Another security system outside her place, but he tried the door and it was open. Huh. Even more simple than he thought. Maybe he could start doing more side jobs like this. Problem was, he had a code of ethics, he really did, and that code didn’t take lightly to beating up women. But he’d been given a cool grand for what should just be a couple of punches, maybe a couple of cracked bones. And then he’d collect another two grand.
Until then, he’d pocket a few things to make it look like a robbery. In the dark apartment now, he clapped his hands together, rubbed them and pulled them apart in a show of ease.
But right then he heard something—a scratch of some kind, maybe a drawer closing? He froze, listened some more but heard nothing. All the lights were out. He took a tentative step inside, then another, heard nothing. Then a minute sound, like someone moving just a little bit. Was the redhead home? If so, why was she in the dark? Maybe she’d gone to bed already and been startled by the door opening? But his contact had said that she lived with her boyfriend, and that the door opening wouldn’t startle her anyway because she would think it was him.
Another sound. He took a step toward it, then another, walking slowing through a living room, passing a small kitchen, toward the room he thought the sound had come from. As he approached it, he saw the glow of computer equipment. An office, he thought. And that was the last thought before—bam—he was hit on the side of the head with something hard. His head splintered with pain. Jesus, she wasn’t surprised! And she knew how to hit someone.
“Fuck!” he yelled. The sound of his own voice made him leap into action. His right hand shot out toward his attacker. He felt a swatch of hair and he yanked hard, then grabbed her around the throat. She groaned like an animal caught in a trap, but then she wrangled out of his grasp and threw a punch that hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. The girl was a badass. Why hadn’t he been told? Had he been conned into this job so he could take a fall?
Then wham! He felt himself get cracked over the head with a book or something heavy.
He lunged at her. In his brain, he called up the MMA skills he’d learned recently by watching a ton of it on his computer. He grabbed her around the neck again, but she drove an elbow into his stomach and it caused him to loosen his grasp momentarily.
He snaked his hand out and snatched her by the waist. She snarled and scratched his face.
“Fuck!” he yelled again, and he tasted blood.
He took a swing, and phwack, he connected with her jaw.
She screamed. In the dark, he couldn’t see her, but he knew the punch would probably give him a moment while she recovered. He headed toward the door, but she was still right behind him.
Wham! She’d hit him again with something. Then as he turned to her…arrgggghhhhh! She cracked him with that thing in the nuts. His rage made it easy to punch his arms out and grab her around the neck.
“Bastard!” he heard her say, then her words left as he knocked her head against the wall. Once, then again and again. Soon, his hands were wet. She was bleeding now, too.
It was that last thought that stopped him. He was just supposed to give her a little hurt! He dropped her fast, and she crumpled to the ground. He froze for a moment, letting himself lean a little toward her body. But no sounds came. She was silent. Dead kind of silent.
He thought about what he would leave behind in her condo if he ran. There wouldn’t be prints because he was wearing gloves. Some of his blood. Maybe. But the scratches on his face felt nearly dry. There might be nothing. He had to hope for that. He really didn’t know anything about forensics or crime scenes and this whole thing was turning his stomach to this kind of work.
He turned to the front door and threw himself through it. When he was on the street, it looked like any other night.
44
In the cab on the way home from Tru, I finally started shaking. Something about my dad’s horrified expression had made me play down what had happened in the bathroom and play up the fact that I was fine. And I was—no visible scars or bruises—but I felt a fear that grew more voluminous.
I wanted to run to the van, but I felt bad enough about Tatum to be unable to leave him hanging. I told him I didn’t feel well, skipped dessert, dodged a kiss and said goodbye.
When I got in the van, they were in a jocular mood, jocular being an adjective I would never, ever have attributed to my father. But there they were, laughing and joking. I must have looked white, because they stopped laughing as soon as they saw me. I quickly told them what happened.
“I can’t believe we sent you right into danger,” he said.
I was about to point out that Mayburn had never had a problem with that. Then I saw that horror on my dad’s face, and I couldn’t stand it.
“I’m fine,” I said. I held out my arms as if to show them.
My dad could only shake his head. Mayburn went into detective mode, asking me a million questions about the specifics of what had happened, then we debated calling the police.
But I didn’t want to make things worse for Theo. If he were telling the truth, and it wasn’t him who had stolen money from the company, it wouldn’t look good to tell the authorities that some thug had said Theo had to take responsibility.
I texted Theo. Didn’t hear back.
We looked at my necklace cam, but I hadn’t caught a glance of the guy on film. He must have come behind me as I turned it off.
I brought the conversation around back to Tatum, feeling that the more I talked about the guy, the more real he was becoming and the more confusing the whole situation was becoming.
“I feel so bad for that kid,” my dad said then about Tatum. “He’s doing the wrong thing for the right reason.”
“What’s the right reason for stealing money from the bank?” Mayburn asked.
“Love. He’s looking for it.”
I don’t think either Mayburn or I knew what to say to that, but I knew in my mind that was the same reason my father had left us, his family, so many years ago. He loved us. Beyond anything. And therefore, he’d left us to keep us safe.
Mayburn and my dad wanted to take me to my mom’s. If we weren’t calling the police, they wanted me to stay the night there, but right then Theo called. He was on his way to our place in a cab, and I convinced them I was fine and to let me get a cab home myself. Theo and I needed to talk. Something needed to give.
“Where were you?” I asked Theo when I was in the cab and had called him again. That’s when I started noticing the trembling.
“Working. You knew that.”
“Okay, don’t snap at me. Yeah, I knew this morning. But a lot has happened since then. And I haven’t been able to find you!” I hated the shrewish tone of my voice. I was not a whiner, not a complainer. I was not one of those women. But I sure felt like one now. The trembling intensified.
“I just got threatened because of you. And…and roughed up!” Roughed up. It struck me as an odd phrase.
“What?” He sounded horrified. “Oh, my God, what happened? Where are you? I’m just a few blocks away.”
“Me, too.” Suddenly, I didn’t want to be at my place, alone with Theo. “Meet me at Twin Anchors?” More shaking. What did this mean, these feelings of trepidation? Were they simply related to the guy in the bathroom and all that was happening, or was I getting a greater message from the gods in my universe? If so, it was way too foggy to read.
“Yeah, let’s meet there instead of the house.”
As soon as I hung up, I concentrated on calming down. Breathe, breathe, breathe, I ordered myself. Then when I caught a few breaths, I took it slower. Breathe, Iz, breathe. Don’t think about anything. Just let your mind relax.
I must have learned something over the past year. Because I actually started to allow myself not to think about everything, not to analyze. And that’s when some words—what were they?—some words I’d heard this past week niggled at my brain, wanting to be recognized.
I tried to replay conversations in my head, but i
t was difficult. I’d done so much this week, been to so many places. So I backed off again. I just let it go, tried to let everything go. And finally—finally—was struck by the vague familiarity of two words that kept returning to me. Where had I heard them before?
I focused some more. I heard myself say foreign…trust, Maggie had said the Cortaderos likely kept money in a foreign trust. Foreign, Sam had said. It wasn’t a foreign thing for me being involved with someone who was in trouble with the law. And then I told him I trusted him. And Theo—when he’d learned about getting turned down for the mortgage, he’d said something like that. Something about a foreign trust.
I threw a twenty at the cabbie when we reached Sedgwick and Eugenie, crossing the street to where Theo was doing the same.
Inside, it was crowded but we scored two bar stools. There, I told Theo what had happened at Tru, watching his anguished eyes, watching him fighting tears.
“I don’t know what is going on,” he said, his voice weary now. “I don’t know what’s going on with this or the business or where all our funds have disappeared to.”
“That’s something I wanted to talk to you about. Have you confirmed that your funds have disappeared?”
He nodded. “I’ve been on the phone with the bankers. Hell, I didn’t even know who the bankers were before this, but now I do.”
“How did it happen?”
“The accounts that we paid bills from? They were funded by the venture capital money that we got initially. And we had more than enough. More than enough for day-to-day operations and for all the expansion we wanted to do. We had no problems paying our bills. But from what I can now tell, money started leaving the account at some point. Small amounts at first, then larger when, I guess, no one noticed. It’s been really hard to track where it’s gone.”
“Any chance it’s a foreign trust?”
He looked surprised. “Yeah. Or something like that. I forgot about it. I mean, I heard about it when we formed the company, but I’m not sure I really get it. What exactly is a foreign trust?’”
“It’s a vehicle used to protect assets and money by putting them in a country where the laws are different than ours.”
“You put money there you want to hide?”
“Not necessarily. You might just want the tax benefits.” I thought about it. “Who opened that account?” I asked. “The foreign trust?”
“My dad.”
I let a second pass. Then, “Who managed that account?”
He let no time pass before he answered, “My dad.”
45
How long did we sit there, the restaurant bustling around us?
I noticed my trembling had started again. Theo did, too, and quickly asked the bartender to bring some water. You need to eat something, he said. But that wasn’t it. I’d eaten more than enough at Tru.
So I made myself breathe again. Then I finally said it. “Your dad.”
“Yeah.”
“Did Eric know about the trust?”
“Yeah. But what does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I’m just thinking about that guy tonight saying you have to take responsibility when you have partners. I thought he meant Eric, but could he have meant your dad?”
Theo said nothing, seemed to be thinking hard.
“How is Eric?” I asked.
“I saw him today, and he’s the same. He’s unconscious. They’re actually keeping him in a medically induced coma so that certain parts of his brain can regrow. Or something like that…”
Theo seemed to shrink a little, and suddenly I thought of that picture of him in his teens. Theo, before all the confidence and the smarts and the sexiness.
But no matter what state he was in, I had to ask the other question I’d been wondering. “Did you take the Cortadero file from my bag?”
For a second he didn’t say anything. And in that second, he scared me. Was I right that he’d taken the Cortadero file? Why? And why had someone busted into a restaurant bathroom and given me that message?
“What do you mean?” Theo said, finally speaking. He was looking down though, at the bar top.
Might as well lay it out. “The Cortadero file, about the one case we have left with them at the firm. It was in my bag.” I leaned down to look at him. I needed to see his face. “That file was in my bag, in my home office. And now I can’t find it.”
A sigh. “I didn’t mean to take it.”
“You didn’t mean to take it?” My voice rose, but in the loud restaurant no one noticed. Except for Theo.
He looked at me with a nervous expression. “Well, I guess I did. I was looking for something else and I opened your bag.”
I held up a hand. “Hold it a second. What were you looking for that you had to go in my bag? Truthfully, I really don’t care if you did. Nothing in our place is off-limits, but I’m just curious about what you could be looking for that would require you to go through my bag. A pen? There are pens on the desktop. Some paper? It’s in a drawer.” I stopped talking suddenly when I realized I was in danger of a rant.
“Okay, I’ll just admit it. I was looking for this.” Theo reached into the bag he’d been carrying. And there was the Cortadero file. “I came back from work and you were gone. I didn’t think you would be home for a while, since you had texted that you were out with your brother and Mayburn and your dad. And I wanted to help, to help find out what in the hell the Cortaderos think they have to do with me. Or HeadFirst.” He was talking faster and faster. “So I went to Starbucks and read this thing. Studied it. But I didn’t find anything. I still have no idea what the Cortaderos have to do with us.”
A group entering the restaurant jostled me from behind. They were laughing, happy. I wondered if I would be like that again—carefree. “I want to go home,” I said.
Last year, when I was just an average fiancée, just an average lawyer, before I’d moonlighted as a P.I., before…well, before everything that has happened in the past year…back then my senses were not as highly tuned, it might have taken me until we were right in front of my building before my internal alarm went off. To be honest, as exhausted as I was that night, I’m surprised I was able to perceive much of anything.
But when we were a few feet away from my condo, that internal alarm went off in my brain. Something is wrong! the alarm said. Very wrong.
I tried to rationalize with myself. Of course something is wrong. Your boyfriend has been arrested. And now he’s admitted to stealing something from you.
It wouldn’t go away—a something-is-off feeling, layered with a sense of being violated.
But I ignored it. My brain was too muddied, trying to keep track of too many things, and decide which of them to believe. Who to believe.
And Theo? What was the excuse for him not noticing the keypad by the front door was hanging off? I didn’t know. Likely because he was so close behind me, still trying to explain why he’d taken the Cortadero file, still trying to process the new suspicions that were starting to arise about his dad, when he already had so many suspicions about his partner.
But I stopped when I hit the third-floor landing, staring at the slightly ajar door of my condo.
Theo stopped, too. He was saying something about Eric. Then his words stopped.
We froze for a second, processing.
Theo stepped around me before I could tell him to stop. Before I could say Nooooo, he had swung the door open.
I don’t know what either of us expected. But it was dark. Just like it always was at night in November.
Theo went to switch on the light inside the doorway, but I put my hand on his arm to stop him. “Wait,” I whispered.
“Hello?” I called into the condo. If there’s anything spookier than hearing your own voice calling into an empty space, I don’t know what it is. Still, I took another step inside my door and called again. “Hello? Anyone here?”
Theo switched the light on.
There was someone there.
“Kim?” I
said.
She was twisted and slumped on my living room floor.
Theo ran to her, touched her. “She’s freezing.” He grabbed her wrist, leaned in and turned his head to listen for breath. I remembered then that Theo had told me he’d been a lifeguard during high school, and I got a flash of him, as I did that day watching him with his mom, of a younger Theo, uncomplicated, unperturbed. What was it about Theo Jameson that made me wish he could be an innocent forever?
But that wasn’t going to happen. Theo sat back. Looked at me. “She’s dead.”
46
One week later
His brother began to weep, softly at first, but his distress quickly grew. Soon, Vincente’s back was hunched, his shoulders shaking violently up and down.
José Ramon had never heard his brother cry, not since they were young children in Xalapa, Mexico, before his parents had sent them to Chicago to be raised as Americans. And he had certainly never heard him cry like this. In fact, the only time he recalled hearing those types of cries was at the funeral for his grandfather when his grandmother shrieked and sobbed and threw herself upon the casket.
He was glad now for his soundproofed room behind the restaurant, from which his employees could hear nothing. He was grateful for the presence of his parents, sitting across the room, having flown in from Xalapa after José heard about the killing of the girl, after he had called them and told all he knew, refusing to hide his brother’s sins anymore. He and his parents had discussed what he knew and they realized the situation in Chicago was veering quickly, quickly away from them. But they still didn’t understand it. And they were waiting for an explanation.
Vincente, or Vince as he liked everyone to call him now, had blue-black hair and brown eyes that normally gleamed. He was dressed as he always was—like a handsome, young American businessman. And he didn’t just dress the part, he lived it. Vince Cort had a mansion in Barrington Hills, where he and his wife, Carol, kept horses, where his kids were in Montessori schools and where Carol ran the most popular book club in town in addition to being the board president of three very reputable charities. Carol Cort, of course, didn’t know the whole story of her husband. She knew, rightly, that he’d grown up in a Mexican neighborhood, that he’d gotten perfect grades all the way up through college and his MBA. She knew he ran a venture capital firm called Barrington Hills Trading that invested in various businesses. The only part she didn’t know was where the money he invested came from.
Question of Trust Page 16