Staying On Top (Whitman University) (2 page)

“I don’t know. The hotel clerk stopped me on the way up and said the credit card on file had been declined. They even called the bank.”

“Probably a mistake. I’ll check with them in the morning and get it cleared up.”

“That’s what I thought, but none of the bank cards would go through. They took the credit card, so we’re fine, but something is definitely going on. I’d prefer to check on it now.” It would be harder than usual to sleep, worried that I’d be humiliated trying to grab a
café
in the morning.

Leo opened the door wider in silent invitation. I took it, sinking into the chair next to the windows and rubbing my eyes.

“You look tired. Grab a beer from the bar if you want. You need to use these couple of days to rest up.” He grabbed his phone and scrolled through numbers. “I’ll give the banks a call.”

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“I have contacts, Sam. That’s what you pay people like Neil and me for, remember?”

I shrugged, knocking the cap off a Heineken from the bar and taking a pull. “Thanks. I’m sure you were probably getting ready for bed, too.”

“It’s fine.” He held up a hand, then switched seamlessly to French as he spoke into his phone. “Hello? Yes, may I speak with Herbert,
sil vous plaît? Merci.”

Someone, I assumed Herbert, came on the line a moment later and I tried halfheartedly to follow the conversation as they continued in French. I spoke some and understood more, same with German, but my Spanish and Russian were flawless. Most of my close friends on the tour were Spaniards, and my last two girlfriends had been Serbian. Aside from that, it was hard to spend as much time in foreign countries as I did and not feel at least a little obligated to learn.

Leo frowned and lowered his voice. I gave up trying to follow the conversation, more tired than ever. When he hung up a moment later, he immediately dialed another number.

“What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute. Let me just make sure we have the facts straight first.”

The next conversation took place in German, and then a third in English. That one was the shortest—apparently midnight customer service was harder to come by in the United States than abroad. It didn’t surprise me. Leo left a message for the district manager at Chase and then hung up.

His face looked paler than when he’d opened the door. It worried me, especially because Leo took care to maintain a little too much of a tan, in my opinion.

“What’s going on, Leo?”

He sat down on the edge of the bed, running hands through his hair before looking me in the eye. “I don’t know for sure. We’ll have to get in contact with Neil first thing in the morning. I’ll leave a message with his office in a minute.”

“Okay, well what do you
think
is going on?”

“The accounts at BNP and UBS are empty. The funds were withdrawn by wire transfer at ten p.m. Eastern Standard Time and sent to an account in the Caymans. Untraceable. I assume we’re going to find the same at Chase.”

About halfway through his speech, the words started to sound far away, as though Leo shouted them through water. My brain and lips felt numb. “How much?” I managed.

“Thirty million, give or take.”

Leo sounded as though he were going to throw up. My stomach didn’t disagree. Thirty million dollars. Gone. 

“There shouldn’t have been so much in those accounts. It’s supposed to be invested—I thought they maxed out at a million each.”

“Your investment accounts must have been moved back into your checking and then withdrawn from there. It would have been easier that way—the investment firms would require fewer authorizations since it was going to another account, not being liquidated.” Leo ran a hand through his hair. “Sam, you’re fine. You need to focus on tennis; let me worry about this. We’ll get ahold of Neil in the morning and I’m sure we’ll get all of this straightened out.”

I nodded, still feeling like this must be happening to someone else. I was far from broke, but losing thirty million would be a huge blow. As I lay in bed, trying to force my eyes closed, I told myself there were years left in my career. If my goddamn abs would heal up, I could make it back. 

Depending on what we found out from Neil, that could end up being my only choice.

Chapter 2

Blair

“I am so freaking ready for winter break.” Audra tossed her cherry red hair into a bun, then fell backward onto the bed in a dramatic pose that would be more at home on her brother’s girlfriend, Ruby, than the levelheaded, even-keeled girl I’d met when we both pledged Kappa Chi.

It made me smile, even though my mind struggled to bounce back from the phone conversation I’d wrapped up with my dad a few minutes ago. “Why? Missing the motherland?”

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not Russian, Blair.”

“I know. I just like saying it.” I grabbed my Ethical Theory textbook out of my backpack and went back for my notes. “Are you going home?”

“I think so, yeah.” She didn’t look terribly excited about the prospect.

“Logan staying stateside?” I guessed.

Audra’s cheeks turned pink and her hand curled around her phone. “Yes. He’s going home to Connecticut.”

Something about Audra’s boyfriend rubbed me the wrong way. Not having an actual reason to dislike him, however, I kept my negative thoughts to myself. She seemed happy enough. We were only nineteen, and she was my sorority sister, not my actual sister. 

“Well, I’m sure you guys will talk as much as always. So, like, a hundred texts a day, average.”

Her cheeks reddened further. “Shut up. I can’t wait until you meet someone you actually like so I can dish all of this shit back your direction.”

“Fat chance. The guys on this campus are a dime a dozen.”

“True. If Zachary Flynn couldn’t hold your attention, who could?” she mumbled, looking down at her phone when it buzzed.

I didn’t bother to answer. She wasn’t listening anyway, and I didn’t want to talk about Flynn. I had liked him. He hadn’t been bad in bed, either, but his notoriety had made me uncomfortable. It had been easy to convince myself it was no big deal, but the first time camera flashes had blinded me coming out of a restaurant, the lies had blown up in my face. Maybe it was because of my dad, or how he’d brought me up, but being noticed—or worse, remembered—gave my hives. Literal ones.

“I’m going to the library,” I said, grabbing my textbook and iPad, then shrugging into a jacket. Seventy degrees meant a slight chill in Florida, and even though I’d grown up in Manhattan, it hadn’t taken long for my body to adjust to the balmy Southern weather.

“What?” Audra looked up, blinking to dislodge the glassiness hazing her eyes. She’d never had a boyfriend before—probably because she had four slightly scary older brothers—and this Logan thing was out of control. “Why are you going to the library? No one studies at the library.”

“I need to, um . . . do some research in the stacks. Some of the reference materials for this take-home test aren’t online yet.”

For the first time in weeks, Audra’s distraction didn’t make me want to smack the freckles off her pretty face, because it meant she didn’t question my flimsy excuse. Questions weren’t welcome. Not when it came to my dad, and certainly not when it came to the part-time “job” I worked at his request.

“Okay. Don’t forget about the meeting tonight. We have to review housing applications.”

“Got it.” Audra and I had been elected—not that we’d run—to oversee the freshmen and sophomores requesting to move into the Kappa Chi house next semester. We were required to fill the house, and since upperclassmen preferred to live off campus we weren’t above forcing newbies in to fill up the rooms.

It’s how Audra and I had ended up living here as roommates, but that had worked out fine. Much better than my disastrous freshman year trying to keep Kennedy Gilbert from killing herself. She seemed to be doing well, now, and she and her boyfriend, Toby, were living together in a pretty swanky beachfront place. I was happy for her, but not sorry to be living with someone normal. Or someone who had been normal before she started secret dating.

I looked down at my outfit. Yoga pants and a Kappa tee were no good—I needed a skirt and blouse at the least, but my suit would be better. No way would Audra fail to notice me changing clothes, so I gathered the suit and a blouse on their hangers, then paused. “I’m going to stop at the cleaners. Do you want me to take anything for you?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Hold on.” She put down her phone and slid off the bed, then dragged four dresses and one skirt out of her closet, tossing them on my bed. “Thanks.”

That was easy enough, except adding a stop at the cleaner’s to my list.

None of my sisters interrupted my escape from the house. I passed through the massive white columns and stepped down into the parking lot, enjoying the cooler brush of air against my cheeks. Autumn was my favorite time in New York. This time of year, late October, was perfect. The trees would be changing, the air would taste crisp and smoky, and the sky would be impossibly huge and blue. I missed it, and not just the weather. The people, more than anything. 

Even if I had spent more time ripping them off than getting to know any of them.

The nice thing about the Kappa house being the farthest sorority from main campus was our secluded lot. No one saw as I changed out of my T-shirt and pants and into a skirt and blouse, complete with an annoying pair of old-lady panty hose I’d snuck into my purse. If my dad’s lessons had taught me anything at all, it was that the proper appearance did at least 85 percent of the work. And old ladies freaking loved panty hose.

*

Dad had been asking me for more favors than ever since I relocated to Florida, thanks to the abundance of gullible, rich elderly people. The drive to this particular job didn’t take long. Twenty minutes or so after leaving campus my GPS said I’d arrived, and a street lined with sprawling faux-brick estates welcomed me to the neighborhood. 

Less than three years to go,
I thought as I pulled into the driveway and shut off the car, taking a few minutes to clear my head. I’d be done with school, have a degree, and be able to get a real job; I would finally be able to refuse the “work” my dad tossed my direction. 

The ever-present worry that I didn’t know how to live any other way tried to wriggle past my defenses, but I swiped it away. I could figure it out. Just because a duck had never seen water didn’t mean it couldn’t swim. Just because I’d grown up stealing didn’t mean I couldn’t be honest.

It took the space of a few deep breaths to twist my hair into a knot at the nape of my neck and dig my fake FBI credentials from the glove compartment. I slipped them into my jacket pocket and climbed out of my high-end Toyota, which I drove on purpose so as not to intimidate potential marks. Plus, FBI agents didn’t drive Beamers like the one Dad had sent me to Whitman in. 

The driveway had been recently repoured, and flowering bushes and plants lined the pathway to the massive double front doors. The house was the kind of structure that only rich people in Florida managed to build—more than one story, with an exterior cut to look like brick instead of the stucco that was more appropriate for the environment down here. 

All of these huge, sprawling houses and sprawling lawns felt foreign to me. The extra space felt wasteful after living in Manhattan. Some people hated it—the crush of humanity, the never being alone, the constant noise—but after growing up that way, the opposite felt wrong.

An impressively long and loud ding-dong sounded when I pressed the bell. I fixed a friendly but professional smile on my lips and a look of appropriate sympathy in my eyes. My father had stolen over ten million dollars from this woman earlier in the week, but she had another fifty squirreled away in accounts to which she’d retained her access. I was here to change that.

Two years ago the light briefcase would have been slippery in my sweating palm, but today I had no nerves. What had started as an eight-year-old girl playing a game had turned into a job at some point—and into my lifestyle as well as my father’s.

The door opened, revealing a tidy African-American woman in an old-fashioned black-and-white maid’s uniform. “Afternoon. Can I help you?”

She gave me a tight smile that said she hated her life, one that relaxed the slight knot at the base of my neck. It meant she had no love for her employer, which worked in my favor.

I pulled the badge out of my pocket as though I’d been doing it for years. “I’m Special Agent Cooley with the FBI. I’d like to speak with . . .” I checked a blank notepad on the back of my badge. “Miss Daisy Brown, if she’s available.”

“Miss Brown is relaxing right now. Can I tell her what this is about?”

“I’m afraid I need to speak with her directly, but you can tell her I’m with the white-collar crime division.”

“She ain’t gonna know what that means.”

“It means we investigate fraud. Like the kind run by questionable accountants who steal money from hardworking ladies such as yourself,” I replied dryly. 

She eyed me for a few more seconds before opening the door wider and inviting me into the foyer. Step one—get into the house.

“I’ll tell Miss Brown you’re here. It might be a few minutes. Can I get you something to drink?”

The acid in her tone made me think the beverage would be mostly spit, so I shook my head. “No, thank you. I’ll be fine.”

The maid left me alone in the foyer. The lack of warmth, or even an invitation to sit, made me wonder why my father had chosen this particular mark and how he’d managed to wrangle the first ten million out of her hands. The house was rattier on the inside than out—the walls had some cracks that needed to be repaired, the wooden floors could use a buff and stain, and the paisley carpet on the stairs was worn thin in the middle. It all added up to the assumption that the mark had money, but she didn’t like to spend it. 

Maybe Dad was getting bored in his old age. Picking bigger challenges. Fine for him, but I wasn’t feeling much like taking on a tough con today. I actually did have an Ethical Theory take-home test to complete before tomorrow.