Miranda Vaughn Mystery 01.00 - Chasing the Dollar (4 page)

My face flushed.
Radioactive?
That's not what I expected to hear. I mean, I knew it was going to be tough, but I figured there was a chance. I wasn't going in without credentials or experience. I graduated near the top of my class. I did excellent work, knew what I was doing. Sure, my best references were en route to federal prison, but I had been cleared of all charges.

I tried to talk, but my throat was closed up like a fist.

"Listen, Miranda, if I hear of anything, I'll let you know." He cleared his throat again in the uncomfortable silence that followed.

"
Thanks, Dylan."

I didn
't know what else to say. I wanted to rage, wanted to scream at him. But it wasn't his fault and I couldn't burn that bridge. As much as I hated to admit it, Dylan was the only person in the banking industry who would return my calls.

He said a hasty goodbye and hung up, and I sat in the small airless conference room, surrounded by the proof that I hadn
't done what they said I did. That I wasn't a swindler, a con artist, a fraudster.

Or was it proof? I remembered one of the jurors quoted in the local newspaper after the acquittal had said that she wasn
't convinced that I didn't know what Ralph and Tim were doing, but the government hadn't proved it beyond a reasonable doubt. The jury had deliberated for four days, and the testimony of the victims who lost their life savings had almost swayed them. Almost, but not quite. At the time I read it, I didn't care about that nuance because I was so happy to not be going to prison. Now I understood that the gulf between being cleared and being found not guilty was going to haunt me. Maybe forever.

I leaned forward and put my forehead on the smooth wood surface of the table, trying to quiet the roaring in my head. All my years of working crappy waitressing jobs to put myself through college, all my hard work at Patterson Tinker, everything that Aunt Marie had sacrificed for me—it was all swirling down the drain. I
'd be stuck making apple turnovers at the Sugar Plum Bakery and dodging my former colleagues until everyone forgot that I was the woman who was arrested on fraud charges. Which was approximately never.

The laptop sitting next to my head beeped, and I sat up and reluctantly opened the electronic discovery software. It looked like I had no choice. I
'd be working for Rob, reliving my past in his new white-collar criminal cases. I was going to get reacquainted with the computer I'd spent so much time with. I navigated to the folders that contained my case, and my finger hovered over the delete command.

I paused for a moment, my earlier discussion with Dylan echoing in my head.

I
had
been set up. I had known it as soon as I saw the evidence against me. Someone knew that I was in charge of transferring client funds and had set up an account in my name and used it to siphon off investments. I knew I hadn't done it. But it was someone with access to my computer, my information, my passwords. Ralph and Tim would have known enough to do it, and Rob had been successful in convincing the jury that they certainly had motive to set up an underling and lie on the stand about it.

My finger still inches above the delete key, I looked up at the rows of boxes.

Maybe the answers I wanted were in here. The FBI was convinced that I was guilty and was only looking for evidence to corroborate Tim and Ralph's stories. But what if there was something here, something that would finally prove that I was innocent, instead of merely "not guilty."

A plan began to percolate through the haze of self-pity I
'd been wallowing in for the past several weeks. I could clear my name. I could find the money stolen from the investors.

No one knew the ins and outs of Patterson Tinker like I did. Not only had I worked there for six years, I had studied it thoroughly in the past year. And no one knew the evidence in the case like I did. I knew where the bodies were buried, so to speak.

I just needed some time. And the computer. And those hard drives sitting in a box waiting to get shipped off to Rob's storage unit.

I stood up and dug through the stack of boxes, ripping the lid off the one I was looking for before good sense could catch up with me. From between folders stuffed with papers, I pulled out the two external hard drives, their cords trailing behind them. Between them, they contained every page of evidence from that government warehouse. I stuffed them in my messenger bag and resealed the box. I turned off the computer and slid it into the bag, too, along with the cords and a binder that I had compiled months earlier as a directory of the volumes of evidence.

The bag weighed heavily on my shoulder as I composed a quick note to Rob, agreeing to work on the financial fraud case and letting him know that I had taken the laptop home to review the software before I started using it again. Then I turned off the light in the War Room and shut the door behind me.

I left the note on Rob
's desk, locked the office, and turned on the alarm, flooded with an unfamiliar energy. Something I hadn't felt in nearly two months.

It was a sense of purpose. I finally had a plan.

I heard the sound of Sarah's motorcycle as she turned down the alley behind my apartment and I closed the laptop, sliding it into a backpack and under my lounge chair. A moment later, her hand reached over the fence and unlatched the gate.

"
I hope you have enough beer to share," she said, trotting toward the pool.

I kicked the lid off the cooler near my feet to expose the five remaining beers submerged in ice.

"Oooh, good stuff," Sarah said, tossing her helmet onto a chair and dropping her backpack onto the grass. She grabbed a bottle and raised an eyebrow at the craft beer's label. "Russian River Brewing? Are we celebrating something?"

"
Isn't everyday a celebration, really?"

She laughed and caught the bottle opener I tossed her. When she drank the icy brew, she closed her eyes and let out a sigh of contentedness.
"That is good IPA."

"
Make yourself comfortable," I said.

She stripped off the black jacket and then unzipped her padded pants and pulled her long-sleeved
T-shirt off, revealing a red-and-white striped bikini underneath. From her backpack, she pulled a bottle of sunscreen and applied the goo liberally to her skin.

"
To what do I owe the honor of your presence?" I asked, opening my second bottle of the Blind Pig IPA.

Sarah had called that morning and wanted to stop by after work. It was my day off from the bakery, so I told her she
'd find me by the pool. It was a perk of living over Aunt Marie's garage—I got to share the backyard swimming pool.

"
Nothing really, I just wanted to catch up. Oh, and I brought your last invoice from Rob. There's nothing due, but there's also nothing left in the trust from your retainer."

I suspected as much and wasn
't expecting that there would be a balance. Rob had probably paid for some of the last expenses out of his own pocket before the trial was over.

"
Rob says you're going to come back and work on the new case," Sarah said, settling into the padded lounge next to mine. Her chair was in the sun. Mine was shaded because I'd been working on the computer. Also because I'm a fair-haired girl of Nordic descent who burns at the first glimpse of sun.

I nodded and took a drink.
"It's been hard finding a job."

Rob had probably already told Sarah the whole story. The office was small, and news traveled fast. That
's how Sarah and I became friends, working in close proximity and on the same case for months on end. Plus, we're the same age and had a lot of the same interests. Except that she's a bad ass and I'm scared to death of motorcycles. Officially, Sarah was Rob's paralegal, but her duties often went beyond researching and drafting documents. She was the office fixer—able to find information from public records, deep social media searches, or even a little undercover work. And when Burton had trouble serving subpoenas on reluctant witnesses, he often turned the job over to Sarah.

Sarah leaned forward, brushed her shiny black hair out of her face, and then dug into her bag and pulled out the envelope from Rob. I stuck it unopened in my backpack.

"It will be good to have you back at the office. We're getting a ton of calls for fraud cases now. Your acquittal was the best advertisement Rob could have hoped for."

"
Rob was hoping to retire."

She waved her hand.
"He'll never retire. He enjoys what he does too much."

"
I'll probably be working at home most of the time, since I just need the computer and the electronic files to review," I said.

"
That's cool," Sarah said, adjusting the top of her swimsuit. "Hey, did you hear Burton's got a new girlfriend?"

I raised an eyebrow. Burton Worthington, the investigator who rented an office from Rob, was a notorious ladies
' man. And it was easy to see why. Towering over six feet tall, smooth mocha-colored skin, a rogue's smile—the man was a wall of muscles and sin. "Is he giving up the life of a player?"

Sarah shrugged.
"Don't know about that, but I did meet this one."

"
And?"

Another shrug.
"She's okay. Looks like a stripper."

I laughed, and she shot me a steely glare. There was something going on between Sarah and
Burton, though neither would admit or even acknowledge it.

"
So, since you're not working full-time and the new case won't pick up for a couple months, what are you going to do?" she asked, and I let her change the subject.

I stretched so my feet were in the sun and wondered how much to tell Sarah of my new plans. I
'd spent every free minute in the last week going over the electronic evidence I'd swiped from Rob's files. It was enough time to get an overview of the discovery and reacquaint myself with the volumes of files. I had broken my research into chunks and started the night before on bank records, looking for transfers that were out of the ordinary.

And it hadn
't taken long to find that—and more.

Had the FBI been looking for evidence of criminal activity, they had only to dig into their own warehouse. But they had been investigating me and my role in fleecing the hundreds of investors in the Sahara Fund, a mutual fund Ralph and Tim managed. So the agents must have focused on just that one investment fund and missed a much larger problem. I couldn
't yet tell exactly what the scheme was, but there was something odd—huge sums were being transferred to accounts for Patterson Tinker offices overseas, mostly in Macau and Geneva. But when I cross-referenced those transfers, I couldn't figure out why the money was flowing to those accounts.

It would be natural to bounce this question off Sarah, who was super smart and savvy about criminal enterprises. But if I told her, she
'd be obligated to let Rob know that I had taken the evidence from the office, possibly violating the court's protective order.

So instead, I just shook my head.
"I'm not sure. The bakery still needs help, so I'll hang out there for a while, help Aunt Marie."

Sarah sat up again and reached for her bag.
"I almost forgot," she said, unzipping a pocket on the exterior and reaching in. "Your passport. In case you need to flee the country."

She tossed it to me, and I grinned.

"Well, it's always good to have that option."

"
The court mailed it back to the office along with all the paperwork exonerating your bond. You're now officially a free woman," she said, raising her bottle.

I raised mine, and we clinked them together.

"Thanks, Sarah," I said. "I appreciate all your help."

"
Anytime," she said. "But I don't mean that you should go get in trouble again. Whatever you decide to do."

"
What would you do in my situation?"

She thought about it for a moment then looked at me.
"I'd probably use that passport, travel around, enjoy the fact that you're not tied to a job or a husband."

"
Travel usually costs money, which I am plumb out of."

I didn
't mention that the husband part of the equation was a sore subject with my recent run-in with Dylan.

"
Doesn't have to cost a fortune," she said. "Plus, you've got credit cards."

Oddly enough, I still had excellent credit. I
'd made really good money with Patterson Tinker and was responsible with my spending, so all my credit cards were gold and platinum cards with high limits. Apparently, the fact that I was fired from Patterson Tinker wasn't on the credit bureaus' radar, and since I hadn't run up any debt, the cards were all just sitting there with full credit lines at the ready.

"
If you're not going to travel, at least go find a man—a
real
man—and go wild for a while," she said. Sarah had met Dylan when she and Burton interviewed him while they were investigating my case. She wasn't impressed.

"
Hmm, like maybe Burton?" I mused and laughed when I saw the jealousy cross her face. In a flash it was gone, and she shook her head at my laughter.

"
I'm not interested in Burton," she said. "Well, maybe his DNA. I mean, admit it, we would make incredibly beautiful children together."

This was true. Sarah
's mother was Chinese and her father was French. She was a stunning mix of the best of her parents' genetics—green eyes with a slight almond shape, shiny black hair that hung straight as rain to the middle of her back, creamy skin that never required make-up. And she had a naturally willowy figure, despite her disdain for exercise. If she'd grown taller than 5-feet, 4-inches, she'd probably be a supermodel. I'd hate her if she weren't so damn nice.

"
Maybe you'd have cute kids. Or maybe they'd get your height and Burton's bald head. You don't know how these things work."

She threw the sunscreen at me and laughed.

"Let's go get tacos for dinner," she said. "You need to put on a couple pounds."

I rolled my eyes.
"Thanks,
Mom
. I work in a bakery. The pounds will find their way home soon enough."

We sat by the pool and talked about nothing important for a couple hours, finished off the beers, and then Sarah raided my closet for something to wear, and we got dressed to go out for dinner. As we walked to the restaurant on somewhat unsteady feet, it felt like a normal life, like any other 31-year-old woman would lead. It was the best day I
'd had in a long time, and I reveled in it, ordering a margarita at the restaurant.

The taco plates arrived after my second margarita and Sarah
's third.

"
I'm sleeping on your couch tonight," Sarah said. I nodded and sipped at the tart cocktail, licking the salt off the rim.

The waitress set the steaming plates in front of us, and I inhaled the spicy roasted carnitas. I closed my eyes and let the savory fragrance wash over me.

Sarah laughed. "I don't think I've ever enjoyed something as much as you're enjoying those tacos. Not even sex."

I grinned and opened my eyes. It had been a long year and a half, but I felt at that moment finally fully relaxed. Life was good. Everything was going to be all right.

I rolled up the taco and took a bite, savoring the flavors.

Sarah did the same and then groaned.
"Now I get it. These tacos are better than sex."

Looking over her shoulder, my gaze met that of a man sitting alone at the bar, a plate of food in front of him. He had a funny half-smile on his face, seeming amused by my encounter with the Mexican food. Sarah followed my gaze and turned to look at him.

She turned back and gave me a huge drunken smile. "Go for it, Miranda. He's hot."

My tequila-addled brain scrambled to keep up with the rush of hormones that the man had triggered. He was good looking—broad shoulders, wavy dark brown hair and intense dark eyes. He was still watching me, but now he was watching me study him. I gave him a smile and turned my attention back to my dinner.

I declined another margarita. It was only a three-block walk home, but any more alcohol and I'd probably head in the wrong direction. Sarah leaned back after polishing off her plate and one of my tacos. She ate like a linebacker. Damn her metabolism.

When the check came, Sarah grabbed it out of my hands and slapped a credit card down.

"My treat," she said, putting the folder in the waitress's hands. "We never got a chance to celebrate our win. Plus, I'll probably throw up later, and you'll end up holding my hair. So we'll be even."

I knew better than to fight with her, so I thanked her and glanced again toward the man at the bar. He was still there, lingering over a drink. He was watching me in the mirror behind the bar now, and I caught his eye again. This time, his expression was serious instead of flirty, and my brain woke from its boozy slumber and started sorting through memories trying to place him.

My smile faltered as the recognition clicked into place. His hair was shorter then, and he had been wearing a dark blue windbreaker with FBI emblazoned on the back. His strong hands grabbed mine, pulled them behind me, and snapped a pair of handcuffs on my wrists. Later, in a tiny room at the federal building downtown, he sat quietly taking notes while another man, the lead investigator, questioned me about the Sahara Fund.

"
Miranda? Are you okay?"

I snapped back to see Sarah, leaning toward me, concerned. My throat closed, and the blood drained from my head.

I stood quickly, knocking the table with my leg. Sarah caught it and stood, too, grabbing her purse off the back of her chair.

"
Let's go," I said.

Sarah waved toward the waitress and retrieved the check to sign the credit card receipt. I mumbled something about waiting outside and wobbled toward the door. Leaning against the stucco wall, I gulped down the still-warm evening air. My heart thundered and my hands shook.