, he avoided any relationship talk.
“And Kristine Haynes?” Mike asked.
“She handled stock options inside the accounting department.”
“So Tag Taylor seduced her and talked her into helping?”
“She wanted money for her twin’s schooling. Looks like she might have wanted it badly enough to perform some accounting sleight of hand. We’ll know more when we get her files. I’m betting there’ll be some serious discrepancies.”
And there were.
Bing scrolled through pages and pages of financial mumbo jumbo, charts and analytics, spreadsheets, reports and God only knew what else. He was going cross-eyed before he’d gotten through a tenth of it. But he kept digging.
People got awarded stock options by their managers. Except, the final HR paperwork showed a much higher number, sometimes ten times, twenty times as much. And when that information reached accounting, those extra shares got separated out, and were dumped into a fictitious account.
“Looks like all the fraudulent stock options were exercised this morning,” Bing said as he scrutinized the file. “Approximate worth is just a little over ten million dollars.”
Chase whistled. “Exercised by whom?”
“Fictional employee. Not in the HR files, but in accounting. Tammy Town.”
“Alias for Tag Taylor?” Joe voiced the question in Bing’s head, rising. “I’ll go look for him.”
Mike and Harper followed. All the local airports were called and the state police notified. They’d have their man.
Bing was ready to go too, but he wanted to figure out one last thing. The damn crimson staircase with the golden door.
How did the private investment group tie in with the stock-option scheme? He took out his notebook, found Jeremy Denvil’s phone number, and dialed it.
“How did you come to be involved with the investment group in the first place?” he asked after he introduced himself.
“My old broker from Shreff Financial hooked me up. He and two other brokers set up the fund as a side business. Twenty percent annual returns each year so far.”
Shreff was one of the bigger financial institutions that had been hit by the collapse of the credit market. They’d laid off thousands of employees in the aftermath. Tag Taylor had been one of them. Bing was willing to bet his fracture boot Taylor was one of the three brokers who’d set up the private fund.
“I’d check my account, if I were you,” he advised Jeremy. If Taylor stole stock options at Anselm-Gnamm, why wouldn’t he steal from his clients at some sham investment club he was running on the side?
He ended the call, then rose, ready to go and troll the streets for Taylor, but his gaze caught on the time at the bottom of the computer screen. Ten minutes past noon. He rubbed his eyes and filled his lungs. He was supposed to be having lunch with Sophie today. Not that he knew what he was going to say. He’d been hoping that by t
his time something would come to him.
He needed to call and apologize, let her know that he wasn’t going to make it. Except that when he rang her cell, the call didn’t go through. He was heading out anyway. He’d drive by, let her know, tell her to go home and stay home, even if she wasn’t connected to Taylor and the murders.
She had the mug because of her ex. The Peeping Tom had turned out to be her neighbor. The break-in had to be a random event. Guy came in, thinking to do a quick grab of whatever electronics would be lying around, then came face-to-face with Peaches. And then he ran.
The intruder was unlikely to come back again. He had nothing to do with Taylor’s scam. Sophie wasn’t in any mortal danger. And yet…every part of Bing wanted her in protective custody until he had Taylor in hand and a full confession, everything a hundred percent sure.
Maybe they could talk about that for a minute. Maybe she would see things his way.
Because he cared about her, no matter what his brain told him about her heart.
* * *
Sophie chose a table outside. The small bistro-type restaurant could have come straight from a European movie, looking very chic compared to the Main Street Diner down the street. Just sitting in the wrought iron chair made her feel worldly and sophisticated. The day was windless and sunny, the perfect day to sit outside.
She noted the phone store across the road. She’d pop over after lunch. Peaches had managed to knock her cell phone from the counter into the kitchen sink full of soapy water, killing it. She had to get used to having a big dog in the house and put her valuables higher.
Since she didn’t have a phone, she had no idea what time it was, but she was pretty sure Bing was late.
Then his cruiser turned the corner, and he pulled into the parking lot.
“Sorry,” he said as he strode up to her.
He looked tired, harried, and sexy. That never changed. Everything inside her responded to him, whether she wanted it to or not. They had to figure things out between them.
She gave him a tentative smile. “Big case?”
“I’m only here for a minute. I’m sorry.” He dropped his long body into the chair across the small round table from her. “We might have the killer in the Haynes case. Can’t really talk about it. How do you feel about protective custody?”
“I got a new door.”
He nodded. “Joe told me.” He scratched the back of his head. “Listen, about the heart—”
“I understand.” She didn’t want him to tell her all the reasons why a relationship between the two of them couldn’t work. “It’s saving my life, and even I can barely deal with the thought. It’s too much. It’s too weird. It’s too macabre.”
He was watching her, preparing to say something, but she cut him off. “I don’t even know who I am. So how could you, right? I was just trying to figure things out for myself. I was always the sick girl. That was my identity forever. The girl who might die before she gets a transplant. My plans never went beyond the next test, the next exam. I was always focused on just surviving the next hurdle.”
“Sophie—”
But she held up a hand. “So now that I have a future, what do I want it to be? Now that I’m not the sick girl, who am I? I could barely cope with those questions before I found out that I’m living with the heart of a killer. Honestly, I don’t blame you. But don’t you think some things are worth fighting for, if—”
He was the one to cut her off this time. “How the hell don’t you know who you are? You’re the one who was scared to death of dogs and took in a stray Rottweiler, putting your health at risk. You’re the one who’s building a business from nothing and making it. In this economy. Do you know how rare that is?”
He leaned forward as he went on, urgency filling his voice. “You’re the one who has some old jerk for a neighbor, and instead of pressing charges, you step up to the plate and help make his life better. You’re the one who’s brave enough to go up in a hot air balloon. You’re the one who can even show some idiot like me how to live.”
Her heart turned over in her chest with a thud. She was in love with him. Really. All the way.
She waited for him to continue, waited for him to say—after all the compliments—that he cared for her. She leaned forward.
And then a Mac Truck hit her.
Except there wasn’t a truck anywhere, she thought as she fell out of her chair to the ground. Her heart was beating slowly and incredibly hard at the same time. Whomp. Whomp. Whomp. And then it skipped. And then it skipped again. Bing’s lips were moving as he rushed to her side to help, but she couldn’t hear a thing.
* * *
Her eyes rolled up in her head, and that was it, blood spreading on her side where the bullet had hit. By the time Bing carried her into the restaurant, she wasn’t breathing.
He’d heard the cliché, dozens of times, about not knowing what you want until you lose it. He’d just never thought he’d be that stupid. But he was, apparently. Because now, when it was too late, he knew with every fiber of his being that he wanted Sophie.
“Call 911. Stay down. There’s a shooter outside,” he shouted to the dozen startled diners. “Possibly Tag Taylor. Tell that to the dispatcher.”
It had to be Taylor. Did the idiot think that if he shot Bing, the investigation would end? Then again, maybe all he’d wanted was some chaos and everyone busy so he could make a quick getaway. And then Sophie had leaned forward, straight into the path of the bullet.
Guilt ate at him as he loosened her clothing and started CPR. She’d taken a bullet meant for him. At least he was pretty sure she had. He couldn’t think of a single reason Taylor would target her. He focused on counting and shut out the fact that he couldn’t feel a heartbeat under his palm as he performed the compressions.
The heart he’d wanted to stop beating, the justice he’d been chasing for the past two years was here. But he didn’t want this.
He felt cold sweat breaking out on his back. His peripheral vision narrowed. He counted out the compressions as dark panic gripped him. In his mind, he could see her optimistic grin, the way she was with the dog, the way her eyes had gone hazy when he’d made love to her.
“Live,” he ordered, pumping the heart again. His eyes burned. “Live. For me. Please.”
He kept up with the compressions until his officers came and surrounded the restaurant. They cleared the EMTs to enter, and then the medical personnel took Sophie from him.
Chapter Sixteen
Sophie was breathing again and semiconscious by the time they reached the hospital. Since they wheeled her straight into surgery, there was nothing Bing could do at that point. He went back to the police station to supervise the manhunt for Taylor.
His chest hurt as he barked orders into his radio unit. He couldn’t lose her. He pushed the fear back. He had to think about something else, or he’d drive himself crazy.
Chase was still processing the scene of the shooting. Everyone else was out looking for the shooter. Bing gathered up every morsel of data that had trickled in over the last couple of days about the man, then laid everything out in front of him, covering his desk.
Taylor hadn’t gone to the airport. Security was watching for him there. The Canadian border was a four-hundred-mile drive north. Would he head up that way? If he did, he’d be captured. Leila had sent photos to the state police in both Pennsylvania and New York so they’d be looking for the man.
Mexico seemed like too long a shot. Too many chances to be recognized and caught between here and there.
What else?
In situations like this a criminal would either flee, wanting to put as much distance between himself and the police at the crime scene as possible, going as far and as fast as he could, or hole up somewhere he thought he’d never be found.
The attack had been premeditated. Taylor must have followed him to the restaurant. He’d staked out the station from afar, didn’t want to do the shooting there, too close to too much heat. Then B
ing had been in his car, a moving target, a tough shot even for a professional. But at the restaurant, sitting outside—much easier.
If the hit had been planned, then it stood to reason that the man’s escape plan would be set up and thought out too.
Did he have a safe lair somewhere?
Bing sorted through all the reports he had, going line by line through Taylor’s tax returns. Then he backed up a little when something caught his eye.
Three years before, Taylor had reported rental income from a cabin he owned just outside Broslin, on the other side of the reservoir. There were a number of cabins scattered through the woods out that way, used by hunters. Taylor probably rented his cabin out to people who came in from out of state during deer and wild turkey season.
Bing opened another window on his computer and searched property records, but Taylor was no longer listed as the owner. The cabin had been sold some eighteen months back.
And yet…
Hunting was closed for the time being for everything but woodchucks, and nobody would rent a cabin for that, so the woods would be just about deserted. What better place to hole up until Taylor figured out his next step? He knew the area. He might even have kept a key to the cabin.
Bing checked his weapon, made sure he had an extra clip, pulled his ankle holster from his desk drawer and strapped it on and checked his backup weapon. He shrugged into a Kevlar vest before he put on his jacket. The cabin was a long shot, but he wasn’t about to head out unprepared.
On his way out, he told Leila where he was headed.
“You want me to send one of the boys over as backup?”
“Have whoever is closest come over if he can.”
He drove out past Jack and Ashley’s place, past the reservoir and around it. It had rained the night before, so once the paved road ended and the dirt road began, the going got a lot slower.
When his phone rang, he picked it up. Brian Haynes.
“I think I figured out what the burglar took,” the man said. “I was trying to access a vacation savings account Kristine used to handle. I can’t find her password book. She kept a little address book, but instead of addresses, she kept all her passwords in it.”
