Perfect Strangers

by Tasmina Perry

  Sophie glanced over at Josh again.

  ‘Well, yes, my father received no compensation after the scam collapsed.’

  ‘Not many people did,’ Sayer said sympathetically. ‘A few hundred million dollars were recovered – most has gone in fees to the trustee and to the investors with the biggest lawyers. Hence our class action suit against Asner – we don’t think it’s fair that the smaller investors should get such a raw deal, so clubbing together gives us more muscle.’

  Josh sat forward.

  ‘You said there was a grain of truth about finding the money?’

  Sayer gave a small smile.

  ‘Well I’m not the sort to hang around and wait for the government to sort it out.’

  ‘But is there any money?’

  ‘I spent two hours in a jail cell interviewing Michael Asner myself. He pretty much told me everything – how much money there was, where it came from and how the scheme worked. He was a vain man and he was boasting about it. He didn’t admit to me that there was any hidden money, but it was something he apparently crowed about to inmates in the slammer.’

  ‘Could that just have been jail talk?’ asked Josh.

  Andrea shrugged.

  ‘A crook as clever, as ruthless as Asner wouldn’t pull a scam like that and not keep something aside for a rainy day. There’s at least one hundred million dollars in my opinion, maybe three or four times that much. Asner never thought he was going to get the length of sentence that he did. He was sixty-five. He would have assumed ten years inside, a non-violent white-collar criminal; they would have quietly paroled him after five and he would have disappeared to some island somewhere to live out his retirement on the hidden cash.’

  Josh gave a low whistle.

  ‘One hundred million bucks. He’d need a warehouse for that much cash.’

  ‘Oh, it wouldn’t be in real money,’ said Sayer. ‘He could have converted it into diamonds, gold or bearer bonds and hidden them away in some anonymous vault somewhere.’

  ‘Not in a bank?’ asked Sophie.

  ‘Could be in an offshore account, yes, although most traditional tax havens like Switzerland and Liechtenstein are cooperating with the authorities these days.’

  ‘Can’t you trace all the transactions that Asner made over the years?’

  Sayer laughed. ‘Don’t you think the authorities have tried that? No, the money went into Asner’s account, then was probably withdrawn as cash – and simply disappeared. Our best guess is that he was using a second player to hide the money for him.’

  Sophie felt her scalp prickle.

  ‘But you don’t know who?’

  ‘We’ve checked his phone records, emails, diary logs, financial statements, but it’s a tiny needle in a very big haystack. Unless we have a name, we have no idea where to start. But we have to find a way. Asner was a sociopath. His scam was like a game to him, but he was playing with countless lives with his little scheme. Some of his investors were public funds; that means public amenities lost their funding – community centres, day care, outreach programmes – and thousands of people will lose their pensions. And that’s the tip of the iceberg. No, Miss Ellis, believe me when I say I’m motivated to find that money and get it back to the right people.’

  Sophie looked at her, feeling torn. Andrea Sayer was one of the good guys, she could feel it, and if she told the lawyer the truth, then maybe she could help. But Josh was right too. Once they gave the authorities everything they had, they were vulnerable, dispensable. Sophie found herself at the crossroads – and she had to choose a path. ‘Does the name Benedict Grear mean anything to you?’ she said suddenly

  ‘No. Should it?’ replied Sayer, her clever eyes piercing.

  ‘I don’t know,’ stuttered Sophie. ‘Maybe someone connected to the Asner scheme? A lawyer he used, or an investor?’

  Sayer shook her head. ‘What is this about?’

  Sophie knew she had to word this carefully.

  ‘When my father lost his – our – money, he came to the same conclusion as you: that he’d be at the back of the queue, so he decided to do some of his own investigating.’

  ‘Good for him,’ said Sayer. ‘So why’s he not here?’

  ‘He’s dead, Miss Sayer.’

  ‘Oh I’m sorry. And call me Andrea.’

  ‘After he died, we found that name written down in a file he’d collected on Asner. We wondered if it might be something he’d discovered during his research.’

  Sophie hoped her expression hadn’t betrayed her lies.

  The attorney looked at her; her face said she was unconvinced by what Sophie was saying. After a pause, however, she turned to her computer and rattled at the keyboard.

  ‘We have interviewed everyone in Asner’s inner circle,’ she said. ‘We’ve built up a pretty big database about the scheme – we managed to get the SEC to pool their resources too.’

  She clicked away.

  ‘No . . . nothing on Benedict Grear. But then we don’t have the time or resources to speak to everyone Asner ever met.’

  She sat back in her chair.

  ‘Why do I get the feeling you’re not telling me everything, Ms Ellis?’

  ‘Because we . . .’ Josh began to speak, but Sophie put her hand on his knee. He had been right in the lift; she needed to start taking control. This was her problem, her life, and it was about time she grabbed the steering wheel.

  ‘You say you want to find Asner’s hidden booty. Well so do I. We were British investors, Miss Sayer. You think your clients are at the bottom of a very long list for compensation; believe me, my family is bumping along the seabed. I want to help. My dad and Michael Asner were old friends. Perhaps someone they both knew knows something, anything that might help us find the truth.’

  Andrea looked thoughtful.

  ‘You could talk to Tyler Connor.’

  ‘Who’s he?’ asked Josh.

  ‘A biker. Small-time hood, big-time meth dealer. This man shared a ten-by-ten cell with Michael Asner for months. You spend that much time together, you’re going to get close. If you want to find out who Benedict Grear is, maybe Ty got to hear about him.’

  ‘How do we speak to an inmate?’ asked Sophie.

  ‘Ty was released six weeks ago.’

  ‘Do you have contact details for him?’

  Sayer sighed and flipped her Rolodex.

  ‘He’s living in Fort Lauderdale. I warn you, though, he’s intimidating. Not a nice man.’

  She scribbled down the details and held out the note. As Sophie reached for it, Sayer pulled it back, fluttering in mid-air.

  ‘If you find out anything, anything at all, you have to tell me,’ she said, holding Sophie’s gaze. ‘That’s the deal, Ms Ellis.’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Sophie, feeling the top of her neck begin to flush.

  ‘This is serious, Sophie. The SEC, the FBI – they don’t fuck around. And if they find out you’ve been withholding information from a major fraud inquiry, believe me, they will find a way to hurt you.’

  37

  Robert ‘Squirrel’ Sykes, society editor of Class magazine, looked at Ruth with a sly smile.

  ‘So tell me again,’ he said, leaning forward. ‘You’re there in the hallway, your hair perfectly back-lit by the bathroom cabinet, and the sexy policeman says in a deep voice, “My pleasure”? Why didn’t you just grab him and take him right there?’

  Ruth slapped his arm.

  ‘I only split up with David three days ago. What sort of girl do you take me for?’

  ‘The sort who should be gagging for a bit of saucy rebound sex, that’s who.’

  She flipped her napkin at him and tried not to smile. Ostensibly, her Saturday afternoon lunch with Robbie at Scott’s was to pick his brains about Lana Goddard-Price, but they’d spent the first twenty minutes huddled at their corner table talking about Fox, or ‘your dirty detective’ as Squirrel insisted on referring to him. The truth was, since their intimate night brainstorming over Chi
nese, Ruth hadn’t been able to get him out of her head, and in a way that wasn’t a million miles from what Robert was suggesting.

  Fox was infuriatingly bullish and patronising and he clearly didn’t trust her enough to give her the information she needed, although she had to admit she reciprocated on that score. But there was something aloof and elusive about him that was as sexy as hell. However, the last thing she needed right now was any more inappropriate liaisons; the prospect of having to face poor Chuck Dean was embarrassing enough, and she and Fox had a potentially useful working relationship.

  ‘Anyway, I didn’t come here to talk about my non-existent love life,’ said Ruth. ‘I’ve got a story to write, remember?’

  ‘Oh, I know and it sounds so exciting. Honestly, you’re wasted on the Trib. You should so come over to Class. You know Cate Balcon loves you.’

  The idea of approaching Class’s glamorous editor had of course crossed Ruth’s mind more than once. Class was a respected stylish glossy and one of the few magazines left which actually ran in-depth features on crime, political intrigue and the back-stabbing antics of the upper classes. Plus it would be a joy to spend the day in the energetic slipstream of Robbie Sykes. But Ruth wasn’t quite ready to leave the cut-and-thrust deadline hell of newspapers, especially when the prospect of bureau chief was still on the table.

  ‘It’s flattering to be considered,’ she said, ‘but I’m gunning for a Pulitzer, which isn’t going to happen unless I finish this story.’

  She smiled at the thought of American journalism’s highest accolade; the prize she had always dreamed of winning. Two friends from college now had them and she had been a more promising journalist than both of them. But so far she had never really got the killer break. Never had that right-place-at-the-right-time story. She knew she had not yet fulfilled her potential.

  ‘Well it’s your loss,’ said Robbie with mock affront. ‘You’re missing out on some fabulous parties.’

  He poured her some more wine and looked around the restaurant with its chic twenties decor and crisp white tablecloths, the diners a mix of edgy media types and old money.

  ‘Although I could do with coming here more often,’ said Robbie. ‘Darling, this is a treat. I only hope I can earn it.’

  ‘So come on then, tell me what you know about Lana Goddard-Price.’

  Since her visits to the gym and Lana’s house, Ruth had become convinced there was more to Mrs Goddard-Price than met the eye. She was particularly intrigued by Mike’s suggestion that Lana had somehow targeted Sophie. She wasn’t entirely sure how it would help her solve Nick Beddingfield’s murder, but she had been a journalist long enough to know that random leads often led you in interesting directions.

  And who better to find out a little bit more about Lana Goddard-Price than Mr Social Intrigue himself, the Squirrel? Even if a quick glance at the wine list had told her that she’d be paying for it for months to come.

  ‘Okay, our friend Lana is late thirties, though she claims thirty-four,’ said Robbie, buttering a roll. ‘Spanish, former model – although not a very successful one from what I can gather. She’d been knocking around London for years, hanging around with the club crowd rather than the country set: traders rather than investment bankers, footballers and the like.’

  He crinkled his nose in distaste.

  ‘Anyway, there were whispers she was a bit of a gold-digger, but she was never a player until she met Simon Goddard-Price and married him about a year ago.’

  ‘And who’s this lucky man?’

  ‘Hedge fund manager, chairman of GP Capital. Absolutely loaded; we’re talking net worth of about four hundred million. Rich list, private jet and so on, works out of Geneva now, I think.’

  ‘You think?’ teased Ruth.

  ‘Darling, it’s not my fault if these people choose to hide themselves away. Simon doesn’t dabble in the society circuit very much. You’re lucky I got this much.’

  ‘So the bottom line is that Lana struck gold after all?’

  Robbie pursed his lips. ‘I don’t know about that. Rumour has it that Simon wants a divorce. That grand house in Knightsbridge is in hubby’s name, and word is Lana signed a pre-nup; five years ago they weren’t worth the paper they were written on, but the law is changing. My guess is the house won’t be part of the pay-off. She’ll probably be left with six months’ housekeeper wages as severance.’

  Ruth scribbled it all down. Lana was on the skids and presumably knew it, so it was reasonable to assume that she would be looking for an exit strategy. But what had that got to do with Sophie Ellis?

  Robbie suddenly looked more animated.

  ‘Darling, Simon Cowell is over there. I just want to pop over and say hi. Order two coffees. Irish.’ He winked.

  Ruth craned her neck to see Cowell, but she had the wrong seat to be in eyeshot. Sighing, she ordered the warm pistachio cake and two Irish coffees and began doodling on the notebook in front of her.

  She wrote three words in the middle of the page. Lana. Sophie. Nick. She circled the word Lana. She was definitely linked to Sophie. She was ‘after her’, according to Mike from the gym; targeting her, befriending her, drawing her into her world. If she wasn’t after Sophie in a sexual sense, then it meant she wanted something else from her. Money? Contacts? Information?

  A penny suddenly dropped. Another person had been after Sophie too – Nick. He had romanced her, become attached to her world, and Jeanne Parsons had made Ruth question his motives. If Nick and Lana were both targeting Sophie, then it made them connected. And Ruth was sure that Nick’s murderer was linked to him somehow.

  She felt giddy with excitement. She grabbed her bag and went out of the restaurant. Stabbing numbers into her phone, she called Chuck Dean.

  She took a depth breath; mumbling some contrite apology about her behaviour at the Frontline Club would only make things worse.

  ‘Chuck, I need you to do something for me. Don’t worry, it’s not of a sexual nature,’ she said brazenly.

  For one moment, she thought he had taken it the wrong way, but his low baritone laugh reassured her that their friendship was back on track.

  ‘CCTV footage from the Riverton lobby. I need you to get hold of it. Not just on the morning of Nick’s murder, but during his entire stay.’

  ‘Okay,’ he replied, not even flinching about the big ask. Every journalist in town would be after the footage. She supposed some night-shift security guard would be making a nice little earner selling copies.

  ‘Do you want me to sift through it frame by frame?’

  There was a reason Ruth hadn’t tried to get hold of the footage before. Fox had already intimated that it hadn’t been that useful. It had shown Sophie leaving and entering the Riverton at exactly the times she had told the police inspector. Ruth also did not have the resources to identify every person caught on film; there would be so many guests milling around the lobby in the hour before and after Nick’s death that it would be a lengthy and ultimately pointless exercise going through the CCTV frame by frame, unless you were looking out for a specific someone.

  She lowered her voice and glanced around Mount Street.

  ‘I want you to check the footage and see if you can identify Lana Goddard-Price. I’ll send you some links to photographs of her. I want to know if at any time she visited Nick Beddingfield in his hotel, all right? Can you get that done as quickly as possible?’

  ‘On it already,’ said Chuck as she ended the call.

  She heard the sound of a throat being cleared loudly and pointedly behind her.

  ‘There you are,’ said Robert dramatically. ‘I was just thinking you’d invited me for lunch and then run off without paying the bill.’

  38

  If Montmartre had been everything Sophie had expected, Fort Lauderdale was nothing like the place she had imagined. She had pictured a quiet, family-friendly tourist town with a sugar-white beach, a jigsaw of Creole cottages and boardwalks, shopping malls and fun parks. Instead it was
a bustling city complete with a downtown financial district and out-of-town commuter belt. There was barely an inflatable dolphin to be seen. Certainly not in Sistrunk, the run-down neighbourhood their taxi was crawling through. Sophie was feeling more uncomfortable by the minute as they pulled up at a red light. On both sides were pawn shops and pizza joints, along with a liquor store that had a grille instead of a door, presumably to discourage hold-ups. A group of kids – no more than nine or ten – sat on BMX-style bicycles outside the store, openly smoking a joint; Sophie could smell the sickly-sweet herb through the open window. The light turned green and they moved off, past a down-and-out pushing a shopping trolley full of cans, past a red-brick church with a hoarding reading ‘Thou Shalt Not KILL’, past a single palm tree jutting out of a vacant lot, waving like a flag of surrender for the American Dream.

  ‘You sure you guys want this address?’ said the driver, glancing at them in his mirror, as they turned into a side street and pulled up outside a crumbling apartment complex.

  Sophie looked up at the graffiti-scarred walls and wished she was back in the comfort of Lana’s Gulfstream that had brought them from New York.

  In the last twenty-four hours she’d clocked up more air miles than your average pilot. After their meeting with Andrea Sayer, they had checked into an anonymous two-star hotel on the Lower East Side and called Lana. She had told them to get some sleep, then meet her – and the jet – at Teterboro at seven a.m. From there they flew straight to Fort Lauderdale executive airport, then into town to meet Tyler Connor. Lana had gone south to Miami, where she apparently had some friends.

  I’m not surprised she didn’t want to hang around here, thought Sophie, looking at the building’s barred windows. It was exactly how she imagined a drug dealer’s house to look.

  ‘Can you wait for us?’ said Josh, slipping the driver a twenty-dollar tip.

  ‘Sure, but don’t be too long, huh?’ he said, his gold tooth winking at them in the sunshine.