by Julia Derek
I sat up. “Really? That would be so awesome!”
“I know, right? George’s a good friend to have.” She reached down into her blue canvas tote that she’d placed next to her feet and fished out her phone. “Let me call him and see if he’s free for dinner. My bet is that he is. He doesn’t have much of a social life and runs his own schedule down at the station.”
She punched in a few numbers into her phone and put it against her ear. “Hey Lori,” she said into the phone. “Can you connect me to George? He’s working today, right?”
It didn’t take long until this George-person seemed to be at the other end of the line.
“Hey George, it’s Gabi.” Gabi was smiling big as she talked. “How are things?” She nodded as she listened to what George was telling her. “Uh-huh… Yeah, things are great here, too. Hawaii was fantastic. Hey, what are you doing for dinner later? I need to thank you for helping me when I was so stuck in New York, so if you’re free, I’d love to take you somewhere. And there’s something I wanted to talk to you about. Something very important.”
Her eyes lit up and she nodded at me. “Really? Well, how about we go to some place by the beach then? I’ll be bringing a friend of mine. A very nice, blond girl.” She giggled into the phone. “Exactly. I know that’s your type….” She listened some more, turning serious. “Okay, how about we pick you up at six thirty then?” She listened for a moment again before ending the call with, “Great, see you soon. Bye, George.”
“Done,” she said and put her phone back into her bag. She turned to me, got to her feet, and pointed at me and then at herself, back and forth a couple of times. “Go get cleaned up. You and I are going to do some shopping. I assume you can’t go back to your mom’s house and get clothes before someone makes sure the place is completely clean, right?”
“Yeah, no, I can’t,” I said. “But they’ll be done tomorrow before noon, according to what my mom said.”
“Well, we want George to get this done today, so we can nail this psychotic bitch once and for all. Let’s go get you prettied up, girlie .”
Chapter Twenty
Just as Gabi had promised, George turned out to be a most efficient hacker. He started sending us stuff only a couple of hours after our early dinner together had ended. By the time Chase and I had gotten through most of Chrissy’s email communication it was almost four in the morning, but we then had a good idea why she’d wanted to get rid of Chase so badly she’d had him abducted by professionals. We were still not sure who the snake had been intended for, primarily me or him. She obviously knew we were together and staying in my mom’s house in my room, having planted it there in the first place. Perhaps she’d hoped to get rid of both us once and for all if she’d gotten really lucky. All we felt certain of was that she apparently wanted us gone for good now.
Nick had known what he’d spoken of when he’d mentioned that psychopathic minds really didn’t like it when they got outmastered.
The subject that stuck out the most in her emails was all the exchanges she was having with a very powerful client that Chase wanted to work with. A client I despised, primarily because of moral reasons.
Chattanooga James.
“Huh,” Chase said, rubbing his temples. His eyelids were heavy with exhaustion. “Who would have thought she knew Chattanooga so well? And judging from the contents of all those emails they not only know each other, but they might even be dating. Or she wants to date him at least.”
“I know,” I said, “and that is so… ew.” I grimaced and stuck my tongue out to emphasize just how disgusted I was with this idea.
Chase chuckled. “Why don’t you tell me how you really feel?”
I shuddered as I pictured myself having to make out with someone like Chattanooga. “That guy is disgusting on so many levels.” Not only did he lack scruples, but he was severely overweight, had really bad skin, no hair and breath that could easily outrival a litter box full of cat urine.
“Yeah, I can’t imagine too many women being into him,” Chase said and nodded. “But he’s probably the most desirable client in the entire finance world right now.” He smirked. “As you know, he was going to sign with us in the next couple of weeks. Chrissy must have thought she could win him over and get him to work with Morgan Stanley as long as I was out of the picture.” And then his face darkened. “Long enough, that is. For Chattanooga to give up on me and Goldman would take a few weeks at least. Which means that you and I would have been in that room for a long time. Maybe even dead eventually.”
“I can’t see how she could have let us survive if she was going to have her team take him over as a client,” I said. “Wouldn’t it be obvious that she was behind our kidnapping if she let us get out and Chattanooga signed with Morgan Stanley? Don’t you think we would’ve figured it out eventually?”
“Not necessarily. Chattanooga needs someone to oversee his deals at some point, so he would have had to pick someone else to work with if I was gone for weeks. I was the main reason he’d be signing with Goldman, not the company itself. Still, he wouldn’t wait for me forever, so it wouldn’t be weird if he signed with someone at Morgan. Also, even if we eventually did suspect that Chrissy was behind our abduction, we don’t exactly have a lot of proof to back our claims. As I mentioned before, I doubt we could use these emails without getting in trouble ourselves. She probably knows that or she’d have erased them.”
“Yeah, that would not be good…” Then I thought about how Chase had been so insistent about working with this monster Chattanooga despite all the run-ins he’d had with the U.N. Human Rights Council. The more I thought about how unethical he was in his business dealings, the more annoyed I got. I huffed and glared at Chase.
“I can’t believe you don’t care at all about the fact that this guy employs kids to work for him seven days a week,” I said. “I know you had to work as a kid yourself, but I’m sure you didn’t have to work under the same conditions as this bastard makes his young workers do! And then he pays everyone else who works for him peanuts, as well as doesn’t give a shit about how his companies pollute the environment.”
I was suddenly so annoyed that I couldn’t even look at Chase. I swiveled around and started marching out of the room we were in, doing our research, a part of the hotel suite we had taken for the night. But before I could get very far, Chase grabbed my hand and turned me around so that I was facing him.
He pulled me close and looked at me intently. “If you’d ever bothered to take a look at the contract I’d had written up for this particular client, you would’ve known that I’d added several stipulations, especially regarding those three things you just mentioned. In order for us to work together, he’d have to change the way he treated his workers. And you’d also see that he wouldn’t be allowed to hire anyone under the age of sixteen.”
I stared at Chase, unable to speak I was so stunned. Well, I guess I should have taken another look at that contract before I opened my mouth. But at the time I had been convinced that Chase was so greedy to work with this admittedly financially attractive client that he’d been willing to look the other way when it came to Chattanooga’s work ethics.
I gazed down at the floor. “I’m sorry,” I mumbled. “You’re right. I should have looked at the contract before I opened my mouth.”
He pulled me into his arms and kissed the crown of my head. “It’s okay, Elisa. I think we’ve moved past all that, don’t you?”
I gazed up at him. “Yeah, we have.”
He put a finger under my chin and kissed me gently on the mouth, making me forget all about Chrissy and her snakes and Chattanooga and his unscrupulous ways. All I could think about was how good Chase’s soft lips felt against mine.
“I’d love to keep kissing you, but don’t you think we should get back to Chrissy?” Chase whispered. “And why she’s literally trying to kill us now?”
“Yes, of course,” I replied and inhaled deeply, pushing away all the thoughts of how wonderful i
t would be if Chase just lifted me up and placed me on the huge bed in the other room and made love to me right then. But before we let ourselves go, we needed to focus on solving our problem. When that was done, we had the rest of our lives to enjoy ourselves. Well, hopefully.
Oh, God, I really hope this doesn’t turn out to be just a fling for him in the end…
“Good,” Chase said and let go of me. He cleared his throat and adjusted the front of his pants. I hid a little smile when I realized exactly how excited he’d gotten from our brief kiss, feeling instantly better.
“As you may remember,” he continued, “the reason we had such a hard time figuring out who this woman was was because we couldn’t think of anyone benefitting from us being gone at the same time. Or at all even. I’m sure that wasn’t an accident. Which is also why I think she might have let us both go in the end. After all, kidnapping is not as serious a crime as homicide. On the offshoot that she got caught.”
I frowned at him, not sure what he was getting at.
“I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said when he didn’t elaborate.
“I’m talking about why I think she chose to have the two of us abducted. In order to throw off suspicion, Chrissy needed to kidnap someone completely random in addition to me. You know, so when she’d gotten Chattanooga to come work with Morgan, you and I wouldn’t think too much about it. This is why I think she also decided to kidnap you. See what I mean?”
I stared at him, in awe. What he had just explained made perfect sense.
“Yes, you’re right,” I whispered. “Why didn’t I think of that before?”
Chase shot me a triumphant grin. “I think that might have something to do with you being an associate and I a managing director at Goldman at the moment… I’m simply smarter than you.”
I slapped him, annoyed with him for spelling out the obvious. So I guess he was smarter than me, having figured it all out so quickly… How irritating.
Wait a minute… I bit the inside of my lower lip. Something about all that he had just explained didn’t feel quite right. There was something else. I felt that distinctly. Maybe Chrissy having chosen to kidnap me wasn’t quite as random as Chase had just put it…
She had obviously known I existed or else she wouldn’t have known to abduct me at all. And especially not abduct me in the manner that she had done. In order to succeed taking me in the middle of the day in my own doormen-secured apartment building, there must have been plenty of planning involved. The more I thought about this, the more sense it made to me. I wasn’t just a random person to throw off suspicion.
She had known somehow that I hadn’t been able to stand Chase and that was the reason I was chosen. I told Chase my thoughts.
He gazed at me appreciatively. “Right… Of course! She chose you to get back at you. That way she killed two birds with one stone. I forgot that you told me how much she hated you.” His eyes glittered with amusement, then he smiled at me. “Maybe you are as smart as I am after all…”
I ignored the snarky little comment he’d just made. Instead, I sucked in a breath and put my hands on my hips as I thought about what Chrissy had done. “And while she had us in there, she decided that she might as well fuck with us— me—as much as possible to get back at me for humiliating her in high school. I’m sure if we hadn’t gotten away as quickly as we had, she’d have done lots more.”
Chase nodded. “I think that’s exactly right. She definitely enjoyed toying with us. Those guys were only her puppets.”
I was in complete agreement. “Okay, so now that we have it all figured out, what do we do? How do we get her to confess all of this? That would be the only way to get her, right? Or at least the quickest. Considering that she seems hell-bent on killing us now, we better nail her as soon as possible ourselves and not rely on the police. Who knows how long it’ll take them to get anything done?”
“Yeah, that might take a while,” Chase said slowly. “In order for us to get her, she needs to confess everything on tape.”
I took a closer look at him. “What exactly do you have on your mind?”
“Exactly what I just said. We’re going to have to come up with a way to make her confess to what she did on tape.”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I got that part. But how do we make that happen? She’s not gonna just tell us.”
“No, of course not.” He pursed his lips. “So we need to trick her. The one advantage we have is that she doesn’t know that we know she’s the one behind this. She probably assumes we’re totally clueless and are crapping our pants right now. You know, after the snake incident. She obviously has someone here keeping tabs on us. Which means she also knows we survived. Anyway, so one of us should confront her somehow while wearing a wire.”
“How about we do it at the same time?”
He frowned. “You mean we both confront her? I think that would be trying too hard and she wouldn’t admit to a thing. It’s better if one of us does it. One of us has to get her comfortable enough to even be alone with her somewhere. She’ll immediately suspect something if both of us approach her. Think about it.”
Yeah, he did have a point with that, I had to admit.
“Then who should talk to her?” I asked.
He sighed as he looked at me. “I hate to say this, but given that you know her a lot better than I do, it might be better if you talked to her. Got her alone somehow. I really don’t know her at all except for having met her that one time at that function. I think if I tried, it would be way too obvious and she’d get suspicious. I mean, I wasn’t very nice to her the one time we spoke, so why would I be nice now?”
I thought about what Chase had said. Would Chrissy be more likely to open up to me than to him, even though she hated me as much as she did? I soon decided that it was more likely that she’d relax around me. If it seemed like a spontaneous encounter, us running into each other somewhere on Manhattan.
“What do you think?” Chase asked. Before I could answer, he added, “Maybe it would be safer if I confronted her somehow … The woman is after all a complete nut job. Who knows what she’ll try next.”
“No,” I said. “It’s better if I do it. It’s the only way. How would you make her let her guard down, not to mention get her to agree to go somewhere to talk to you alone? She already thinks she can control me, so it’ll be easy for me. All I need to do is bump into her somewhere and one thing should lead to another. She might even suggest for the two of us to get together somewhere on her own in the hopes that she’ll squeeze info about you out of me. What kind of excuse would you use to lure her away?”
Chase shrugged. “I don’t know. But I’m sure we can come up with something.”
“No, I’ll do it.” I looked him straight in the eyes. “I want to do it. I need to do it. I want to prove both to her and to myself that I’m not scared of her. She has to pay for all the hurt she’s caused so many people in her life. And I want to be the one who makes sure that finally happens.”
“Well, if that’s how you feel—”
I smiled at him without involving my eyes; the thought of Chrissy made that impossible. And then I said, “That’s exactly how I feel.”
***
Chase and I discussed our plan with Gabi and Nick the following day, and they both agreed our best chance to nail Chrissy ASAP was if we could get her confession on tape. All we needed to do now was come up with a plan to get her to be alone with me somewhere and open up about what she had done. Surely, if I provoked her enough, she’d be unable to keep her mouth shut.
They also agreed that I had to be the person who approached her, not Chase.
After some discussion, Nick and Gabi decided that we had no choice but to involve the NYPD for this operation to work out, even though most of them there needed to keep thinking that Nick was dead. To get around that issue, Nick would hand-pick a few cops whom he trusted and who could come out and arrest Chrissy as soon as we’d gotten her to confess. Gabi would
use the NYPD handler she’d worked with while undercover in New York to help out with men as well. So, while Chrissy and I would appear to be alone at our meeting area, we wouldn’t really be. Nick and Gabi would make sure there were several cops close by, in addition to themselves.
A day later, the four of us boarded another plane together, this time one that would take us back to New York, much to the chagrin of my mother, who had really hoped that we would stay longer. The house had been thoroughly cleaned out and was safe again, she assured us. And no one but she, Dylan, and I knew the new code to the home security system. I told her it didn’t matter; we had to go back to New York if we wanted all of the horror to end.
“Well, when will you be back, honey?” she asked, hugging me hard as I was about to board.
“I don’t know, Mom,” I replied. “Hopefully soon.”
She sighed heavily. “You didn’t even get a chance to see Victor and Jen and the kids.”
That was true. Chase and I never did go to watch that Lakers game with my brother and uncle. Beginning with Chase confessing how he’d known me for years to me remembering whose laugh I’d heard to the snake that we’d gotten confirmed was of a very deadly kind, we forgot all about calling Dylan. And then, when the game actually was on, we’d hung by the computer, waiting for Chrissy’s emails.
I gently removed my mom’s arms from around me.
“I promise I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said.
She shook her head. “Are you sure this is a good idea?” She touched my right cheekbone lightly. “Your bruise is not even healed,” she added before I got a chance to reply.
“I’m sure I’ll be able to cover that up with some makeup.” I kissed her on the cheek. A voice announced that our plane was boarding. Chase, Gabi, and Nick had already gone through security. “I really have to go now or I’ll miss the plane.”