by Jenna Rae
“And I with you. Thank you for meeting with me on such short notice. A good meal and some interesting conversation may help you through your jet lag. I’ll see you there and will try to make it worth your while.”
She rang off and drove home to go over her notes one last time. She wanted to find out whether Miller pushed or helped Harding to kill Donnelly. She also needed to know whether his many cameras had ever shown Donnelly’s activities and what if anything Miller might have done with that. There were a few other things she would explore, and those gave her the shivers despite the hot water. When her chest started to tighten, she forced herself to breathe easily and slowly. She had a long list of things to do before seven o’clock.
By five thirty she had arranged everything. She went over her plan with careful attention to detail and hoped she’d anticipated every possible potential outcome. She’d moved the pieces into place on the chessboard of her choice, which was about the best she could hope for.
Eleven phone calls, nine purchases, two outright lies and a handful of omissions all added up to one big, fat snare. What exactly that would catch she would soon learn. Now it was time to get into her costume and begin her brief and hopefully successful acting career.
By six forty she was standing on the deck outside of Dave’s and staring out at the churning sea. The clouds she’d watched blow into the harbor that afternoon framed the setting sun and gave the dappled seascape an ominous air.
With a sigh she turned to circle the restaurant. Her gaze wandered to allow her peripheral vision to give her a view inside the eatery. By the time she reached the entrance that faced the parking lot, she had reviewed her mental map of the room and her plan for the evening.
She heard Dan Miller come in behind her but pretended not to notice. He stood watching her for a second and then circled around her, leaving too little space between them. She faked pleasure at seeing him, and he stuck out his hand to shake hers. As before, she was prepared for his squeeze and yank. This time, she let him crush her fingers and strain her shoulder.
“I’m sorry for not being available to you earlier. It’s just one of those things. The world is changing fast, and I want us to be bleeding edge. They’ll leave us behind if we let them. Believe me, I know the truth, and if you stick with me, you will too.”
She nodded and smiled blithely.
They were seated at the best table in the crow’s-nest section and given their drinks—beer for him, iced tea for her. Without asking, Miller ordered the seafood special for both of them, and Brenda let him. She exclaimed over the good table and let him feel like a big shot.
“Wait’ll you see this dinner. You’ll love it. I only get the special. It’s the best. It’s amazing, and you won’t believe it. Yes, it’s expensive, but I’ve earned it and I want to share the wealth.”
She listened with half an ear and a doubled smile. Miller had decided to take the lead and establish dominance. She had anticipated it and planned to let him do so until it was time to make a change. She played the polite, easily manipulated dupe as well as she could, smiling too much and paying rapt attention to his carefully constructed sales pitch.
He was, as always, the hero of his own stories, the long-suffering good guy who overcame endless trials and tribulations to stumble haplessly into immeasurable success.
Brenda drew him out, offering a sympathetic ear and a noncritical audience for his self-serving narrative. She wanted to see how long it would take before he realized he was self-aggrandizing, but he went on and on without appearing to discern how ridiculously adolescent he sounded. She leaned forward, her eyes wide and blank and fixed on his endlessly spewing mouth.
If she were a con artist, she’d zero in on Dan Miller. He was all hot air and ego, too self-absorbed to assess other people with clarity. He was, to all appearances, successfully building up his business to an ambitious degree. It didn’t take too close an examination to find cracks in the foundation.
He was insufficiently astute to anticipate market needs, too shortsighted to build his most important asset—his personnel—out of quality candidates. He hired the cheapest muscle-bound idiots he could find, instead of paying fifteen percent more to get experienced, well-trained veterans. He saturated the relatively limited home and business security markets with enticingly low-priced introductory contracts that expired after a year.
A customer who wanted to renew that contract found himself paying more for each subsequent year. Having paid for the installation of the equipment, clients were unlikely to drop the contract for the first few renewals. It all seemed like a sound plan for rooking people out of their hard-earned dollars. But from what Darius Brown had found, customers tended to drop his service in the fourth or fifth year, by which time they were paying nearly thirty percent more than in the first year. Then they would never do business with him again.
It didn’t seem like a formula that would lead to long-term success, but maybe Miller would move on to another new field when he’d burned all his bridges in this one. He’d done that several times before. She was far less interested in the shelf life of his doomed business venture than what inroads he’d made in her city’s government and police department. She was also interested in his expenditures, as uncovered by Darius Brown. Who was on his payroll? Who was his lackey in the Briarwood Police Department?
He had not one but two yachts, one berthed at Green Hand Marina and one at his mansion’s private dock off the northern point known locally and colloquially as Snob Hill. The smaller of his oversized crafts was large enough to sail around the world. She had to wonder why he needed a floating city berthed by his palatial home. Miller owned several strip clubs in Briarwood. Could he be hosting parties at which the exotic dancers were expected to accommodate the desires of his male guests?
Finally, after a particularly long exposition on his own brilliance, he seemed to run out of air. He gulped half his beer and looked restlessly around the room. He’d bored himself, she realized.
“Wow,” she said, grinning idiotically at her dinner companion, “I’m in awe. You’ve really thought this through.”
Cocking his head at her, he puffed up like a preening rooster. “I’ve always been good at seeing the big picture,” he bragged. “Most people can’t do that.”
“It’s true,” she murmured. “Can I ask a question?”
“Sure, sure,” he said blithely. “Whatever you want, ask.”
“What percentage of your budget do you spend on personnel?”
He narrowed his eyes. “Why are you asking me that?”
She widened her eyes, lifted her voice to a girlish whisper. “I just feel like in the department, I’m constantly running up against budget constraints. I can’t help but notice we spend so much of our budget on things the unions demand.”
This launched him into a diatribe against unions, labor and the greed and laziness of the officers and people in general.
“They don’t appreciate what they’ve got,” she said in a sympathetic tone.
“They’re leeches, every one of them,” he announced, his tone strident and his pitch awkwardly high. He was red and splotchy, his eyes snapping. He slammed his beer bottle on the table with a too-loud bang. “The city won’t listen to me, even though I’m the expert here. My taxes—I make more money than anybody in this little town, and it’s my money they’re spending. They could save a lot of my hard-earned money if they didn’t have to coddle all these so-called public servants and—”
“But we need police officers, firefighters, teachers—”
“Sure, sure, sure, but I could do all of it for half the cost, less, and save taxpayers like me millions! Then there’s a whole huge amount of the population that’s useless. They just sit on their asses and leech off the money you and I pay in taxes. You know that? Welfare queens, drug addicts, immigrants, convicted felons, all them—they won’t work hard, so they can’t make it, so they just sit back and roll in our money, and we let them! We pay them to be useless!
I don’t have kids, but my money pays for schools. Why should I pay for that? I don’t take drugs, but my money pays for drug rehab for junkies. I don’t need birth control, so why should I pay for it? Why should I pay a single dollar for something people chose?”
“You feel used,” she said gently, her tone and expression sympathetic and encouraging.
“Damned right I feel used! And so should you! There’re maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred people in this whole town who are worth anything. The rest are illegals, criminals, homeless, fat, lazy, worthless. They just sit back and enjoy the good life on our dime, and the decent people break our backs trying to help them. What for? What do we owe them? Nothing.”
“How would you make it better? If you could change how things are?”
He nodded, steepling his hands in front of him and staring at her with an evangelical light in his eyes.
“Look at my company,” he said, his tone suddenly dropping into what she guessed he thought was professorial register. “I took my money that I earned from the sweat of my brow, and I invested it. American dream, that’s me. I was smart about it. I’ve always been smarter than other people, and that’s just how it is. You know, you’re smarter than other people. You’re almost as smart as me, which is saying something, believe me.”
She manufactured a blush and nodded at him to continue. She knew the money he referred to was comprised of his father’s loans, gifts, and estate.
“Once I had enough capital and a few investors, I moved forward.”
“How did you find investors?”
“They approached me. Said they heard I was some kind of financial genius. I had other things I was doing. People wanted me to be a professional athlete, an actor, a movie producer. I almost ran for office. I had a million options, but these guys needed somebody like me. They said I was the only one who could do it.”
“Wow,” she said. Thanks to Darius Brown, she knew he’d squandered over twenty million dollars the first decade after his father’s death.
Then he teamed with another huckster to form a pyramid scheme that bilked elderly investors out of their money. His old partner fled the country under the cloud of a dozen warrants. Miller made some kind of deal, and a handful of his employees went to federal prison in his stead. Darius thought part of the deal was Miller had to stay out of banking, finance, and real estate. It was then he started up Watchdogs.
He offered a modest grin. “I have so much money, believe me, it’s amazing. I was still trying to decide what I wanted to do with my capital. And one of the guys—these guys were eating out of my palm, okay?—one of the guys suggested I buy this little security firm. It was maybe ten guys, working a few little contracts, and their boss ran it into the ground. I rescued them. I mean, at the time it was an act of charity. I hated to see these guys out of work. Veterans, you know? Once you’ve been on the front line, you have a bond.”
She knew he’d spent two years at military school as an adolescent but had never served his country in any branch of the military. She also knew the original owner of Watchdogs, Tim Lancaster, was a retired police officer. He paid good wages and kept overhead to a minimum. Then Lancaster’s wife got pancreatic cancer and he gutted his business trying to save her.
When Lancaster was desperate, when he was flying all over the world trying to find a way to save his wife, Miller came in and took advantage of his desperation. Miller was a parasite and he had the audacity to play the hero. She masked her disgust and listened to him boast about rescuing the floundering former owner.
“So, you really saved the company,” she murmured.
“Oh, yeah. I mean, I didn’t even want it, but then I had to help the guy out.”
“So kind,” she said, her tone low and admiring.
The idiot blushed and offered a shy grin. Had his hair been long enough, he’d have tugged on a forelock.
“So I’m pretty savvy. I know what I’m doing, you know, and I built it up great. Now it’s practically an empire. You’ve seen it. We’re everywhere!”
She nodded, her smile vacuous and her eyes reflecting nothing but admiration. “It’s really impressive,” she said. “I don’t know how to ask this, but I do have a question.”
Like every con man, he was overconfident and therefore both cynical and naïve. He fell for this bit of manipulation without a fight.
“I bet you have a few questions.”
They shared a laugh, as though the moron had said something clever. He snapped his fingers at the waiter and demanded another beer for himself. “And the lady will switch to white wine.”
She grinned as if she liked his imperious manner. “Thank you.”
He gave a lordly nod. “So, first of all, yes, I am the brains behind this operation. Yes, I really am as rich as I seem. Yes, I really do run the business myself. People tell me,” he said, leaning forward and tapping the table with his index finger, “I am the heart of the operation. The men look to me for guidance on everything. I can’t be weak or indecisive or, or, or anything like that.” He sat back. “It’s a burden, honestly. It weighs on me.”
She made a sympathetic face and waited him out.
“It’s just the beginning, you know. I mean, sure, I’ve been successful here, obviously. We’ve done great. A lot of men would be happy with achieving what I have. A lot of men.”
“But you’re not a lot of men.”
He laughed, throwing his head back. He was giddy with glee over her attention, and for a moment she felt sorry for him. He was so easily manipulated that she felt predatory playing with him. Then she remembered why she was doing this. She needed him to let down his guard so she could learn about his possible involvement with Donnelly’s death.
He pointed at her, nearly knocking over the wineglass the waiter was just setting down. “You see it. You get it. That’s why I’ve always been interested in bringing you over to my side. You get it.”
She smiled and lowered her eyes demurely, thinking as she did so that straight women had it easy in at least one way. A lot of men were astoundingly gullible.
Michael Morgan glided up to their table on cue, his dark hair shining in the soft glow of the restaurant he’d made over.
“Michael,” said Miller expansively, “allow me to introduce Captain Brenda Borelli.”
His expression untroubled, Michael nodded and shook her hand. They exchanged a quick look and she knew he’d play along.
“Always a pleasure to meet one of Mr. Miller’s friends. I hope your dinner is perfection. If it’s not, please alert me right away, and please, enjoy dessert on me, will you? Mr. Miller, I see you’re looking a little thirsty. Someone will be right here. Enjoy your evening.”
As Michael eased away, Miller beamed and examined her expression.
“You’ll get used to it. Wherever I go, people always suck up to me. I don’t ask for that kind of thing. I don’t need it, but people can smell power. They naturally try to get me to like ’em, and I don’t mind it.”
She made sure to look dazzled, and the Watchdogs CEO seemed satisfied.
“You know everyone,” she murmured. “And they all know you.”
“You’re right. I can get this company in place to take over law enforcement, code enforcement, fire patrol, hell, why not the parks too? Get a few girls in, take over city hall, the schools too—millions, billions of dollars. But it’s bigger than that. Why not change the way the whole state does business? California has a huge economy, enormous amounts of money. Believe me, if we could stop paying these damned lazy public employees their ridiculous salaries, we could save taxpayers billions every year!”
“Wow!” Brenda whispered the word.
“Right? And why not the whole country? People like you and me, we’re special, Brenda—we’re the engine that moves this country. We need to decide we’re tired of taking their shit. We deserve to be successful. The reality is, they need us to guide them. A lot of people tell me I should drive this train.”
Brenda gaped at M
iller.
“I mean it. They’re sheep. Do you let sheep run wild in the, the wilderness? No, you get a sheep herder to tell them where to go. They’re happier like that. They need someone to guide them. You and I are sheep herders. And we deserve to profit from that. Don’t we?”
She allowed a hint of skepticism to show on her face.
“I know, I know.” He sat back, gazing fondly at her. “You feel sorry for ’em. I get it. I used to feel sorry for them too. But if you look at them, they’re idiots. Take my guys you tricked into letting you in to Watchdogs.”
She had the grace to look embarrassed. “Yeah, about that—”
“No, no,” he said, waving off what he clearly assumed was an impending apology. “I get it. You used your superior intellect to manipulate them into doing what you wanted. You had a job to do, and that’s that.”
The air was thick with his ego and his cynicism, and Brenda hid her relief when the waiter brought the seafood specials to their table. He suspended his asseveration to smack his lips and exclaim over the bounty of the sea. She hid her revulsion and moved things around on her giant platter as he gobbled shrimp and scallions and lobster. He smacked his lips, drooled on his chin, spewed bits of mussel and cod and rice and crab. He caught her watching him and grinned broadly, displaying bits of food in his teeth and clinging to his lips. He was shiny with grease from his fleshy cheekbones to his tight collar.
“It’s amazing, right? I bet you could never afford to get this kind of thing on a cop’s salary. But it’s my treat. Go ahead, enjoy!”
“Thank you. I suppose you know why I met with Mason Harding?”
“I assume it’s normal procedure. I know a lot about police work, of course. I have a certain background. I can’t talk about it, naturally. I can only say I’ve served my country in ways they don’t give medals for.”
She smiled and forked a tiny amount of rice, wondering if she’d ever be able to eat seafood again without seeing his oily, gaping maw. Did he really imagine she’d believe he was some kind of super spy?