Sebastian

by Lagomarsino, Giulia

  “Yeah.”

  “Boss, it’s Becky. We have a lot of stuff to go over. Is this a good time?”

  “Give me about a half hour. I’ll call you back.”

  “Sure thing, boss.”

  I hung up with her and thanked my lucky stars that work was interfering.

  “Becky’s got something. We have to get back.”

  “Alright. Thanks for everything, Harry. I’ll see you two later.”

  “You be safe, girlie. Sebastian, I’m trusting you to take care of our girl.”

  “Of course.”

  Aggie gave Maggie a big hug and then we walked out the door and headed to the SUV.

  “Wait. I need to get my pills.”

  “Already grabbed them, Freckles. Was there something else you needed?”

  “Well, it would be nice to have my own clothes.”

  I rolled my eyes at her. “You have some at the safe house. If we go back to your house, I have to clear it again, which means you have to wait with the dirty grandparents.”

  She shudder. “No, that’s okay. I’ll just wear what’s in the closet.”

  ✯✯✯✯✯

  When we got back to the safe house, I placed a call to the office. Either Sam or Derek would be running things, depending on who was taking on the night shift. Usually, I worked until about midnight and then monitored team activities from my house with the help of Rob. Usually Becky worked days and Rob worked nights, but I couldn’t solely rely on them to monitor all situations with the teams.

  “Reed Security. Derek Cortell speaking.”

  “It’s Sebastian. How are things holding up?”

  Derek blew out a harsh breath. “Well, all our cases are going fine. In fact, John’s team just finished up last night. The rest of us are splitting duties where we can. We really need some more people in here.”

  “I know. We need to start interviewing.”

  “Cazzo pulled some files and started weeding out the underqualified. He set up some interviews for tomorrow.”

  That was a relief. There had been so much going on and I really needed one of these guys to step up and help out or I was going to drown. We were growing too fast and it was becoming too much. Most nights, I was lucky to get three hours of sleep before I had to be back in the office. Some nights, I just slept there. I had gotten more sleep being here on duty than when I wasn’t in the field.

  “I appreciate that. After I talk to Becky I’ll have a better idea of how much longer we need on this case. I think we might be getting close, but..damn, we took a hit with Cal. How is everyone taking it at the office?”

  “Honestly, I think everyone’s pretty upset. I don’t think people were ready to work with him, but he was still one of us. I think..I think we all wish we would have talked to him, you know, tried to help him a little. Now it’s too late.”

  “I talked to him. He wasn’t ever going to be okay. I know Maggie talked to him quite a bit and I think that helped him a little, but honestly, I think he’s better off now.”

  “What? How could you say that?”

  “Derek, he was miserable. I’m not saying I’m glad he’s dead, but you should have heard him. He wanted to be with his family and wished he had died along with them. He might have gotten over it eventually, but that guilt would always eat at him. He was never going to be comfortable being on our team again. He was doing it because he felt he owed us. At least now he’s at peace.”

  Silence filled the line and I wondered if that was the wrong thing to say to a fellow team mate, but they had to understand what I now knew. Cal was a broken man that no one could have put back together.

  “I get it. I just wish we could have done more,” Derek finally said.

  “Me too.”

  “So, do you want me to send John’s team out to you?”

  “Let’s hear what Becky has to say first. Why don’t you patch her through and stay on the line.”

  “Sounds good.” I heard a few clicks as he switched over and connected Becky to our call. I motioned Maggie over and put it on speaker.

  “Boss, I’m so sorry about Cal. I always liked him.” Her voice quivered as she spoke. I glanced at Maggie and saw tears filling her eyes.

  “Me too, Becky. I’ll talk with you when we’re done and we’ll make some funeral arrangements, okay?”

  “Yeah. I’d like to do that.”

  “Okay, so you said you had a lot for me.”

  “Right. First, the tests came back from the gas chromatograph. There was an acid that couldn’t be identified and organic matter. Unfortunately, it was basically sludge, so that’s about all the test showed. The lab said that the acid was most likely hydrofluoric acid because of the way the organic matter was broken down.”

  “Organic matter. What does that mean exactly?”

  “Basically, it could be any living organism. They couldn’t positively identify what it was. For all we know, it could have been a deer in there, but why would a deer be in a beer vat?”

  “So, it looks like it could be human remains, but we have no proof that it was.”

  “Exactly. The second thing we need to discuss is the offshore accounts. It took a lot of work, but Rob and I were able to trace all the accounts.”

  “Good. Lay it on me.”

  “You’re gonna love this boss. The offshore accounts were all listed in different names, but after much searching, I traced them all back to none other than Mayor Johnson.”

  Maggie’s eyes lit up and she started writing down notes, officially in work mode.

  “The money was all sent through several different banks, and every time the money was sent to a new bank, it was split up to go to several different accounts, so it was very difficult to match all the funds. Eventually, I traced all the money back to three companies: RND Construction, Gray Electric, and Hogan Concrete.”

  Maggie practically shoved me over to get in front of the phone. “Hi Becky, it’s Maggie. So, let me get this straight. The three companies filtered money through different banks that eventually ended up in offshore accounts that are all linked to the Mayor?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “So, what am I missing? Why would they do that?”

  “Here’s the best part. I got all the financials from the city on the projects that you sent me. Then, I convinced some rather nice ladies at the three companies to send me the reports on those projects. The projects listed showed the cost of the materials and what the city was being charged for the project. The numbers don’t match what the city paid, though. On all the projects, the city overpaid by about ten percent. I followed the money and guess how much was missing from what the city paid?”

  “Ten percent?” Maggie theorized.

  “Nope. Nine percent. And that matched perfectly with the amount of money that was deposited into the offshore accounts.”

  Maggie stood up and started pacing. “So, the Mayor strikes a deal with these three companies. They overcharge the city by ten percent and keep ten percent of what was overcharged. The rest of the money is sent to offshore accounts for the Mayor.”

  “Correct.”

  “So that’s why the Mayor always wanted to choose which companies the cities dealt with. He’d struck deals with them to skim off the city. Then, when he couldn’t get city council members to go along with his plans, he blackmailed them and then paid them off. He kept records of who he paid off so that he had back up blackmail in case the members ever decided that they’d had enough. With all of this information, a lot of people are going to jail.”

  She turned to me an gave me a big smile. “This is great. The Mayor is going down big time. Becky, could you send me copies of all the information you found? I’m going to need all of it to reference and then I’ll need copies also for the police.”

  “Boss?”

  “Yeah, go ahead and put a packet together. Freckles, I think you should come back to the office with me while you write your story. We have great protection there and you’ll have all th
e documents faster.”

  “I can do that. Wait. I need figure out a different paper to send this to. There’s no way Darren will print this if he’s involved like we suspect.”

  “Derek, did you get any leads on Keith Breckenridge?”

  “Lola and Hunter are picking him up as we speak. They should be back within the hour.”

  “Good. I want him to stay at the office until we get back and get a plan in place. We need to convince him to stay with us so he doesn’t get himself killed before he can talk to the police. He’s going to need a security detail or to stay in a safe house until everyone’s in jail. Tell Cazzo that we need to start interviews today. We need more people ASAP.”

  “Will do, Cap.”

  “Alright. Freckles and I should be back at the office in a few hours. We just have a few things to wrap up here.”

  “Ten-four.”

  I hung up and looked at Maggie who was already writing down notes and thoroughly engaged in her story. We needed to clear a few things up about us before we headed back to Reed Security.

  “Freckles, I think we should talk before we head out.”

  “Sure, just let me finish this thought.”

  I waited patiently as she wrote for another five minutes, but she was totally lost in her thoughts. I got up from my seat and walked over to her, ripping the notebook from her grasp.

  “Hey! I was working on something.”

  “I know and I’ve been waiting for five minutes for you to finish your thought. We need to talk.”

  “Okay, what do you want to talk about?”

  “Us.”

  “Us. What’s there to talk about?”

  “I hate to sound like the girl in this relationship, but where is this going?”

  “Um. Well, I’m not sure. Call me old fashioned, but I kinda expect the guy to take the lead.”

  “And normally I would, but seeing as how you’re about to break a major story and will probably be following up on it, that doesn’t exactly let me know where your head’s at. We live an hour apart and we’re both very busy, so I need to know what you want out of this. Do you want to try to make this work?”

  “Of course I do. I mean, obviously it’s not going to be easy, but we can at least see each other on weekends or one of us can drive to the other during the week. I’m sure we’ll work it out.”

  She grabbed her notebook from my hand and then gave a quick smile before going back to her writing. It didn’t give me very much hope that this would all work out. Maybe I should have told her exactly how much I wanted her; told her that I wanted to make this work so badly that my gut hurt. I thought when we made love last night that it meant something more. I could swear that she felt what I felt, but maybe that was just because of everything that had happened yesterday. Maybe she didn’t really feel as strongly as I had.

  “I’m going to pack up our stuff and get it in the SUV. We’ll leave in fifteen minutes.”

  “I thought we were going to be here at least an hour?”

  I had planned on taking her upstairs and having my way with her one more time, but her mind was somewhere else. Better to just get back to Reed Security. I had a business to run and it was time I got back to that.

  “I have to get back and get some work done.”

  “Okay. I’ll just get my stuff together.”

  Fifteen minutes later, the safe house was locked up and we were back on the road. Maggie worked on her story the whole way back to Reed Security, so I focused on the drive and tried not to think about our relationship, or lack thereof. By the time we made it back, I was fuming over her lack of interest in exploring our relationship. She couldn’t even be bothered to talk to me about it. I’m sure we’ll work it out. Yeah, that didn’t make me feel like she was taking this seriously.

  We made our way upstairs and into the conference room where Becky informed me Keith was waiting.

  “Keith, it’s good to see you alive and in one piece.” I held out my hand and shook his.

  “I gotta say, I was scared when I showed up to The Downtowner and saw the flash drive was missing. Then I went home and my place was ransacked. I took off and hid out at an old friend’s house. Your people scared the shit out of me when they showed up there.”

  “Keith, we think that Darren is involved in this. I didn’t see anything on your flash drive that would implicate him, but I called him and asked about Mark’s disappearance and then Sebastian was being shot at when we went to retrieve the information. It’s just awfully suspicious.”

  “Are you sure about this? There’s no one else that could have followed you? I mean I suspected him being involved with the Mayor, but..shit.”

  “The first day that Sebastian was protecting me, I told Darren about the list of properties I found and which one I was going to check out first. Some guys showed up when we were there and tried to kill us. At first, I just thought it was bad timing, but then Sebastian was telling me how much he was being paid and it turns out that the paper isn’t paying for my protection. Darren is.”

  He looked at us in confusion. “I don’t follow. What does that mean? You know he thinks of you as a daughter.”

  “Darren doesn’t have that kind of money, unless he’s getting it from somewhere else. We think he was using Sebastian to try to keep tabs on me, so that he could stay a step ahead of us. Only Sebastian didn’t do regular check-ins like Darren wanted.”

  “Look, Keith. Obviously we don’t have any proof yet, but until we can clear Darren of any involvement with the Mayor, I think it’s best that he doesn’t know anything.”

  “Alright. Whatever you say. So, how does this work?”

  “We’ll put you in a safe house with some guards until we can get the information to the police and everyone’s arrested and in jail. It may end up being until you testify. We don’t want anyone coming after you to silence you. Is that something you can deal with?”

  “Yeah, but how do I even pay for that?”

  “Don’t worry about it. We’ll talk to the police chief and work it all out. Maggie will be with you, so-”

  “What? I thought I was going to be with you?”

  I’m not sure when I decided that she wouldn’t be staying with me, but it seemed like a really good idea. She had a story to write and I had a business to run. Something that I wouldn’t do a very good job of if I was distracted by her.

  “Maggie, I have a business to run. There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done as far as gathering information that the police can use. On top of that, it will take less people on guard duty if you two are in the same place.”

  Maggie looked slightly hurt by that, the first sign that she wanted to be close to me. I had to take a step back though. If we tried to be together after the case, that was a different story, but for now, this was best.

  “Keith, why don’t you go see Becky. She’s down the hall, second door on your right. She’ll want to go over all the particulars of what you know and see if she can come up with anything further.”

  “Sure.”

  He turned to leave and Maggie waited until he had shut the door before whirling on me. “What the hell? What was all that about wanting to work things out? Now you’re sending me off to a safe house where other people can keep an eye on me?”

  “You didn’t seem all that worried about it when we talked. I seem to recall you saying ‘I’m sure we’ll figure it out’.”

  “So this is payback because I didn’t have all the answers?”

  “No, this is me taking a step back. I’ve been playing bodyguard for the past week and I have to get back to running my business. You’ll be fine with another team, and frankly, if you had really wanted to work it out, you would have said so earlier.”

  “I was distracted. We’d just got all that information from Becky and I wanted to get started on it. I wanted to write down my thoughts before I forgot.”

  “Look, I understand that, but I think that’s why we need to just step back. Let’s just get throug
h this and then we can see where we stand. I can still come see you, but I have a shit ton of work to catch up on and people that I need to hire. You have work that you need to do. This way, neither of us will feel bad if we let the other down.”

  “Fine. If that’s what you want. Where will I be going?”

  “I’ll talk that over with the team and we’ll make a decision, but you won’t know until you get there.”

  She nodded and then turned on her heel and headed out the door. It was for the best. I could see that I was already way too enamored with Maggie and I couldn’t afford that right now. At least not if she didn’t feel the same way. It was time I got my shit together and got back to work.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Maggie

  “HEY, FRECKLES. SEBASTIAN’S on the phone.”

  It had been two days since I came to stay at the safe house again. Luckily, I was in the same one as before so I still had clothes that fit me. I got up from my bed and made my way downstairs to the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Freckles.” His deep voice rumbled through the phone, sending chills down my body. I may be pissed at him, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t still crave him.

  “I wanted to let you know that Cal’s funeral is tomorrow. We’re just having a small ceremony, since, well, since he didn’t have anyone else left. Did you want to go?”

  “Yes, but I’ll have to see if there’s anything to wear. I don’t think I saw anything in the closet upstairs that would be appropriate for a funeral.”

  “I’ll have something sent over for you. The funeral will be at one and Derek’s team will take you to the cemetery. I’ll meet you there.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Wait! Is that it?”

  “Is what it?”

  “I mean..” I stammered for a moment trying to come up with exactly what I wanted to say to him. “I guess I was wondering if you’d be coming here any time soon?”

  There was a pause on the line that pretty much told me all I needed to know. He had no plans of coming to see me.