by Janet Dailey
Let it be easy. No fuss. He wanted to be cremated and his ashes scattered where no one could walk on them. No memorial. He had specified both in a letter of intent that was separate from his will. That lengthy document left her a reasonable sum, invested safely but nowhere near as much as she probably hoped for. As far as his obituary, she would have nothing to preen about. She would be listed only as his companion, Caroline Loudon.
The newspapers and media would add a tactful line stating that his long-ago marriage had ended in divorce and name his ex-wife—that was routine. But they would not disclose where Luanne lived now.
No one knew that but him, his lawyer, and a trusted relative who had been paid well to keep certain secrets.
And then there was Ann. Given the recent coverage, the polite conventions of obituary writing would be set aside to include a line or two about the unsolved kidnapping. That and only that would make his death newsworthy enough to be featured online and on television with a photo and a brief bio. And images of her.
If she had survived, as he wanted to believe she had, would she make the connection? She did not resemble him.
There were things he could do to ensure that she had that chance. His lineage would be his ultimate legacy. If Ann required DNA testing to prove that she was his child and only survivor, he would arrange for his own genetic profile to be done—and the results safely hidden from Caroline.
He looked around the pretentious room and sighed.
Once upon a time, precious objects and valuable furniture had mattered to him. As the last of the Montgomerys, he had felt dutybound to keep up appearances and play the role of a Southern aristocrat. Not to mention carrying on traditions that had lost their meaning.
No more.
He heard a car door slam, and a minute later, the front door eased open. Caroline entered, clutching the handles of shopping bags printed with the names of expensive stores. She didn’t see him as she walked briskly to the bottom of the stairs, going up them fast.
Hiding her purchases, he thought. He went back to the piano and waited five minutes before he sat down and began to play again, just to let her know that he was in the house.
The notes were jumbled this time and the melody unrecognizable. But he didn’t notice.
Caroline came downstairs an hour later, much more quietly, smoothing her hair as she entered the room. “Hello, Monty.” She walked over to the piano. “Are you improvising?”
He rested the hand he’d been playing with on the side scroll, tapping his fingers on the glossy black wood. “Just playing an old song.”
“Oh.” She looked down at him but he didn’t glance up. The scowl on his mouth showed, though. It was going to be another long evening, she thought. Caroline went over to a set of crystal decanters filled with liquor, pulled the stopper from one, and poured herself a stiff drink.
There wasn’t any ice and she decided to have the liquor straight up rather than trek to the kitchen.
“Did you send the servants home?”
The butler and housekeeper lived in, but the others didn’t. Lately he had been dismissing the day staff by late afternoon, forcing her to fend for herself around the house.
“Yes. They make too much noise.”
“Well, they do have work to do,” she said lightly.
He only shrugged. “My head was aching.” Before she could give him advice he didn’t want, he added, “I took something for it.”
“Oh, good,” she replied, going over to him and holding up her glass. “Cheers.”
Monty closed the long lid over the piano keys.
“Don’t stop,” she said in a wheedling voice. “I was hoping you’d play our song.”
He looked at her with dull eyes. “What was it again? I don’t remember.”
“Monty, is something the matter?” She put a hand on his forehead and he pushed it away. “Sorry. I thought you might have a fever or something.”
“I’m fine.”
Caroline took a big swallow from the drink in her hand. “You don’t look fine.”
“Leave me alone.”
She was taken aback by the roughness in his tone, and then insulted.
“Okay with me,” she snapped, downing the rest of the liquor in her glass and setting it on top of the piano, knowing it would make him angry if it left a ring.
The spiteful gesture worked. Monty got up so fast the piano bench fell over behind him.
“Damn it, Caroline!” He swept the empty glass to the floor, where it shattered.
Caroline fled. She didn’t hear his footsteps coming after her. Midway up the stairs to the second floor, she halted and turned around, bending to peer into the room where the piano was, looking for Monty.
He was stretched out on the couch, motionless, with one arm flung over his eyes. Maybe he did have a headache. Maybe he was drunk. She didn’t care. She hoped he was out cold, because she had a little snooping she wanted to do.
She went the rest of the way up the stairs on the balls of her feet and when she reached the top, she slipped off her shoes to go down the hall and into his study. That was directly above the room she’d left him in.
Caroline turned the doorknob and paused on the threshold, half expecting him to come running up the grand staircase after her to prevent her from entering his sanctuary. It was a good thing the servants were gone. The house was so quiet she could hear the ticking of clocks behind closed doors. But there was one other sound . . . she listened hard to the faint noise and then she smiled.
Monty was snoring down below.
He never took naps—he had to be unwell. But she didn’t care. She needed a little extra time.
She went in, not closing the door. She wanted to be able to hear him coming if he woke up.
Caroline went over to the gigantic antique partner’s desk, moving past it to get to the computer on a much smaller, jarringly modern table next to it.
She was not exactly a tech type, but she did know what a USB port was. Caroline located it around the back and then found the on switch.
The computer hummed to life. A box on the glowing blue screen asked for a password, which she carefully keyed in.
She’d watched Monty type the same one many times when he thought she wasn’t paying attention. Memorizing it had seemed like a good idea, and she was glad she had. Eventually he’d begun to order her out when he was working in here. She hoped and prayed he hadn’t changed the password.
The monitor shimmered as another screen replaced the first, with rows of icons. Excellent. This was going to be effortless and fast.
Caroline reached between her bra cups and pulled out a flash drive she’d tucked there. It was a pretty little gizmo, a promotional item from Monty’s accountant. His name and title—Sidney Merritt, CPA—were printed on its red lacquer shell, a color that happened to match her fingernails.
In less than five minutes, she’d downloaded as many financial files as she could find onto the flash drive. She closed them all and went through the short rigamarole of safely removing the drive from the USB port. Back it went into her bra. Caroline ran her hands over her breasts, just in case the two-inch-long thingy made a visible lump.
No. Mission accomplished. The drive was snugly tucked deep into her cleavage. She turned to the monitor and keyboard, and shut down the computer. To her annoyance, it promptly started up again but without the rows of icons. Only the box asking for a password appeared.
Caroline exhaled a nervous sigh, then listened again. The silence was oppressive.
She no longer heard snoring, but then she’d moved to the far corner of the room. She began to investigate the partner’s desk, sure he hadn’t shown her everything that was in it. But pulling out the small drawers revealed the same assortment of office supplies and cache of stationery she’d seen before, orderly and neat.
There were some papers on top of the desk. Mostly bills, she noticed, and mostly from boutiques. She riffled through them, flushing with anger at rude scribbled commen
ts not meant for her to read.
And underneath those was a carbon copy of a cashier’s check. Caroline made a mental note of which bill it was under so she could replace it exactly where it had been. Then she studied it under the lamp.
The check part, gone, had been made out in his handwriting to Erin Randall. For fifteen thousand dollars. The lower left corner specified in a few brief words that it was an advance on a commissioned portrait of Take All, and that the total fee was thirty thousand.
She drew in her breath with a hiss. The bastard. He’d lied through his teeth when she’d asked him how much he was paying that girl. Told her oh-so-casually that an unknown artist like Erin only charged fifteen hundred for a painting like that. He considered it a steal.
Caroline had been willing to let that pass with a couple of sarcastic remarks. She had no idea why she’d believed him.
Fifteen thousand would have bought a decent diamond ring—thirty thousand would have bought something worth showing off. But he had other priorities. She had suspected the girl was a potential rival and now she was sure of it. More than ever, Caro knew where she stood with Hugh Montgomery. The hand holding the check carbon shook and the thin paper fluttered.
Furious, Caroline slammed the carbon down on the desk under her flattened palm, then shoved it back into the pile of bills, not caring if it was in the right place. She was going to try to catch him out in his lie; then she would wave it under his nose.
She straightened up and turned—and saw Monty standing in the door.
“Ah—hello.” She controlled her anger—barely. Let him make a fool of himself. “Did you have a nice nap?”
“It was short. But refreshing.” His voice was strong and clear. “I feel better.” Then he held up her discarded shoes.
“Did you have fun sneaking around?” He waved the shoes at the computer, which she hadn’t turned off. “Were you in my files?”
“I don’t know your password.”
“Really? I didn’t leave the computer on.”
Caroline threw him a blazing look. “It just came on. Maybe I touched a key by accident.”
He tossed her shoes to one side and came closer. She saw that he wasn’t wearing his, just socks. No wonder she hadn’t heard him.
“Find anything interesting on my desk?” The question was sharp. Whatever had made him unfocused and irritable had been cured by his nap. Caroline silently cursed herself for not being quicker at her task.
“Yes.” She might as well admit to the lesser of her sins. It would distract him from the issue of the computer. The check carbon had been on top of the desk, if not on top of the boutique bills, but it was fair game. Not private, not in the way password-protected files were. Reminding herself that it wasn’t as if she’d done anything wrong. Caroline searched for the carbon under everything else. “Fifteen thousand in advance for a painting by Miss Nobody? Are you crazy?”
“Erin Randall is a talented young woman and I got a bargain.”
“You lied to me!”
“So I did. To keep the peace. But you aren’t entitled to question any expenditure I choose to make.”
“That much money would buy—”
“Oh, here we go again.” Montgomery looked mad enough to break something big. “Shut up. Just shut up.”
“I want a ring!” she burst out. “That’s not too much to ask for! Not after all this time!”
“You sound like a little girl,” he said contemptuously. “Go on back home to daddy. If he hasn’t rented out your room.”
“What?” she shrieked. “Are you trying to insult me or my father? He’s worth ten of you!”
She sank her red nails into the upholstered back of one of the gigantic armchairs, clutching it so as not to fling herself at him. Monty thrust his hands into his pockets and stood his ground.
“Is he? Maybe not,” he said calmly. “But I take back the remark about him renting out your room. That wasn’t nice.”
She took a heaving breath. “Don’t do me any favors.”
“He can’t, Caro. The Loudon house and the land it stands on are in foreclosure. The sign went up on the front lawn this morning. It’s hard to see across two acres of grass, but it’s there.”
“What?”
Montgomery took a step toward her. “You don’t have anywhere to go at the moment. But I won’t bother you.”
She stared at him in shock.
“I think it’s fair to say that what we had is over, don’t you? And by the way, I don’t want to hurt you.”
“Monty—” She said his name in a cracking whisper.
“I’m sure you have a lot of things to think about, Caroline. I certainly do. In the meantime, leave me alone.”
He took a step forward in the direction of the partner’s desk, and for the second time that day, she fled from him.
Montgomery listened until the sound of her running footsteps diminished. A door slammed far away. He went to his desk and bent down a little to run a hand over the concealed latch. It hadn’t been tripped. His laptop was safe and so were the hidden papers in the recess.
Then he sat and turned to the computer she’d gotten into. It was a top-of-the-line model, fully functioning, but essentially a decoy, loaded with dummy files set up to fool someone who was financially unsophisticated and didn’t know much about computers.
Caroline was both. He had to keep her away from the real secrets.
The phone on the desk rang and Montgomery answered, rubbing his temple. His headache was back and somewhat worse.
“Hello.”
“Good afternoon, Mr. Montgomery.”
“Hello, Sidney.”
He knew exactly why his accountant was calling and fiddled with a pencil while he listened.
“We got an alert five minutes ago. Miss Loudon took the bait. And we got her doing it on the PC’s webcam if she says she didn’t.”
His reply was weary. “She was cornered. What else would she say?”
Sidney was too tactful to ask what was going on. He stuck to the facts. “And just so you know, the records of the file downloads she made are in our encrypted files and copied to a backup hard drive.”
“Overkill,” Montgomery said. “There isn’t anything on them she can use, right?”
“No, nothing at all,” Sidney assured him. “Paul created a fun little fake company for you. For a college kid, he gets an amazing amount done. Stays late, works cheap—my kind of assistant.”
“Congratulations.” Montgomery wanted to get off the phone and lie down. “At least Caroline has something to do now. Besides shopping. And screaming at me.”
“Ha ha.” Sidney chuckled dutifully. “Is there anything else you need me or Paul to do for you at this point, sir?”
“No.”
It was after midnight when Montgomery reviewed the cover layout for the hedge fund’s quarterly report. His investors expected something classy, and they would get it. The understated but strong design featured a small, stylized image of a racehorse above the company name. He took out a fountain pen and signed the layout in an unsteady scrawl. It would be picked up by a courier tomorrow.
Last year, he’d had two assistants to take care of all that. His short, glowing letter to investors was his sole contribution, followed by pages of carefully phrased double-talk written by a business marketer, backed up with graphs and charts. The whole thing had been close to fiction. The numbers had begun their downward trend even then. And now it was nothing more than lies. There was a limit to how well he could do that when cold, hard numbers contradicted every word.
He booted up the laptop from the partner’s desk and pulled up a private feed from the day’s stock markets. From it, he entered figures rapidly in his fund file, doing calculations in his head that seemed right at first—he was good at mental math—but were wrong when he checked them. He entered the corrections, cursing under his breath. No matter how he juggled the sums, the fund was in free fall, and the rate of loss was accelerating.
&
nbsp; Without saving his work, Monty clicked out of the fund file. He felt too numb to care.
He struggled to think for a minute, his head in his hands. Then he lifted it and opened another file, moving fifteen thousand dollars to cover the withdrawal for the painting. Transaction completed, he rose, bracing himself on his chair before he nearly lost his balance.
Keep moving. Always moving . . .
Had he said the words aloud or was he hearing them? Monty had no way of knowing. He forced himself to focus as he returned the laptop to the hidden recess. Then he walked unsteadily to the couch and lay down, staring at the ceiling.
Fifty miles away, the file he’d worked on was still open.
Colorless eyes looked over the latest entries. Paul hummed to himself.
“Stop that,” Hoebel said irritably. He was slouched in a chair, looking tired. Cutt hadn’t showed. “You’re making me sleepy.”
The hacker glanced his way. “This is a waiting game. Go home,” Paul said. “Get some sleep. Digest your pizza.” The air in the windowless room smelled of the fast food they’d both eaten, the box tossed on the floor.
“Just tell me if the big bucks got moved.”
Paul’s fingers clicked on the keyboard. “Okay, I’m looking through everything this time.”
“Don’t work too hard.”
The younger man ignored the sarcasm. “And it looks like . . . hey, fifteen thousand bucks played hopscotch this evening. Want the details?”
“Yes.”
Paul nodded. “I’m going into Notes—Montgomery likes to make notes, doesn’t he? Looks like the deposit was made to cover a payment via cashier’s check—”
“Who was that for?”
Paul poked around in the distant hard drive. “You know, considering he’s ancient, Montgomery is pretty good with computers. But he’s got more nasty holes in his encryption than I do in my socks.”
Hoebel glanced down at the hacker’s unlaced, graffiti-print high tops. “Don’t show me.”
“I wasn’t going to.” Paul stopped and peered into the screen. “Got it. He listed the payee as Erin Randall. Whoops—I tagged that name.” He waited for a beat. “And there she is.” He tapped on the screen. “I showed you this. It was downloaded from a security vidcam onto Montgomery’s laptop. Who’s the guy?”